Dr. Metablog

Another P.S. 217 Picture

Is it my imagination, or did we mature later in those days than kids do now?  These handsome juveniles are thirteen and fourteen years old.  To my eyes, the girls look barely half-grown, the boys variable but distinctly unfledged.

Claire R., who sent me the picture (thanks so much, Claire!!), looks womanly, but the others --not far out of childhood.  The boys in the second row look as though adolescence has not yet begun to rear its unhandsome head. 

Want to know the names of these unpromising lads and lasses?  Search here.  

I

My First Racist

There was this kid in our class at P. S. 217, back there in the 'Flatbush '50s.  I'm not going to name names, but if anyone is cares to look, you can know him by his smirk in the picture of our eighth grade graduating class.  For convenience, I'll call this guy K.   K was not particularly smart, or athletic, or talented, or attractive, or congenial, so he was quite a way down in the nebbish area.  But to give him his due, he was intense, dogged, hard-working, and perpetually argumentative.  He was not afraid to offend.  He took positions that no one else in the schoolyard supported.  I remember him haranguing me on the subject of social security.  It was a bad thing, he asserted, because his father could make more money by investing on his own rather than contributing to the pot. "But, but, but...," I remember stuttering, "it's insurance, and not everyone is a good investor."  This exchange must have taken place during the Truman years. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard, where everyone was the child or grandchild of immigrants, FDR was our guy and social security was a fact of life, a revolutionary improvement in quality of life.  Besides, wasn't it the case that my widowed grandmother received $32 a month -- not enough to live on, but a great help, enough to pay her rent?  To argue against social security -- where in the world could K get such weird, off-the-track ideas?  Plus K was a Yankees fan --an unholy, contrarian jerk!

Then K disappeared for a month or a year -- some period of time, I can't remember exactly how long.  He had relatives in a southern city -- Baltimore, I believe, and he lived with them for an extended while. When he returned, he starting spouting the most appalling racist remarks, one of which is engraved on my memory:  "they have a lot of uppity blacks down there, they won't even get off the sidewalk for you."  Whoa, daddy.  First of all, no one said "blacks" in those days -- they were "Negroes."  And second -- "uppity?"  I had never heard the term before and was shocked beyond measure.  "Get off the sidewalk" --WTF???  Beyond my conception, beyond anyone's conception in our part of the universe.  Remember, dear reader, that the only person more sacred to the schoolyarders than FDR was Jackie Robinson.

I tell you, I gave K a lot of room after that conversation.  Truth to tell, there was no need for our paths to cross -- we weren't in the same classroom and K didn't play softball or basketball -- as I said, he was pretty much of a klutz.  

I looked up K on the internet.  He's a retired professor of economics and is now a fellow at a right-wing  think tank.  He's made a career out of opposing third-world development and supporting "free market solutions" to all our ills.  That dogged dullness has produced a number of books.  I've even found a picture of him -- where he was once greasy and pimpled, he's now bald and sleek, with a malevolent cast to his eye. 

There's always been a connection in my mind between conservatism and racism.  The link is narcissism.  "I've got mine, let "them" take care of themselves."  For the Ks of the world, it's not "how do we take care of less fortunate and of our old people?"  It's, "how do 'we' deal with 'them.'"  And "they" are usually, almost always, darker-skinned than "we."  I'm sure that K would deny that his "free-market" views have anything to do with racism.  But I know better -- I was there at the beginning, before K became quite so sleek.  

P.S 217 Prosopography

After the passage of oh-so-many years, I've become shamelessly curious to know what happened to the friends and classmates who graduated from P. S. 217 in June of 1952. There were about 175 of these golden lads and lasses, and you can see their pictures here.

I know just enough to pique my curiousity. Lester Silberman became a gynecologist, Stephen Lewin an editor, Herman Bressel was career navy, George Coven an entrepreneur, Fred Litto a professor in Brazil, Buddy Sogluizzo a librarian, Melvin Polay a CPA.  Allen Guday emigrated to Israel and Stuart Blickstein to South Carolina.  Nicky Antonucci died in Korea.  But I have no information on 90% of the boys and 100% of the girls.  Hey, guys and gals, check out the pictures and help me track down those missing members of the class of 1952.  Where the heck are you?  What have you been doing since 1952? 

We're all 70 years old;  It's now or never.    

Am I the only one who's curious? 

Number 44 and Number 42

I'm jubilant that, come January 20, we'll once again have a president whose brain waves are dancing, who can bring an English sentence to completion, and who understands that America consists of much more than the Bushian roster of Fortune 500 executives, evangelicals, know-nothings, high school dropouts, gay-bashers, neocon imperialists, dittoheads, gun nuts, military contractors, upward redistributionists, fetus-worshipers and health insurance profiteers.  The new president will abandon the present system of government (trust the market -- capitalism is always right!) and return us to the world of evidence and reason.  Quite the revolution, isn't it?  And speaking of revolutions, the new president, if you haven't heard, is black (or to be more accurate, black-and-white, which is this country still means, in defiance of all logic, black).  How splendid to bury a long-standing racial taboo. Nothing makes me prouder than that we've elected an African-American, Kenyan-Kansan president.  With a brain. 

The election of Barack Obama brought me back to hometown Brooklyn of sixty-one years ago.  I was eight years old on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson "broke the color barrier."  It was Jackie on first base or Jackie running the bases that alerted me to the idea that I lived in a conflict-riven society.  We (family, friends, neighbors, writers for the Brooklyn Eagle) were enthusiastic about Jackie, but there were those reactionaries and bigots in other cities who were convinced that their world had just come to an end. No question but that the advent of Jackie Robinson was the major formative political experience of my early childhood -- even though it was decades before I could fully appreciate its cosmic significance.   

In my mind, and I think in the minds of others of my generation, there's a direct line from Jack Roosevelt Robinson to Barack Hussein Obama. Two smart, skilled performers; two ferocious but very cool competitors.  Two very courageous gentlemen. Two barriers busted all to smithereens. Two milestones in American history.  Never the latter if hadn't hadn't been for the former.    

Jackie's fabulously athletic body fell apart early and he died young of diabetes.  He was born in 1918, and if he had been blessed with longevity, he would have been ninety years old today.   

Wouldn't that have been a pretty picture -- Jackie Robinson, frail, gray, stooped, leaning on his cane, but still in possession of that marvelous knowing glint in his coal black eyes, sitting right there on the platform in front of the United States Capitol, a tear on his cheek while Barack Obama holds up his hand and swears to protect and defend the constitution of the United States of America.  I see it oh so clearly in my mind's eye.  It gladdens my fond old heart. 

A Letter to my Grandchildren

What was it like in the 1940s when I was your age?  Different.  Milk was delivered daily in bottles: a milk-wagon, drawn by a tired, plodding old horse, appeared on East 9th Street three times a week before we sat down to breakfast.   There were also daily visits from a horse-drawn vegetable truck.  An itinerant knife-sharpener came once every couple of months.  And also a very old man with a large sack thrown over his back, singing out in the loudest voice I've ever heard, 'old clothes."  There were squarish automobiles (Packards, DeSotos, Studebakers), but far fewer than today -- so few that kids would play punchball and stickball right in the middle of the street, just stepping to the side to let that occasional car pass by.  Kids also skated in the street, using clunky metal skates that attached to the shoe by turning a "skate key."  There was no television, but everyone listened to the radio.  "Portable" radios were as big as bread boxes.  Some people had refrigerators (much smaller than modern ones), but most had "iceboxes."  Every week, an ice delivery man would haul a block of ice (about a foot-and-a-half square if I remember correctly) with large tongs and set it in the icebox.  Coal was delivered in barrels:  men with heavy gloves would roll the barrels from the truck to the ground-level coal chute.  All telephones were attached to the wall with wires.  Long distance phone calls were expensive and only for emergencies.  People did not communicate by e-mail or by IM-ing, but by means of letters.  A "letter" was a piece of paper on which whole paragraphs were written;  it was inserted into an "envelope" and put in a "mail box" for delivery.  Hard to believe, I know.  There were no word processors.  I learned to write with a "straight pen."  There were no dvd's or cd's.  Instead, we had "records," vinyl discs 12-inches in diameter which were placed on a rotating "turntable" on which rested a hand with a stylus, at first steel and then later diamond.  It was primitive but it worked rather well.  There were no credit cards.  Some people had checking accounts, but 99% of commercial transactions were completed with "money." When I started at P. S. 217, in 1944, I wore "knickers" (pants that went to just below the knee and were held in place with elastic) and long socks.  You can sometimes see knickers in old illustrated books or in clothes museums.  Men always wore hats:  fedoras or derbies or panamas or bowlers or pork-pies, usually made of felt.  Women wore hats too, some with veils, most of them godawful ugly.  Young folks "courted."  In those days, before people became intimate, they would go through a period in which they would "date" and talk and get to know each other.  This period could last for weeks or even months.  Astonishing, I know, but trust me, it happened that way in the old days.  "The past is another country;  they do things differently there."      

CCNY Basketball Ups and Downs, 1950-51

My friend (and frequent contributor to Dr. Metablog) Otis Jefferson Brown has reminded me about the crushing sports-and-morals tragedy of our joint childhoods.  It all took place in 1950/51, when I was a creeping like snail to sixth grade in P. S. 217 and Otis, a Bay Ridger, was trudging with satchel and shining morning face to P.S. 102.  Our guys, our local heroes, the CCNY basketball team, won both of the major basketball tournaments, the NIT as well as the NCAA.  The city -- New York City -- was electric with excitement.  Headlines, victory parades, demonstrations. 

The twin wins -- it never had happened before and will never happen again -- was a great event in the public sphere but an even greater one in my family.  My father had attended CCNY for a year in the 1920s but, like so many of the sons of immigrants, had to drop out to help put potatoes and black radishes on the family table. While at City, he had played on the freshman basketball team.  Would he have made the varsity?  Who can tell?  He was a strong man, a fine natural athlete, very graceful in his movements even into his 70s, and very serious about basketball.

His coach had been Nat Holman (one of the first stars of professional basketball), and Nat was still the City College coach twenty-five years later.  So whenever CCNY played, everything in our family came to a halt, and we all gathered around the Philco to listen as my father's team went down to the wire against Bradley or Kentucky or Toledo.  My father was as partisan and as jubilant as I ever knew him to be.  Not only were the victories a fulfillment of his own hopes, but it was all accomplished by a bunch of local players -- Jews and "Negroes" from the Bronx and Brooklyn who, in those days, would not have been welcome at most of the big basketball powers.  Ed Roman and Ed Warner and Irvin Dambrot and Normie Mager and Floyd Lane were household names as familiar and as admired as Koufax and Campanella. 

It was the very next year that it all blew up in our faces.  The CCNY players, or most of them, confessed to taking bribes from the gamblers and bookies and to shaving points and managing the spread.  There were indictments, "perp walks," headlines, indignant editorials.

My father was devastated.  Although in size he was only a scrappy guard, in person he was a tower of rectitude, and it was beyond his ken that our guys, even poor guys who desperately needed cash, would compromise their integrity and their futures for a few bucks.

He turned the episode into a morality play.  Every day, for a year it seems in retrospect, I heard still another lecture about keeping to the straight and narrow.  Not that there was anyone in the world who would pay me to miss a shot;  I could miss shots on my own.  But I knew what he meant.   

I've now read the Charles Rosen's Scandals of '51, how the gamblers almost killed college basketball [New York, 1971]).  It's a shoddy, melodramatic, disheartening book. Rosen makes it clear that there was more than a little nativist glee about taking CCNY and its upstart culture down a peg.  It was sad to read that players from many other colleges were also indicted (I hadn't remembered), but discouraging to learn that their defenders were happy to extol heartland values and to blame the corruption on big city depravity.  It was also sad to be reminded that the only basketball player who served hard time was Sherman White, the biggest, the best, and the blackest of all the athletes.  Nor was it pleasant to discover that although there were apparently point-shavers at St. Johns, a Catholic college, DA Frank Hogan brought no indictments against them because the evidence was "inadvertently" destroyed.

The events were a blight on my basketball-loving childhood.  But I must say that we, as a family, engineered a strong comeback.  It was only a few years after the scandals that one of those 13" black and white TVs with the rabbit ears made its first appearance in our home.  And along with the Zenith came the NBA. I think that my father was on perpetual alert for signs of malfeasance, but our faith in the game and in humanity was restored by a new set of New York heroes:  Harry Gallatin, Connie Simmons, Carl Braun, Bud Palmer, Vince Boryla, Sweetwater Clifton, Max Zaslofsky.   

More P. S. 217 1952 Graduates

Searching the out-of-the-way corners of this ol' house that we are leaving behind after thirty-five years, I discovered a mutilated copy of The Log, an eight-page mimeographed pamphlet produced by students of P.S. 217 in June of 1952.  The entries seem to have been written not by the students but by the teachers and  were designed to inculcate a moral. For example: "Class 8-1 has made many things in cooking, shop, sewing and arts and crafts.  The girls under the supervision of Miss Willig have baked many good cookies and cakes while the boys, under the supervision of Mr. Kaminsky have made expertly constructed pieces of furniture.  In grammar we have learned to diagram long sentences and are beginning to excel at it.  On Graduation Day, when the girls wear their beautiful organdy dresses which they themselves made, they will be very grateful for the instructions they received from Mrs. Ennis."  The bottom line: "you may have run wildly amok, you horrid little creatures, and created ruckus after ruckus, but some day you'll appreciate us, we hope hope hope."

Also In The Log,  and far more interesting and useful than the forced feeding of pre-nostalgia, is a list of the 1952 graduates of our fabled elementary school.

A month or so ago, I posted on this blague a formal picture of the assembled graduates, and, with the help of a committee of distinguished volunteer mnemosynists, was able to identify about half of the members of the class. With the discovery The Log, I am now able to to list the remaining students who graduated from P. S. 217 that last Truman June.  Here's hoping that my enthusiastic comrades will now be able to assign faces to the following seventy-seven most musical names:  Carol Berse, Diane Goldberg, Norma Harris, Rosalind Symons, Sheila Slovis, Dorothy Steinfeld, Sara Steinman, Harriet Young, Robert Derwin, Harold Schienkoff, Myron Sklar, Maryann Abrahams, Sheila Carp, Ria DeCastri, Anita Friedman, Ricki Gottlieb, Marcia Katz, Sheila Katz, Sandra Kopelton, Rochelle Miller, Diane Spatz, Janet Solomon, Eleanor Troy, Appolonia Yacovelli, Carole Zietlin, Thomas Bellavita, Donald Carbone, Joseph Cassano, Robert Cohen, John McKay, Arne Neilson, Toby Anker, Renee Dickson, Sylvia Gordon, Francine Herskowitz, Marguerite McGinty, Florence Rosenthal, Yvette Rosenthal, Doris Sippel, Hope Steuer, Michael Gerber, Alan Lipis, Stuart Stillman, Stanley Weinberg, Michael Welch, Carol Coniglio, Carol Gerber, Marline Gold, Leah Goodman, Evelyn and Norma Greenberg, Laurie and Roberta Katcher, Selma Schier, Edith Snyder, Robert Goldstein, Leslie Shernoff, Barbara Bider, Ann Cacioppa, Sheryl Jerome, Patricia McCabe, Marilyn Snow, Barbara Williams, Ruth Wintheil.

Identifications as well as news of our friends and companions are solicited.  Who are these people?  What paths in life, glorious life, did they tread?  Did they embark on careers of baking, or furniture making, or sewing long dresses?  Did they ever truly excel at diagramming long sentences?   Your contributions are most welcome. 

P. S. 217 Graduating Class: June, 1952

On your left is the official photograph of the 1952 P. S. 217 eighth grade graduating class, contributed by a classmate who now teaches in Brazil.  It's quite the time capsule, isn't it -- the dated costumes, the old-fashioned hairstyles, along with the clean-cut and dewy enthusiasm of far-away-and-long-ago youth.  What has become of these promising young people?  Some of them have long since left the planet and some are no doubt still engaged in distinguished careers.  Do any of them still live in the old neighborhood?  Sent their children or grandchildren to the old school?   

A panel of experts has tentatively identified some of the graduates.  Some of these ascriptions are sure to be inaccurate.  Corrections, suggestions and comments are very welcome. 

First row, left to right:  Carl Bernstein, unknown, Michael Silver, unknown, Nicholas Antonucci (said to have died in Korea), Arne Neilson, unknown, unknown, William Roberts, unknown, George Coven (entrepreneur, owner of Score Oil and Zodiac nightclub, d. 1983),  Ralph Tromba, supposedly living in steamy Florida, Theodore (Teddy) Schorr;  second row: Ira Bernstein, Bernard Sandigorsky, Anthony (Buddy) Sogluizzo, semi-retired from a career in librarianship, Elihu Pearlman (Boulder, Colorado), Helene Rosen, unknown, Harold Jacobson, Fred Ljubicich, Donald Carbone, Michael Brody;  third row: unknown, unknown, Claire Rabinowitz (formerly Dominican Republic, now Orlando), Charlotte Meineke, Carol Gerber, Marlene Gold, Ruth Rubinstein, Eleanor Troy, Sheila Katz, Carol Coniglio, Barbara Heiferman, Maureen Haynes, two unknowns, Josephine Casalino, two unknowns, Mary Anne Abrahams, Sandra Abrahams;  fourth row:  unknown, Beryl McLeod, Sandra Roseman, unknown, unknown, Karen Scheer, Jeanne Boyce, Barbara Dinner, Bridget Pugliese, unknown, Marjorie Rennick, Selma Schnier, unknown, Wendy Rosenberg, Mimi Shyko, Barbara Wolowitz, Evelyn and/or Norma Greenberg, two unknowns, Rochelle Yasser, unknown, Beverley Leventhal, Lori Katcher, two unknowns, Hilda Tarud;  fifth row: Herbie Wessoly aka Percy Wessoly, Albie Luongo, Donald Schiebel, Daniel Roos (Prof at MIT), Tommy Bellavita, John McKay, unknown, Robert Goldstein, Alan Ihrig, Lester Silberman (ret NE ob/gyn), Harvey Greif, Melvin Polay (CPA, died 1996) Howard Nirenberg, Morton Kamienny, Eric Sanders, Herbert Damsky, unknown, unknown, Melvyn Krauss, Martin Wallenstein;  sixth row: Anne Perkins, Linda Bly, seven unknowns, Pauline Aridas, Estelle Tarman, Lisa Pomerance (finance, LA), Phyllis Mancuso, Roberta Katcher, four unknowns, Marcia and/or Virginia Gargiulo, unknown, Evelyn Fleishner, unknown; seventh row: Stuart Blickstein (now a South Carolinian), Allen Guday (longtime Israeli), Paul Citron, Stuart (Sandy) Stillman (atty, Southampton and Scottsdale), Donald Caress (MD), Carl Sprung, Norman Young, Jonathan Guliner, Michael O'Gorman, Stephen Lewin (ret from a career in publishing), Edwin Lawlor, unknown, George Molinari, Allan Stern, Robert Jaclin, unknown, Fredric Litto (Prof in Brazil), Fred Hohl, Richard Schwartz, Stephen Richard Conn (Cornell grad); eighth row:  two unknowns, Judith Peretzman, Norma Harris, Diane Wert, two unknowns, Dolores Bormann, Rosalind Simons, unknown, Loretta Tillman; top row:  Alfred Podhurst, Michael Welch, unknown, Ira Blum, Herman Bressel (USN ret, Long Beach, CA), Norman Kaufman, unknown, unknown, unknown, Kenneth Tucker aka Drupiloff, Gary Steinberg, Charles Gillen.  

May 14, 2008.  More names of members of this class have been recovered.  They can be found at this site,  Match the name to the face and win the eternal gratitude of your classmates.

The Kent Theater/ Sex

I can't recommend Marion Meade's The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (New York, 2000), which I too hastily snatched off the library shelf. Written at the tabloid height of the Woody-Mia-Soon-yi fracas, it masquerades as a biography but in truth it's nothing more than scandalmongery.   

Before it gets down in the dirt, however, Unruly Life offers a quick summary of Allen’s life, a matter of which I was largely ignorant. Of course I knew that Allen was a Brooklyn boy who grew up in the old neighborhood.  Allen Koenigsberg attended P. S. 99 on East 10 Street near Avenue K (where my cousin Louie was also a student).  In addition, I knew, from Louie, that P. S. 99's principal was Eudora Fletcher and that, in the very inventive chameleon movie, Woody gave Ms. Fletcher's name to the psychiatrist who takes Zelig under her wing. 

But cousin Louie did not know, or did not bother to tell me, that Allen was a frequent patron of the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue and that it's rumored that it was at the Kent that the interior scenes in The Purple Rose of Cairo were filmed.  I've seen Purple Rose recently and if it wasn't the Kent, it sure looks like the Kent of my memory.  The Kent, along with its sister theater, the Leader, was one of my own childhood haunts.  In fact, it was my father’s aunt Manya, substitute cashier, who sometimes sat in the box office and took my quarter.   

It was not at the Kent but at the Jewel Theater on Kings Highway that Allen encountered Ingmar Bergman for the first time.  Well, not exactly Bergman himself.  It was Harriet Andersson disrobing in Summer with Monika that seems to have caught Allen's attention.  Unruly Life reports that Allen sat “with eyes bulging” to watch this and other early Bergman films. 

Allen’s protruding orbs brought to mind the impact that those shocking 1950s Scandinavian films had on the days of my early adolescence. It was at the Kent (aunt Manya must not have been on duty that day) that I once watched a Danish film in which there was a very brief flash of a woman in naked silhouette.  All I can remember is that I sat through to watch the picture again -- it might even have been a double feature -- and that by the time the silhouette appeared a second time, my poor bladder was so swollen (I was afraid to leave my seat for fear of missing the moment) that it was about to rupture.  How embarrassing it would have been to die of an aneurysm of the urinary tract simply to catch a glimpse of Harriet Andersson or one of her friends. 

In the 1950s, naked bodies were simply not on view.  Never at all, at least not in my slice of the universe.  I doubt that anyone from the post-Vietnam, post-sexual-revolution generation can imagine how nude-deprived were those severely repressed years.  Bodies, women's bodies, were so rare and mysterious that a brief and evanescent flash of shadowed skin, circa 1953, could remain in the memory for more than fifty years.

Which is why I retain the warmest feelings for Coney Island Avenue's Kent Theater.

"Cautionary" Songs of the 1950s

A while back, I recalled that during the late 1940s and early 1950s, students at P. S. 217 in Flatbush were force fed patriotic and religious music.  I've now remembered (perhaps it's the DHA) that we were also indoctrinated with songs that could be called "cautionary."  For example: do not chase a bouncing ball into the street, because while you could get a new ball, but "you can't always get a new leg."

I also remember a lyric in which we were exhorted to solicit divine intervention, and which contained these deistic lines:  "Pray in any language, to Him they all are dear/ Pray for it is music to His ear."   It was in this same song, I believe, that we were allowed the ecumenical freedom to pray "in temple, mosque, or tabernacle,/ He won't need to search."  (I had heard of temples, but the word "mosque" was beyond my ken and "tabernacle" was a complete mystery, though it had warm associations with "pumpernickel.")

Does anyone out there in Bloglandia remember either of these songs?  Or other cautionary songs from the old days?  They don't google.  Any information or citations will be much appreciated.

Incidentally, despite the well-meant advice, I pursued many a rubber ball into the street.  Nor was I ever once moved to pray in a consecrated building, except perhaps in Ebbets Field, and then only in tough ninth-inning situations.