Brazil

My high school boyfriend emigrated from Brazil to the U.S. around 1960. Crazy in love, I tried to pry that story out of him, looking to make sense of his changeable personality. He didn’t want to share, so I picked up not a single detail about his early life.

Lately, though, the coverage of government corruption and social instability has helped me to imagine the situation from which his family fled. It’s clear that the people of Brazil have never caught a break.

In 1930 after a contested election and military action, Getulio Vargas became president through a junta. This began the Second Republic, marked by nationalism and authoritarianism. But Vargas did institute social welfare programs which is why Brazilians still celebrate the “Father of the Poor.”

Skimming through history, there was a 1937 coup and Vargas’ establishment of the New State (Estado Novo), a political and economic system known as “corporatism” that also found favor with Mussolini. Vargas kept coming back until 1954 when he committed suicide rather than resign.

Violence, terror, and poverty; I guess my ex-boyfriend’s parents had enough by then.

They were very young. I knew that because his mother bore him at the age of 18, possibly earlier. She was a sweet worried lady who hugged me the only time we met. His stepfather, I learned later, harassed him even though he earned excellent grades and didn’t make trouble. 

Clearly there was discord in his family, but he never talked about it. Not that family life felt harmonious anywhere in the U.S. during the 1970s.

Looking back now, I think: why should he have shared his Brazilian immigration story with me?

Between 1948 and 1980, many of the kids who went to public school in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., were the grandchildren of Italian, Irish, and Eastern European immigrants.

We didn’t tell our families’ stories to each other. We knew them, all right. They weren’t that far in the past. But why would teenagers, already embarrassed by so much about themselves, draw attention to stuff that would make them feel even more conspicuous?  

I wouldn’t have told anyone that my grandfather slept on a park bench in Union Square after he got off the boat at Ellis Island in 1914. 

As an adult, however, I've found that some of the best stories that friends share are about the lives of their parents and grandparents. Some are about immigration. Overall, they grant greater understanding and intimacy.

Meanwhile, here I am stuck with a tenacious habit, gravitating toward any and all information about Brazil. After 42 years, still trying to figure out that boy.

  

Collage by Claudia Keenan

See also 2015 posts: November 5, November 23, December 21 + December 29

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/brazil.html?m=1

The Story of Negro Mystic Lore

Advertisements for the book appeared exclusively in To-morrow Magazine, an early 20^th century journal whose writers enthused about Socialism, atheism, and woman’s suffrage.

The “talented authoress,” an Alabama native named Mamie Hunt Sims, wrote with “a Pathos and a Sociological Insight” and “knew every touch of Negro Philosophy,” according to the promotion.

In passing, I assumed that Negro Mystic Lore, published in 1907, was written by a black woman.  Perhaps it explored stories told by former slaves and analyzed their African antecedents.

But now, book in hand, I realize that my assumption was absurd.  Negro Mystic Lore comprises 18 stories written in what linguists today define as African American Vernacular English.  In her foreword, Sims wrote that she hoped “to show the real kindly feeling that existed between the people of the South and the better class of the negroes.”

A character named Uncle Jake, based on a real person according to Sims, is the main voice in a series of interactions between “de collured pussuns” and “white folkies.”  He is a grotesque caricature:

You chillun is too interruptin enny how and ef you all don’t hush I gwine to hush my mouf and I ain’t gwine to tell you nuthin. I did low ter tell you some two or three nannydotes dis mawnin in case hits too naturally hot ter work dat garden an I mout as well be erestentin you chillun as gwin ter sleep under dat fig tree.

According to the sole notice the book received, Mrs. Sims originally created the stories as entertainment for her friends. “Her work is at once a memory of the ‘Old South’ in its pride and beauty, and a suggestion of the new and greater South flushed with the dawning of more glorious days,” wrote the reviewer.

The title page bears the quotation: “Dem dat has must give to dem dat hain’t.”

How did Negro Mystic Lore come to be published? The likely answer is that it was a favor granted by Parker Sercombe, editor of To-morrow Magazine who also ran a press.

The self-aggrandizing Sercombe (see earlier post), stood accused of many things but not bigotry. He had railed against South Carolina Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, a white supremacist who led a KKK-style terrorist group called the Red Shirts. He expressed solidarity with J. Max Barber, editor of the newspaper Voice of the Negro, who fled a white mob in Atlanta in 1907.

But it turns out that one of Sercombe’s friends, William Hill Hunt, had a sister named Mamie Hunt Sims who wanted to publish her stories. Sercombe obliged.

William Hill Hunt, born in Alabama in 1864, grew up in a family with some wealth in its past. He became successful in business at a young age. In 1902, he founded the Mexican Trust Company with a group of American investors. Around this time, Parker Sercombe also was active in banking in Mexico.

Like Sercombe, Hunt proved slippery. In 1905, the state of Illinois accused the latter of violating its banking laws when he accepted deposits from a bank that he knew was insolvent. Sentenced to Joliet Penitentiary, eventually he received a pardon from the governor.

Mamie Sims dedicated Negro Mystic Lore to her brother, thanking him for his support and encouragement.

The book is a nasty relic of racism written 44 years after the end of the Civil War. But it is typical of its time. During the Progressive Era, America’s white upper class perpetrated outrageous indignities against black people in books, music, and theater. The insults reflected the deep-seated, rationalized prejudices of educated whites.

During the Theodore Roosevelt administration, performers at the White House included Mary L. Leech, a soprano who performed a selection of “coon songs.” The German diplomat Baron Speck von Sternburg and TR’s Secretary of State, John Hay (once President Lincoln’s private secretary) were among the guests who applauded “You’se Just a Little Nigger, Still Youse Mine All Mine” and “Is Dat You?”

Whose dare? Whose dare?

Oh who’s dat knockin’ at my door?

Is dat you, Sambo?

Is dat you, Sambo?

Now you better stop dat knockin’ at de door!

Although Negro Mystic Lore was published by an obscure press and scarcely advertised, my bet is that it was read widely.

Mamie Hunt Sims, frontispiece of Negro Mystic Lore

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/the-story-of-negro-mystic-lore.html?m=1

Miss Violet Romer

Violet Romer, 1910

It made complete sense that they lived in a quintessential American house: an elegant Foursquare with generous bay windows that overlooked the sidewalks lined with elm trees.  

The elderly brother and sister at 108 Forster Avenue filled their home with art, antiques, and such memorabilia as a broken plate pulled from the rubble of the San Francisco Earthquake.

While we trudged to school through sunshine and snowstorms, Violet and Romer Shawhan moved about in rooms hung with the portraits of ancestors. A few of these men had accumulated tremendous wealth before and during the Gilded Age.

Their paternal grandfather, descended from a Kentucky family whose money came from whiskey distilleries, moved West after the Civil War and invested in mining, streetcars, and stocks.

John E. Shawhan had everyone living in grand style at the Palace Hotel until the State of Virginia defaulted on its “consols” (consolidated annuities). Then he became known for “Shawhan’s Folly” – the California Street property where he built a stable to house his collection of splendid horses and carriages.

The horses drank from marble troughs and occupied stalls carved of birds-eye maple. In a private room at the stable, Mrs. Shawhan entertained friends and reporters. She showed off her gold-tipped harnesses and whips.

After the bankruptcy, the Shawhans decamped to Nevada where the missus filed for divorce. But their son James made a bit of a recovery when he married Ada Romer, a free-spirited painter whose father had arrived in California during the Gold Rush.

Ada’s father, John Lyons Romer, made his fortune in real estate and as a founding director of the San Francisco & North Pacific Railroad Company and vice president of the Sausalito Land & Ferry Company. Her portrait of him won a silver medal at the 1909 Alaska Yukon Exhibition in Seattle.

Sometime around 1890, Ada’s husband took off and left her with their two children, Violet and Romer. She turned to art full-time, set up the Shawhan Studio, and earned money illustrating books and painting society portraits. She became well-known in California and often was written up in the San Francisco Call, where a woman reporter followed the art scene closely.

It’s evident that Ada nurtured her children, who developed confidence and worldliness. In 1896 Violet wrote to her grandfather Romer, who was visiting Colorado:

I think we are going to San Francisco and I am glad for I am just getting so I hate the sight of Los Angeles, business is so poor here I don’t know how it is. I guess you have lots to tell about Denver. I guess it is a nice city. Of coarse those big citys all are.

Violet Romer's letter to her grandfather, "Parmer," 1896

Within several years, Violet was dancing her heart out. She never took formal lessons or studied classical ballet. Like Isadora Duncan, Violet danced interpretively and free form, eschewing ballerina costumes. Isadora, also raised by an artistic single mother in the Bay Area, had long gone to France by 1904 when Violet performed as a hamadryad in a redwood forest grove for members of The Bohemian Club.

Violet’s career really took off when The Papyrus Club, a San Francisco woman’s group, decided to sponsor her. She danced at the city’s Columbia Theatre accompanied by a 6o-piece orchestra and returned a week later by popular demand. Soon after, Ada took Violet to London and Paris where the young dancer’s “inspirational” performances drew acclaim.  

That same year, Violet caught the eye of an impresario named Marc Klaw who co-controlled the Theatrical Syndicate, which monopolized theater bookings nationwide during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. By 1910, the powerful syndicate was losing its influence to the Schubert Brothers of New York, but Klaw and a former drama critic, Harrison Grey Fiske, were producing the Arabian play Kismet. They cast Violet as “the Egyptian Girl.”


Kismet ran for two years on Broadway and made Violet’s reputation. She stayed in New York to star “sans hosiery” in Joseph and His Brethren, a pageant by a British playwright named Louis N. Parker. A critic wrote: 

It may shock a number of persons in the present generation to see graphically depicted on the stage the disreputable bunch of crooks from which sprung the whole Jewish race of today, but they will find comfort in the immaculate qualities of the Joseph of Mr. Parker’s play.

Violet turned 30 years old in 1916. The following year she returned to California, moved in with her mother and taught dance at a studio into the early 1920s. Thereafter she dropped her stage name and became Violet Shawhan. The two women lived together until Ada died in 1947, with Violet working in a library. 

Romer, who married in 1936, had bought the Foursquare in Mount Vernon, N.Y. just before World War II. His sister crossed the continent for the last time to live with him and his wife.

1910

 

See also December 29, 2015 + January 12, January 16 + April 27, 2016 posts.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/violets-story.html?m=1

The Uncompromising Parker Sercombe

Advertisement for a book by Parker Sercombe, 
evidently never published 

He was a newsboy, editor, capitalist, anarchist, and lecturer. And it looks like he led a colony that verged on being a cult.  

His education stopped at high school yet he engaged the interest of professors, including Oscar Lovell Triggs of the University of Chicago.  He mastered the works of Herbert Spencer, edited To-Morrow, a magazine advertised as "a hand-book of the changing order," and received Jack London, H.G. Wells, and other authors at his office.

Born in Milwaukee in 1860, Parker Holmes Sercombe wended his way through Chicago, Detroit, Mexico City, Austin, and other places that remain unknown before dying in obscurity in Alhambra, California, in 1944. 

By the time Parker turned five years old, his mother was gone, probably in childbirth, leaving six children with his father, a farmer born in England. 

Two of the daughters went to college; one to the Women’s Medical College of Northwestern University which was no mean feat in 1881. She returned to practice in Milwaukee where Parker still hung around, figuring things out. 

He worked as a teacher and postal clerk, married, and finally found some success selling bicycles, typewriters, and the occasional cash register.

“He sprang to prominence in 1894,” noted the Milwaukee Journal. Powerfully athletic, he loved bicycle races and built a plant that manufactured the “Parker Sercombe racing bicycle.”

Parker H. Sercombe was lauded as an up-and-coming
bicycle entrepreneur in The Bearings, the Cycling Authority
of America (1892). 

As bicycling became a nationwide craze, Parker made a lot of money but annoyed competitors with schemes to get free advertising. They called him a “plunging faker” and “snooky.” Then, at the top of his bicycle game, his wife died and in 1896 he suddenly took off for Mexico.

In Mexico City, Sercombe became friends with President Porfirio Diaz, who ruled Mexico from 1876 until the first stirrings of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. An autocrat who favored economic development through capitalism, Diaz encouraged foreign investment. 

Between 1897 and 1903, Sercombe promoted commercial banking in Mexico with support from Chicago and New York financiers. He established the American Surety Bank in Mexico City and traveled between Mexico and the U.S. numerous times. According to two books that describe Sercombe’s work, he conducted several unsavory business transactions.  

It sounds like Sercombe’s yanqui colleagues eventually drove him out. Bear in mind, however, that the trusts established by Morgan, Schiff, Baruch, Rockefeller, and others carried on and came to dominate the Mexican economy.     

***

Back in Chicago, Sercombe struck up with Professor Triggs. They collaborated on several ventures including the Spencer-Whitman Center at 2238 Calumet Avenue – named for Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman – which became notorious as a free love colony. It also housed the offices of To-Morrow Magazine.

To-Morrow published the poems of young Carl Sandburg, who accepted Sercombe’s offer of room and board in exchange for some writing and copy editing. “A foggy philosophical anarchist,” as Sandburg described him:

. . . he was at any time ready to show his various wrestling holds though never throwing a guest to the floor. He welcomed radicals and revolutionaries but he preferred the gentle philosophical anarchists of the Kropotkin variety to the direct actionists who believed in bombs and ‘the propaganda of the deed.’

Parker Sercombe inscribed an issue of To-Morrow to Otto Lippert,
who was either a Cincinnati pharmacist or a news photographer.

Then there was the People’s Industrial College, to be “funded by the intellectual elect,” per Triggs and Sercombe. They would offer free tuition to students of all ages who would perform “at least four hours of useful work with their hands each day.” 

The plan for the college grew out of the men’s interest in industrial arts education. The sole evidence of its existence is advertisements.

In 1906 the Chicago police broke up the Spencer-Whitman Center, citing immoral activities and ramshackle living conditions. Referring to himself as a prophet, Sercombe told a Chicago Tribune reporter that the colony would move to an 800-acre farm on the Kankakee River. That never happened.

In 1907, Triggs went down in a scandalous divorce trial and soon disappeared from the scene.

But Parker Sercombe carried on.

He lectured widely, presenting himself as an expert in politics, religion, philosophy, economics, crime, and sociology. 

He claimed to be organizing a National Bureau of Longevity for the Federal Government. He claimed to be a retired Baptist minister. 

He claimed that his collection of 7,000 rare books would be housed in a marble hall of fame which Andrew Carnegie had agreed to build at a cost of $200,000.

In 1909, he promoted his book Correct Thinking, The First Gun in a Revolt against Leisure-Class Ideals of Education. In 1910, he spoke about “Education in a Democracy” at the University of Wisconsin. In 1915, he was fired from his job as a supervising statistician for the Cook County coroner’s office after he told a welfare bureau official that “350 high school girls are ruined yearly in Chicago.” (Perhaps he was right about that.)

While he denounced marriage as a social evil, Sercombe married a woman named Leontine with whom he had three children: Syndex, Rommanie, and Herbert Spencer.

In 1918 the police sought him for embezzling $875. In 1927, he ran over a child with his car. During the Depression, he moved his family to Mexico where he owned a gas station. Eventually the Sercombe family ended up in California where he came full circle working as a salesman. His ashes are in the Chapel of the Pines crematory in Los Angeles.

What’s compelling about his life? Everything! It’s remarkable that he dissembled so often; people and newspapers took note, but he rolled along. He embraced established institutions – universities, government, banks – yet he attacked the conventions that they represented. He sat on top of the heap at several points in his life, then almost perversely made his own trouble. 

But you have to hand it to him: unabashed, unapologetic, he always acted out of self-interest. 


See also March 2 + 10, 2016 posts.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/the-uncompromising-parker-sercombe.html?m=1

Doing PR in 1983

Watching Jacob Bernstein’s new documentary about his mother, Nora Ephron, reminded me that she co-wrote the screenplay for the 1983 film, Silkwood. The true story concerned a worker at a plutonium processing plant who was contaminated and possibly murdered after discovering that corporate executives knew about radiation leaks.

I heard the movie was on its way to theaters quite a while before it opened. The public relations firm for which I worked had been hired by Kerr-McGee (the company that owned the plant) to persuade as many people as possible that the movie was inaccurate.

The company had another problem. We learned that the Communications Workers of America had produced a play based on the Silkwood story, with performances well-attended in cities nationwide.  

So I was placed on assignment. Go to Milwaukee, watch the play, take notes, and report back on the script and audience reaction. Stick around afterward to hear as many comments as possible.

My husband and I headed north from Chicago with a reservation for an expense-account dinner at a restaurant that revolved on top of a tall building. Then we went to the play.

He had an idea. To spare me from taking notes all night, he brought along a small tape recorder which he placed in the breast pocket of his jacket. But his heartbeat was the only discernible sound on the recording – at least that’s how I remember it.

The next day, I flew to Indianapolis to see another performance. The audience responded as enthusiastically as it had in Milwaukee. I wrote it all up, amused that a publicly-traded company worried about a modest play produced by a union.

But I did understand why the company wanted to defeat the film.

Our strategy was to compile long lists of editorial writers and film critics who worked in the largest cities and smallest towns, in every state, including student newspapers.

Then we telephoned, wrote letters, left phone messages, called back, rinsed and repeated. The goal was to generate bad reviews of the film and accusations of unfairness to the company. I’m sure that some writers responded to our pitch. After all, each side told a different story.

Ultimately, though, the movie became a box office success, garnering five Oscar nominations and a comeback for director Mike Nichols. The critics loved it.

Looking back, I’m struck by the idea of trying to change public opinion by laboriously making individual, local contact with members of the press!  

Who could have anticipated social media?

So there we sat, in offices with darkly tinted windows, bearing down on journalists, marking the lists with checks, x’s, and question marks, trying to score one writer at a time; doing PR in 1983. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/03/doing-pr-in-1983.html?m=1

Becoming Weda Yap

The name of the author of Willie Wong, American, was a pseudonym. Vanya Oakes (Virginia Armstrong Oakes) was a librarian, journalist, and author who wrote prolifically about China. Her best-known book, White Man's Folly (1942), was reviewed in Foreign Affairs as "an indictment of the ineptness of European and American policy during the last decade."

****

Allen Drew Cook and his wife, Bertha, reared their four daughters in Camden, N.J. Louise, born in 1894, was the eldest. She studied at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and received a Certificate of Applied Art in 1912. One has the feeling she was not demure.

Her father encouraged her career in art, Louise once said. Allen Drew Cook belonged to a school of photographers called the Pictorialists (of whom the most famous was Alfred Stieglitz), whose images had the quality of being painted. During World War I, Clarence Darrow and Eugene V. Debs sat for portraits in Cook’s Philadelphia studio.

In 1913, Louise began work as a studio artist in New York City while continuing to live at home.

She soon became romantically involved with the publicity director of the Co-operative League of America, Edward Ralph Cheyney, who was helping to build the American cooperative movement. The goal was to organize collective purchasing for American consumers. In this way, industrial workers and farmers could stretch their budgets in hard times.  

Although the League’s offices were in New York City, Ralph, as he was known, resided at home with his family in Philadelphia. His father was an eminent University of Pennsylvania historian named Edward Potts Cheyney who lived in an elegant house on Spruce Street.  

Several leaders of the cooperative movement, including Ralph Cheyney, worked closely with the Socialist Party. When the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, they became vocal critics of the draft.

That fall, Ralph and a revolution-minded firebrand named Louis Fraina were arrested while leading a meeting to recruit conscientious objectors. A jury in U.S. District Court found the two men guilty of conspiring to violate the draft law. The Second Circuit upheld the verdict and in 1919 Cheyney and Fraina were sentenced to 30 days in prison.

In the meantime, Louise and Ralph decided to marry. Their daughter, Gertrude Louise, came along in 1918.

And then, in 1920, China called out to Louise and off she went for five years. There is no record of what she did there but most likely she studied art. Curiously, during this very time many Chinese artists left to study in Europe, embracing the Western aesthetic.

When Louise returned to the U.S., she was a Chinese citizen.  

Soon enough, she and Ralph divorced. Louise’s new husband, a Filipino of Chinese ancestry named Chu Pei Yap, worked as a chemical engineer.

In 1929, now Louise Yap, she sailed alone to Shanghai on a Japanese ship called the Yokohama Maru. There’s an elegant menu from the ship’s dining room in the New York Public Library’s digital collection. Navarin de la Porc a la Printaniere . . . but who knows if Louise traveled first-class?

It’s hard to imagine why she chose to visit China again at this particular time. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army had led the Shanghai Massacre to triumph over Mao and the Chinese Communists, and a civil war was raging.

Clearly there was “the urge for going,” as Joni Mitchell sang.

When Louise came back to New York a year later, she and Chu Pei, and not 12-year old Gertrude, moved to a house on charming crooked Grove Street in the West Village.  

Now she took the name Weda Yap.

Many years later, she explained:

My real name is Louise Drew Cook. My professional name, Weda Yap, was acquired during a long and close association with the Chinese. The ideographs which are used to write this name mean “a witty and sagacious page." 

Weda Yap, 1930s
(photo courtesy of her family)

In 1932, Weda published Abigail’s Private Reason, the only book she wrote. 

That same year, she drew pictures for Rosalita, the story of “a charming Spanish girl who lived on a ranch with her family when California was ruled by the Mexican government. Rosalita’s impetuous search for a doll results in her being kidnapped,” according to a review.

Through the rest of her life, Weda illustrated dozens of children’s books. Some of the titles are Rain, Hail, Sleet and Snow; Rico the Young Rancher, Peter on the Min, and Children of the Sun in Hawaii. 

Weda and Chu Pei moved to Milligan Place, virtually an alley off Sixth Avenue where Eugene O’Neill also lived in a small brick house.

On the eve of World War II, she decided to become an American citizen again. Just two days before Germany invaded Poland, she brought two witnesses to the courthouse to sign the petition for naturalization: her mother, Bertha, and a friend named Remo Bufano. That in itself is noteworthy.

Remo Bufano and his family emigrated from Italy to the U.S. in 1897. Remo loved arts and crafts from the time he could hold a pencil. He became a superb puppeteer and toured nationwide, performing marionette operas with puppets as tall as 12 feet. The year that Bufano signed Louise’s petition, the New York World’s Fair featured his giant puppets portraying the history of medicine, set to music by Aaron Copland.    

Bertha Louise Drew Cook Yap, as she signed her petition, and Remo Bufano knew each other because most Greenwich Village artists were connected through the Bohemian, leftist intellectual scene that flourished during World War I and continued through Prohibition.

Eventually Weda Yap left Greenwich Village. In 1989, she died in a nursing home in South Carolina, where her daughter lived.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/03/becoming-weda-yap.html?m=1

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.

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

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/03/40-years-since-high-school.html?m=1