FOR FAILE STREET BOYS, IT'S BEEN THE BEST OF TIMES.

Byline: Fred Lowery Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

Most of the time, they are Norman Brown, retired New York police officer; Charles Brooks, retired furniture store owner; Joseph Ornstein, retired electronics salesman; Seymour Cummins, retired New York attorney; and Emanuel Skolnick, retired New York taxi driver.

But on Tuesday mornings, just call them Normie and Charlie and Joey and Seymour and Manny - the Faile Street Boys.

Hangin' out. Bustin' chops. Teasin' the girls. Swappin' tall tales, just like in the old neighborhood.

For more than 70 years, this quintet has been the best of friends, keeping spirits up and egos down.

"We laugh, we cry, but through the years we have tried to support each other," Charlie says.

They have been sharing the highs and lows of each other's lives since the old days in the Bronx. Today, they are South Florida retirees, age 79 to 82, and they still get together once a week for deli breakfast and a large helping of the ribbing, storytelling and memories that have kept them close all these years.

"We meet every week," Seymour says. "If somebody has heart surgery, he doesn't come that week."

They take their name from Faile Street in the east Bronx. They all attended P.S. 75 and later James Monroe High, where their classmates included author Herman Wouk and comedian Jan Murray.

"We were a small community," Joey said. "Herman Wouk's father did my mother's laundry."

Many people remember the Great Depression as a time of terrible poverty and turmoil, but to the Faile Street Boys, it was a time of growing up, making do and enjoying life.

In the 1920s and 1930s, they were living in the tenements, children of immigrants who had come to seek a new life in America.

"We were like an extended family," said Joey, the group's unofficial historian. "Italians, Jews, Irish, all had our own little cliques, but we all stuck together."

He remembers a Jewish mother and an Italian mother who would sit together on the stoop of their building every day.

"The Jewish mother couldn't speak anything but Yiddish, and the Italian mother spoke only Italian," he said. "But they would sit and talk to each other all day, and neither one understood a word of what the other was saying."

"We were poor," Joey said of their growing-up days, "but we didn't know we were poor. We made do with what we had and enjoyed life."

Like playing stickball in the middle of the street - "All you needed was a broomstick and a soft ball," Manny says - until Miller the deli owner or someone else would call the cops.

"Then we'd run like hell," Joey said.

And what about those football games in the mud flats?

"We called it the mud flats because, if it rained in January, it would be muddy until sometime in July," Manny said of the area, now part of Bruckner Boulevard. "Our mothers would kill us."

When they were older, the boys scrimmaged against the City College of New York football team on a cinder-covered field.

"We would come home all bloody with our clothes in shreds," he said. "Then our mothers would REALLY kill us."

Not all the conversation is about the good old days. Breakfast talk can range from the latest headlines - their disgust with the drug culture and the criminal justice system are hot topics - to the relative merits of going to Banner Elk or Boone, N.C., for the summer.

Some topics are off-limits, however - no smoking and no talking about obituaries, surgery reports, politics or religion.

Think that doesn't leave much to talk about?

Think again, Joey says. "There's girls, sports, food, sex, the stock market, sex, real estate, happy occasions, sex, good health, sex and restaurants."