40 Years Since High School

I still remember the 1970s classrooms in Mt. Vernon High School, not that they were distinguished. Loose chairs and desks strewn around the room, which the teachers made orderly after each class.

The furniture was built of chrome and a plastic composite whose manufacturer probably guaranteed indestructibility. But the desktops were gouged and covered with crossed-out insults and messages written in the unmistakable blue of a leaky Cristal Bic pen.

On the walls, a few posters: the kitten clinging to a rope telling us to “Hang in there!” And always, the image of a girl and boy silhouetted against a sunset:

I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.

Now this is interesting. Looking up the quote to make sure it is as recalled, I learned that these words did not appear first in a Hallmark card. Rather, this is the “Gestalt Prayer” written by Fritz Perls, a psychotherapist, in 1969.

And there is a last line that I swear was not included in the Mt. Vernon classroom posters:

If not, it can’t be helped.

Oh well. Keep it positive. After all, the school presented many challenges.

A sprawling modern building, modeled after Harvard president James B. Conant’s post-war comprehensive high school, it surrounded a courtyard planted with pathetic trees and grass. Their growth likely was stunted by the clouds of smoke that filled the air during lunch and every time classes changed.

Getting a new high school had been controversial, polarizing the city for more than a decade as referendums repeatedly were defeated by anti-tax, anti-busing, and anti-integration groups. A liberal coalition of Protestants, blacks, and Jews ultimately won the day. Black students were bused from the South Side – across the railroad cut – to the North Side, where the school arose on land formerly owned by Hollywood mogul Harry Warner, who built a ranch there during the 1930s.  

Opening in 1963, Mt. Vernon High School fell far short of integration. Based on test performance, students were assigned to classes which often broke down by race. We self-segregated in the cafeteria. The great leveling occurred in physical education. The first decade of the new school encapsulated some of the most troubling issues in public schooling during the twentieth century.

Of course it’s been four decades, as the reunion invitations insistently remind me. And despite my awful description of the school, I do recall a few instances of revelation in those classrooms.

Despite longtime math troubles, the year of geometry had near-perfect clarity!

In 10^th grade World History, the teacher assigned Anatomy of a Revolution by Crane Brinton, published in 1938 and now surely considered an antique (although it has been revised and remains in print). The book compared the Russian, American, and French revolutions and the seventeenth-century English Civil Wars. I had read a fair amount of history but never before encountered a thesis, and loved it.

Finally, one of our English teachers handed out a literature book that somehow got by the censors. It was full of counterculture poems and art. I tore out two pages and kept them; they illustrate this post.

Let’s not forget the flap when a boy in my homeroom refused to say the Pledge. It must have been 1973, since the war was still raging. We were born in the late fifties, therefore too late for the student movement. But, his transgression duly recognized, he was sent to the principal’s office.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/03/40-years-since-high-school.html

See posts November 2, 2015; November 23, 2015; December 21, 2015; March 16, 2016; May 18, 2016.

Remembering Andrew Patner

My friend Andrew Patner died one year ago today at the impossibly young age of 55. He was a pitch-perfect cultural critic and fine writer.

Over time his intelligence brightened and deepened, and his knowledge of everything: music, literature, politics, race, religion, his beloved native city of Chicago – EVERYTHING – expanded, along with his natural ability to be reflective.

The author of an imaginative study of the radical journalist I.F. Stone, host of a wide-ranging radio show, “Critical Thinking,” on WFMT-Chicago, and producer and host for Chicago’s NPR affiliate, he wrote about the arts for the Chicago Sun-Times for more than two decades.

Andrew definitely knew how to stir the pot. He was a superb interviewer. With his persistent curiosity, intuition, and understanding of social problems, his work evoked that of his friend, Studs Terkel.

Unfortunately, for various reasons he and I had not been in close touch for many years. I’ll regret that forever.

But thankfully and happily, I remember the moment Andrew first stepped into the office of the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper of the University of Chicago. It was September 1978. That year the paper felt particularly reinvigorated. 

We ran more investigations, hit the administration harder, expanded coverage of arts, literature, and sports, and increased space for serious issues in the surrounding community. Of course, our masthead was one-quarter of the size of most that appear on campuses today.

Now here came Andrew, who had grown up in Hyde Park. His perspectives on the neighborhood, university, and city were astonishing. It was always worth talking to him about a hunch or a story; well, really about anything.

He had an elegant generosity. He shared ideas and insight, bestowed encouragement and praise, and made time for rumination, speculation, and, perhaps most delightfully, debunking.

He and I shared a wistfulness about having been born too late for the student movement of the 1960s. Along those lines, we pored over volumes of old newspapers crammed on the office shelves, and pried our way through dusty wooden file cabinets looking for photos of the action we missed. We talked about the past. And we even got up close to some of the people who were deeply into the scene.

Since the twenties, the Maroon office had been located on the top floor of a neo-Gothic hall that resembles, as a university PR officer once wrote, “a Tudor English manor house.” One entered the building through a cloistered courtyard, perhaps bought a cup of coffee at the bakery on the first floor, and hurried upstairs. Someone was always there, perhaps even banging out a paper for a class.

We had no thought that the worn oak desks and chairs, floorboards that lost their varnish years earlier, manual typewriters, and an endless supply of yellow copy paper would someday not be there. Maybe we hoped for a few electric typewriters. But who could imagine that the newspaper wouldn’t always come to life in this perfect office with leaded casement windows and ivy that occasionally crept under the sill?

Now it’s all computerized and located in the basement.

But in my mind’s eye, Andrew stands in that faraway room; 19 years old, caught in the afternoon light, turning toward us, starting to smile, starting to speak. 

Drawing by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/02/andrew-patner.html