Monday, November 2, 2015

The Principal


Martin H. Traphagen School, Mt. Vernon, N.Y., 1950s

Sometimes on the verge of sleep, I imagine myself back in elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York, specifically in the auditorium with the canvas shades lowered over the windows and the darkened room full of whispering children. It seems an unlikely juxtaposition – the twitchy anticipation of children and an adult’s drowsy calm. Yet both places are evocative, the edge of sleep and the vast dim space, filled with memory and slivers of light.

Red velvet curtains conceal the stage; the podium is set at the perfect height for the tall white man with a white pompadour: the principal. As we spill into the auditorium he directs the classes into rows and warns everyone to behave. The teachers snap and wag their fingers when we laugh and squirm. Finally, when silence fills the room, the principal presents the program. Perhaps we are going to watch a postwar film entitled “Corn for Life,” or the police chief will lecture about delinquency, bringing us to the present year – 1967.  During the show the principal stands watch. Occasionally he spies a disorderly child. His arm appears to reach halfway across the auditorium to pluck the student and deposit him in a far corner where the teacher will handle things.

It is an American tradition that elementary school principals will lay down the law in hallways, playgrounds, and other venues where any challenge to their power must be stamped out. Some principals are able to enforce rules in a way that is compelling rather than threatening. My elementary principal evinced neither. Even as kids we recognized that he sought the reflected glory of a perfectly ordered school. His authority seemed not that of an educator but rather of a proprietor.
   
Ironically, the principal sought to impose order on a school that possessed its own serenity well before he came on the scene. Little has been written about the architecture of schools erected by communities during the interwar period when public education merited – well, frankly, it was thought to deserve – beautiful even grand buildings. Built in 1925 of limestone bricks, the Martin H. Traphagen School rose three stories between a crabgrass field and a parking lot. We boys and girls invaded the school through separate entrances. Light filled the tall classrooms; the water fountains were mosaic. We hung our coats on brass hooks and shoved our rain boots into mahogany cubbies. The entrance hall, wide, polished, and used almost exclusively by adults, had long been the province of the P.T.A. Election Day Bake Sale: tables loaded with cakes and pies, surrounded by the fast-talking women who ran it. But that was just one day of the year. Otherwise the school held its composure, imperturbable.

With 100% membership, best in the state for many years, the Traphagen P.T.A. was one of the principal’s prized delights. Led by a coalition of busy women who chaired dozens of committees, arranged multitudinous meetings, booked speakers, and chaperoned field trips, the P.T.A. served as a pacifier, making it possible for all kinds of mothers to support the school even if they didn’t always enjoy each other. They could still work genially around the hostess’s dining room table, admire her decorating, and compliment her coffee. But how could they possibly share one view of public schooling?  Though most were white and natives of the New York metropolitan area, they ranged from lower-middle class to upper-middle class and across ethnic and religious lines. Yet everyone was polite.

In the mid-sixties, however, when Mount Vernon faced the possibility of desegregating its public schools, the P.T.A. shed some of its veneer of gentility. The women began to express their views strongly. The principal observed it and felt disturbed. Accounting for every red rubber ball after recess – he had done well with such challenges. But as mothers ventured into the political realm urging or opposing open enrollment and busing, the principal surely recognized that the proprieties of the school community and his own ability to maintain order would decline.

A native Kansan, the principal came to Mount Vernon in 1947 armed with a Master’s degree in education from the University of Iowa. Born in 1908 in a small town just south of the Santa Fe Trail, he was the oldest son in a Mennonite farm family whose father emigrated from the Crimea and helped introduce Russian wheat to the American plains. Despite drought and grasshoppers the town flourished enough to establish a small college where the principal studied for two years before the Dust Bowl, depression, and war stalled his plans. Between 1929 and 1939 he worked on the farm, attended summer sessions, courted and married, and taught. He knew by heart the sandstone schoolhouses, luminous in the spring sunshine, for he spent nearly a decade crossing the same dirt roads through the central Kansas prairie.    

Surely when the principal first visited Mount Vernon, at the behest of its new superintendent who had known him at Iowa, he felt that he had landed in another tranquil place closer to the nineteenth than the twentieth century. At that time, Mount Vernon was still governed largely by Protestants and known as “The City of Homes,” its broad streets lined with overarching elm trees and houses embellished with turrets and verandas. On a deeply snowy evening, the city resembled a New England village; on a languid August afternoon it guarded its stillness like a Southern town. The city had a habit of making its middle and upper-middle class residents feel like they fit well into their own time and place – not necessarily the case for the African-American community that inhabited “the South Side,” formerly home to many of the white people who lived on “the North Side."

A deep cut had bisected the city since 1895 when immigrant Italian laborers finished lowering the tracks of the New Haven Railroad. During the 1930s several enlightened residents proposed using W.P.A. funds to construct a building over the tracks but nothing came of it. And so the four-square mile city gradually became a wreck of intentions, the opposing dispositions of race, religion, and ethnicity. The railroad cut lay at the center of the community’s hope and anger. School integration, perhaps an imperfect solution to the divide, stirred optimism and fear as local residents aligned themselves pro and con, attendance surged at school board meetings, campaigns became combative, and letters to the editor spilled onto two or three pages. Years of debate, disappointment and resentment, petitions, a lawsuit, would ensue. The pro-integration parents, eager for reform, felt impatient with the principal who clung to his faith in the power of the picture-perfect school. He continued to fuss with organization: new rules for overdue library books, improved scheduling of parent-teacher conferences. Meanwhile, the fight over desegregation dragged on.

Yet, infuriating as it was, the principal’s behavior can be understood. Considering the social distance that he traveled during his lifetime, perhaps his response reflected bewilderment more than resistance. He valued quiet hallways and chairs pushed neatly under desks partly because he was infatuated with decorum but also because that is what he was taught. Educational administrators who earned their degrees during the postwar era did not learn much about educating students; they learned the business of education. And nowhere in his experience were parents the “troublemakers,” a label he had long used for their disobedient children.   

Therefore his 1970 retirement was timed perfectly. At our sixth grade graduation, we honored him by singing one of his favorite songs, “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” composed by George M. Cohan in 1906. How funny we found its jaunty tone; how old-fashioned! 

Ev'ry heart beats true
‘Neath the Red, White and Blue
Where there’s never a boast or brag…
 
Some four decades later, I realize that the principal probably heard the song first at a bandstand in faraway Kansas, a small boy squinting into the sun, and for the last time in the darkened school auditorium as time ran out on the idea that the very best school was the one that stood still.    

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/the-principal.html 

See posts December 21, 2015; May 18, 2016.

23 comments:

  1. Is The principal to which you are referring Mr. Neufeldt? I remember every detail of The Martin H. Traphagen School (formerly Wilson School) like it its seared permanently in my brain...I recall all the teachers, all the classmates...Like Ellen Baumann who would refuse to participate in Air Raid Drills, refusing to get under her desk, or go out into the hall...Others viewed this as strange, or worse...Later in life I viewed this as extremely heroic... I later recalled seeing Ellen crying hysterically, literally shaking, outside the New MVHS High School, on the day Kennedy was shot and they sent us all home early...I attended AB Davis for a year, previous to the opening of The New MVHS...I recall being in shock as I happened to be outside of Edison High school,hearing the school bell ring, and seeing hundreds of Black students pour out, not a white face to be found...I remember remarking to myself "So this is how they railroad The Black Citizens to a life of Poverty...Thank You for this blog...I could find nothing else online about MH Traphagen School...Richard Dubriske, richard.dubriske@aol.com. I have more to comment, but let this be a start...

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  2. I attended Traphagen in the late 60's. Miss Grossman. Does anyone remember?

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  3. I attended Traphagen school in the late 1950s and enjoyed reading about the school and Mr. Neufeldt.
    I have been trying to track down Traphagen's old address. Would anyone have that information?

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    1. When I did a report on MV history I learned that the first Traphagen was located at the corner of Sherman Avenue and Columbus Avenue. I'm not sure of the address. There is a n apartment building there now. I graduated from the current Traphagen Elementary in the 80s.

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  4. My first grade teacher at Traphagen: Mrs. Raft
    second grade teacher: Miss Hart
    My third grade teacher was Miss Warren. I thought she was beautiful. She tried to teach us French. One day she came back into the classroom crying after being called out to the hallway. She announced that the President had been shot.

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    1. Miss Warren was also my third grade teacher. She was a wonderful young woman. I liked her French lessons so much that they inspired me to become fluent in several European languages. She had spent her junior year abroad in Paris as far as I remember. Sadly, I remember one of the parents in our class complained about the fact that her son was learning French and the lessons stopped. Miss Warren was from Ohio. She lived In a ground floor apartment across the courtyard from my building on Elwood Avenue. These apartments were right across the street from the school grounds. In the afternoons, she would invite me over and we would read French magazines, cook and play games. She even tried to teach me chess. I remember her as a true professional.

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  5. you will never see another school like that all the property around it the foot bridge in back over the then cross county parkway I believe the reason for tearing old trap down the teachers there got away with things would never happen now

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  6. Attended Traphagen 1965-6 I think, then they moved all the 9th graders to the "ANNEX", the old AB Davis building before having us inaugurate the new MVHS way out on the other side of town. Carl Neufeldt? spelling? was the principal of Traphagen when we attended. I remember BEATLES music in that auditorium with a balcony, specifically "I FEEL FINE". - Who were the guidance counselors?

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  7. Another wonderful teacher at Traphagen was an older woman named Miss Mossman. She was warm and kind and would often stay after school hours to help me with subjects I was struggling with. It made a big difference for me. I took a shared taxi from the airport once in the 90s with someone who also had grown up in Mt. Vernon and she remembered her fondly, too.

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  8. I was a student at Traphagen in the early to mid sixties. To the right of the steps going up to the main door, in the grassy part with bushes, there was a little grave marked with a small tombstone. It was the grave of the dog. If I recall correctly, the dog had belonged to a former principal of the school. I always thought having a grave on school property was weird. Reading what is written above, I wouldn’t be surprised if the dog had belonged to that principal.

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    1. The dog’s name was Sonny Boy and he belonged to the previous principal Traphagen for which the school was renamed from Wilson. Sonny Boy’s picture hung on the front hallway wall of the original school back in the 50s and 60s.

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  9. Another memory from my time at Traphagen is the kindergarten. My kindergarten teacher was Mrs. Friedlander. The students entered the kindergarten from a door on the lower left side of the building. Inside there was a large room with steps going up to a play area filled with dolls, toys and games. There was a door to the first floor on that level. I never understood why the playroom existed. We were only allowed to go up once to play with the toys during my entire kindergarten year. The toys looked marvelous and were so tempting. I still wonder why we could never play with them.

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  10. attended Trap early thru 1961 1968 girls were treated way better than boys then also very prejudice teachers Christian boys were totally disrespected ,principle was A JERK

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  11. Attended K/'63 to 6th/'70. Wonderful memories of Traphagen. My teachers were Mrs. Friedlander/K; Mrs. Feeley/1st; Mrs. Hartman/2nd; Mrs. Kron/3rd; 4th (Bachman?; Miss. McGinnis/5th; Mrs. Fields/6th. Memories - 11.22.63 - my 8th grade brother (Traphagen went up to 8th grade back at the old school by the footbridge) walked me home from school when it closed after the assassination. Carl Neufeld's retirement concert - I remember also singing "Aquarius" and, I think, "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" (could be wrong about that one).

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  12. I’m surprised nobody mentioned the Kindergarten teacher Miss Kaufman. She was very strict and ran the class in a very regimented way. Both boys and girls did woodworking and sewing projects. There was naptime every day where we knelt on the floor and laid our heads on chairs. Bad kids had to sit on the steps. I had her in 1955-56, she retired around 1959 and passed away not long after. She would never be able to teach in this day and age, but I’m sure Mr. Neufeldt was happy with her. My later teachers (Raff, Hartman, Baldwin, Madden, and Greco) were good, only my 5th grade teacher Ms. Corcoran was as bad.

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    1. I had Miss (better not call her Mrs.) Kauffman as well. She was exactly as you describe. If you stepped on her toe she would step on yours back. She chastised a poor kid in my class for drawing a purple house as houses I guess were not supposed to be that color. My sewing project was an apple pin cushion made out of felt with stuffing. I went on to have Baldwin, Hartman, Krupman, Szoo, Woods and Davis in first through 6th.

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  13. You could say that I grew up at Trahagen. Attended kindergarten with Mrs.Tanz. Then on to Holmes 1 - 6, then back to Trap. For 8 & 9 at Nichols. Years later I went into teaching. My first year I was at Hamilton. The next year I was transferred to Traphagen where I spent the next 25 years.
    Traphagen was and is my very soul.

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  14. I attended Traphagen from 1962-1968. Like many of my classmates, my grandparents were immigrants - from Italy - and my parents the first American-born generation. My teachers were K - Mrs. Estelle Friedlander (who had also been my father's kindergarten teacher), I was then skipped ahead to 2nd grade with Mrs. Sylvia Hartman (who was strict but I loved her and named one of my dolls after her), 3rd - Mrs. Eleanor Kron (who I adored and remained in touch with for many years - who remembers Basil the Elf?), 4th - Mrs. Diana Heaton (who I also adored and who kindled a lifelong love of poetry), 5th - Mrs. Mary Jane Powell (who let me help her with administrative tasks which made me feel very grown up), and 6th - Mrs. Marie O'Horo (pretty, blonde Mrs. O'Horo who stopped teaching at holiday break back in the day where you couldn't teach if you were visibly pregnant; Miss Lenora Ress, a serious Victorian spinster taught us in the spring and who I did not sufficiently appreciate). Thank you everyone for these rich memories! While we moved out of Mt. Vernon to Vermont in 1969, I still consider it my hometown and Traphagen my school. How sad I was when I learned that this beautiful building had been torn down!

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  15. Does anyone remember (1951) Miss Izzo, 5th grade teacher. One year, she had a sabbatical in Japan and we enjoyed all the benefits of her tour.

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