COE Exchange

In a previous posting I reviewed elementary school in the Bronx, New York fifty years ago. This essay will review life in secondary school during the Depression and World War II.

I entered Junior High School 98 in 1942 and was placed in the Rapid Advance class. We were segregated from other students in special classes and most probably had access to among the best teachers in school. Herman Ridder Junior High School was an experimental institution which adhered to many ideas of John Dewey. All students, including Rapid Advanced students, had a half day of academic work and a half day learning a trade. I was trained to be a printer and could have left school after the 9th grade and secured a position in a print shop.

Herman Ridder exemplified the ideas of Dewey in regard to practicing democracy in order to engage immigrant children in the intricacies of the American system of government. We had a Student Court which handled discipline issues. A student charged with misbehavior went before the student court which had a prosecutor, defense attorney, jury and judge that heard the case and administered either punishment or cleared the student of all charges. I believe teachers could mitigate a sentence if they believed it was excessive.

It was at junior high school that neighborhood based students first encountered children of other ethnic, social, and religious backgrounds. Joseph Jelik was the first Christian student I ever encountered in class. I came from a working class East European Jewish background and it was in JHS that I initially encountered middle class Jewish students who mainly came from German backgrounds. The competition between the two groups was intense and most of us felt closer to Irish or Italian working class children than to middle class Jewish students.

Two incidents exemplify my comment. The first day of school, my homeroom elected a class president and my friends entered my name. The teacher, Mrs. Goldberg, sent Hannah Goldstein and myself into the corridor while voting took place. A few moments later, Mrs. Goldberg came out, went over to Hannah, hugged her, and said: “I don’t know why, but they voted for him.” I remained silent. She was a teacher, a German Jew, and I had been taught in my family not to trust German Jews because they looked down on us. The second incident came when one of my friends threw a spitball while Mrs. Goldberg was writing on the blackboard. She turned and demanded we tell who had thrown the object. Being working class, we never would reveal the name of the culprit and made known our determination by angry looks toward the German Jewish students. No one spoke. About 5:00 p.m. Mrs. Goldberg allowed the middle class children to leave and kept us until 6:00 p.m. when she finally gave up.

Many classes were based on the concept of group work. We entered the class, the teacher would assign a topic or problem and we then proceeded to our group where we spent most of the period working on the task. It was not usual for the teacher to spend time in each group, she might devote almost the entire period with one group. Our math classes were not based on group work, but followed the traditional model of teacher and class.

We took a one semester course in journalism which tremendously influenced me as a student. I was intrigued by newspapers and read at least five each day since I followed World War II intently. Each day, newspapers had incredible maps which provided wonderful geographic descriptions of places all over the world. It was in junior high school that my cousin, Dave, introduced me to the great newspaper, PM. It had incredible writers like I.F. Stone, Max Lerner, the cartoons of the man who would become Dr. Seuss, and sports columnists who wrote about integration of baseball. PM carried no advertising and was considered to be the most liberal paper in America. It was my Harvard.

My background is east European working class, socialist, and in our homes those ideas were fostered. My father read the Yiddish paper, the Forward, and sometimes, though not a Communist, he read the Freiheit. Politics was part of our home life and adults constantly discussed political issues at family gatherings. A working class mentality was instilled by family, not school. My father owned a hole-in-the-wall butcher shop and on Thursday, he hired Jake to help pluck the chickens. One Thursday I arrived to help deliver packages and saw Jake sitting outside. My father said the Chicken Pluckers Union was on strike. I asked Jake if he was on strike and he nodded his head. I turned to my father and said, I could not cross the picket line because that would make me a scab. My father looked at me, shook his head, and quietly said: “Go home, Freddie, I’ll get another boy.”

World War II was constantly in our lives. Older brothers, cousins, and neighbors were leaving every day to join the armed forces. We avidly followed newspaper reports, radio broadcasts, and newsreels that were shown with every movie. My friends and I talked about the war almost every day. Teachers discussed the war in current events and it was hard not to know something about where fighting was occurring. I devoured books about the war and then got hooked on reading books about the Civil War and World War I. I developed a tremendous admiration for the British and Russian people for their heroism in the war. My uncle was still in Russia along with his three daughters. One day we finally received a letter from him saying he was alive and had become a partisan along with the girls. I worshiped the Red Army.

In my family and neighborhood we believed the Nazis hated Jews and had killed some, but we never had any understanding of the Holocaust. I don’t recall any discussions of a mass slaughter of Jews by my teachers. Something bad was happening to Jews in Europe, that was it. Several times, teachers mentioned that during WWI, the British had exaggerated German atrocities and we must be careful not to do the same thing in WW II.

At school, we had homework almost every night and tests on just about every Friday. In 9th grade all RA students had to take a course in typing–most girls in commercial programs took typing. I assume they thought typing would help students bound for college. I still ate lunch at home by running as fast as I could during the one hour lunch break, gobbled some food, then ran back to play in Crotona Park for the remainder of the lunch hour. We also had gym every day. There was no organized sport program for the school but each homeroom class had a team– girls did not have sport teams.

Junior High School did not impact me dramatically in terms of academics. I enjoyed working in print shop classes because it was the first time I really felt that I could do something with my hands. I also enjoyed wood shop because I could see something concrete emerge from the class.

Due to the RA program I completed the three year junior high school program in two years. Ninth grade students could take tests to enter the elite high schools of New York City such as Bronx High School of Science or Stuyvesant or Townsend Harris. I was terrified and did not think I was smart enough so I never took the tests. I also could not stand the prospect of leaving my friends.

There was also informal education which was important to a child being raised in a working class neighborhood. It was from older boys that I received my initial, and mistaken, ideas concerning sex. I was taught by older boys how to behave when in a different neighborhood, for example, always walk on your heels, not toes, in order to avoid coming across as provocative. I was taught the importance of studying body behavior when meeting a stranger. Once a week, my father had me take scraps of meat to Mr. Munaker in Harlem to be made into salami. I spent hours playing with Negro boys while waiting for the salami to be made. This was my introduction to Negroes.

Politics was important to us because it was local. A friend took a draftsman program and the local Democratic Party got him a six month job working for the city so he could get experience. My father had to make arrangements with the cops in order to be open on Sunday since we had Sunday store closing in those days. On Sunday mornings I sometimes went to Crotona Park and listened to anarchists, Socialists, Communists, liberals and feminists speaking. By age 15, I knew the rudiments of Marxism, the difference between a Stalinist and Trotskyite, the ideas of my hero, Eugene Victor Debs, and why Communists had authoritarian minds and could not be trusted. All this was learned in the streets, not in school.

One day, I was working for my pop delivering packages when I came across a small group on the corner of Vyse and E.174th street. An elderly lady was speaking and I pushed my way close to her and listened to what she was saying. She leaned down and patted me on the head. It was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the great feminist. One of my cousins was a great admirer of Emma Goldman and I learned about her. All the women in my extended family worked as well as raised families. My aunt told me about walking picket lines for the International Ladies Garment Union(ILGWU) so I assumed women were powerful people. I absorbed feminist ideas through life, not through studying in class.

At this point in my life, I was not certain what I would do or whether I would go to college. My older brother, David, was very smart and I never believed I could match him academically. I was an outstanding athlete. The family assumed that David would go to college. I went along with life, high school was the next step and then, the unknown loomed before me. In truth, I hoped the war would last long enough for me to enter the army. I did join the Army during the Korean War and turned down a draft deferment.