Watch: Bernie Sanders Tours His Old Brooklyn Neighborhood

MIDWOOD, BROOKLYN — Now that presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has a Democratic primary win under his belt — in New Hampshire, but still! — the execs at CBS Evening News say they must “know more” about this strange old dude with the crazy Brooklyn hair and hands and accent whose anti-establishment platform has begun to appear quite established indeed.

So they sent CBS anchor Scott Pelley out to Midwood, Brooklyn, to take a walk with Sanders down memory lane. East 26th Street near Kings Highway, to be precise.

Over the course of the brief yet predictably adorable tour, Sanders shows Pelley the old brick apartment building where he was raised by poor Jewish immigrants from Poland — and where little baby Bernie and his childhood street crew used to throw old Spalding balls, pronounced Spaldeen in the Brooklyn accent, against stripes of brick on their building’s exterior.

Video above. And below, in his own words, the origin story of America’s new favorite underdog.

“Most of the kids lived in the apartment houses. I grew up in that one. Good friends across the street. It was my mother’s dream to get out of the apartment and get a home of her own, but she died young and she never achieved that dream.”

“Not having enough money was a cause of constant tension. And when you’re five or six years of age, and your parents are yelling at each other. You think back on it now, and it’s traumatic. It’s hard.”

“I would get up on a Saturday morning when we weren’t in school. We used to play with what we called a Spaldeen rubber ball. And you would throw it starting off at the red brick, then the white brick, red brick, white brick. And then, you know, you would win I guess if you threw it all the way up there.”

“Literally I would leave 9, 10 o’clock in the morning and I would come back at 5 o’clock in the evening, exhausted. I had been running all day long. But it was a happy exhaustion. And by the way, I learned something also about democracy. We didn’t have much adult supervision. So the games were all determined not by adult cultures, [but by] kids themselves. So we would choose up a team. There was no other person dictating anything. We worked out our own rules. It was a very interesting way to grow up.”

(Hear that, Brooklyn Heights helicopter parents? If you want your kid to be president someday, might be time to loosen up the leash a little. Or at least swap out the iPad for a Spaldeen.)

Local newspaper Sheepshead Bites reported a Bernie sighting on the day of the CBS interview at Memo Shish Kebab, a Turkish cafe a few blocks from his childhood home. “He was a very sweet, charming man,” a cashier at the restaurant told the paper. “He was beyond a gentleman.”

Previously, we learned that Sanders was a star player on his elementary school’s basketball team, which he claims won the borough championship (!), and was captain of his track team at James Madison High School in Midwood.