In 1958 Eisenhower was still in office. It felt to me that the entire country was in a comfortable snooze. I attended Jamaica High School, a huge mound of bricks, granite and concrete that stood on an imposing hillock across the street from a kettle pond made by the glaciers thousand of years ago. The entire north shore was terminal moraine that ran through Queens out to Long Island. All kinds of students had graduated here, even Josef von Sternberg (Josef Sternberg), the famed director of Marlene Dietrich. I was in my senior year and it proved to be a bitter one for me.
In those days school programs were tracked — academic, business and general. You knew your place. If you were in the general track you were headed for blue collar work; if you were in business, secretarial work or some kind of accounting, and if you were in the academic program college was next after high school. Of course, teachers and administrators loved their academic pets. I could sense the favoritism. No one spoke about it then. In fact no one spoke about anything of substance then. Like the moraine the building rested on, the world for four years was glacial.
Schools were inflexible and authoritarian in those days, down even to a white line in the corridors which you could not cross even if your classroom was across the way. You had to go to the end of the corridor and turn around and then go to your room. Sometimes it was silent passing. Looking back is easy, looking back makes it horrific, but it was mind-numbing and unchallenged at the time. A teacher’s mere look or scowl was enough, if you were a reasonably intimidated young person, to shut up. The classic fear was that infractions of any sort might “go on your permanent record card,” hidden somewhere in the bowels of the school and a lifelong behavioral tattoo that you would wear until you died. How ubiquitous it is that distilled fear is driven into each generation by the authoritarians of that generation. It never ends. Have you observed in your own experience how much of teaching is made up of threats? Of course, you have. Paul Goodman labeled it as growing up absurd, in a book of the same title.
I had a difficult and hard time in high school, excellent in social studies because I read a lot, terrible, really terrible in math, especially geometry, mediocre in language, reasonable in earth science and biology, an eighty student in English. At home I had no support or real encouragement for I bathed in benign neglect, parents who had not gotten through school during the Depression years. They were not active in my academic life, for they were ignorant themselves of, let us say, geometry. I suffered alone. I was depressed and did not know it. It was not like now; it was then; depression was only spoken of, I imagine, in psychoanalytic circles.
In any case I recall the spring semester. I was preparing for six Regents! which were statewide three hour long New York tests for four years of Spanish, four years of social studies, four years of English, four years of Science, etc. Because I was disordered, disorganized and did not plan well, it came to pass that in June of 1958 I stood for these tests. I did pass all of them but the anxiety and studying was stressful. In those days passing a Regents was a mark of scholarship. I must say that my four years in Jamaica high School more than holds up against some community colleges today in terms of what I learned, underachiever that I was.
I was feeling moody when I received notice that after all these years in high school I was on the honor roll for the first time; I felt very bitter about that, beyond ironical considering the quiet suffering I endured — alone. I had been a mediocre student but somehow I caught fire in my last semester and achieved. Related to this I had written a poem called “To Those Who Fail,” in which I expressed my adolescent angst about my struggle, comparing it to a stream that continues to wend its way although obstacles get in its course. I submitted it to my English teacher and to my surprise it was accepted and I knew it would be in my 1958 yearbook.
When it was published with a different title, “Destroyer and Builder,” I was distressed no end, for this schmuck of an English teacher only saw one theme in it, a minor one at that, and so my first editing experience was depressing. And when I unwittingly showed my poem to my uncle in the yearbook, who was unlettered himself, he innocently defaced it by signing his name on it with well wishes. All this compounded my feelings of being fucked over. I still have that original poem after 55 years.
In that spring I went to Mrs. Young who was the guidance counselor to get my scores on the College Boards which is what they were called in those days. I had no training or prep for these tests and just took them and, of course, that was a mistake. I simply didn’t know any better. Consider all the prep work, tutoring and Kaplan courses today so Johnny can slip into college. I remember her in that Dickensian garret office of hers imperiously hovering over a small wooden box containing index cards with student scores and how she looked at my marks and then told me, in effect, that I should not think of college and consider some other avenue of effort. She was matter-of-fact heartless. Demoralizing, unkind– and devastating. I would implant a stake in her heart if I came upon her grave. All I knew I could do was read and learn; I had few other skills or attributes, definitely not handy. I felt at sea, without compass. I felt useless because I liked the liberal arts. I was a lost soul, and she reminded me of that condition, my nature. When I think of her I think of Mrs. Farber as well, another soul murderer, a math teacher, who circled a 45 on a quarterly report card in red crayon as if I would not understand what 45 meant. The cruelty was remarkable. I would use a special stake to implant in her heart as well and then circle it with barbed wire.
I have a reminiscence of Iris, the one with the big jugs, who bartered, bickered, slobbered for an extra point in Mrs. Farber’s geometry class to go from a 96 to a 97. I recall hearing that repartee between teacher and very bright student, her pet. And I sat at my desk with my failing grade with shit in my pants and calculating in my mind how many points I could take from Iris’s grade and pass(!) yet leaving her with sufficient points to pass as well. The depression was deep. The rage untouched. The anger was red hot. Iris would go on to the next semester, and I would have to repeat the course. I felt emotionally and psychologically left back. It goes a long way to explain my resentment of those who have, the “upper” classes, the well-to-do. It was a class dislike I acquired. I was the oppressed.
There were some interesting young kids in the class of 1958, Stephen Jay Gould, who I never met but probably had seen him in the halls who went on to become a major scholar of evolution. Unfortunately he died much too young (2001) but he was in the broth I swam in. And there was Michael Weiner who signed my yearbook in an undecipherable scrawl who I did know, but not indelibly. And here I will add that he went on for his doctorate in ethno-botany and wrote many books and then became Michael Savage, the far right or conservative commentator. I did not know but learned later on that he was physically abused by his father and as you can imagine in the Fifties that was not spoken of. In my feeling imagination I can see him coming to school after a slugfest at home. It saddens me to see how far right he has gone and given his home life I can postulate a few thoughts about that veering off. And I wonder now if I have left any impact upon any one in that school. As I look back now I was probably viewed as a nice guy, inordinately shy , harmless, a square, unobtrusive — bordering on being a schlemiel. And that I was someone who would drift into the great unwashed expectorate of the Eisenhower working masses of 1958.
As a graduation gift I got a sterling silver ID bracelet from my parents. The summer of 1958 I worked at S.Klein, long since defunct, a department store in Hempstead, Long Island. I would take a bus from the Jamaica terminal and ride out to this suburb and it was tiring, but I was young. In the store I was a clerk in the record department and it was here that I began to appreciate the talent of Frank Sinatra, his phrasing especially, as the record manager played his records incessantly. In 1958 Volare by Domenico Modugno was a hit record as well as another called Patricia which had a propulsive Latin beat.
It was also the summer in which Lady Chatterley’s Lover in its famous white cover was a major book release. What I found interesting was that on the bus going home people would read the book in a cover so as not to be considered prurient — oh, the repressed fifties. I later read it myself and thought it was beautifully written erotica, first class with an underlying critique of the English industrialized classes, who were unfeeling, frozen, and like her husband, paralyzed. I had applied to night school at Queens college as I had no idea what I was to do in this world. I recall dimly a call from my mother from our seventh floor housing project window on Parsons Boulevard telling me that I had been accepted into night school at Queens College. Observe that she opened the acceptance, therefore depriving me of the pleasure of notification.
Wisely, a word I would not use for me at eighteen, I took four courses in the arts during the first semester at night school which I loved, music and art appreciation of the first order. I got four A’s and with that average I was able to transfer into day college. I had finally made it. I wish I could say goodbye to all that but I can’t because I choose not to.
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