1
10
26
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/2d9b3a841185112f775a307d984dd1c0.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=JkMh1zjCJLVpUDzDh4AzVKQ7O5Xni9vkm72heS3Aro%7EKhOir7BvlHTlI4GO8xl17IfLC3ZbpTNjYUC3anS5fK1j3QRr7uTrn6Ejf75xxY-CP%7EPAP4StNK9Y4y%7EX9jSfTDX2Iv1fnGVZ7aHInGjJF8txULVcL5%7E6w6dnDZ9I9f5Ngs3gfdx1X1tmGVJ3xjiZwXDt0WaS0dTTWG7Qwucu8F6ZZ%7Egf-c4E9lDoeZmbDHnzIGTHy9yU-vB76keb20nbouGNZbRUp64ZD3icLR3Lrrc3fFpz1oONwyAZUzxsO3aRrKgs4t6y43UgtxBu30VdMHQjuPkiNeL0YgPEYGg5AFA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
fa74e58c1a87f9cd59c2e1371d096556
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
GIRLFRIENDS
Whenever I begin to write a new piece, my tendency is to do it chronologically. I approach it by cataloging whatever it is I want to write about. If it is travel, I start listing all the trips I have taken from the earliest to today. The same for jobs, places I have lived, schools and camps I have attended, and today—girlfriends.
My mind goes back to that moment in time when I first thought about girls. The truth is, I had little contact with girls as a pre-teen. Of course there were my two cousins, Rozzie Goldstein and Barbara Kestenbaum, who coincidentally, were born on the same day, May 13, ( I believe 1931) which made them a little young for me. They were girls, and both were cute. Barbara was the prettier one (and still is). My mother shlepped me along on our visits to their parents, and as a 10 or 12 or even 14 year old, I would sit quietly next to my mother and have very little to say to either of them, and they certainly had nothing to say to me.
When I was in sixth grade, there was the beginning of interest in the opposite sex. I was 12 years old, and there were two girls in my class who excited me: Phyllis Flyer and Rita Feit. They must have made a deep impression on me if I can still remember their names. Phyllis was tall, blond and one of the smartest kids in our class. She lived on Southern Blvd., and I have a vague memory of going to her apartment building after school and shouting “Phyllis, I love you,” and running away. Rita was dark, very pretty and also very smart. I never learned where she lived. If I did, I might have done the same thing. The fact is, I didn’t know how to approach girls. I was very shy, very poor, and very aware that I was both shy and poor. Nor did I think I was good looking.
Unfortunately, when I graduated from PS 62, I went on to an all-boys junior high school, and then to an all-boys high school, and my classroom contact with girls ended. Except for a one-year stint at the Workmen’s Circle Shule on Beck Street, after my Bar Mitzvah. In my class was Beatrice Birnbaum. She was my age, also shy and moderately attractive. When I was 16 or 17, there was a high school event which required attendance with a date. Beatrice was the only girl I could think of, and I invited her. Our first and last date.
In my last year of high school, my friend Sidney Reiter was going with a girl named Elaine, who lived in Brooklyn. Out of desparation, I asked him if she had a friend. When you live in the Bronx, you don’t want to date girls who live in Brooklyn, but when worse comes to worse, and that is all you can find, you will even go out with a girl who lives in Queens. Now here is where it becomes very vague. The double date was arranged: Sid and Elaine, and Elaine’s friend and I. We met them in Manhattan, went to a movie and someplace for ice cream or coffee, and then I took her home. I believe we had a good time, and I asked her if I could see her again. She said yes. There was no goodnight kiss at the door. There was a long ride back by subway to the Bronx. A few weeks later I called her to ask her out. The routine at that time—the mid-forties—was for the boy to call the girl on Tuesday for Saturday, which seemed to be the only date night. If you called Monday or earlier for Saturday, you were seen as too anxious. If you called Wednesday or later, you were taking the girl for granted. Sometimes when you called on Tuesday, you would get a busy signal, and you kicked yourself for not calling earlier. But you kept trying until you reached her. Then you would engage in small talk: how are you, how is school, have you seen so and so, until you came to the question—would you like to go out Saturday? Elaine’s friend and I went out three or four more times, until we had a disagreement, about what, I have no idea. But that ended our relationship. We had reached the point where I got a good night kiss, but nothing more. I really wasn’t broken-hearted about not seeing her again. I no longer had to endure those subway rides to and from Brooklyn.
At about the same time I developed a crush on a young woman who lived in Irving Plotnick’s apartment house, 736 Fox Street. Her name was Eunice Danzig (her name I remember). We had long talks about life, and would walk around the neighborhood, but we never went out. I don’t know why. Perhaps she had a boy friend. She also was pretty and smart, and seemed to feel superior to the other kids on the block.
When I was 16 1/2, I got a job as a camper-waiter at Camp Echo Lake, a private camp for rich kids in the Adorandacks. The role of the camper-waiter is to wait on the campers, but also to provide the senior girls with boys with whom to socialize. A couple of the other camper-waiters were very advanced socially. They were good dancers,
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Girlfriends
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"Whenever I begin to write a new piece, my tendency is to do it chronologically." (Fragment)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2009
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
1931/1946
Adolescence
Bronx
Brooklyn
Dating
Fragment
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/86f70a3dcb41ac4b38a0ad01c26fa17d.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=kZqzkbSNr%7EtERGZg87HUAem4X-B-voagrja7o-DSApryPkmBumaw1-MeTetz0G6EhFnVCnElxxChhW1gBrPr8JJkI8Jf6OHAm8QSlbqnq37FSInxG%7EAAFacqM6Y0gp2WeVWgtxWBGm679dWqO9XsJ8loOMXEVP4d6SzU49eV-fdF9V8N4uAHnDp85038gP2NVMkQj5swmcUqk4Y7SRPXSosuQJrjwuO-nhA1zmJ-VZP9XfSMP%7EKf0lbUilQcGXJvW7%7ECC5RNQtWCfLGLPypvgpCPoj0XHZptwk-Jjova-cb2uf3TMKfIG3l-psC3GejN-kJ41kLtpbHtNMRJjDty4g__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
c12b682c096646c45b32ea08c16d6e0c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
THE UNETHICIST
Some time ago, I wrote a couple of pieces called “Things of which I am ashamed.” It was a form of “Confession.” Jews don’t go to Confession, but on Yom Kippur we spend a large part of the day running through “Al Kheyts,” asking forgiveness for the many sins we have committed over the past year. I have been thinking of the many ways I have been unethical, dishonest, and have cheated, and taken advantage of various institutions.
When I was a kid and went to the movies with my mother, I would try to beat the movie house three ways: First, I would buy two tickets before the price changed at 5 pm, even though we would not go into the theatre until after 5 pm. In fact, my mother would not arrive at the Prospect Av. station until closer to 5:30 pm. Then we would go to the Prospect Cafeteria and have supper, which meant that we would not be entering the theatre until close to 6 pm. Second, we would take our own candy into the movie house, not buying it at the candy stand. And third, when we arrived home, I would try to glue the two stubs together, making it appear as if it were a whole ticket, which I would use at a later date. The fact that I never used the glued movie ticket is irrelevant. The thought and the act of gluing were wrong, and though it is 75 years later, I feel ashamed.
In college, in my late teens, I would, from time to time, do my homework at the 42nd Street library. When the library closed at 9 pm, I would walk over to Broadway and look for theatres which were breaking for intermission. The Theatre District was between Broadway and Eighth Avenue from 43rd Street to 50th Street. The curtain went up at 8:40 pm, and the end of the first act usually occurred between 9:15 and 9:30 pm. I would stroll up one street and down the other until I found an intermission crowd outside a theatre. I really did not care what the play was. I mingled with the crowd, and entered the theatre with them. Standing in the back of the theatre, I would pick up a Playbill. I would then figure out where there were empty seats, usually in the last few rows at the extreme left or right of the orchestra, sometimes in the boxes. I seldom bothered with the mezzanine or balcony.
The challenge was to figure out what took place during the first act after reading the Playbill, and from the first few minutes of second act dialogue. I claimed that I developed the skill because my mother insisted on listening to the 15 minute news, broadcast on the hour, depriving me of listening to my half hour programs from the beginning. I saw scores of second and third acts, and still have the Playbills. And I saw them from better seats than when I bought balcony tickets to the theatre. Though sneaking into the theatre was unethical, I was hardly troubled by it. I did not feel I was stealing anything.
I would take pens, pencils and stationery from my places of employment, from my first to my last jobs. I would also make personal calls, both local and long distance, from the phone on my desk. It was in the mid-70s, I was visiting a friend at another Federal agency, and as we were talking, a colleague of his came over to tell him he would be gone for a few minutes. When I asked him what that was about, he told me that he does not use his phone for personal calls, but goes down to the lobby to use the pay phone. Unbelievable!
More recently, I rented a car when Fran and I were on a trip. One morning, I decided to explore the area, and drove down a narrow road where there was a beautiful vista—a lake and a breathtaking view of the nearby mountains. I did not realize that some of the branches of trees rubbed against the rented car. When I returned to the main road, I was shocked to see that the branches left scratch marks on the car, a late model, black Ford. Realizing that if I saw it, so would the rental agent, I began thinking about ways to hide it. Rather than own up to having scratched the car, I, unethically, decided that I would go into town and buy some spray paint to cover the scratches. There was no hardware, paint store or auto supply store that carried what I wanted. When I passed a stationery store, I decided that a black marker might do the trick. I bought a “King Size Sharpie—Permanent Black Marker.” I carefully applied it to the scratches, and voila! They were gone, at least to the casual viewer. When I returned the car, nothing was said. I was not charged for the body damage, and I still have the marker to be used for its intended purpose.
Finally, I have even passed on my unethical behavior to my son David. A number of years ago, Fran and I obtained Senior T passes, which enable us to ride Boston’s public transportation system at a reduced rate. We add money to the pass, tap something, and it deducts the cost of the ride to seniors from the pass. Fran hardly ever uses her pass, so whenever David and I go someplace together, like to a Red Sox game, I give him Fran’s pass. I even encourage him to use her pass when we are not going someplace together. I realize, and I am sure David realizes, that we are cheating the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, and it is unethical. Oh well.
Through this document, I confess my unethical behavior, but I am not going to promise that I will never do anything unethical again. It is too ingrained.
11-24-14 (updated)
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Unethicist
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"Some time ago, I wrote a couple of pieces called 'Things of which I am ashamed.'"
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2014-11-24
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
THE_UNETHICIST
Adolescence
Childhood
Confessions
Money
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/40688a8026d772f7912e1051729533c4.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=WNksnPr%7EyKaPVRuX%7ELnTgl7i8nGBXf6VF3rE3NXrZjAnVXuvoDOos%7EzHXmVt-dnZy6NM4B-KYjvxGzayciKWodxKk1wT1RUIDrma-ltJlvM39oaiB2PcCAt9RnnGnl66V0qSmpYnJYDNZ9tXe3Az9-bXenS8BgKmaYUVKePn2zk%7EBNIrXoQi0d%7E%7E70t9MfrIh1eGOGTf6HnWLxfd8GQqKGzKikYTxPyhChabKc9c76fHFUaKstS--aa8FT7QVM2lmZzCLva1xzXoHkpgcKrDuQ61cZDT6nronUwmezyqBkxPtRrE8IKaYL66aP0smG2G8UAeisM8OHY54kvAgKiVNA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
823388ff50974599ba396eda716b071c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
GILBERT AND SULLIVAN
I guess the first time I heard of Gilbert and Sullivan was in junior high school. Our music teacher came up with the idea of putting on HMS Pinafore. Our class didn’t have any strong feelings, one way or the other. We had been singing folk songs, and holiday songs the previous year, so learning songs from something called a comic opera seemed like fun. It would be a change from “Low bridge, everybody down…” and “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing…”
I was designated a “listener” so I knew I would not get a solo part. I wouldn’t be Sir Joseph Porter or Dick Deadeye. But I was permitted to sing in the chorus as a sailor, and I still know all the words to “We sail the ocean blue…” I don’t remember which of my classmates had the male leads, but I distinctly remember that Normie Perlmutter played Little Buttercup, and I thought that it was real “macho” on his part to play a woman. Sol Rauch may have been the Captain because for many years afterward, Sol would sing “I am the Captain of the Pinafore…” and I would reply, “And a right good captain too…”
The class practiced, learned the edited dialogue, and all those great songs. Sir Joseph had the best songs in the play: “When I was a lad I served a term as office boy to an Attorney’s firm…” And a couple more like that. I later found out that they were called “patter songs” and since they were more spoken than sung, I tried to memorize them. Every song had fantastic rhymes. We performed Pinafore for our junior high Assembly and everybody loved it. And I developed a love for Gilbert and Sullivan.
A few years later, in a “music appreciation” class in high school, one of my classmates suggested to the teacher that we listen to recordings of some of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, as a break from the usual fare. To my surprise and delight, the teacher agreed.
Recordings by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company were played, and everybody had a wonderful time. I learned that there were many more operettas besides Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance and Mikado. I also learned that the operettas were broadcast every Saturday morning on WQXR. I was hooked.
I was 16, I didn’t own a phonograph, but we had a radio, and Saturday morning did not interfere with my mother’s radio listening. Week after week for the next five or six years, I would listen to the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company recordings, of ALL the G and S comic operas. When I entered CCNY and discovered “The Modern Library” editions in our college bookstore, I flipped. There was “The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan,” and for $1.95! And I still have it. Saturday mornings, I would open it to the operetta being broadcast, and follow along.
What I also learned was that there was a lot of dialogue in between the songs, which were not recorded. And when I read the dialogue, I finally understood the plots, and enjoyed the operettas even more. Gilbert was my kind of guy. He made fun of bureaucracy, the establishment, the 1%, like Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, George Carlin, and Lennie Bruce. Gilbert and Sullivan pioneered musical comedies which led to Rogers and Hammerstein, George and Ira Gershwin, and the songs of Tom Lehrer, and Alan Sherman. And of course, Sylvia Fine, who wrote all those patter songs for Danny Kaye.
In 1949, I had bought my mother a wire recorder. She wanted it for the same reason I am writing this stuff—to record her memories, her thoughts. When my mother wasn’t looking, I took her wire recorder to record G and S off WQXR. She was outraged. That was not what her wire recorder was for. A couple years later, I invested in a hi-fi set and bought my own G and S LP recordings. The first album I bought was Pirates of Penzance with my new hero, Martyn Green, as the major general. Over the years, I acquired several more. When we moved to the condo in which we are now living, I got rid of several hundred records. I kept all of my G and S albums, and I play them from time to time. Time for me to get them on CD.
Early on, I began to read about William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and their producer, Richard D’Oyly Carte, who created the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, and built the Savoy Theatre for them. After Richard died, his son Rupert took over, and then Rupert’s daughter Bridget, whose name is on the cover of most of my albums. The Company must have been aware of what a fan I had become. They came to New York in the late ‘40s and a few members of the Company appeared at CCNY. I saved the clipping from our college newspaper, which I placed inside my book. They returned to Broadway a few years later, and I finally got to see a live D’Oyly Carte production. The Company stopped touring in the ‘80s, but there continue to be countless performances of all the operettas by amateur and professional groups all over the world.
In New York, a clever Yiddishist named Al Grand translated Pinafore into Yiddish, and it has been performed before very appreciative bilingual audiences. Here is a couplet sung by Buttercup (Putershisel): “A many years ago, when I was young and charming./ As some of you may know, I practiced baby-farming.” Now in Yiddish: “Amol mit yorn tsurik, Ikh bin geven a sheyne./ Tsvey kinderlakh hob ikh, gevizn zise, kleyne.” He also translated Pirates of Penzance (Yam Gazlonim) and my favorite patter song: “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.” “Ikh bin der groyser general un ikh bin oikh a guter Yid.” I did a take-off of that (in English) when my daughter Martha married: “I am the very model of a father of the modern bride./ I ruined a half a dozen shirts by puffing up my chest with pride.”
Here in the Boston area, the Sudbury Savoyards produce an operetta a year, as do the Harvard, MIT and Brown University G and S clubs. There are a lot of “Savoyards” around, despite the fact that G and S have been dead for over 100 years. Of course, we still play and sing music and read books written hundreds of years ago, and that may be the point: Good stuff lasts. And to me, there is nothing as good as Gilbert and Sullivan.
3-24-13
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Gilbert and Sullivan
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"I guess the first time I heard of Gilbert and Sullivan was in junior high school."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2013-03-24
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GILBERT_AND_SULLIVAN
Adolescence
Humor
Junior High School (J.H.S. 52)
Music
Poetry
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/449ff544753212d2cbe6a4bfaa9da3f7.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=Q-zYOASL%7EU--XKojKJ-YS7sP-nyyLG7PO1cP4QeFcjLnzo2f8ju-ot48k1y13BgznlmpHw6gs6H2osCnGajxUv11d0ami0LJvWQkuWsRkxRPHyCDBe6DBGEZ38G8rwVEPwHSErylTgLSGsY7d9cvxbbJsdhDUcr2NW4AV8zcmC1xKhBuz%7ENQuEdmawQvHbTrhC4tJFx5lhwWdoujNpr-N85tvEThHRhy6Qgpm8agCZZ5KrwIUorzfpGUX9bctyJ8JBnbFH%7EpiBUj6F8GpQNm1dZ5JlZ9sqklQmqMCI47CS2b5sS32MiQNghhL7cHEjWfQUg8O25lBm1u-HYynQp9%7Eg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
2f656ca7330f036034adec220fb873dd
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
My Brooklyn Girlfriend
I came late to dating. I was shy as a teenager and felt awkward around girls. There were a few girls that I knew, and only once in a great while would I call one of them to ask for a date. This would usually come about because a few of my friends were going out and would ask me to join them. The destination would be a downtown movie. This was the period toward the end of high school that I hung out with two different groups: The Fox Street group, consisting of Irv Plotnick, Sid Reiter, Jerry Stern and a few others; and the Lexington AYD group made up of the guys who became my closest friends: Bob Epstein, Sid Stern, and Alex Roth. It eventually expanded to include Sol Rauch, Phil Bernstein and Mel Schulman.
Many of the guys in each group had girl friends. Speaking with Sid Reiter one day, I asked him if his girl friend had a girl friend. He was delighted that I asked. His girl friend, Elaine, who lived in Brooklyn, had lots of girl friends. He would talk to her and she would think about it and suggest someone who would be “my type.” Besides, if we went out together, we could take the subway to Brooklyn together to pick up our girls. (We would come home separately, for obvious reasons.)
After a couple weeks, Elaine the matchmaker came up with what she thought was the perfect match. She was pretty, dark haired, medium height, nice figure, a year younger than me. I accompanied Sid to Brooklyn (a long ride) and we went to Elaine’s house where I met Elaine’s friend. There were a few awkward moments, but we hit it off, and the four of us went to Manhattan and a movie. We had a fun time, and when I took her home, we exchanged phone numbers and I told her I would call her. I did not try to kiss her good night on that first date.
In a couple weeks, I called her. The ritual was to call on Tuesday if you wanted to take out a girl on Saturday. I called Tuesday. She said yes. And the routine was initiated. Sometimes we would go out with Sid and Irv; sometimes we would go out alone. I liked her, but I wasn’t crazy about her. We now kissed good night, but not much more. I had gotten to know a couple of girls in the Bronx, and going out with them was a lot more convenient. Did I hate that ride to and from Brooklyn!
After about six months, we had hit a plateau. Going out with her became an obligation. We enjoyed each other’s company, but we were also “seeing other people.” Sid and Elaine were “going steady.” Once or twice, I called my Brooklyn girlfriend and she was not available. When this occurred, I almost felt relieved. The subway trip home almost cancelled out the enjoyment of the evening. The trains were running less frequently, and if you just missed a train, it was a long wait until the next one. It was a lonely feeling sitting on the subway platform at one in the morning. There had also been a couple of occasions that I fell asleep on the subway coming home, and rode past my stop, which added an additional half hour or more to the trip.
Finally it happened. We had gone out, had a pleasant evening, but we had gotten into a disagreement on our way home. I have no idea what it was about, but my girlfriend was very upset. We walked from the subway to her home in silence. When we got to her door, not only wasn’t there a good night kiss, she said she did not want to see me again. I was puzzled and asked her why. She refused to tell me. I said if I had said anything to upset her, I apologize. She did not accept my apology. I shrugged, and said good bye. And that was the last I saw of my Brooklyn girlfriend.
1-2-12
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
My Brooklyn Girlfriend
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"I came late to dating."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2012-01-02
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
My_Brooklyn_Girlfriend
Adolescence
Dating
Friends
Reading Out Loud (R.O.L.)
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/7d01b14ea75f4329b202d026a4174b2d.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=Yjx%7E0EN6g1xy6KsnGvelv4EeaQejHvGdqE9eucwXllGl97NlHgoBrdxwVClFPeAub5aJ2iGW5LpezsMcq6Xtv%7ErZLzQIIbkDLLvSBxmfvlfOGy9OnSrCAsHrCARMNSzB4OyuajCB92ethw89uawxWzNZqR0qy%7Ea7%7EYqRl3T18WLx6fasqfyTomj3i-VoB-hOs2g9Glryg1psczml98KOmci%7Eg1PxqnbjnSspX3HRs6q8zxEoROO5UZvl1HwZyA2xqeM015SEjz7r8aK0nkWJ1Im4io2Ss37E1GXRP6A4F1uNw7kuzVuC%7E5ZDTouZ5C%7Eqn7ypNfvgMV6XAlboPG%7EfGg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
1a8c319184bad137aec6a932806ff490
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
I Take My Cousin to Her Prom
My cousin Rozzie is 3 ½ years younger than me. A most remarkable coincidence is the fact that my two cousins, Barbara and Rosalind, were born on the same day: May 13, 1931. Rozzie is the daughter of Louis Goldstein, and Barbara is the daughter of Ruth Goldstein Kestenbaum, brother and sister. At one time I wondered if the two couples planned to conceive at the same time.
As I was growing up, the Goldsteins and the Kestenbaums were the only cousins I knew. My mother and I would visit them from time to time. Actually, my mother would visit, and I tagged along. My mother would be engaged in conversation with the grownups, while I sat quietly by myself. I had little or nothing in common with the grownups, or with Rozzie, her younger brother Eddie, or Barbara.
When I entered college, I felt more comfortable talking with both my older and younger cousins, but I saw less and less of them. By this time, I chose not to tag along. From my earliest years, both fathers, Louis Goldstein and Arthur Kestenbaum, served as role models and I admired them both. Louis taught biology at Clinton High School, and Arthur sold men’s clothing at Bancroft’s on Madison Avenue.
Louis and his wife Esther were teachers, and they pushed their children, not only to excel in school, but to accelerate, to skip classes. Rozzie was two years younger than her classmates when she graduated from high school.
For many high school graduates, the culmination of 12 years of school (or 10 years of school for Rozzie) is not the graduation ceremony but the prom. When I graduated from Stuyvesant, I chose not to attend the prom. I certainly did not believe I missed anything. I didn’t have a girlfriend, and it struck me that it would be silly for me to get dressed up and spend all that money to take someone to a prom for whom I had no feeling, and to take her someplace where I would feel uncomfortable. That was 1945.
It was now June 1947, and I was completing my sophomore year at CCNY. One evening I received a call from my cousin Louis. He wanted to ask me for a favor. Would I take Rozzie to her high school prom? Wow! I was taken aback, and after a few moments of hesitation, I stammered, sure. I really don’t know how these things work with girls. Rozzie attended a coed high school. Do the boys ask the girls to go to the prom with them? Do the girls ask the boys? I believe Louis explained that no one had asked Rozzie to the prom, and her friends were going. It occurred to me that she may have been seen as “too young,” by the boys in her class. An unanticipated disadvantage of skipping. Louis explained that he would like me to take her to her prom. He told me that he would take care of all expenses. I said I would be delighted.
Thinking about Louis’ request, I had all kinds of mixed feelings. First I was flattered; then I wondered if I was called out of desparation. No where else to turn. Or was it a stroke of genius? Ask Jacob! He is our handsome, smart, cousin who is in college. How was I really seen? For years, I believed we were looked upon as the poor relations. That was then. This was now.
The evening of the prom, I put on my best (and only) suit, and took the trolley to Rozzie’s house on Sedgwick Avenue, corsage in hand. Rozzie and her friends had arranged for a limousine, and off we went to the Copacabana. By now, my ability to make small talk had improved considerably. Besides, I was a couple years older than the others. I was very gallant, complimented Rozzie, and entertained her friends. I had never been to a night club, though I had been to a few jazz clubs on 52nd Street. I looked forward to the show with great anticipation. The featured entertainer was Jimmie Durante! I loved Jimmie Durante. I used to do imitations of Jimmie Durante. I couldn’t have been happier, and more important, Rozzie was happy. We danced, we talked, we ate, we drank, we laughed. We had a great time. The night club photographer took a picture of our table, and before we left, we each had a Copacabana match book with our picture. We all looked great. For a moment I wondered if I would have had an equally good time at my prom.
1-2-12
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
I Take My Cousin to Her Prom
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"My cousin Rozzie is 3 ½ years younger than me."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2012-01-02
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1931/1947
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
I_Take_My_Cousin_to_Her_Prom
Adolescence
Bronx
City College (CCNY)
Cousins
Family
New York City
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/5bb2d6ecdced4ad76c40b7f478a625d9.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=Ym4TB%7EQXePbVE4KVksMecDNQPtHhJsLN9J0FwgE%7ETleAMVDHl8-1ksBv6DdefXeEFhTRDQjgWaE3AnOJY4zCmU5Ft86L6R2UEnh932QSBXNDHZ4a6qvTHy8XgMHLJhnsavB7g5q9NSdN-VWxEeFT5CBqXlAFBFxRcwTjSTTDtFA9btoDcKeuRbQ2s9vGsMfRtUk-u1Dh-u69aW5Kxdlb5FFQKTDCC8W7jgb89jxVN930K1zo%7ENVnBCvE62RzhBeovvlV7d7NkDozd2No%7EQknl%7E1TtQzlHqB5qkwwFMYTBVdozesqUUti2onZ5KXSrLfxpjPNUzgRjYAWPdN1shMJkw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
7cb1805b83de0db9b1ccdec2a760b494
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
My Life as a Writer
As I write these pieces, surveying my life, it occurred to me to look back on my life as a writer. Calling oneself a writer strikes me as pompous, if not delusional, if you are not a serious writer, or if you do not earn your living as a writer. I am neither, but I have been writing since my schooldays.
In elementary and junior high school, we all had writing assignments and I always tried to be original or funny, and most of the time I received a good mark and a complimentary note: very original, or very funny. In Junior High School, we had a literary magazine, “The Knowlton Herald,” and I joined the staff and wrote a couple of stories and a couple of poems. They were childish, something a 13 year old would write. My mother was pleased, and I was proud. Phil Alexander, who was a year behind me, wrote epic poems, which blew me away. He was a writer!
In high school, I tried keeping a journal. Calling it a journal sounded more grown-up than a diary. After a few months of the same repititious—“I got up, had breakfast, caught the train to school, met X, had a test, went to work” etc, the entries became more infrequent. (However, when the computer entered my life, I resumed these jottings.)
One of my new high school friends, Maurice Dunst, was the editor of Stuyvesant’s literary magazine, “The Caliper.” He was aware of my interest in writing and encouraged me to write something, suggesting a “how to…” piece. I came up with an article about graphology: how to tell someone’s personality through his handwriting. I did some research, got a writing sample from a friend, analyzed it, and voila!, my article was published. A couple of pieces in one’s junior high and high school magazines do not make you a writer.
I thought briefly about writing for my high school and college newspapers, but I worked after school, and the papers demanded a great deal of after-school time. Many of the students who wrote for them were interested in careers in journalism. I wasn’t. While in high school, I met a neighbor, David Futornick, who fantasized that we could be song writers. He would write the music and I would write the words. We tried it for a few months, and gave it up. “I’m rolling along, singing a song…”
I wrote lots of papers in college. So did everyone else. In my senior year, I was president of the Economics Society and editor of the Journal of Social Science. I was in a position to take a paper that I had written for an Economics class on the Incandescent Lamp Cartel, and adapt it for the Journal. And I did, footnotes and all.
In 1950, I entered the ILGWU Training Institute, and its classes required writing many short papers on a variety of labor-related topics. I enjoyed writing them. During this period, Irv Weinstein and I became friends, and we noted that we both liked to write. Irv asked me a question which still intrigues me: “Do you write because you have something to say, or because you want to see your name in print?”
In March 1951, my mother died. I was organizing in Cleveland. I flew home, found her will, and made arrangements for her funeral. In her will she wrote, “In the event that my son JACOB should prove to be a writer, I would like him to use the name Goldstein or Tsirelson.” I realized how my mother held writers in such high regard. To her, being a writer makes you immortal.
After the Training Institute, I went to work as an organizer for Local 38 of the ILGWU. I became a writer of leaflets. I would draft new leaflets almost every week, and distribute them to the workers at Bonwit Teller, Tailored Woman, Elizabeth Arden, Mainbocher etc. Not only did I write them, I would also design them, do the art work, and run them off on my own mimeograph machine. And make home visits at night. All for $60 a week. (It was 1952.) I also felt a close connection to the staff of “Justice,” the union’s newspaper, and over the three years that I was at Local 38, I wrote a few pieces about the local for the paper.
In 1956, when I went to work for the Jewish Labor Committee, I was delighted to learn that part of my job included editing “Labor Reports,” a monthly news service to the labor press. I felt very important. “Labor Reports” consisted of short news stories which I gathered over the course of a month, an editorial, a quiz called “Test You Labor IQ,” a cartoon by Bernie Seaman, and a column by either Alton Levy or Harry Gersh. A few weeks before going to press, I would call Bernie and Al or Harry and suggest a few ideas. I, a 29 year old “pisher,” was suggesting ideas to three of the best in the business. I was also given the responsibility for editing all of the JLC’s English publications. I loved it. A story about my editing: In an article by Israel Knox, which we were to publish, Knox wrote about the Yiddish writer, Avram Liessin. I had never heard of Liessin, and assumed that he meant Avram Reisen. I sent Knox the corrected copy, and he called me, and gave me a lesson in modern Yiddish literature.
During the six years at the JLC, I wrote lots of speeches, pamphlets, articles, minutes of meetings, and countless letters. Nothing that I would call really creative writing, but I enjoyed putting words on paper. I was dimly aware that I was surrounded by the last generation of Yiddish writers: Jacob Glatstein, Chaim Grade, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who would drop by the JLC’s dining room (ess tzimmer) from time to time. The Garden Cafeteria on East Broadway had closed, so they came uptown to the Atran Center at 25 East 78th Street.
In 1962, I left 78th Street for 160 Fifth Avenue, the Amalgamated Laundry Workers. As the Education Director, I also assumed the mantle of editor of the union’s newspaper. When the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACWA), our parent union, celebrated its 50th Anniversary two years later, we sponsored a concert of the New York Philharmonic and I wrote the program insert. It summarized the history of the laundry workers union and contained reproductions of paintings of laundry workers. And when a new contract was negotiated, I put together a booklet explaining its provisions, something that had never been done before.
We skip to the US Commission on Civil Rights where I worked from 1965 to 1986, starting as a Field Representative and ending up as a Regional Director. It was our responsibility to provide information to the Commissioners on the status of civil rights in the States in which we worked. Each State had Advisory Committees which undertook investigations, held hearings, and wrote reports to the Commissioners. The reports were published and disseminated across the State. Over the 21 years with the Commission, I wrote a lot of reports. I also wrote monthly regional office reports for the Commissioners.
My next job was that of “Member” of the Board of Review of the Massachusetts Department of Employment and Training. We reviewed and issued decisions concerning unemployment insurance appeals. I was one of three members appointed by the Governor. After we made our ruling, a senior staff member would write the decision, to which all three members would affix their signatures. However, when I differed from my two colleagues, I would write a dissent. That was fun. I also became the poet laureate of the Board. When staff retired, I would write a poem in their honor. That was also fun.
I suspect this spurred me on to writing poems for special occasions, celebrating family and friends: birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, anniversaries etc. I usually patterned the meter after a well known poem, though lately I have been doing sonnets. My friend Bob said there was a word for such a person. I was afraid he was going to say something like a bore, or a boor. He said it was applied to Oliver Wendell Holmes, so it couldn’t be bad: an occasional poet.
My last job before I retired in 1997, was Inspector with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division. Each inspection required the submission of a written report. I tried to raise the quality of those reports, but I don’t think it was appreciated. What I did do to fulfill my need to write was to initiate a Division Newsletter, which I edited. The director was delighted. I was delighted. The staff didn’t care much, one way or the other. When I retired, the director wrote a lovely tribute, and I wrote a farewell poem.
From time to time, the spirit, or a news item, moved me to write a letter to the editor. One was printed in the New York Times, and I basked in my 15 minutes of fame. On the strength of that I sent a few items to the Times’ Metropolitan Diary. It wasn’t published. Getting into the Jewish Advocate or the Brookline Tab is easy.
When I retired, I discovered the Brookline Adult Education program’s class “Telling Your Story.” I knew immediately that it was for me. I had been telling my story (and my mother’s story), orally, most of my life. Now, I will be motivated to write it down and make it available to the world, fulfilling my destiny as a memoirist.
10-4-11
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
My Life as a Writer
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"As I write these pieces, surveying my life, it occurred to me to look back on my life as a writer. "
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011-10-04
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
My_Life_as_a_Writer
Adolescence
Career
ILGWU
Jewish Labor Committee (JLC)
Writing
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/43cb3a1a31bab79a528142fe561e2e61.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=UYpQ1gJb1-1%7EJ9Nz0IxIG3LjxSScHOMbQR-LEofmjXAGIltwL5D2C4dTFM5UgVOPXfyWD%7E5gXiVm2QM%7EZFDFF5gSG-uMLFo7kGQzC738V6VEWF0kyAGGG1QEINHm4nZtBTAbUSQfCU7DgPQK3r0rGeOKRbo8h-EDZpBf81lEZdxOwXup-rmJg4bRTEq0uJP1PqCZLw%7EbfNq4rqvU94kFxMfHiEYezhf%7EJLgA4YuFDNlTU3GIagDiepZOo1cwyS%7ELIiwae32eBBaPnx9L%7ENQ0Q-3I97e8TZxi0w35kJ9KQ9C1A1b48LDgTY3hOlfEITZxg7LSFvz0ZLWoUYqVC3EVAg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
e666e165b3f264247940c34efec23624
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
My Friend Phil
My friend Phil turned 84 July 30, 2011, and I want to tell his story—at least as much as I know. Phil has been reticent about sharing many of the details, and I have been reticent about prying. I am afraid that if I don’t get what little I know down on paper, it will not be told.
Phil Bernstein is six months older than me. He grew up on Fox Street, but I didn’t get to know him until we were in junior high school. When Phil was 10, his father committed suicide. He jumped out of the window into the courtyard of 725 Fox Street. Soon after, Phil’s family—his mother, and an older brother and sister—moved around the corner to Southern Boulevard. Actually, his brother Moe, who was 18, simply left the family. His sister Lillian, who was 12 years older than Phil, was married to a man whose name was also Moe (Senate). For several years after his father’s death, Phil was shuttled from one relative to the next in the Bronx. No one was supposed to know this, and Phil would take the trolley to school. When he entered junior high, he was finally living at home. He also was the only one of us who had a paying job. He worked in the morning for a bakery (Mr. Gamzen?), before going to school.
In junior high, Phil and Mel Schulman became close friends. They were both interested in chemistry, and came under the influence of our science teacher, Mr. Mandel. I assume they stayed after school and conducted experiments, or whatever students interested in chemistry do. Mel knew how difficult things were for Phil, and when Mel was offered a job in a neighborhood drug store, he turned it down and told Phil about it.
Life was difficult for Phil. The family lived in a four room apartment in a sixth floor walk-up. Phil slept on a couch in the living room. His mother was a cook, and managed to get a job in a luncheonette in downtown Manhattan. In the summers, she worked in a small hotel in the Catskills (the Prospect Hotel?), and Phil accompanied her. When my son David had his Bar Mitzvah, Phil revealed that he never had a real Bar Mitzvah. He was taken to a Synagogue in the area, was given an Aliyah, said the blessing, and that was it.
As a teenager, spending his summers in the Catskills, Phil, met a young woman who knew jazz, and who shared this knowledge with him. I recently asked Phil about her. He said her name was Muriel Finkelstein and she was in college. When he returned to the city, Phil began to collect jazz records, and he shared his knowledge about jazz with his friends. He also shared his records which he started buying with his friends, because he didn’t own a record player. When he dropped in to visit friends, he would listen to his records.
Everybody in our junior high school class liked Phil. He was bright, but we all were bright. More important, he seemed laid back, self-effacing. We elected him class captain. I don’t believe he sought it; it was generally recognized that he would make a good class leader. I can still see him as he ambled down the auditorium aisle to receive an award for our class’s performance—best attendance, fewest students late: Phil was cool..
Guys liked him and girls liked him. In elementary school, he was in the same class as my ex-wife’s sister, Hilda, which is how he got to know Sylvia. He was both Hilda’s and Sylvia’s friend. I certainly had no girl friends in junior high school. We were sophomores in college when Phil introduced me to Sylvia. As I have noted elsewhere, I liked her immediately, but I wouldn’t think of asking her out “because she was Phil’s friend.” It was only after Phil married that I figured it was all right to ask Sylvia for a date.
Phil developed an interest in art equal to his interest in jazz. He collected art books, read extensively, and visited art museums and galleries. It was Phil who introduced us to th Museum of Non-Objective Art (later the Guggenheim) and told us about the 57th Street galleries. I wouldn’t have set foot in the galleries at the time if it wasn’t for Phil. They sold art to rich people, and seemed unapproachable. On one occasion, when we were in college and “doing” the galleries, we visited one with several Maurice Utrillos. Phil explained to us how he painted the streets of Paris, and added that he died in poverty. The gallery receptionist smiled and said, “Oh no monsieur, he is very much alive.” Phil smiled and shrugged. Where lots of people whiz through museums, Phil was known to stand in front of one painting for five minutes or more.
All of us moved on from JHS 52 to Stuyvesant High School. (Except Sol who went to Clinton.) Phil continued his interest in chemistry, but an English teacher was his favorite. He also continued his interest in jazz and art. In the spring of 1945, we were bombarded by armed forces recruiters, and Phil succumbed and enlisted in the Navy. With exquisite timing, he was inducted on VJ Day, the day the Japanese surrendered. I don’t know what his assignment was, but I know he was on a ship that went to China, and that in an absent-minded moment, he carved his initials on the Captain’s table and was in the brig for a brief time on bread and water.
Phil returned, and joined us at CCNY. Our Reading Out Loud group was in full swing. (Phil’s specialty was the kazoo.) It was a few weeks before New Year’s Eve of 1950. Our friend Bob was going out with a young woman he met at camp, who had a younger sister. He called me to ask if I would like to go out with her. I already had a date. He called Phil who didn’t have a date, so Bob “fixed him up” with Martha. They fell in love, and were married a little more than a year later. Phil and Martha went to Texas where he planned to do graduate work, but then they decided to go to Boston so Martha could complete her studies at Radcliffe. Phil switched to Brandeis to complete his Master’s. While in the Boston area, Phil and Martha worked as house parents for a Jewish agency, and Phil worked at the Beth Israel Hospital and then later as a chemist for the Borden Company in Leominster.
Like all of us, Phil was a first generation American. Our parents were European born and spoke Yiddish (except for the Hungarians.) Therefore we were all familiar with Yiddish, and Phil knew lots of Yiddish jokes. Several of us called him by his Yiddish name, Fayvel. Martha and her sister Edna were also referred to by their Yiddish names—Malke and Eckie--by family and close friends.
The ‘50s and ‘60s saw our ROL group spreading out: Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Washington and even Long Island. Coincidentally, both Phil and Mel went to work for Thiokol in New Jersey, and Phil and Martha settled in Yardley Pennsylvania. Barbara and Sidney remained in the Bronx.
During this period, we all started having children. The Bernstein brood began with Benjamin, then Jason, Louis and Emily. Phil was a loving father. He lavished attention on all his children, but none more than Jason. When Jason was about two, it became clear that he was brain-damaged. This started a series of visits to doctors, special schools and finally group houses, a job, an accident, and a tragic death.
Phil was devoted to his entire family: his mother, his sister Lily and her husband and their children, Barry and Faith (known as Butchy and Faigie). His brother took off, but Phil maintained contact with his brother’s children. Faigie had a learning disability, and in 1956, when I was working for the ILGWU’s shipping clerk’s union, Phil asked me if I could help her. I was able to get her a job in a clothing warehouse as a ticketer, but the job was too demanding for her.
Phil suffered many losses, but the loss of Jason hit him hardest. He started going to Shul to say Kaddish. He found it comforting, and then started studying with the Rabbi. Involved as he was with the Shul, Phil decided to have the Bar Mitzvah he never had. He learned his Haftorah, chanted it beautifully, davened, gave a short talk, and after services, family and friends had a festive meal in the Shul’s Social Hall, where Phil was showered with gifts.
Speaking of gifts, no one is more generous than Phil. On two occasions, when we got together for a Reading Out Loud, Phil brought gifts for everyone: a CCNY sweatshirt, and a book that he thought we would all enjoy.
I don’t have Phil’s resume, but I know he was a respected organic chemist and had more than 20 patents to his credit. Two jobs that I remember: at an electric storage battery company and a nickel company. Phil taught as well. He was a natural as a teacher. During one of our ROLs, he lectured about Ethanol. Early on he taught his friends about jazz, and his favorite tenor sax players: Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. Also, about art, especially Renaissance art. Phil and Martha loved Italy. Phil worked with an Italian chemist and they became good friends. He invited them to visit; Martha learned Italian; they then rented a house in a small village and returned for several years.
The Bernstein children grew up, moved away and married. Phil and Martha retired and moved from Glen Ridge back to Yardley. It was getting harder for Martha to negotiate the stairs, and they decided to move into an independent living facility. Martha’s sister and her husband had found Heritage Towers in Doylestown, PA, and Phil and Martha decided to follow them.
They were happy initially, in their two bedroom apartment, though it was hard to downsize. They had so many lovely pieces. Phil had a lot of woodworking equipment in his basement in Glen Ridge. He persuaded the officials at Heritage Towers to accept it with the idea of creating a woodworking facility. It never happened. He also gave them one of his Isamu Noguchi-like benches. Phil also initiated a short-story reading group.
Martha’s condition deteriorated and she was moved into the nursing section. Heritage Towers moved Phil into a studio apartment. Not too long after, Heritage Towers moved Phil into the nursing section, so that they now live in what is essentially a hospital room. Phil and Martha always loved good food. Both are excellent cooks. They are now eating less than appetizing institutional food.
Memorial Day weekend 2008, ROL had a three-generation reunion at the Pocono Environmental and Education Center. We had more than 50 participants from the seven families. We designed a T shirt and every family had a different color. We very much wanted Phil and Martha and all their children and grandchildren there. On Saturday afternoon, Phil arrived with daughter Emily, her husband David, and their daughter Joanna. Phil had difficulty walking. This was an ROL, and Phil had a short story to read. While he was reading, his son-in-law David strolled up to me and said, “Your friend has dementia.” Emily and Joanna were having a wonderful time when, after a few hours, David announced that it was time to go home. We suggested that Phil stay over and one of us would take him back to Doylestown. David refused and they left. We have had two ROLs at Heritage Towers since, so that we could involve Phil and Martha.
Both Phil and Martha get around now in wheel chairs. Phil no longer reads short stories to residents. He is not doing much reading at all. He isn’t listening to music. The TV seems to be on all the time. They have given up their computer. It is almost impossible to reach them by phone. They have few visitors.
Some time in the late spring of 2011, when I called Phil and got through, he told me that he had gone back to the Bronx, and looked in on his old apartment at 725 Fox Street. I was amazed. How did he get there? With his son, Louis, he told me. I called Louis a few weeks later and asked about the trip to the Bronx. Louis said that there was no trip to the Bronx. In addition to short term memory loss, Phil is suffering from a number of physical ailments, most recently diabetes. Martha no longer makes jokes. It has become a sad and lonely life.
October, 2011
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
My Friend Phil
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"My friend Phil turned 84 July 30, 2011, and I want to tell his story—at least as much as I know."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011/2012
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1927/2011
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
My_Friend_Phil
Adolescence
Aging
Bronx
City College (CCNY)
Friends
Illness
Reading Out Loud (R.O.L.)
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/8992dabc2646f1bfe246c14f76fef5fa.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=kqgzLYK89PdJo7%7E9GFcvBzdsntcloZK2Ldl%7EiWrYBMyUVybaJAmaleZFh8wTWbc4L4S9PAN1RUPaHMsEE4SeK%7EKSNRWaWiZiY11TOyjTWDr1UNJ22-Qxo1fFjOgJPKXs6rmiACqkZYBoKxF9bsHviGZhDplfRr-VrB9eeEb-IzoT5jE4ibK5y40mR0yD5GZZgh0NkwBmfpL7f-yCchOZofvdGZTae4t2zf3ONKyK-AWVy%7E8oAcV1I7pJxGQuLzg6bHxxTFrFcbE4phA6uxYaxT5gPREHDVvC%7EH3uwS5kIVViKPx0UXbn7hUsumiWxVyra2vOvx5W1ft7P4SkSbFI6Q__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
33b2920edc121b3e637f549fe2c7f683
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
My Favorite Educational Experience
I entered JHS 52, Thomas Knowlton Junior High School, in February 1940. I was 12 years old. I had come from PS 62, which was co-ed. JHS 52 was all-boys. I remember those first days, going to 52, with trepidation. We had been warned that the ninth graders were giants, that they beat up the incoming seventh graders, and cut off their ties. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
JHS 52 was on Kelly Street, and I would walk up Fox Street, cross 156th Street, to Leggett Avenue, make a right on Leggett and walk past Beck Street to Kelly Street. I had a short four block walk to 52. Some of my classmates came to school from the Hunts Point area and beyond, a mile or more away. Ten years later, I was followed to 52 by Colin Powell, who also lived near Hunts Point.
On school days, my routine was to wake up, make my bed, wash, dress, turn on the radio and have breakfast. My breakfast consisted of juice, a soft-boiled egg, toast and milk. My radio listening consisted of Phil Cook, who, when he ended his program at 8 am, would sign off with the following song:
“Try and live today
So tomorrow you can say
What a wonderful yesterday.
“Let’s not borrow sorrow
For tomorrow’s skies may clear.
Life is what you make it
So just take it while it’s here.”
My God! I remembered it, and that was over 70 years ago!
I would usually walk to 52 by myself. If I spotted one of my friends, we would walk together. There were at least 10 or 15 boys on my block, headed for 52: David Goldman, Danny Lala, Stanley Harris, Eddie Handwerger, Larry Wilson, Miltie Greenspan, Seymour Mirchin and Eugene Alperin. On the next block were Irving Plotnick, Sidney Reiter, and Sheldon Greenberg. Bert Siegelstein lived on Leggett Avenue. Phil Bernstein had lived on Fox Street, but moved around the corner to Southern Blvd. We had all previously gone to PS 62.
A whole slew of kids came to 52 from PS 39, the other feeder school, which was on Longwood Avenue and Beck Street. PS 39 had more black and Puerto Rican kids than 62. Whoever drew the district lines routed Fox Street ending at Longwood Avenue to 62, even though we were closer to 39. I felt that both school assignments and class assignments were largely arbitrary. Sure, there were bright, average and slow kids. The teachers assigned us to classes according to their evaluation of us. The “1” class was for the brightest. And in descending order: 3,4,5 and 2. And then there was something called “ungraded” for the absolute slowest students.
Many kids were afraid of being “left back,” being required to repeat a semester. There were students at 52, a year or two older than their classmates who had been “left back.” Conversely, there were a few bright kids who were “skipped,” I actually felt sorry for them because they were younger and smaller than the others in their class, and felt out of place.
This was not the case with the “Rs.” If you were assigned to 7AR, as Sol and I were, you did three years of junior high in 2 ½, as a class. Equally bright kids were placed in 7A1. Bob Epstein, Phil Bernstein and Mel Schulman, who became three of my closest friends, were placed in 7A1, and were then moved to 9AR for their last year. They did not skip a term as Sol and I did. Alex Roth and Sid Stern, who attended PS 39, also made the “Rs,” but they were a term behind us.
Kids today carry their books in knapsacks. This was unknown in my day. A few kids had school bags. I and most of my friends simply used a strap which held our text books and note book. The note book was either hard covered (more expensive) or soft covered. The cover was marbleized, black and white, with the multiplication table on the back. We may have had a pencil case, which we jammed in under the strap. If we were taking math, the pencil case would have contained a compass and a protractor. Some of us had a pencil sharpener. Toward the end of junior high, my mother gave me a pen knife which belonged to my father. I used to sharpen pencils.
The transition from PS 62 to JHS 52 meant that we were able to move from class to class. In 62, one teacher taught us most everything—English, history, geography, math, science. We remained in the same classroom. In 52, we started out in our home room, but then we would go to different classrooms for different subjects with different teachers. It was much more grown up. The junior high school teachers were subject matter specialists. Junior high was also our introduction to hall and staircase monitors, and staircases labeled “up” and “down.”
A concern of many students at every level was bullies. My children have horror stories of bullies, which I only learned about much later. The only bully I remember was the previously mentioned David Goldman, who was in my class in PS 62. It was in fourth or fifth grade that he picked on me until he provoked a fight. I certainly was not a fighter. Somehow I managed to survive that experience, and even knocked him down. (Unless he tripped.) After that, no more bullying. Besides, the toughest guy in my class, Sheldon Greenberg, was my friend, which helped. I don’t remember bullies in junior high.
Though I have a vivid memory of those 2 ½ years, it has been augmented by my having saved the graduation program, dated June 25, 1942. It listed all the graduates and indicated those who made the Honor Roll. I also have the January and June 1942 copies of the Knowlton Herald, the combination literary magazine and yearbook. I am sure I kept them because they contained two of my stories and a poem, and I was listed on the masthead as a member of the staff. Another valuable resource (about which I will write later) was my autograph album. And thanks to a relatively recently discovered classmate, Bert Siegelstein, I have a copy of the 9BR graduation photograph.
I not only remember the names of my classmates, I remember almost all of my junior high school teachers. Why, since I do not remember many of my high school and college teachers, did my junior high school teachers make such an impression? Perhaps I was at my most impressionable during those years, and perhaps they just happened to be good teachers.
Today, kids usually start school in September. We entered school in both February and September. I started first grade in February 1934, having turned six the previous December. In February 1940, entering seventh grade, we were finally coming out of the depression, but my mother still did not have work, and we were still on relief. She soon found work in a WPA garment shop. World War II started in September 1939. In the fall of 1940, I began preparing for my Bar Mitzvah, and campaigning for FDR who was running for an unprecedented third term. At 12, FDR, was my hero, as were Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and Governor Herbert Lehman.
It felt good being in junior high; more grown up and independent. In elementary school, we lined up by class, in the schoolyard, or the inside yard. We then went to our classroom as a group. In junior high, if we came early, we milled around the schoolyard, then went directly to our “home rooms.” We were supposed to be in our home rooms by 8:30. We put our coats in the closet, attendance was taken, announcements were read, and a bell was rung for our first class. We would walk through the halls, supervised by both teachers and hall monitors. We went up and down the stairs, supervised by staircase monitors. After the last morning class, we returned to our home rooms, from which we were dismissed for lunch.
Lunch was between 12 noon and 1 pm. Most of my classmates went home for lunch. Some of them brought their lunch, and ate them in designated classrooms. There was no lunch room. Those of us who received “free lunch” went to the second floor where it was served. A couple of classrooms were designated for the purpose. We lined up, took trays and were served a watery soup, a sandwich, milk and either fresh or canned fruit.
I felt stigmatized, receiving free lunch. It meant that you were poor. I have already written about the experience of receiving a winter jacket which had been distributed to the children on welfare. I came to the school yard one morning and noticed 10 or 15 other kids wearing the same jacket. It may not have been obvious to other kids, but those of us who were wearing them saw it as a sign that said, “We are poor.” One of those kids, Tony Rodriguez, was in my class. A week or two later, he came to school with another jacket. I asked him where was the “relief” jacket. He said, with a smile, that he threw it in a fire, and told his mother that he tripped and fell into the fire, but, thank God, didn’t get hurt. His mother was so thankful, she bought him another jacket.
An important part of the junior high school experience was “assembly.” Once a week the entire school would line up by class and go to the auditorium. We lined up by height, with a monitor in front and in the back. Height took on a value which frequently determined how you were viewed by others. It was better to be tall than short. I felt lucky to have been among the taller boys in our class. We were seated in our classes by height, with the shorter boys in front. It seemed to make sense. One of the smallest boys in our class was nicknamed “mousy.” I did not view it as complimentary. Kids who had vision problems also sat in the front.
We entered the auditorium, took our seats, and when every class was seated, the Principal or Assistant Principal would greet us. I believe he then read a passage from the Bible. There was a “color guard” which marched down the aisle with the flag; we would then recite the Pledge of Allegiance. (At some point in my school experience, the Pledge was amended to add “under God.”) We also sang the Star Spangled Banner. Each week, awards were given to classes for the least tardiness, and best attendance. The President of the class receiving the award would go to the front of the auditorium to accept it. I can still see Phil Bernstein as he casually strode down the aisle, during our last year at 52. He was cool. There were also announcements, pep talks, and singing: Miss Haver at the piano and Mrs. Lubin leading us, waving her hands and mouthing the words. Despite the fact that I was labeled a “listener,” I sang along with everyone else. In our music classes, we learned the songs of the season, the busiest season being Thanksgiving and Christmas. The songs had a religious overtone, but nobody seemed to mind. We sang them in assembly.
Junior high school was a wonderful learning experience, expanding on the subjects we were exposed to in elementary school, with subject matter teachers. My English teachers made the greatest impression on me: Mrs. Merten, Miss Jensen and Mrs. Davis, who was black. They were all older women; I would guess in their 60s. They taught us grammar, sentence structure, creative writing, and they introduced us to great literature. We read Shakespeare, and memorized poems, sonnets and soliloquies. Speaking of Shakespeare, the following exchange took place in my ninth grade English class: We were reading aloud from a Shakespeare play, when a student, reading the word “whore,” pronounced it “who-ah.” The teacher corrected him. “It is pronounced “hore” like “more” or “core.” He looked at the teacher, shook his head and said, “I always pronounce it “who-ah.” (How times have changed: today, on the street, it is pronounced, “hoe.”)
We were encouraged to read lots of books, and I read lots of books. My mother had a bookcase filled with Yiddish books, which she had acquired when times were good. Soon after I came along, times turned bad. I remember having only one book, when I was seven or eight. It was a “pop-up” book of fairy tales: Puss in Boots, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin. For my Bar Mitzvah, I received two books: Laughs from Jewish Lore (which I still have) and a book by Richard Halliburton.
It was during junior high school that I really became “a reader.” I had gotten my library card while I was in elementary school, and would go to the Hunts Point Library regularly. The children’s section was one flight up. I entered the library, turned to the right, and against the wall were shelves and shelves of children’s fiction, arranged alphabetically. My favorites were Barbour and Heyliger who both wrote about high school sports teams. I was also a fan of Howard Pease who specialized in nautical adventures—cabin boys on steamships, pirates on the high seas, intrigue in foreign ports. Toward the end of junior high school, I moved on to “Books for Older Children” and I started reading Dickens, and Dumas and Mark Twain. In my autograph album, I claimed that “The Three Musketeers” was my favorite book.
My history teachers were Mr. Levin and Mr. Rothfeder, who was the Debating Club advisor. We also had classes in Geography and Civics, all of which came under the heading of social studies. We did a lot of memorizing in social studies as well as in English. We entered World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday December 7, 1941. The next day we had a special assembly and heard President Roosevelt declare war, calling the day of the attack, “a date which will live in infamy.” I was in 9AR. We had been following the progress of the war in our history class from the time I entered 52. Several of my classmates were very knowledgeable, especially Augie Iglesias, who was an expert on the war in Yugoslavia. I was aware of what was happening in Germany, before entering 52, from discussions in Hebrew School, from my mother’s reading of her Yiddish newspaper, “The Day,” and listening to news on the Yiddish language station, WEVD.
The teacher who, without a doubt, made the greatest impression on three of my closest friends, was our science teacher, Mr. Mandel. Phil Bernstein, Mel Schulman and Alex Roth all credit Mr. Mandel with stimulating their interest in science. Phil and Mel stayed after school and worked with Mr. Mandel on chemistry. Alex, who had been involved, on his own in several scientific projects involving electricity, actually went to Mr. Mandel’s house for help.
Only one foreign language was offered—French--and there was only one foreign language teacher--Miss Garmir. She was French, and easily intimidated by unruly ninth grade boys. She was the only teacher so intimidated. We were never disruptive in any other class. The high point (or low point) of our behavior: we entered the classroom one day and Miss Garmir was not there. Her record book was on her desk. One of my classmates took the record book and threw it out the window. We did learn French and we all were admitted to third term French in high school.
One of the subjects we all liked was typing. We were thrilled to be sitting at a typewriter, which none of us owned, learning how to “touch-type.” It was not easy, but we plugged away at it: “a s d f g f” etc. And we liked the teachers, Mrs. Kerchof and Mr. Fried. My friend Irving Plotnick was the best typist in our class, and when he was in high school his father, a furrier, bought him am old Remington manual typewriter, which weighted a ton. Irv typed his father’s bills on it, as well as his homework, and term papers. The rest of us hand wrote everything.
We were given a wonderful introduction to music. We listened to classical music and were provided with words, enabling us to remember the melody: “This is the symphony that Schubert wrote and never finished.” And we sang the Ballad for Americans, and we put on a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, and a school play where we sang lots of folk songs. The play was called, The Land of the Free. I was designated “a listener” and was not supposed to sing when the class performed.
Shop classes were the high point of the day. There was wood shop and sheet metal shop. We learned to use tools, and we made useful objects like a tie rack in wood shop and a dust pan in metal shop. Print shop with Mr. Lyman was magical. I loved the smell of the ink and the sound of the printing press. We learned to hold a printer’s stick and take the letters from the boxes and assemble words, then sentences, then paragraphs, and finally a page. Our literary magazine, “Knowlton Herald” was produced in our print shop by the students, and illustrated with linoleum cuts, made by the students in the Linoleum Club. How many other junior high schools published a literary magazine?
We were dismissed at 3 pm and most of us went straight home. A few guys may have stayed around the schoolyard and played ball. A few may have had some after school duties, or were being kept after school as punishment. Most of the Jewish kids went to Hebrew school, which they usually left after Bar Mitzvah. (My Bar Mitzvah was at the end of my second semester at 52, but though I left Hebrew School, my mother sent me to the Yiddish school, which I attended until the end of junior high.) Hanging out was an important after school activity. We talked, we played ball, we engaged in whatever the seasonal activity might have been: skating, marbles, bottle caps, trading cards. And then we headed upstairs, and listened to programs like Jack Armstrong or Little Orphan Annie. The streets became deserted.
When my mother came home from work, she would make supper. It was late and she found shortcuts. She would open a can of Campbell’s vegetable soup, heat it up, prepare hamburgers or some other meat, serve the soup without the vegetables, while the meat was broiling. Then serve the vegetables from the vegetable soup with the meat. Sometimes my mother would serve canned salmon or tuna with a salad, or noodles and cheese. For dessert, canned fruit.
After supper, I would do my homework. I had a constant battle with my mother who insisted, “Do not do your homework with the radio on.” I tried to tell her I could do both. I never won that battle. When I finished my homework, I was allowed to listen to “my programs:” The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, The Green Hornet. Inner Sanctum. However, if one of my programs came on at 9 pm, my mother’s insisted that Gabriel Heatter take precedence. So I put on my program at 9:15 pm and tried to imagine what took place during the first 15 minutes. There were several programs that we listened to together: The Goldbergs, Lux Radio Theatre, Amos and Andy, The Quiz Kids, Information Please. And the comedians and news commentators.
During my last semester, I was confronted with the momentous question: wheret to go to high school? I immediately selected Townsend Harris, the very prestigious exam school on 23rd Street in Manhattan, the CCNY “prep school.” The other exam schools were Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. Prior to making application, we met with an “advisor.” When I met with her, she looked at my record and told me that I was not Townsend Harris material. I told her I planned to apply anyway. Her attitude was: “it’s your funeral.” However, during the spring of 1942, New York City closed Townsend Harris, so I never found out if I was Townsend Harris material.
I, and most of my classmates, applied to Stuyvesant. A few others applied to Science and Tech. Our teachers worked with us, preparing us for the exams. An indication of how good our teachers were (or how smart we were): almost all of us passed. The Knowlton Herald carried Norman Perlmutter’s story, The Stuyvesant Test. He described how we nervously left 52, took the subway to 14th Street, and entered the high school auditorium where there were students from all over the city. The tests were distributed—vocabulary, then a paragraph test, then math and algebra. No one in my class wanted to go to the district high school, Morris.
The best schools attract the best teachers. I don’t know if JHS 52 was considered one of the best schools, but we had outstanding teachers. My guess is that close to half the student body was Jewish. My 9BR class had 36 students; 28 were Jewish and five were Puerto Rican. Using name recognition, I guess that 111 of the 225 graduates in June 1942 were Jewish. By the late 40s, the ethnic make-op of the school was changing.
When I was a substitute teacher at 52 for a few days in 1950, the school was majority Puerto Rican and black. None of my teachers were still in the school. My friends and I returned to the school 50 years later. We were revisiting the old neighborhood, or the Shtetl, as Bob Epstein calls it. We met the Principal who was Puerto Rican. She had little idea of the history of the school, and was surprised to know that there was a school song. We were shown the auditorium, and spontaneously burst out into song:
“Rah for dear old Knowlton.
Shout til the rafters ring.
Rah for dear old Knowlton once again.
Let every man in Knowlton sing.
We’ll sing of all the happy hours.
Sing of the carefree days.
Sing of dear old alma mater.
The school of our hearts always.”
There is another stanza which begins: “We’ll be true, we’ll be true…” but I can no longer remember what it was that we will be true to. But we remembered all of it then, and sang out lustily.
No matter how poor you were, when you graduated from junior high school, you bought an autograph album. There were two kinds: one with a zipper, and the cheaper one with a clasp. I got the one with a clasp. When my friend Sol died, his children found his autograph album, and not knowing what to do with it, they sent it to me. Though he was as poor as me, his had a zipper.
Comparing the contents of both albums, I realized how similar the entries were. At the beginning of the album, was a page titled “Favorites.” For Book, Sol chose The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. I chose The Three Musketeers. For Game, Sol’s choice was stickball; mine was baseball. For Chum, Sol picked Marvin Peyser and me. And I picked Sol and Larry Wilson. We both selected CCNY for College. On the next page, Class Officers, we of course had the same entries: Philip Bernstein as President, and David Mass as Vice President, the 52 equivalent was Captain and Lieutenant.) I was the Class Secretary, but since the list included Treasurer, Sol put me in as Treasurer as well.
Having the albums at hand, I don’t have to rely on memory to share what my fellow classmates wrote. The last week before graduation, the halls of 52 were alive with the scurrying of the graduating class, albums in hand, cornering other classmates and teachers. The aim was to fill up your album, as if the graduate who filled the most pages, got a prize. Teachers usually just signed their names. The teachers who were special, wrote something special for you. My favorite English teacher, P. T. (Pauline Turner) Davis wrote “Steadiness is one of your fine qualities. Success to you,” A few teachers wrote Best Wishes, or Sincerely, or Good Luck. Looking through Sol’s album, I was impressed that our gorgeous music teacher, R. Sybil Haver, wrote “You’ll talk your way through, I’m sure.” There has to be a fascinating story behind that.
Very few of us were original. The same inscriptions appeared year after year in junior high school autograph albums across the land:
“You asked me to write, What shall it be? Two little words. “Remember Me.’”
“When on this page you chance to look, Just think of me and close the book.”
I wrote the following in several albums: “First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then comes (Sol, Phil, Bob etc) with a perambulator.”
“Here’s to those who wish you well. And those who don’t can go to ‘Morris.’”
“If all the girls lived across the sea, What wonderful swimmers we would be.”
“If writing in a book, Remembrance assures. With the greatest of pleasure, I will write in yours.”
“He who only hopes is hopeless.”
“Remember once, remember twice. Remember the time We rolled the dice.”
“I am no poet, I have no fame. Just to do you a favor, I’ll sign my name.”
“If you sit on the tack of ambition, you will surely rise,”
“When you get married And have a shiny new car, Remember me, the guy from 9BR.” Another ‘When you get married…poem: “When you get married And your wife asks for a drink, Just give her a cup, And show her the sink.”
“Friend is a word of royal tone. Friend is a poem all alone.”
“When you are low and feeling blue, Just think of the days in 52.”
One of my classmates looked for a page with a certain color, and wrote: “May you never be as blue as this page.”
Another classmate had this as his favorite inscription: “First in the album, Best of the lot, first to be remembered, Last to be forgot.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it should be written on the first page of the album, not in the middle.
In addition to the clever poem or saying, I was surprised to see how my classmates addressed me: I was Jake, Jaky, Jakie, Jacke, Jackob, Jacob, J.S., and Schlitt, To Tony Rodriguez, I was Schlittzenbergen.
And how did my classmates close their entries? Your pal; your classmate; your friend; your fellow grad-u-8; your fellow grad-u-past tense of to eat; a fellow grad; your brother graduate. Phil Bernstein signed: Your Captain, and David Mass wrote Your Lieutenant. The page was occasionally decorated with “4 get me knot” in the corners, or “Yours til the board walks.”
A sad note: I had saved the first page for my mother, but I never asked her to write anything. There were entries from my classmates, my teachers, my relatives, but I had not asked my mother. Three years later, after I had graduated from high school, she found my junior high school autograph album, looked through it, and wrote the following on the first page that I had reserved for her:
“Sep. 7, 1945
To my son Jacob,
Best wishes to your Graduation my son. Late, well, late is my fate.
You, my dear son, came late, but thanks God you came. You came, my son.
Blessed shall be that day in December 1927. The day of days.
Dear God, may my son be blessed white. Everything that is good, fine and nice.
A very happy New Year 5705, to you my son.
Mother”
I weep when I read or remember it. Five and a half years after she wrote this, she was gone.
While we were in 52, we never gave any thought to why our school was called Thomas Knowlton. It was a given. Somebody, I would assume at the Board of Education, named it Thomas Knowlton. But we never knew who Thomas Knowlton was. I believe I once asked a teacher, and was told that he fought in the Revolutionary War, but he wasn’t sure. Thanks to Wikipedia, I learned that Thomas Knowlton was born in Boxford MA in 1740, his family moved to Ashford CT when he was 8, he fought in the French and Indian War when he was 15, and as a result of his leadership in the Battle of Bunker Hill, was made an officer. He organized a group of spies called the Knowlton Rangers, in August 1776, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and was killed in the Battle of Harlem Heights in September 1776. It would have been nice to have known this when we went to Knowlton.
I recently learned that our school is no longer designated JHS 52; it is now Middle School 302. Furthermore, it is no longer Knowlton; it is Luisa Dessus Cruz. When I asked who was Luisa Dessus Cruz, no one knew. Someone believes she was an educator.
For some reason, we never questioned that junior high school should be a single sex institution. (52 became co-ed in 1962.) We said goodbye to girls as classmates at the end of sixth grade, just as we were beginning to be aware of them. During that last year of elementary school, I decided that I was in love with both Phyllis Flyer and Rita Feit. I suspect that they had no idea how I felt about them, though one day I went with a friend to the courtyard of Phyllis’ apartment house and shouted, “Phyllis, I love you!,” and ran away.
All those feelings were put on hold for the next few years. I suspect that for the same reason Orthodox synagogues separate men and women, the New York City school system separated boys and girls in junior high school (and even in some high schools.) They are very distracting.
Girls were absent from my world during junior high school, and the chasm that junior high created was widened by an all-boys high school. Not only were there no girls to distract us, there was only one teacher among the entire faculty who was young and attractive: R. Sybil Haver. I would have thought by the law of averages, there would have been more. But it was the end of the depression, and teachers were holding on to their jobs for dear life. There was very little turnover. Few young teachers were being hired.
A final observation regarding sex: In my 2 ½ years in junior high (and for that matter in high school and college) I never met a homosexual. They must have been well closeted in the 40s. We knew they existed, but we thought they were confined to Greenwich Village. If we wanted to make fun of someone, especially someone who was not macho, we would call him “homo!” and speak in a falsetto It might be accompanied by a limp writs and a pinkie along the eye brow.. My Puerto Rican friends labeled the individual “maricon.” The closest anyone came to having his sexual preference questioned in 52 was Norman Perlmutter. He was blonde and pudgy, and played Buttercup in our production of HMS Pinafore, wearing a dress. That really took courage. And he wasn’t gay.
At 2:15 every Thursday, we participated in the “club” of our choice.. Most of the clubs were extensions of the curriculum: French Club, Glee Club, P.T. Club, Debating Club, Clay Club, Soap Sculpture Club etc. We didn’t stay with the same club each term. I was in the Debating Club one term and possibly the Stamp Club or the Garden Club another term. We did not take it very seriously. It was when the Glee Club and Orchestra practiced, and when the members of the Traffic Squad, the Staircase Squad and the GO met.
I was always puzzled by what the GO (General Organization) did. It was supposed to be something like a Student Council, where elected representatives from each class, met and deliberated. But about what? It was the “teacher’advisor” who ran the show. I always joined the GO (dues were 25 cents), and I have my GO buttons from all my five terms. Our dues money bought the Service pins, the Knowlton “K,” and the carnations given to the graduates. We also saw a baseball game, underwritten by the GO.
Perhaps it was my involvement with the Garden Club that led me to join the school’s Victory Garden over the summer. Across the street from the school was a garden plot, and we prepared the ground during the spring, and tended to the garden during the summer. We harvested our “crop” before school started in the fall. I worked in our Victory Garden for two summers. (The summer of 1942, after I graduated, was devoted to looking for a summer job.) I believe the N.Y. Herald Tribune partnered with the Board of Education to encourage school Victory Gardens. They held an annual fair where students displayed the result of their labors, and prizes were awarded. We may not have won a prize, but all of us who worked in the garden were awarded certificates. And we were able to bring home the food we grew. In addition to the more common vegetables, we grew stuff I had never heard of. My favorite was kol rabi. It was years later that I realized that my friends Bob Epstein and Mel Schulman were also involved with the Victory Garden. We must have been solitary gardeners.
My interest in growing things preceded my working in 52’s garden, but it was encouraged by the school. We were sold seeds every spring that were packaged by the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. The packets sold for a few cents, and contained both vegetable and flower seeds. I would get cheese boxes from the grocery store, fill them with soil that I would dig out of the empty lots near the East River, put the seeds in the soil, and place the boxes on my fire escape. I grew asters, marigolds, morning glories and string beans. Again, I owe a debt of gratitude to JHS 52.
I have enjoyed reliving those years, and treasure the friendships I made at junior high school 52--my closest friends. Most educators consider the junior high school--middle school years the most difficult to teach. I don’t believe my teachers felt that, but times were different in the 1930s-‘40s. JHS 52 had children of immigrant parents. Learning was the passport to success. We wanted to do well. We may have come from families that questioned the economic system, but we were taught to respect out teachers, and that the knowledge they were imparting will be the tools we would need to make a better world. Thank you Thomas Knowlton Junior High School.
Finally, I am a sucker for reunions. When I learn about a reunion—from high school or college—if I can get there, I will. Of course, it usually is a disappointment. As far as I know, there has never been a junior high school reunion of any of the graduating classes of the 1940s and 1950s. I am toying with the thought such a reunion would be a great idea. Those of us who are still around will range in age from our mid-70s to our mid-80s. Why not? We just have to get the word out.
12-16-11
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Junior High School
My Favorite Educational Experience
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
Further condensed/revised version of "Junior High School: My Most Favorite Educational Experience
(And My Longest Memoir)" (2011) and "Junior High School: My Favorite Educational Experience" (2011/2012)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2012
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1940/1942
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Further_condenced
Adolescence
Bronx
Education
Friends
Junior High School (J.H.S. 52)
Mother
Reading Out Loud (R.O.L.)
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/f2d67f5f6a44523894726f1d034f7bc0.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=vRSZ-JPCTczqP6wfWt9Zdgh5N3UmHA0dI%7ED3vgmnj7URVx1KzG6eE6P2dSoxCi3c29FCZOuzbMwVZjuKHoVg794NsgJk3m4XzeEykMuF58Orsyvth72tcNaJywiOaaTsvflToWZ1YbwEMiS8zinWczOlpWRggjBt7d9UdGPQ9BD8b-G%7EffLD6slA4Fj3auGVX8-bGGVWH9OykF2U07R%7EuR-paWVfe%7E71ZGDYulZ3FViByS414VJkAhNnt%7Ect6Gvt7JpDJ3pQMFuWzgVRkMBvCoye2zZ1jhtl13REkmuSgm97QfRjS6mCuKunke1Gbpo%7EB0Zg8y3FkfgyTnmP4Z0O6A__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
811413be9642b4ce7a73fd7e062060a1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
My Favorite Educational Experience
I entered JHS 52, Thomas Knowlton Junior High School, in February 1940. I was 12 years old. I had come from PS 62, which was co-ed. JHS 52 was all-boys. I remember those first days, walking to 52, with trepidation. We had been warned that the ninth graders were giants, that they beat up the incoming seventh graders, and cut off their ties. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
JHS 52 was on Kelly Street, and I would walk up Fox Street, cross 156th Street, to Leggett Avenue, make a right on Leggett and walk past Beck Street to Kelly Street . During the 2 ½ years that I attended JHS 52, my mother had me take our laundry to a steam laundry on Leggett Avenue. Once a week, I would drop it off in the morning and pick it up after school. When I was not returning from school with the laundry, I would walk down Beck Street hoping to see Sallie Mae Pollack who lived at 722 Beck Street.
I had a short four block walk to 52. Some of my classmates came to school from the Hunts Point area and beyond, a mile or more away. Ten years later, I was followed to 52 by Colin Powell, who also lived near Hunts Point, and who went on to the neighborhood high school, Morris, and then to CCNY, and the rest is history.
On school days, my routine was to wake up, make my bed, wash, dress, turn on the radio and have breakfast. My breakfast consisted of juice, a soft-boiled egg, toast and milk. My radio listening consisted of Phil Cook, who, when he ended his program at 8 am, would sign off with the following song:
“Try and live today
So tomorrow you can say
What a wonderful yesterday.
“Let’s not borrow sorrow
For tomorrow’s skies may clear.
Life is what you make it
So just take it while it’s here.”
My God! I remembered it, and that was over 70 years ago! When Phil Cook retired, he was followed by Arthur Godfrey.
I would usually walk to 52 by myself. If I spotted one of my friends, we would walk together. There were at least 10 or 15 boys on my block, headed for 52: David Goldman, Danny Lala, Stanley Harris, Eddie Handwerger, Larry Wilson, Miltie Greenspan, Seymour Mirchin and Eugene Alperin. On the next block were Irving Plotnick, Sidney Reiter, and Sheldon Greenberg. Bert Siegelstein lived on Leggett Avenue. Phil Bernstein had lived on Fox Street, but moved around the corner to Southern Blvd.
A whole slew of kids came to 52 from PS 39, the other feeder school, which was on Longwood Avenue and Beck Street. PS 39 had more black and Puerto Rican kids than 62, but still not that many. My guess is under 20%. Whoever drew the district lines routed Fox Street ending at Longwood Avenue to 62, even though we were closer to 39. Among the kids from 39, was Sol Rauch. We became good friends during that first semester in 7AR.
I felt that both school and class assignments were largely arbitrary. We were aware that there were bright kids, average kids and slow kids. The teachers assigned us to classes according to their evaluation of us. The “1” class was for the brightest. And in descending order: 3,4,5 and 2. And then there was something called “ungraded” for the absolute slowest students.
Many kids were afraid of being “left back,” being required to repeat a semester. There were students at 52, a year or two older than their classmates who had been “left back.” Conversely, there were a few bright kids who were “skipped,” I actually felt sorry for them because they were younger and smaller than the others in their class, and felt out of place.
This was not the case with the “Rs.” If you were assigned to 7AR, as Sol and I were, you did three years of junior high in 2 ½, as a class. Equally bright kids were placed in 7A1. Bob Epstein, Phil Bernstein and Mel Schulman, who became three of my closest friends, were placed in 7A1, and were then moved to 9AR for their last year. They did not skip a term as Sol and I did. Alex Roth and Sid Stern, who attended PS 39, also made the “Rs,” but they were a term behind us.
Kids today carry their books in knapsacks. This was unknown in my day. A few kids had school bags. I and most of my friends simply used a strap which held our text books and note book. The note book was either hard covered (more expensive) or soft covered. The cover was marbleized, black and white, with the multiplication table on the back. We may have had a pencil case, which we jammed in under the strap. If we were taking math, the pencil case would have contained a compass and a protractor. Some of us had a pencil sharpener. Toward the end of junior high, my mother gave me a pen knife which belonged to my father. I used to sharpen pencils.
The transition from PS 62 to JHS 52 meant that we were able to move from class to class. In 62, one teacher taught us most everything—English, history, geography, math, science. We remained in the same classroom. In 52, we started out in our home room, but then we would go to different classrooms for different subjects with different teachers. It was much more grown up. The junior high school teachers were subject matter specialists. Junior high was also our introduction to hall and staircase monitors, and staircases labeled “up” and “down.”
A concern of many students at every level was bullies. My children have horror stories of bullies, which I only learned about much later. The only bully I remember was the previously mentioned David Goldman, who was in my class in PS 62. It was in fourth or fifth grade that he picked on me until he provoked a fight. I certainly was not a fighter. Somehow I managed to survive that experience, and even knocked him down. (Unless he tripped.) After that, no more bullying. Besides, the toughest guy in my class, Sheldon Greenberg, was my friend, which helped. I don’t remember bullies in junior high.
Though I have a vivid memory of those 2 ½ years, it has been augmented by my having saved the graduation program, dated June 25, 1942. It listed all the graduates and indicated those who made the Honor Roll. I also have the January and June 1942 copies of the Knowlton Herald, the combination literary magazine and yearbook. I am sure I kept them because they contained two of my stories and a poem, and I was listed on the masthead as a member of the staff. Another valuable resource (about which I will write later) was my autograph album. And thanks to a relatively recently discovered classmate, Bert Siegelstein, I have a copy of the 9BR graduation photograph.
I not only remember the names of my classmates, I remember almost all of my junior high school teachers. Why, since I do not remember many of my high school and college teachers, did my junior high school teachers make such an impression? Perhaps I was at my most impressionable during those years, and perhaps they just happened to be good teachers.
Today, kids usually start school in September. We entered school in both February and September. I started first grade in February 1934, having turned six the previous December. In February 1940, entering seventh grade, we were finally coming out of the depression, but my mother still did not have work, and we were still on relief. She soon found work in a WPA garment shop. World War II started in September 1939. In the fall of 1940, I began preparing for my Bar Mitzvah, and campaigning for FDR who was running for an unprecedented third term. At 12, FDR, was my hero, as were Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and Governor Herbert Lehman.
It felt good being in junior high; more grown up and independent. In elementary school, we lined up by class, in the schoolyard, or the inside yard. We then went to our classroom as a group. In junior high, if we came early, we milled around the schoolyard, then went directly to our “home rooms.” We were supposed to be in our home rooms by 8:30. We put our coats in the closet, attendance was taken, announcements were read, and a bell was rung for our first class. We would walk through the halls, supervised by both teachers and hall monitors. We went up and down the stairs, supervised by staircase monitors. After the last morning class, we returned to our home rooms, from which we were dismissed for lunch.
Lunch was between 12 noon and 1 pm. Most of my classmates went home for lunch. Some of them brought their lunch, and ate them in designated classrooms. There was no lunch room. Those of us who received “free lunch” went to the second floor where it was served. A couple of classrooms were designated for the purpose. We lined up, took trays and were served a watery soup, a sandwich, milk and either fresh or canned fruit.
I felt stigmatized, receiving free lunch. It meant that you were poor. I have already written about the experience of receiving a winter jacket which had been distributed to the children on welfare. I came to the school yard one morning and noticed 10 or 15 other kids wearing the same jacket. It may not have been obvious to other kids, but those of us who were wearing them saw it as a sign that said, “We are poor.” One of those kids, Tony Rodriguez, was in my class. A week or two later, he came to school with another jacket. I asked him where was the “relief” jacket. He said, with a smile, that he threw it in a fire, and told his mother that he tripped and fell into the fire, but, thank God, didn’t get hurt. His mother was so thankful, she bought him another jacket.
An important part of the junior high school experience was “assembly.” Once a week the entire school would line up by class and go to the auditorium. We lined up by height, with a monitor in front and in the back. Height took on a value which frequently determined how you were viewed by others. It was better to be tall than short. I felt lucky to have been among the taller boys in our class. We were seated in our classes by height, with the shorter boys in front. It seemed to make sense. One of the smallest boys in our class was nicknamed “mousy.” I did not view it as complimentary. Kids who had vision problems also sat in the front.
We entered the auditorium, took our seats, and when every class was seated, the Principal or Assistant Principal would greet us. I believe he then read a passage from the Bible. There was a “color guard” which marched down the aisle with the flag; we would then recite the Pledge of Allegiance. (At some point in my school experience, the Pledge was amended to add “under God.”) We also sang the Star Spangled Banner. Each week, awards were given to classes for the least tardiness, and best attendance. The President of the class receiving the award would go to the front of the auditorium to accept it. I can still see Phil Bernstein as he casually strode down the aisle, during our last year at 52. He was cool. There were also announcements, pep talks, and singing: Miss Haver at the piano and Mrs. Lubin leading us, waving her hands and mouthing the words. Despite the fact that I was labeled a “listener,” I sang along with everyone else. In our music classes, we learned the songs of the season, the busiest season being Thanksgiving and Christmas. The songs had a religious overtone, but nobody seemed to mind. We sang them in assembly.
Junior high school was a wonderful learning experience, expanding on the subjects we were exposed to in elementary school, with subject matter teachers. My English teachers made the greatest impression on me: Mrs. Merten, Miss Jensen and Mrs. Davis, who was black. They were all older women; I would guess in their 60s. They taught us grammar, sentence structure, creative writing, and they introduced us to great literature. We read Shakespeare, and memorized poems, sonnets and soliloquies. The mention of Shakespeare reminds me of an exchange between a teacher and student in ninth grade English. We were reading aloud from a Shakespeare play, when my classmate came upon the word “whore.” He pronounced the word “who-ah.” The teacher stopped him and told him that it is pronounced “hore” like “more” or “core.” He looked at the teacher and shook his head and said, “I always pronounce it “who-ah.” (How times have changed: today, on the street, it is pronounced, “hoe.”)
We were encouraged to read lots of books, and I read lots of books. My mother had a bookcase filled with Yiddish books, which she had bought when times were good. Soon after I came along, times turned bad. I remember having only one book, when I was seven or eight. It was a “pop-up” book of fairy tales: Puss in Boots, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin. For my Bar Mitzvah, I received two books: Laughs from Jewish Lore (which I still have) and a book by Richard Halliburton.
It was during junior high school that I really became “a reader.” I had gotten my library card while I was in elementary school, and would go to the Hunts Point Library regularly. The children’s section was one flight up. I entered the library, turned to the right, and against the wall were shelves and shelves of children’s fiction, arranged alphabetically. My favorites were Barbour and Heyliger who both wrote about high school sports teams. I was also a fan of Howard Pease who specialized in nautical adventures—cabin boys on steamships, pirates on the high seas, intrigue in foreign ports. Toward the end of junior high school, I moved on to “Books for Older Children” and I started reading Dickens, and Dumas and Mark Twain. In my autograph album, I claimed that “The Three Musketeers” was my favorite book.
My history teachers were Mr. Levin and Mr. Rothfeder, who was the Debating Club advisor. We also had classes in Geography and Civics, all of which came under the heading of social studies. We did a lot of memorizing in social studies as well as in English. We entered World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday December 7, 1941. The next day we had a special assembly and heard President Roosevelt declare war, calling the day of the attack, “a date which will live in infamy.” I was in 9AR. We had been following the progress of the war in our history class from the time I entered 52. Several of my classmates were very knowledgeable, especially Augie Iglesias, who was an expert on the war in Yugoslavia. I was aware of what was happening in Germany, before entering 52, from discussions in Hebrew School, from my mother’s reading of her Yiddish newspaper, “The Day,” and listening to news on the Yiddish language station, WEVD.
The teacher who, without a doubt, made the greatest impression on three of my closest friends, was our science teacher, Mr. Mandel. Phil Bernstein, Mel Schulman and Alex Roth all credit Mr. Mandel with stimulating their interest in science. Phil and Mel stayed after school and worked with Mr. Mandel on chemistry. Alex, who had been involved, on his own in several scientific projects involving electricity, actually went to Mr. Mandel’s house for help.
Only one foreign language was offered—French--and there was only one foreign language teacher--Miss Garmir. She was French, and easily intimidated by unruly ninth grade boys. She was the only teacher so intimidated. We were never disruptive in any other class. The high point (or low point) of our behavior: we entered the classroom one day and Miss Garmir was not there. Her record book was on her desk. One of my classmates took the record book and threw it out the window. We did learn French and we all were admitted to third term French in high school.
One of the subjects we all liked was typing. We were thrilled to be sitting at a typewriter, which none of us owned, learning how to “touch-type.” It was not easy, but we plugged away at it: “a s d f g f” etc. And we liked the teachers, Mrs. Kerchof and Mr. Fried. My friend Irving Plotnick was the best typist in our class, and when he was in high school his father, a furrier, bought him am old Remington manual typewriter, which weighted a ton. Irv typed his father’s bills on it, as well as his homework, and term papers. The rest of us hand wrote everything.
We were given a wonderful introduction to music. We listened to classical music and were provided with words, enabling us to remember the melody: “This is the symphony that Schubert wrote and never finished.” And we sang the Ballad for Americans, and we put on a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, and a school play where we sang lots of folk songs. The play was called, The Land of the Free. I was designated “a listener” and was not supposed to sing when the class performed.
Shop classes were the high point of the day. There was wood shop and sheet metal shop. We learned to use tools, and we made useful objects like a tie rack in wood shop and a dust pan in metal shop. Print shop with Mr. Lyman was magical. I loved the smell of the ink and the sound of the printing press. We learned to hold a printer’s stick and take the letters from the boxes and assemble words, then sentences, then paragraphs, and finally a page. Our literary magazine, “Knowlton Herald” was produced in our print shop by the students, and illustrated with linoleum cuts, made by the students in the Linoleum Club. How many other junior high schools published a literary magazine?
We were dismissed at 3 pm and most of us went straight home. A few guys may have stayed around the schoolyard and played ball. A few may have had some after school duties, or were being kept after school as punishment. Most of the Jewish kids went to Hebrew school, which they usually left after Bar Mitzvah. (My Bar Mitzvah was at the end of my second semester at 52, but though I left Hebrew School, my mother sent me to the Yiddish school, which I attended until the end of junior high.) Hanging out was an important after school activity. We talked, we played ball, we engaged in whatever the seasonal activity might have been: skating, marbles, bottle caps, trading cards. And then we headed upstairs, and listened to programs like Jack Armstrong or Little Orphan Annie. The streets became deserted.
When my mother came home from work, she would make supper. It was late and she found shortcuts. She would open a can of Campbell’s vegetable soup, heat it up, prepare hamburgers or some other meat, serve the soup without the vegetables, while the meat was broiling. Then serve the vegetables from the vegetable soup with the meat. Sometimes my mother would serve canned salmon or tuna with a salad, or noodles and cheese. For dessert, canned fruit.
After supper, I would do my homework. I had a constant battle with my mother who insisted, “Do not do your homework with the radio on.” I tried to tell her I could do both. I never won that battle. When I finished my homework, I was allowed to listen to “my programs:” The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, The Green Hornet. Inner Sanctum. However, if one of my programs came on at 9 pm, my mother’s insisted that Gabriel Heatter take precedence. So I put on my program at 9:15 pm and tried to imagine what took place during the first 15 minutes. There were several programs that we listened to together: The Goldbergs, Lux Radio Theatre, Amos and Andy, The Quiz Kids, Information Please. And the comedians and news commentators.
During my last semester, I was confronted with the momentous question: where to go to high school? I immediately selected Townsend Harris, the very prestigious exam school on 23rd Street in Manhattan, the CCNY “prep school.” The other exam schools were Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. Prior to making application, we met with an “advisor.” When I met with her, she looked at my record and told me that I was not Townsend Harris material. I told her I planned to apply anyway. Her attitude was: “it’s your funeral.” However, during the spring of 1942, New York City closed Townsend Harris, so I never found out if I was Townsend Harris material.
I, and most of my classmates, applied to Stuyvesant. A few others applied to Science and Tech. Our teachers worked with us, preparing us for the exams. An indication of how good our teachers were (or how smart we were): almost all of us passed. The Knowlton Herald carried Norman Perlmutter’s story, The Stuyvesant Test. He described how we nervously left 52, took the subway to 14th Street, and entered the high school auditorium where there were students from all over the city. The tests were distributed—vocabulary, then a paragraph test, then math and algebra. No one in my class wanted to go to the district high school, Morris.
The best schools attract the best teachers. I don’t know if JHS 52 was considered one of the best schools, but we had outstanding teachers. My guess is that close to half the student body was Jewish. My 9BR class had 36 students; 28 were Jewish and five were Puerto Rican. Using name recognition, I guess that 111 of the 225 graduates in June 1942 were Jewish. By the late 40s, the ethnic make-op of the school was changing.
When I was a substitute teacher at 52 for a few days in 1950, the school was majority Puerto Rican and black. None of my teachers were still in the school. My friends and I returned to the school 50 years later. We were revisiting the old neighborhood, or the Shtetl, as Bob Epstein calls it. We met the Principal who was Puerto Rican. She had little idea of the history of the school, and was surprised to know that there was a school song. We were shown the auditorium, and spontaneously burst into song:
“Rah for dear old Knowlton.
Shout til the rafters ring.
Rah for dear old Knowlton once again.
Let every man in Knowlton sing.
We’ll sing of all the happy hours.
Sing of the carefree days.
Sing of dear old alma mater.
The school of our hearts always.”
There is another stanza which begins: “We’ll be true, we’ll be true…” but I can no longer remember what it was that we will be true to. I asked everyone I knew who went to 52, and only Phil Bernstein who now has a severe short term memory loss said: “We’ll be true to the teaching of truth and of happiness…” Thanks , Phil. We all remembered it then.
No matter how poor you were, when you graduated from junior high school, you bought an autograph album. There were two kinds: one with a zipper, and the cheaper one with a clasp. I got the one with a clasp. When my friend Sol died, his children found his autograph album, and not knowing what to do with it, they sent it to me. Though he was as poor as me, his had a zipper.
Comparing the contents of both albums, I realized how similar the entries were. At the beginning of the album, was a page titled “Favorites.” For Book, Sol chose The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. I chose The Three Musketeers. For Game, Sol’s choice was stickball; mine was baseball. For Chum, Sol picked Marvin Peyser and me. And I picked Sol and Larry Wilson. We both selected CCNY for College. On the next page, Class Officers, we of course had the same entries: Philip Bernstein as President, and David Mass as Vice President, the 52 equivalent was Captain and Lieutenant.) I was the Class Secretary, but since the list included Treasurer, Sol put me in as Treasurer as well.
Having the albums at hand, I don’t have to rely on memory to share what my fellow classmates wrote. The last week before graduation, the halls of 52 were alive with the scurrying of the graduating class, albums in hand, cornering other classmates and teachers. The aim was to fill up your album, as if the graduate who filled the most pages, got a prize. Teachers usually just signed their names. The teachers who were special, wrote something special for you. My favorite English teacher, P. T. (Pauline Turner) Davis wrote “Steadiness is one of your fine qualities. Success to you,” A few teachers wrote Best Wishes, or Sincerely, or Good Luck. Looking through Sol’s album, I was impressed that our gorgeous music teacher, R. Sybil Haver, wrote “You’ll talk your way through, I’m sure.” There has to be a fascinating story behind that.
Very few of us were original. The same inscriptions appeared year after year in junior high school autograph albums across the land:
“You asked me to write, What shall it be? Two little words. “Remember Me.’”
“When on this page you chance to look, Just think of me and close the book.”
I wrote the following in several albums: “First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then comes (Sol, Phil, Bob etc) with a perambulator.”
“Here’s to those who wish you well. And those who don’t can go to ‘Morris.’”
“If all the girls lived across the sea, What wonderful swimmers we would be.”
“If writing in a book, Remembrance assures. With the greatest of pleasure, I will write in yours.”
“He who only hopes is hopeless.”
“Remember once, remember twice. Remember the time We rolled the dice.”
“I am no poet, I have no fame. Just to do you a favor, I’ll sign my name.”
“If you sit on the tack of ambition, you will surely rise,”
“When you get married And have a shiny new car, Remember me, the guy from 9BR.” Another ‘When you get married…poem: “When you get married And your wife asks for a drink, Just give her a cup, And show her the sink.”
“Friend is a word of royal tone. Friend is a poem all alone.”
“When you are low and feeling blue, Just think of the days in 52.”
One of my classmates looked for a page with a certain color, and wrote: “May you never be as blue as this page.”
Another classmate had this as his favorite inscription: “First in the album, Best of the lot, first to be remembered, Last to be forgot.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it should be written on the first page of the album, not in the middle.
In addition to the clever poem or saying, I was surprised to see how my classmates addressed me: I was Jake, Jaky, Jakie, Jacke, Jackob, Jacob, J.S., and Schlitt, To Tony Rodriguez, I was Schlittzenbergen.
And how did my classmates close their entries? Your pal; your classmate; your friend; your fellow grad-u-8; your fellow grad-u-past tense of to eat; a fellow grad; your brother graduate. Phil Bernstein signed: Your Captain, and David Mass wrote Your Lieutenant. The page was occasionally decorated with “4 get me knot” in the corners, or “Yours til the board walks.”
A sad note: I had saved the first page for my mother, but I never asked her to write anything. There were entries from my classmates, my teachers, my relatives, but I had not asked my mother. Three years later, after I had graduated from high school, she found my junior high school autograph album, looked through it, and wrote the following on the first page that I had reserved for her:
“Sep. 7, 1945
To my son Jacob,
Best wishes to your Graduation my son. Late, well, late is my fate.
You, my dear son, came late, but thanks God you came. You came, my son.
Blessed shall be that day in December 1927. The day of days.
Dear God, may my son be blessed white. Everything that is good, fine and nice.
A very happy New Year 5705, to you my son.
Mother”
Five and a half years after she wrote this, she was gone.
While we were in 52, we never gave any thought to why our school was called Thomas Knowlton. It was a given. Somebody, I would assume at the Board of Education, named it Thomas Knowlton. But we never knew who Thomas Knowlton was. I believe I once asked a teacher, and was told that he fought in the Revolutionary War, but he wasn’t sure. Thanks to Wikipedia, I learned that Thomas Knowlton was born in Boxford MA in 1740, his family moved to Ashford CT when he was 8, he fought in the French and Indian War when he was 15, and as a result of his leadership in the Battle of Bunker Hill, was made an officer. He organized a group of spies called the Knowlton Rangers, in August 1776, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and was killed in the Battle of Harlem Heights in September 1776. It would have been nice to have known this when we went to Knowlton.
I recently learned that our school is no longer designated JHS 52; it is now Middle School 302. Furthermore, it is no longer Knowlton; it is Luisa Dessus Cruz. When I asked who was Luisa Dessus Cruz, no one knew. Someone believes she was an educator.
For some reason, we never questioned that junior high school should be a single sex institution. (52 became co-ed in 1962.) We said goodbye to girls as classmates at the end of sixth grade, just as we were beginning to be aware of them. During that last year of elementary school, I decided that I was in love with both Phyllis Flyer and Rita Feit. I suspect that they had no idea how I felt about them, though one day I went with a friend to the courtyard of Phyllis’ apartment house and shouted, “Phyllis, I love you!,” and ran away.
All those feelings were put on hold for the next few years. I suspect that for the same reason Orthodox synagogues separate men and women, the New York City school system separated boys and girls in junior high school (and even in some high schools.) They are very distracting.
Girls were absent from my world during junior high school, and the chasm that junior high created was widened by an all-boys high school. Not only were there no girls to distract us, there was only one teacher among the entire faculty who was young and attractive: R. Sybil Haver. I would have thought by the law of averages, there would have been more. But it was the end of the depression, and teachers were holding on to their jobs for dear life. There was very little turnover. Few young teachers were being hired.
A final observation regarding sex: In my 2 ½ years in junior high (and for that matter in high school and college) I never met a homosexual. They must have been well closeted in the 40s. We knew they existed, but we thought they were confined to Greenwich Village. If we wanted to make fun of someone, especially someone who was not macho, we would call him “homo!” and speak in a falsetto It might be accompanied by a limp writs and a pinkie along the eye brow. My Puerto Rican friends labeled the individual “maricon.” The closest anyone came to having his sexual preference questioned in 52 was Norman Perlmutter. He was blonde and pudgy, and played Buttercup in our production of HMS Pinafore, wearing a dress. That really took courage. And he wasn’t gay.
At 2:15 every Thursday, we participated in the “club” of our choice.. Most of the clubs were extensions of the curriculum: French Club, Glee Club, P.T. Club, Debating Club, Clay Club, Soap Sculpture Club etc. We didn’t stay with the same club each term. I was in the Debating Club one term and possibly the Stamp Club or the Garden Club another term. We did not take it very seriously. It was when the Glee Club and Orchestra practiced, and when the members of the Traffic Squad, the Staircase Squad and the GO met.
I was always puzzled by what the GO (General Organization) did. It was supposed to be something like a Student Council, where elected representatives from each class, met and deliberated. But about what? It was the “teacher’advisor” who ran the show. I always joined the GO (dues were 25 cents), and I have my GO buttons from all my five terms. Our dues money bought the Service pins, the Knowlton “K,” and the carnations given to the graduates. We also saw a baseball game, underwritten by the GO.
Perhaps it was my involvement with the Garden Club that led me to join the school’s Victory Garden over the summer. Across the street from the school was a garden plot, and we prepared the ground during the spring, and tended to the garden during the summer. We harvested our “crop” before school started in the fall. I worked in our Victory Garden for two summers. (The summer of 1942, after I graduated, was devoted to looking for a summer job.) I believe the N.Y. Herald Tribune partnered with the Board of Education to encourage school Victory Gardens. They held an annual fair where students displayed the result of their labors, and prizes were awarded. We may not have won a prize, but all of us who worked in the garden were awarded certificates. And we were able to bring home the food we grew. In addition to the more common vegetables, we grew stuff I had never heard of. My favorite was kol rabi. It was years later that I realized that my friends Bob Epstein and Mel Schulman were also involved with the Victory Garden. We must have been solitary gardeners.
My interest in growing things preceded my working in 52’s garden, but it was encouraged by the school. We were sold seeds every spring that were packaged by the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. The packets sold for a few cents, and contained both vegetable and flower seeds. I would get cheese boxes from the grocery store, fill them with soil that I would dig out of the empty lots near the East River, put the seeds in the soil, and place the boxes on my fire escape. I grew asters, marigolds, morning glories and string beans. Again, I owe a debt of gratitude to JHS 52.
I have enjoyed reliving those years, and treasure the friendships I made at junior high school 52, my closest friends. Most educators consider the junior high school--middle school years the most difficult to teach. I don’t believe my teachers felt that, but times were different in the 1930s-‘40s. JHS 52 had children of immigrant parents. Learning was the passport to success. We wanted to do well. We may have come from families that questioned the economic system, but we were taught to respect out teachers, and that the knowledge they were imparting will be the tools we would need to make a better world. Thank you Thomas Knowlton Junior High School.
Finally, I am a sucker for reunions. When I learn about a reunion—from high school or college—if I can get there, I will. Of course, it usually is a disappointment. As far as I know, there has never been a junior high school reunion of any of the graduating classes of the 1940s and 1950s. I am toying with the thought such a reunion would be a great idea. Those of us who are still around will range in age from our mid-70s to our mid-80s. Why not? We just have to get the word out.
12-16-11
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Junior High School
My Favorite Educational Experience
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
Condensed/revised version of "Junior High School: My Most Favorite Educational Experience (And My Longest Memoir)" (2011)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011/2012
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1940/1942
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JHS_condencedl
Adolescence
Education
Friends
Junior High School (J.H.S. 52)
Mother
Reading Out Loud (R.O.L.)
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/71642/archive/files/2b18cac74a05a108e4608c9951fb2658.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=ve4pT1bT6yxaZQj6wjDu7UyF7jQqvgGC0MqyQqfSxehhMMpB9%7Ew4cZ8iYxjSDF%7EF28moDbdw5o1M0UnKQ2oi5qKDHxZyin38Z37zkLQug2rk2oahuGMZEGd0FBByaAXb8O0ZFD7vNiITwuctUFLOAQUIWUAGypRZ-vFkZCOh79qv1%7EI1D2vSvFj85YW3Cm-Ongw4%7EnP35OxhX-YBL1m7LG9mGsv%7EmANGSdTtSYsQE-CG3nihcrGPceKp3osPIzPFsat7nVwTC9JJZAizAX3DhMa5w5fZ3K3VoKuK1xpQWm26A02CLolSobQsF89CQ9lTQYeuZD4TbiUGhHWGGJkL6Q__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
8bb25ef9135fce70d0361f9ec95c4d1a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
My Most Favorite Educational Experience
(And My Longest Memoir)
Introduction
It is mid-December, 2011, and for the past month I have been reliving my life in junior high school. For weeks, I would wake up with memories of still another aspect of those 2 ½ years. Usually, when I write something, I edit out extraneous material; the final version is much shorter than the original draft. With this memoir, I found myself adding material. How could I not have mentioned X, and I was impelled to incorporate it. My junior high school days kept growing. I began thinking that those days were more significant than I gave them credit for, and I had already given them a great deal of credit. I now believe the years between 12 and 14 laid the foundation for everything that followed. So here it is.
Entering Junior High, and Before
I entered JHS 52, Thomas Knowlton Junior High School, in February 1940. I was 12 years old. I had come from PS 62, also called the Casanova School, which was co-ed. JHS 52 was an all boys school. I remember those first days, walking to 52 with trepidation. We had been warned that the ninth graders were giants, that they beat up the incoming seventh graders, and cut off their ties. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
Speaking of walking to school, the trek to first grade at PS 62 was initially a traumatic experience, despite the fact that there was not much traffic. My mother walked with me for the first few weeks: one block south, up Fox Street to 156 Street; cross the street and walk another block to Leggett Avenue; cross the street again, and there we were. The school was on the corner of Leggett Avenue and Fox Street.
Walking on my own, I was supposed to ask an adult to “cross me” when I reached the corner. I was also supposed to go to the Isaac Gerson Foundation Hebrew Day Nursery, on Beck Street and 156 Street, after school, where my mother would pick me up. I had attended the nursery prior to first grade. As a six year old, I was not entrusted with a house key. Most of the time, instead of going to the nursery, I came home and hung out. My mother became very upset when she went to the nursery and I was not there. I eventually got a key (which I kept losing.) After first grade, walking back and forth to school was no longer an issue.
JHS 52 was two blocks past PS 62. West up Leggett Avenue from Fox Street, past Beck Street to Kelly Street. During the 2 ½ years that I attended JHS 52, my mother had me take our laundry to a steam laundry on Leggett Avenue. Once a week, I would drop it off in the morning and pick it up after school. When I was not returning from school with the laundry, I would walk down Beck Street hoping to see Sallie Mae Pollack who lived at 722 Beck Street.
Beck Street, between 156 and Leggett was unusual. It was tree-lined, and there were no apartment houses; there were charming brownstones, and the Kavenoff family lived in one of them. Sallie Mae’s mother was a Kavenoff. A few doors down in the basement of another brownstone was the Arbeter Ring Shule, the Yiddish school that I attended before my mother transferred me to Hebrew School, and to which I returned after my Bar Mitzvah. The nursery was also on this block, and on the corner was the Juvenile House.
I had a short four block walk to 52. Some of my classmates came to school from the Hunts Point area and beyond, a mile or more away. Ten years later, I was followed to 52 by Colin Powell, who also lived near Hunts Point, and who went on to the neighborhood high school, Morris, and then to CCNY. Preceding me was the playwright Clifford Odets. I don’t know where he went to high school.
When I woke up on school days, my routine was essentially the same: straighten my bed, wash, dress, turn on the radio and have breakfast. My breakfast consisted of juice, a soft-boiled egg, toast and milk. My radio listening consisted of Phil Cook, who, when he ended his program at 8 am, would sign off with the song:
“Try and live today
So tomorrow you can say
What a wonderful yesterday.
“Let’s not borrow sorrow
For tomorrow’s skies may clear.
Life is what you make it
So just take it while it’s here.”
My God! I remembered the whole damn thing, and that was over 70 years ago! It was a great way for me to start the day. I believe when Phil Cook retired, he was followed by Arthur Godfrey. More about radio when I discuss my after school activities.
Most of the time, I would walk to 52 by myself. If I saw one of my friends walking, we would join up. There were at least 10 or 15 boys on my block or the next block, who were also going to 52. About five were on my grade; the rest were either a year ahead or a year behind. The former bully, and now my friend, David Goldman, lived across the street, as did Danny Lala, and Stanley Harris. On my side of the street were Eddie Handwerger, whose parents owned the dry cleaning store on Longwood Avenue; my best friend Larry Wilson; Miltie Greenspan who lived in the same apartment house with Larry; and Seymour Mirchin and Eugene Alperin. Eugene was very handsome and went out with girls, years before any of the rest of us. On the next block were Irving Plotnick, Sidney Reiter, and my tough friend, Sheldon Greenberg. Phil Bernstein had lived on Fox Street, but then his family moved around the corner to Southern Blvd. Only Irv and Sid, who were in my class in PS 62, were with me from 7AR through 9BR.
A whole slew of kids came to 52 from PS 39, the other feeder school, which was on Longwood Avenue and Beck Street. PS 39 had more black and Puerto Rican kids than 62, but still not that many. My guess is under 20%. Whoever drew the district lines routed our block to 62, even though we were closer to 39. Among the kids from 39, was Sol Rauch. We became good friends during that first semester in 7AR.
I had the feeling that both school and class assignments were largely arbitrary. I guess class assignments considered previous class performance, and “Intelligence Test” results, but where do you draw the line? I don’t remember when the IQ tests were given, but we all wanted to know our score. The teachers would not tell us, but it was in their record book. When the teacher was out of the room, we would sneak up to the desk and look it up. I believe mine was 134, which I thought was pretty good, since “average intelligence” was supposed to be 100.
As we worked our way through elementary school (also called grade school or public school), we were aware that there was a range of “intelligence” among us. There were bright kids, average kids and slow kids. The teachers and the administrators assigned us to classes according to their evaluation of us. The “1” class was for the brightest. And in descending order: 3,4,5 and 2. And then there was something called “ungraded” for the slowest, or most difficult students.
No matter where you were in school, there was always the fear of “being left back,” being required to repeat a semester. Nothing could be worse. There were students at 52 who were a year or two older than their classmates. They had been “left back.” Conversely, there were a few of the brightest kids who, having shown their mastery of the subject matter, were “skipped,” I actually felt sorry for a few kids who had skipped because they were younger and smaller than the others in their class, and felt out of place.
This was not the case with the “Rs.” If you were assigned to 7AR, as Sol and I were, you did three years of junior high in 2 ½, as a class. If not, you were placed in 7A1. How much brighter were the students in 7AR? Bob Epstein, Phil Bernstein and Mel Schulman, who became three of my closest friends, were placed in 7A1, and were then moved to 9AR for their last year. They did not skip a term as Sol and I did. Alex Roth and Sid Stern, who attended PS 39, also made the “Rs,” but they were a term behind us.
Kids today carry their books in knapsacks. This was unknown in my day. The more well-to-do had school bags. I and most of my friends simply used a strap which held our text books and note book. The note book was either hard covered (more expensive) or soft covered. The cover was marbleized, black and white, with the multiplication table on the back. We may have had a pencil case, which we jammed in under the strap. If we were taking math, the pencil case would have contained a compass and a protractor. Some of us had a pencil sharpener. Toward the end of junior high, my mother gave me a pen knife which belonged to my father, which I used to sharpen pencils.
The transition from PS 62 to JHS 52 meant that we were able to move from class to class. In 62, one teacher taught us most everything—English, history, geography, math, science. We remained in the same classroom. In 52, we started out in our home room, but then we would go to different classrooms for different subjects with different teachers. It was much more grown up. The junior high school teachers were subject matter specialists. They knew more about their subject than the elementary school teachers.. Junior high was also our introduction to hall and staircase monitors, and staircases labeled “up” and “down.”
A serious concern of many students at every level was bullies. My children have horror stories of bullies, which I only learned about much later. The only bully I remember was the previously mentioned David Goldman, who was in my class in PS 62. It was in fourth or fifth grade that he picked on me until he provoked a fight. I certainly was not a fighter. Somehow I managed to survive that experience, and even knocked him down. (Unless he tripped.) After that, no more bullying. Besides, the toughest guy in my class, Sheldon Greenberg, was my friend, which helped. I don’t remember bullies in junior high.
Though I have a vivid memory of those 2 ½ years, it has been augmented by my having saved the graduation program, dated June 25, 1942. It listed the names of all the graduates and indicated who made the Honor Roll, and who received the service award, the “Knowlton K.” I also have the January and June 1942 copies of the Knowlton Herald, the combination literary magazine and yearbook, a valuable source of information. I doubt if there are many of them still around. I am sure I kept them because they contained two of my stories and a poem, and I was listed on the masthead as a member of the staff. Another valuable resource (about which I will write later) was my autograph album. And thanks to a relatively recently discovered classmate, Bert Siegelstein, I have a copy of the 9BR graduation photograph, and I was able to name practically everyone in our class.
Not only can I remember the names of my classmates, I can remember almost all of my junior high school teachers. Why, since I do not remember many of my high school and college teachers, did my junior high school teachers make such an impression? Perhaps I was at my most impressionable during those years, and perhaps they happened to be good teachers.
I do remember my elementary school teachers, but only two of them were really “memorable.” Mrs. Soskin was my third grade teacher, and she was warm, wise and loving. Aware that I may have been embarrassed by the fact that we were on relief, and I was getting “free lunch,” she told me a story about a child who had a patch on his jacket, and he wore it with pride, as if it were a badge. Be proud, she was saying. There is nothing to be ashamed of. (And it is alright to end a sentence with a preposition.)
My sixth grade teacher was Mrs. Young. She was tall, very pretty, an inspiring teacher, and she had a coat with a fur collar, which I tried to touch whenever I had the opportunity. She frequently rose up on her toes, while standing in front of the classroom, as if to make herself even taller, or as if she were davening “Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh.” All the rest: Hogan, Weingarten, McGlaughlin, Leiberman, Wolfson and Banks were forgettable.
The Times, They Were A’Changing
Today, kids usually start school in September. We entered school in both February and September. I started first grade in February 1934, having turned six the previous December. In February 1940, entering seventh grade, we were finally coming out of the depression, but my mother still did not have work, and we were still on relief. She soon found work in a WPA garment shop.
World War II started in September 1939, and my mother was worried about her sister in Paris and her brother in Vaslui, Romania, and their families. The correspondence that we carried on with them had stopped. The summer of 1940, I went away for a month to Camp Northrop, a nature camp. To be selected to attend the camp, applicants had to pass a nature test. It was my first term in junior high school. That spring, in addition to doing my class work, my cousin Louis coached me on “nature” for the Northrop exam. In the fall, I began preparing for my Bar Mitzvah. More studying, in addition to my class work. It was tough learning to chant my Haftorah. Learning the speech, written by my Hebrew School teacher, thanking my mother and my teacher, and commenting on the Torah portion, was easier. I was also involved in campaigning for FDR who was running for an unprecedented third term. (I had previously convinced my neighbors to vote for FDR in 1936.) At 12, FDR, was my hero, as were our Mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, and our Governor, Herbert Lehman.
It felt good being in junior high; more grown up and independent. In elementary school, we lined up by class, in the schoolyard, or the inside yard. We then went to our classroom as a group. In junior high, if we came early, we milled around the schoolyard, then went directly to our “home rooms.” We were supposed to be in our home rooms by 8:30. We put our coats in the closet, attendance was taken, announcements were read, and a bell was rung for our first class. We would walk through the halls, supervised by both teachers and hall monitors. We went up and down the stairs, supervised by staircase monitors. After the last morning class, we returned to our home rooms, from which we were dismissed for lunch.
Lunch
Lunch was between 12 noon and 1 pm. Most of my classmates went home for lunch. Some of them brought their lunch, and ate them in designated classrooms. There was no lunch room. Those of us who received “free lunch” went to the second floor where it was served. A couple of classrooms were designated for the purpose. We lined up, took trays and were served a watery soup, a sandwich, milk and either fresh or canned fruit.
I felt stigmatized, receiving free lunch. It meant that you were poor. I have already written about the experience of receiving a winter jacket which had been distributed to the children on relief. I came to the school yard one morning and noticed 10 or 15 other kids wearing the same jacket. It may not have been obvious to other kids, but those of us who were wearing them saw it as a sign that said, “We are poor.” One of those kids, Tony Rodriguez, was in my class. A week or two later, he came to school with another jacket. I asked him where was the “relief” jacket. He said, with a smile, that he threw it in a fire, and told his mother that he tripped and fell into the fire, but didn’t get hurt. His mother was so thankful that nothing happened to Tony, that she bought him another jacket.
Assembly
An important part of the junior high school experience was “assembly.” Once a week the entire school would line up by class and go to the auditorium. We lined up by height, with a monitor in front and in the back. It reminded me of prison movies with James Cagney and George Raft. Height took on a value which frequently determined how you were viewed by others. It was better to be tall than short. I felt lucky to have been among the taller boys in our class. We were seated in our classes by height, with the shorter boys in front. It seemed to make sense. One of the smallest boys in our class was nicknamed “mousy.” I did not view it as complimentary. After we lined up, there could be no talking.
We entered the auditorium, took our seats, and when every class was seated, the Principal or Assistant Principal would greet us. I believe he then read a passage from the Bible. There was a “color guard” which walked down the aisle with the flag; we would then recite the Pledge of Allegiance. (At some point in my school experience, the Pledge was amended to add “under God.”) We also sang the Star Spangled Banner. Each week awards were given out to classes for something or other—no latenesses, best attendance. The President of the class receiving the award would go to the front of the auditorium to accept it. I can still see Phil Bernstein as he casually strode down the aisle, during our last year at 52. He was cool. There were also announcements, pep talks, and singing: Miss Haver at the piano and Mrs. Lubin leading all of us, waving her hands and mouthing the words. Despite the fact that I was labeled a “listener,” I sang along with everyone else. In our music classes, we learned the songs of the season, the busiest season being Thanksgiving and Christmas. The songs had a religious overtone, but nobody seemed to mind. We sang them in assembly. The schools are more sensitive these days.
Teachers and Subjects
Junior high school was a wonderful learning experience, thanks to wonderful teachers. Our elementary school teachers introduced us to all the usual subjects. Now we went into them in depth. My English teachers made the greatest impression on me: Mrs. Merten, Mrs. Davis and Miss Jensen. Mrs. Davis was the only black teacher that I had. They were all older women; I would guess in their 60s. They taught us grammar, sentence structure, creative writing, and they introduced us to great literature. We read Shakespeare, and memorized poems, sonnets and soliloquies. The mention of Shakespeare reminds me of an exchange between a teacher and student in ninth grade English. We were reading aloud from a Shakespeare play, when my classmate came upon the word “whore.” He pronounced the word “who-ah.” The teacher stopped him and told him that it is pronounced “hore” like “more” or “core.” He looked at the teacher and shook his head and said, “I always pronounce it “who-ah.” (How times have changed: today on the street, it is pronounced, “hoe.”
We were encouraged to read lots of books, and I read lots of books. My mother had a bookcase filled with Yiddish books, which she had bought when times were good. Soon after I came along, times turned bad. I remember having only one book, when I was seven or eight. It was a “pop-up” book of fairy tales: Puss in Boots, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin. For my Bar Mitzvah, I received two books: Laughs from Jewish Lore (which I still have) and a book by Richard Halliburton.
It was during junior high school that I really became “a reader.” I had gotten my library card while I was in elementary school, and would go to the Hunts Point Library regularly. The children’s section was one flight up. I entered the library, turned to the right, and against the wall were shelves and shelves of children’s fiction, arranged alphabetically. My favorites at this time were Barbour and Heyliger who wrote about high school sports teams. And Howard Pease who specialized in nautical adventures—cabin boys on steamships, pirates on the high seas, intrigue in foreign ports. Toward the end of junior high school, I graduated to the bookcases labeled “Books for Older Children” and I started reading Dickens, and Dumas and Mark Twain. In my autograph album, I claimed that “The Three Musketeers” was my favorite book.
To confirm my memory, I googled “children’s authors” and came up with lots of stuff. It turns out that Barbour and Heyliger were among the most popular boys fiction writers of the period, but the most popular was Altsheler, whose name I vaguely remember. Both Bartbour and Heliger had been reporters and switched to writing juvenile fiction. They each wrote over 150 books. Both wrote about sports in prep schools and colleges. Both had heroes who excelled, were honorable, and hard working. I am not sure why I remembered Pease’s first name but not Barbour’s ((Ralph) nor Heliger’s (William). Also, I remembered the names of a couple of Pease’s books, The Jinx Ship, and The Tattooed Man. I thought his hero was a cabin boy; he was a mess boy. My library reading included magazines, I spent hours in the library reading Boy’s Life, Popular Mechanics and National Geographic (looking for pictures of bare breasted African women.)
History teachers Ned Levin was cool, and Mr. Rothfeder was very big, had thick glasses and a handshake that almost broke your knuckles. He was the Debating Club advisor. We also had classes in Geography and Civics, all of which came under the heading of social studies. We did a lot of memorizing in social studies as well as in English. We entered World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday December 7, 1941. The next day we had a special assembly and heard President Roosevelt declare war, calling the day of the attack, “a date which will live in infamy.” I was in 9AR. We had been following the progress of the war in our history class from the time I entered 52. Several of my classmates were very knowledgeable, especially Augie Iglesias, who was an expert on the war in Yugoslavia.
I was aware of what was happening in Germany in the ‘30s with the rise of Hitler and anti-Semitism, from discussions in Hebrew School, from my mother’s reading of her Yiddish newspaper, “The Day,” and listening to news on the Yiddish language station, WEVD. We did not buy an English language newspaper. That was an indulgence we did not think we could afford, even though the News and the Mirror were two cents and the Times was three cents. However, when the newspaper PM came out in June 1940, I knew it was historic, and bought a copy of the first edition for five cents. By the end of junior high school, I decided I wanted to be a social studies teacher.
The teacher who, without a doubt, made the greatest impression on three of my closest friends, was our science teacher, Mr. Mandel. Phil Bernstein, Mel Schulman and Alex Roth all credit Mr. Mandel with turning them on to science. That is what a good teacher is supposed to do. Phil and Mel stayed after school and worked with Mr. Mandel on chemistry. Alex, who had been involved, on his own, in several scientific projects involving electricity, actually went to Mr. Mandel’s house for help.
Foreign language was part of our curriculum. However, only one foreign language was offered—French-- and there was only one foreign language teacher--Miss Garmir. She was French, and easily intimidated by unruly ninth grade boys. Like dogs who supposedly can tell when someone is afraid of them, our class could tell that Miss Garmir was afraid of us. No other teacher showed signs of fear. We were never disruptive in any other class. The high point (or low point) of our behavior: we entered the classroom one day and Miss Garmir was not there. Her record book was on her desk. One outrageously nervy classmate took the record book off her desk and threw it out the window. We did learn French and were admitted to third term French in high school. I was a poor French student, but I do not blame Miss Garmir. She did her best.
One of the subjects we all liked was typing. We were thrilled to be able to sit at a typewriter, which none of us owned, learning the keyboard, and learning how to “touch-type.” It was not easy, but we plugged away at it: “a s d f g f” etc. And we liked the teachers, Mrs. Kerchof and Mr. Fried. We certainly didn’t have anything like it in elementary school. My friend Irving Plotnick was the best typist in our class, and when he was in high school his father, a furrier, bought him am old Remington manual typewriter, which weighted a ton. Irv typed his father’s bills on it, as well as his homework, and term papers. The rest of us hand wrote everything.
We were given a wonderful introduction to music. We listened to classical music and were provided with words. enabling us to remember the melody: “This is the symphony that Schubert wrote and never finished.” And we sang folk songs, and the Ballad for Americans, and we put on a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, and a school play where we sang lots of folk songs. The play was called, The Land of the Free. I was designated “a listener” but I learned the songs. i was not supposed to sing when the class performed. Our music teachers could not have been more different. Mrs. Lubin was an older woman, very serious. Miss Haver, was young and very attractive, and it was rumored that she and Mr. Mandel were having an affair.
Shop classes were the high point of the day. There was wood shop with Dr. H.B.R. Lichtman, and sheet metal shop. We learned to use tools, and we made useful objects like a tie rack in wood shop and a dust pan in metal shop. Print shop with Mr. Lyman was magical. I loved the smell of the ink and the sound of the printing press. We learned to hold a printer’s stick and take the letters from the boxes and assemble words, then sentences, then paragraphs, and finally a page. Our literary magazine, “Knowlton Herald” was printed in our print shop by the students, and illustrated with linoleum cuts, made by the students in the Linoleum Club. How many other junior high schools published a literary magazine? For some reason, PT (physical training) made no impression on me.
After School
We were dismissed at 3 pm and most of us went straight home. A few guys may have stayed around the schoolyard and played ball. A few may have had some volunteer after school duties, or were being kept after school as punishment. Most of the Jewish kids went to Hebrew school at some point between school dismissal and supper. They usually quit Hebrew School after Bar Mitzvah. (My Bar Mitzvah was at the end of my second semester at 52, but though I left Hebrew School, my mother sent me back to the Yiddish school, which I attended until the end of junior high.) Hanging around the block was an important after school activity. We talked, we played ball, we engaged in whatever the seasonal activity might have been: skating, marbles, bottle caps, trading cards. And then we headed upstairs. The street became deserted. If the weather was bad, I would go upstairs and listen to programs like Jack Armstrong or Little Orphan Annie.
My mother would make supper. Coming home from work, she found shortcuts to put a meal on the table. My mother would open a can of Campbell’s vegetable soup, put it in a pot, and heat it up; put hamburgers or liver or some other meat in a pan; serve the soup without the vegetables, while the meat was broiling. Then serve the vegetables from the vegetable soup with the meat. Sometimes my mother would serve canned salmon or tuna with a salad, or noodles and cheese. For dessert, canned fruit.
After supper, I would do my homework. I had a constant battle with my mother who insisted, “Do not do your homework with the radio on.” I tried to tell her I could do both. I seldom won that battle. But when I told her I finished my homework, I was then allowed to listen to “my programs:” The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, The Green Hornet. Inner Sanctum. However if one of my programs came on at 9 pm, my mother’s insisted that Gabriel Heatter take precedence. So I put on my program at 9:15 pm and tried to imagine what took place during the first 15 minutes. There were several programs that we listened to together: The Goldbergs, Lux Radio Theatre, Amos and Andy, The Quiz Kids, Information Please. And the comedians: Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Edgar Bergen, Milton Berle. I am blurring the weekday programs with the Sunday programs. There were also the news commentators, in addition to Gabriel Heatter: Walter Winchell, Raymond Gram Swing, Johannes Steele, H.V. Kaltenborn, and J. Raymond Walsh.
During our last semester, we were confronted with the earth-shaking question: where do we go to high school? I immediately selected Townsend Harris, the very prestigious exam school on 23rd Street in Manhattan. It was considered the CCNY “prep school.” The other prestigious exam schools were Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. Prior to making application, we met with an “advisor.” Her name was Rhea Fox. When I met with her, she looked at my record and told me that I was not Townsend Harris material. I was stunned. I told her I planned to apply anyway. Her attitude was: “it’s your funeral.” However, during the spring of 1942, New York City, in order to save money, closed Townsend Harris, so I never found out if I was Townsend Harris material.
I, and most of my classmates, applied to Stuyvesant. A few others applied to Science and Tech. Our teachers worked with us, preparing us for the exams. An indication of how good our teachers were (or how smart we were): almost all of us passed. The Knowlton Herald carried Norman Perlmutter’ story, The Stuyvesant Test. He described how we nervously left 52, took the subway to 14th Street, and entered the high school auditorium where the tests were distributed—vocabulary, a paragraph test (?) and math and algebra. If Norman said that was what the test consisted of, I believe him. No one in my class wanted to go to the district high school, Morris.
I would guess that outstanding schools would attract outstanding teachers. High school teachers would vie to teach in the “exam” schools. Elementary and junior high teachers would want to teach in wealthy neighborhoods. JHS 52 was not in a wealthy neighborhood, but we had several outstanding teachers. Actually, it was the early 1940s and we were coming out of the depression, and if you had a job teaching in the NYC school system, you were lucky. My guess is that close to half the student body was Jewish. 9BR had 36 students; 28 were Jewish and five were Puerto Rican. My calculation, using name recognition: 111 of the 225 graduates in June 1942 were Jewish. By the late 40s, the ethnic make-op of the school was changing.
When I was a substitute teacher at 52 for a few days in 1950, the school was majority Puerto Rican and black. I do not believe any of my teachers were still in the school. My friends and I returned to the school 50 years later. We were revisiting the old neighborhood, or the Shtetl, as Bob Epstein calls it. We met the Principal who was Puerto Rican. The Principal when we went to 52 was Jewish. She had little idea of the history of the school, and was surprised to know that there was a school song. We were shown the auditorium, and spontaneously burst out into song:
“Rah for dear old Knowlton.
Shout til the rafters ring.
Rah for dear old Knowlton once again.
Let every man in Knowlton sing.
We’ll sing of all the happy hours.
Sing of the care free days.
Sing of dear old alma mater.
The school of our heart always.”
There is another stanza which begins: “We’ll be true, we’ll be true…” but I can no longer remember what it was that we will be true to. But we remembered it then.
The Autograph Album
Graduation from junior high school was a major event in my life, at the time, surpassed only by my Bar Mitzvah. I was excited by the prospect of going on to high school, but saddened at the thought of leaving 52. My mother allowed me one indulgence as her graduation gift. When I graduated from elementary school, she let me buy a silver lapel pin. It consisted of a small rectangle with a P on top and an S on the bottom, and “62” in the center, connected with a thin silver chain to “40,” my graduation year. In retrospect, I see it as “aroysgevarfene gelt,” thrown away money, but I still have it.
This time, I didn’t buy a pin, nor did I buy our graduation picture. I bought an autograph album. There were two kinds: one with a zipper, and the cheaper one with a clasp. I got the one with a clasp. When my friend Sol died, his children found his autograph album, and not knowing what to do with it, they sent it to me. His had a zipper.
Comparing the contents of both albums, I realized how similar the entries were. At the beginning of the album, was a page titled “Favorites.” For Book, Sol chose The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. I chose The Three Musketeers. For Game, Sol’s choice was stickball; mine was baseball. For Chum, Sol picked Marvin Peyser and me. And I picked Sol and Larry Wilson. We both selected CCNY for College. On the next page, Class Officers, we of course had the same entries: Philip Bernstein as President, and David Mass as Vice President. ( I think, ay 52, they were designated Captain and Lieutenant.) I was the Class Secretary, but since the list included Treasurer, Sol put me in as Treasurer as well.
Having the albums at hand, I don’t have to rely on memory to share what my fellow classmates wrote. The last week before graduation, the halls of 52 were alive with the scurrying of the graduating class, albums in hand, cornering other classmates and teachers. The aim was to fill up your album, as if the graduate who filled the most pages, got a prize. Teachers usually just signed their names. The teachers who were special, wrote something special for you. My favorite English teacher, P. T. (Pauline Turner) Davis wrote “Steadiness is one of your fine qualities. Success to you,” A few teachers wrote Best Wishes, or Sincerely, or Good Luck. Looking through Sol’s album, I was impressed that our gorgeous music teacher, R. Sybil Haver, wrote “You’ll talk your way through, I’m sure.” There has to be a fascinating story behind that.
Very few of us were original. The same inscriptions appeared year after year in junior high school autograph albums across the land:
“You asked me to write, What shall it be? Two little words. “Remember Me.’”
“When on this page you chance to look, Just think of me and close the book.”
I wrote the following in several albums: “First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then comes (Sol, Phil, Bob etc) with a perambulator.”
“Here’s to those who wish you well. And those who don’t can go to ‘Morris.’”
“If all the girls lived across the sea, What wonderful swimmers we would be.”
“If writing in a book, Remembrance assures. With the greatest of pleasure, I will write in yours.”
“U R 2 Y’s U R 2 B I C U R 2 Y’s 4 me.”
“He who only hopes is hopeless.”
“Remember once, remember twice. Remember the time We rolled the dice.”
“I am no poet, I have no fame. Just to do you a favor, I’ll sign my name.”
“If you sit on the tack of ambition, you will surely rise,”
“When you get married And have a shiny new car, Remember me, the guy from 9BR.” Another ‘When you get married…poem: “When you get married And your wife asks for a drink, Just give her a cup, And show her the sink.”
“In Central Park There is a rock, And on it says Forget me not.”
“Friend is a word of royal tone. Friend is a poem all alone.”
“In your golden chain of friendship, Regard me as a link.”
“When you are low and feeling blue, Just think of the days in 52.”
One of my classmates looked for a page with a certain color, and wrote: “May you never be as blue as this page.”
Another classmate had this as his favorite inscription: “First in the album, Best of the lot, first to be remembered, Last to be forgot.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it should be written on the first page of the album, not in the middle.
In addition to the clever poem or saying, I was surprised to see how my classmates addressed me: I was Jake, Jaky, Jakie, Jacke, Jackob, Jacob. J.S., and Schlitt, To Tony Rodriguez, I was Schlittzenbergen.
And how did my classmates close their entries? Your pal; your classmate; your friend; your fellow grad-u-8; your fellow grad-u-past tense of to eat; a fellow grad; your brother graduate. Phil Bernstein signed Your Captain, and David Mass wrote Your Lieutenant. The page was occasionally decorated with “4 get me knot” in the corners, or “Yours til the board walks.”
A particularly poignant aspect of my autograph album: I had saved the first page for my mother, but I never asked her to write anything. It was filled with the scribblings of my classmates, the autographs of my teachers, and entries from some of my relatives, but I had not asked my mother. Three years later, she saw my junior high school autograph album lying around. She looked through it, and wrote the following on the first page that I had reserved for her:
“Sep. 7, 1945
To my son Jacob,
Best wishes to your Graduation my son. Late, well, late is my fate.
You, my dear son, came late, but thanks God you came. You came, my son.
Blessed shall be that day in December 1927. The day of days.
Dear God, may my son be blessed white. Everything that is good, fine and nice.
A very happy New Year 5705, to you my son.
Mother”
I now tear every time I read or remember it. Five and a half years after she wrote this, she was gone.
Who Was Thomas Knowlton?
While we were in 52, we never gave any thought to why our school was called Thomas Knowlton. It was a given. Somebody named it Thomas Knowlton so it was Thomas Knowlton. For me it was in the same category as: why is a hat called a hat? Why is my street called Fox Street? Is it named after the animal or somebody named Mr. Fox? Somebody gave names to the various high schools across the city: Stuyvesant, Morris, Monroe, Clinton, Hunter, Washington Irving, Gompers, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Tech. The last two made sense. It said, “I am a science school” and “I am a technical school.” There was also a High School of Aviation Trades. Most of these schools were built and named in the 20’s or early 30’s. Perhaps somebody at the Board of Education had the responsibility for coming up with the names. When I thought about it, which was seldom, I divided the schools into three parts: the no-name schools like Science and Tech; the known-name schools like Stuyvesant and Monroe and Clinton; and the unknown-name schools like Morris and Hunter, and of course, Thomas Knowlton.
Although we went to a school named after him, we never knew who Thomas Knowlton was. I believe I once asked a teacher, and was told that he fought in the Revolutionary War, but he wasn’t sure. Thanks to Wikipedia, I just learned that Thomas Knowlton was born in Boxford MA in 1740, his family moved to Ashford CT when he was 8, he fought in the French and Indian War when he was 15, and as a result of his leadership in the Battle of Bunker Hill, was made an officer. He organized a group of spies called the Knowlton Rangers, in August 1776 he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and was killed in the Battle of Harlem Heights in September 1776. It would have been nice to have known this when we went to Knowlton.
I mentioned Gompers High School, which was in our neighborhood. I was very proud of the fact that a high school was named after a labor leader, and a Jewish labor leader at that. Its full name was Samuel Gompers Vocational High School. Being a vocational high school diminished it in my eyes, but it seemed logical to name a vocational high school after the former president of the American Federation of Labor. No one I knew went there.
Girls
For some reason, we never questioned that junior high school should be a single sex institution. (52 became co-ed in 1962.) We said goodbye to girls as classmates at the end of sixth grade, just as we were beginning to be aware of them. During that last year of elementary school, I decided that I loved both Phyllis Flyer and Rita Feit. I suspect that they had no idea how I felt about them, though one day I went with a friend to the courtyard of Phyllis’ apartment house and shouted, “Phyllis, I love you!” and ran away.
All those feeling were put on hold for the next few years. I suspect that for the same reason Orthodox synagogues separate men and women, the New York City school system separated boys and girls in junior high school (and even in some high schools.) They are very distracting. They might cause your mind to wander. So I conformed. I didn’t think about girls, though I sort of liked Sallie Mae, and there was Bea, in my Arbeter Ring Shule, who sort of interested me. Thinking back to those years, it seemed that the only kids in my neighborhood were boys. Could I have been so oblivious? Wouldn’t there have been an equal number of boys and girls, biologically? Why wasn’t I aware of them? As far as I can remember, there was one kid who had a younger sister, and another who had an older sister, and that was it. (I didn’t know at the time that Bob Epstein had three older sisters.)
Girls were absent from my world during junior high. That is not to say that I was unaware that there was an opposite sex, and that they aroused some strange feeling in me. I believe my life would have been different if junior high had been co-ed, if I had learned that girls were very much like me and my friends, and that we could be friends. The chasm that junior high created was widened by high school. I envied fellows who were at ease with girls, and was always surprised when some of my junior high classmates mentioned that they had girl friends.
Sex had begun to raise its lovely, tousled head, as someone said. By the last year of junior high, dirty books and pictures made the rounds, as well as dirty jokes. One of our teachers was referred to as “the pirate.” Why the pirate, you ask. Because she had a sunken chest! She was also called “Titless Lees.” How cruel, and how dumb! The two books that I remember being circulated were Fanny Hill and God’s Little Acre. Not terribly dirty, and pretty good writing.
Not only were there no girls to distract us, there was only one teacher among the entire faculty who was young and attractive: R. Sybil Haver. I would have thought by the law of averages, there would have been more. But it was the end of the depression, and teachers were holding on to their jobs for dear life. There was very little turnover. Few young teachers were being hired.
A final observation: In my 2 ½ years in junior high (and for that matter in high school and college) I never met a homosexual. They must have been well closeted in the 40s. We knew they existed, but we thought they were confined to Greenwich Village. If we wanted to make fun of someone, especially someone who was not macho, we would yell, “homo!” and speak in a falsetto. My Puerto Rican friends labeled the individual “maricon.” We would also accompany the designation with a gesture--either a limp wrist or a pinky along the eye brow. The closest anyone came to having his sexual preference questioned in 52 was Norman Perlmutter. He was blonde and pudgy, and played Buttercup in our production of HMS Pinafore, wearing a dress. That really took courage. And he wasn’t gay.
Clubs
Time was set aside each week for us to attend a “club” of our choice. Thanks to the “Club News” section of the Knowlton Herald, I learned the names of the clubs and that the time set aside was 2:15 every Thursday. Most of the clubs were extensions of the curriculum, or related activities: French Club, Glee Club, P.T. Club, Debating Club, Clay Club, Soap Sculpture Club, Cartoon Club, Sheet Metal Club etc. We didn’t stay with the same club each term. I was in the Debating Club one term and possibly the Stamp Club or the Garden Club another term. I don’t know if we took it very seriously. The club time slot provided the Glee Club and Orchestra with the opportunity to practice, and for the members of the Traffic Squad, the Staircase Squad and the GO to meet.
I was always puzzled by what the GO (General Organization) did. It was supposed to be something like a Student Council, where elected representatives from each class, met and deliberated. But about what? It was the “teacher’advisor” who ran the show. I always joined the GO (dues were 25 cents), and I have my GO buttons from all my five terms. If I had read the GO Club entries in the Knowlton Herald, it would have confirmed my suspicion: “We meet in 506, and Mr. Lichtman is the head of the GO Club. When we are seated, we wait for Mr. Lichtman to call off classes, to get the money that we have received the previous week…Out of the money, the graduates will receive the Service pins, Knowlton “K,” the carnations and many other things…Through the hard work of Mr. Lichtman and the kindness of Mr. Raben, we were able to see a baseball game.” A troubling introduction to democracy at work. Yet I always wore my GO button, which may have led to my interest in political buttons.
Perhaps it was my involvement with the Garden Club that led me to join the school’s Victory Garden over the summer. Across the street from the school was a garden plot, and we prepared the ground during the spring, and tended to the garden during the summer. We harvested our “crop” before school started in the fall. I worked in our Victory Garden for two summers. (The summer of 1942, after I graduated, was devoted to looking for a summer job.) I believe the N.Y. Herald Tribune partnered with the Board of Education to encourage school Victory Gardens. They held an annual fair where students displayed the result of their labors, and prizes were awarded. We may not have won a prize, but all of us who worked in the garden were awarded certificates. And we were able to bring home the food we grew. In addition to the more common vegetables, we grew stuff I had never heard of. My favorite was kol rabi. It was years later that I realized that my friends Bob Epstein and Mel Schulman were also involved with the Victory Garden. We must have been solitary gardeners.
My interest in growing things preceded my working in 52’s garden, but it was encouraged by the school. We were sold seeds every spring that were packaged by the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. The packets sold for a few cents, and contained both vegetable and flower seeds. I would get cheese boxes from the grocery store, fill them with soil that I would dig out of the empty lots near the East River, put the seeds in the soil, and place the boxes on my fire escape. I grew asters, marigolds, morning glories and string beans. Again, I owe a debt of gratitude to JHS 52.
Conclusion
I have enjoyed reliving those years, and treasure the friendships I have made at junior high school 52. They have become my closest friends, which is another story. For some time, I have been aware that educators consider the junior high school-middle school years the most difficult to teach. I don’t believe my teachers felt that, but times were certainly different in the 1930s-‘40s. JHS 52 had children of immigrant parents. Learning was the passport to success. We wanted to do well. We may have come from families that questioned the economic system, but we were taught to respect out teachers, and that the knowledge they were imparting will be the tools we would need to make a better world. Thank you Thomas Knowlton Junior High School.
Finally, I am a sucker for reunions. When I learn about a reunion—from high school or college—if I can get there, I will. Of course, it usually is a disappointment. As far as I know, there has never been a junior high school reunion of the class of 52’s class of 1942. I am toying with the thought that since June 2012 will be the 70th Anniversary of our graduation, a reunion would be a great idea. I hope Bob Epstein, Alex Roth, Milton Greenwald and Bert Seigelstein might indulge me. We could expand it to include all the 52 graduates in the classes of 1941, and 1943. We will be in our mid-80s. Why not? We just have to get the word out.
12-16-11
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Junior High School
<p>My Most Favorite Educational Experience</p>
<p>(And My Longest Memoir)</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"It is mid-December, 2011, and for the past month I have been reliving my life in junior high school."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011-11-20/2012-12-16
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1940/1942
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Junior_High_School
Adolescence
Bronx
Education
Friends
Junior High School (J.H.S. 52)
Reading Out Loud (R.O.L.)