The Lower East Side tenement museum in Manhattan has a monthly event called the Lower East Side: Stories. Last night’s theme was “Down and Out in New York City”. People came up on stage to tell 3-minute stories about living in New York and being broke. Their yarn will speckle our show today. Marine Olivesi brings them to us. This is the first.

NARR: Both professional story tellers and regular people talked about how to be, as the yeddish expression goes, a luftmensh.

WEISBERG: Does anyone knows what’s a luftmensh by the way? Raise your hand if you know what’s a luftmensh!
MAN: Someone who can like make a living out of the thinest bits of whatever...
WEISBERG: Yeah, someone who kind of gets by. Someone who doesn’t really have a real talent but has a talent for getting by.

NARR: Max Weisberg is a tour guide at the Lower East Side museum. The typical luftmensh, he says, was his grandfather. Living in New York during the great depression, he was a movie fan, but couldn’t afford this indulgence.

WEISBERG: He would take a piece of aspirin and take a glass of water and walk up to the front of the ticket counter and say, “that’s for the manager”. That got him in to more, I kid you not, got him to more movies in 1930s than any rich person in New York.

NARR: Weisberg says things started looking up for his grand father toward the end of depression when he began to work in real estate.

Marine Olivesi, Columbia Radio News