The P. S. 217 "Assembly"

During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies."  Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their costumes that I'm darned if I can remember what was worn by the young ladies).  Before entering the auditorium, classes lined up in "size places."  P. S. 217 was particularly strong on "size places"  -- a point of particular humiliation for me, because I was, as WS says about R of G, "so long a-growing, and so leisurely" that I was by far the smallest child in every class from first grade to eighth.  After we found our assigned seats (boys in one row, girls in the next), our principal Miss Bildersee, a formidable and incredibly ancient woman with hugely distended nostrils in which an agile boy could go spelunking, would perform the mandatory reading from the Bible.  Blessings on her fond old heart, Miss Bildersee regularly choose melodious passages from the book of Psalms.  I was particularly struck by the eloquence of "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful," with its abrupt counterbalancing antistrophe: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away."  After the Bible reading and some announcements, there was usually a performance of some sort.  Choral readings, the oddest of art forms, were far too frequent. I remember that I was once a member of a sextet of quavering sopranos who memorized and recited the patriotic World War I poem "In Flanders Fields."  What in the world was a second-grader supposed to make of "We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/ Loved and were loved, and now we lie/ In Flanders fields./ Take up our quarrel with the foe:/ To you from failing hands we throw/ The torch; be yours to hold it high./ If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields."   (Such poppycock was received as true literary greatness.  It would have been beyond utopian imagination that our teachers would have known or introduced us to the distinguished WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg or Siegfried Sassoon or Edward Thomas.)  Then our music specialist Mrs. Georgia Keiselbach would sit down at the piano and teach us songs, some of them also left over from the first World War:  "Keep the home-fires burning,/ While your hearts are yearning,/ Though your lads are far away/ They dream of home;/ There's a silver lining/ Through the dark cloud shining,/ Turn the dark cloud inside out,/ Till the boys come home."  And also: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/ Who will fight for the right they adore... Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder."  And: "Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway/ Tramp, tramp, tramp, the road is free...  We're planters and Canucks/ Virginians and Kentucks/ Captain Dick's own Infantry/ Captain Dick's own Infantry," which I now know to have come from Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and which provoked a great deal of surreptitious tittering because it had the word "dick" in it.  In those unenlightened days we sang very many overtly religious songs: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" and "Easter Parade."  I much admired the tune of "The First Noel" but I had no idea what was meant by "born is the king of Israel" -- the only Israel I knew of was a recently-founded democracy.  I loved the Thanksgiving hymn "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;/ He chastens and hastens His will to make known;/ The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,/ Sing praises to His name; He forgets not his own" and many more stanzas, none of which I could parse or understand (still can't, in fact!).  Another Thanksgiving song:  "Over the river and through the woods/ To grandmother's house we go/ The horse knows the way/ To carry the sleigh...," which I found to be curiously disorienting because my particular grandmother lived in a tiny third-floor walkup on noisy and sweaty Coney Island Avenue.  We sang the immensely mysterious Lord's Prayer (in the Schubert setting, I later discovered).  Why did we so?  Were the heathens and Jews among us expected to convert on the spot?  I much preferred the patriotic songs, although even they too were permeated with inexplicable theology.  We were fervent patriots.  Not one, but two full stanzas of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":  "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/ With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me/  As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/ For God is marching on."  And two stanzas also of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand/ Between their loved home and the war's desolation!/  Blessed with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land/  Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation./ Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/ And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'"  I preferred the rousing "O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,/ The home of the brave and the free,/ The shrine of each patriot's devotion,/ A world offers homage to thee" and "God Bless America" as well as the jingoist exceptionalism and cluttered syntax of "Our father's God, to thee/ Author of liberty/ To thee we sing./  Long may our land be bright/ With freedom's holy light;/ Protect us by thy might/ Great God our King." 

Here's a song we were distinctly not taught and did not sing: "This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California, to the New York Island./  From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me."  We especially did not sing:  "In the squares of the city  -- in the shadow of the steeple/  Near the relief office -- I see my people/  And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' /  If this land's still made for you and me."

December 17.  I now remember that we sang musical settings to two familiar poems.  The first, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty:  "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."  Hey, that's my grandparents you're calling "wretched refuse."  The second, Joyce Kilmer's horrid "Trees":  "I think that I shall never see/  A poem lovely as a tree...  A tree who's hungry mouth is pressed/ Against the earth's sweet-flowing breast" etc.  This song was only palatable because it allowed us to say the word "breast" out loud. 

(Thanks to Steve and to Barry, graduates of P. S. 217, for jogging my memory;  thanks also to David [P. S. 102].

Graduates of P. S. 217 who happen to stumble onto this site: feel free to add comments or to forward this post to classmates with whom you might be in touch.)

Comments

[David Schacker]

What did we sing at P.S. 102? Every morning in 8th grade Miss F (an old isolationist who used to rail against FDR getting us into WW2) had us start the day with songs from a big silver-colored songbook. I remember two of the songs, songs that any red-blooded Brooklyn kid would love singing: “Hi Ho, Come To The Fair” and “Do Ye Ken, John Peale?”. Do you believe it: “Hi F---ing Ho, Come To The Fair”??? One morning Miss F made the mistake of asking us what song we’d like to sing, and the class bad boy, Victor J, who was always cracking wise, piped up: “Brooklyn Boogie.” Needless to say, young Master J was dealt with severely, but in retrospect he must be given points for honesty. We also sang a lot in Assembly (white shirt and red tie at P.S. 102); lots of Stephen Foster songs. I used to wince at the word “black” every time we sang “Old Black Joe,” but that was before it was okay to be black. (There were no blacks in the school.) At Thanksgiving, of course, the hymn which, until you filled me in, I remembered as: “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing / With something and something alive alive-o....” (I once had some lines to say in a Thanksgiving pageant, a gripping reenactment of the first Thanksgiving. I remember I couldn’t understand my line which started: “It is meat that we gather here...” Nobody would explain it to me so I obediently said it: “It is meat that we gather here...” I figured it had to do with the turkey, but no one ever explained whether it was white meat or dark meat.) At Christmas we sang carols, lots and lots of carols. Miss F, who led the assembly-singing, used to get very upset when we sang “Silent Night.” During the upward glissando in “Sleep in heavenly pe-e-e-e-eace” we would slide through every intermediate quarter-tone on our way up, everyone ascending at different rates. We must have sounded like 200 out-of-tune Hawaiian guitars. I always enjoyed singing Christmas carols, but as one of the two or three Jews in the whole school I didn’t think it was right for me to sing the words “Jesus” and “Christ.” Whenever these words came up I would slur over them, so at the end of the second verse of “Silent Night” it always came out something like “Crelmm our savior is born.”

[epearl]

I went to P.S. 193 in Brooklyn and while I don't recall what the boys wore to assembly, I can tell you what the girls wore: Dark blue or black skirts, with a white blouse and an orange scarf around our necks. Why we wore orange scarfs is a mystery to me. I can't attach any significance to the color other than pumpkins at Halloween, but that was what the elders at P.S. 193 considered acceptable for young girls going to assembly.

[David Schacker]

Loved the bit about “size places.” Did you have to “square your corners” on your way into Assembly, or when entering the building from the schoolyard? We did, or else you got put in “the coop” (not the co-op, the coop) by a Guard or one of his Monitors. Three times in the coop and you were sent to Mr. Burke.

[David Schacker]

Maybe the P.S. stood for "Public Stalag."

[Stuart Blickstein]

3 notes ....
1. Vivian - Do you really remember all of those lyrics, or did you use a cheat sheet, so to speak.
2. The girls wore 'middie blouses'. And for boys forgot their ties, Mrs. Graves kept a ready supply of green fabric scraps (an unusually kind description) for us to wear.
3. I'd like to contact the person who went to PS 193. My uncle was the principal there.

[Vivian]

Did I remember all the lyrics out of my own head? No, Stu, I remembered bits and pieces and googled for the rest of the words. Sorry to disappoint you.

[Helen Bloch]

I went to PS 268 but the routine you've described and the uniforms are almost identical to my memories. At 268, the boys wore these short red crossover ties that had a snap in the middle. I have no idea what you would call them. We also had a color guard who would march into the auditorium carrying the flags. Sometimes students would get to read the hymn at assembly. I wonder if these practices were
citywide or just in Brooklyn? Separation of church and state wasn't a big issue then I guess.

[Herb Yussim]

Hmmm, are my memories that foggy (writing from my secluded home in the Oregon woods)? I was born in Dec '48 so I began school at PS 217 in '54? We had one Chinese boy, one Italian girl and one Black boy; everyone else was Jewish middle class. I dont remember the color of the tie, just that we wore them, had to have clean fingernails and a hankie in a (back) pocket too. I remember singing 'My Name is Dr Ironbeard', twiddle widdle wick, boom, boom. My teachers were Mrs Solotkin, Mrs Rice, Mr Frieidman, and I seem to remember an Asst Principal, Miss Driscall (sp?)...and she was a tall WASP and I think she knew she was out of place.
I remember singing Do Ya Ken John Peale...but I thought I sang that at the Brooklyn Museum's Children's Chorus under the direction of John Motley. There were also Saturday mornings in the basement of the Library near Erasmus Hall High School off Flatbush Ave, where kids sang folk songs under the direction of one of the Banjo picking beatnicks of the day...for all I know it was Pete Seeger, but I was too young to know or care. I have 8mm film of all that so maybe I should look at the film (if it doesnt fall apart due to ancient splices). Also Dad liked to go to the fountain at Washington Square Park in the Village on Sunday mornings to listen, sing with, speak with and meet the beatnicks of the day.