In the Fall of 1949 I became a high school sophomore at Stuyvesant High School. At that time Stuyvesant was located on 15th street between First and Second Avenues, and I lived in the central Bronx, about 10 miles away. But that was only a 45 minute ride on the subway, followed by a 15 minute walk from Union Square (14th street and Broadway).
in order to accommodate the largest number of qualified applicants, Stuyvesant had two sessions: one from 8 AM to 12:30 PM, and the other from 1 PM to 5:30 PM. 10th grade was in the late session, and 11th and 12th grades in the earlier. In my first year, I had to be at the train by 7 AM; as I lived far away from downtown, the train usually was not full, and I could find a seat and one for my sax case. But soon the train filled up, and I had to hold the sax between my legs for the rest of the trip. For the early afternoon trip back home I could relax in a seat of my choosing and read for 45 minutes. I never was in a mood to read my assignments; instead I read novels: the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Jack London, Dostoyevsky novels - all the classics that are not assigned reading. I learned early in my schooling that if a book is assigned in English class, it is not worth reading.
In my second and third years the situation was reversed: on the trip down to school, the train had many available seats, even for my sax. I spent the time reviewing, or finishing up, the overnight assignments, or read at my leisure. However, the return was during rush hour and there was a struggle to get in the train. Fortunately, I always had my saxophone case with me, and I could use it at the door to force my way in the train, after which it gave me something to sit on for the trip home.
Even today, I love the New York subways, because they remind me of some of the best readings. 10th grade
In my first year, my classes, if I remember correctly, were English 10, French 2, Chemistry, Intermediate Algebra and Geometry, American History, and Health.
The first semester of Health was sex education. As this was an all-boys school the education was very explicit about sex; particularly the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases. It probably was a very good course; I really can’t tell since we students were mostly engaged in smirking, winking and feeling that we learned so much in the streets that this course was a waste of time.
In that semester I applied for band, and was accepted. That meant that instead of health, in the second semester, I’d take band practice, so that I could actually go out to the football games with the band the next year.
As an aside, it may seem strange that Stuyvesant had a football team; typically target schools de-emphasize sports, particularly football. Bronx Science, Music and Art and Hunter College High School did not have football teams (the last is a women’s school, so that might be the reason), but Brooklyn Polytech and Stuyvesant did. The reason for this may be that Stuyvesant was considered an “applied science” high school (as Brooklyn Polytech certainly was) and so could
– indeed should – have a football team. The league in which we played did not have enough target-schools-with-football-teams, so the Catholic Parochial Schools were brought into that league. There were three of them; those three, the two “tech” schools and De Witt Clinton High School (a target school for boys that needed some shaping up) made up the league. Clinton was our main adversary, mostly because neither school had a ghost of a chance against the parochial schools and Polytech.
Anyway, I did get into band, and attended and played at every football game in my junior and senior years. The best part of it was that these were not marching bands; in those days that was not the point. So we played marching songs every once in a while from our preferred seats and otherwise just watched football.
Chemistry
This was my favorite course; at the time I considered myself a budding chemist. I had a rather extensive chemistry set at home, and performed experiments in the kitchen on Saturday and Sunday mornings while my parents and brother slept in. My teacher would always end our laboratory classes with instructions on experiments that “we could do at home.” He told us about a Merck store on Broadway just south of 14th Street, where we could buy, at a low price by mentioning his name, the chemicals need for those additional experiments. I visited that store almost every Friday for my Saturday morning experiments. My father was concerned about chemical experiments being performed in our kitchen while he was asleep, but my mother reassured him that, since they were designed by my teacher, it would be fine for me to do them. However, at the Merck store I bought a primer of chemical experiments that brought me much further than my teacher intended, and indeed into some dangerous territory. Luckily, I was totally inept and could not really do those experiments.
Mathematics
In Math, the algebra part struck me as simply logical, and the second semester on Geometry thrilled me. This was the traditional “two column proof” course at the time, and was perfect for me. I loved the “construction” problems the teacher gave us: construct such and such geometric object, using only straight edge and protractor. It was all right up my alley.
English, 10th Grade
In 10th grade I was engrossed in one way or another in all of my courses – except for English. I was not the exception; the whole class was almost always otherwise occupied than in English literature. This was the class in which the “required reading list for New York Schools” was dispatched. We were to read Silas Marner, Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, and such. It was brilliant of the English department to put all the “required” reading in the 10th grade class, so that in subsequent classes they can really try some intellectual probing. And who did they put in charge of that class? The member of the department, it seems to me in retrospect, who had long since given up any attempt at education.
After the first few weeks, during which we maintained some semblance of a regular high school class, our teacher took to letting us do our reading during class, after which we could develop our theses, either (silently) in class, or at home. At the beginning of class, he spent about 10 minutes discussing the intended reading, and then instructed us to get at it, while he read the newspaper. This was true, at least for the first five minutes. After that he spread the newspaper over his head and took a nap. At the end, when the bell rang, he jumped up and reminded us that the first thing next class we had to turn in our reports.
That was the way it was for the whole semester. He did return our reports and they were extensively and coherently analyzed. Apparently, his idea of education was to do his drinking at “the office” and his work at home. We had some evidence, besides his thorough examination of our work, to support this hypothesis. One time, while his snoring under the newspaper was audible, a couple of students went up to his desk and rifled its drawers. In one drawer they found a couple of half empty flasks.
Who were we to be judgmental, as we were? His job was to see to it that the 10th graders read the literature that the City of New York required for graduation, and that we were able to interact with that literature. So, for him, class time was irrelevant: what was relevant for him was to read our interpretations of the literature and be critical about it. Besides, the schedule promoted that. He was required to see to it that we read the assigned texts and presented our appreciation of them. This he did, in particular, with amazing accuracy in the criticism of those appreciations. So, he slept in class – when else was he to do that?
French, 10th grade
In 10th grade, after chemistry, my class was French 2. Our French teacher made clear in the first class that, having been born in France, she was an expert in the French language. She also made clear the rules of the classroom. She showed us her Delaney book. This book had slots in it representing the seats in the classroom. In each slot was a “delaney card” on which she could report on our classroom behavior - in real time. She had already assigned us seats in alphabetical order and so we spent the next fifteen minutes moving to the seat to which we were assigned. She told us that , in this way, she could call on us by seat number, and easily fill in comment on our work (or demeanor) by seat. Suddenly, she stopped, sniffed the air, and said, “I smell something rotten.” She got up, walked down the aisles and after a while, stopped at a particular desk.
“Why do you,” she said, pointing to the occupant of seat D5,”smell so badly?” He responded that hey had just come from chemistry class. She then went on a tirade about the nonsensical scheduling department, that all too often put her class after a chemistry class. We students just sat there and listened. I wondered when we’d get to some French.
Some weeks later, when our chemistry class was studying sulfides, a couple of my fellow students smuggled some rotten egg odorinto her class. As usual, we were all seated when she came in the door. She instantly stopped in the doorway, and instructed us all to go down to the auditorium, “the front left, if you please.” After about 15 minutes, she entered the auditorium with the assistant principal. He said that we were all now on report, and that our parents would be so notified. Further, our French class was dismissed for the rest of the week; we should report to the auditorium at those times, and we shall receive a topic on which to write an essay. As we left the auditorium, a friend asked me, “is the answer to be in French?” 11th grade
In the first semester of my junior year, the instructor was a Shakespearean scholar. He was a regular correspondent to the New York Times, commenting on this revival, or that performance, or the basic meaning of the play. And he oriented his classes around that.
In class, he would start with an introduction of the text for which we were responsible, and then ask the students to read from the play. Unfailingly, he stopped the student after three syllables with a commanding, “Stop! You don’t have it!” For example:
“No, no, no. It is not ’Out, damned spot.” It is “Out! Out!” and then she looks at her palm, scratches at it and then says, sub rosa, “damned spot,”
“No, no, no. It is not “Etu brute.” It is “Et…tu, Brute?” Then he raises his head and puts out his chest to accept the wound. “Then, die, Caesar.”
“No, no, no. It is not ‘Get me a horse.’ You missed the irony. He says, almost in a whisper, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.’ It is a cry for redemption: ‘If only I could get out of here, I’d take the monarchy back!’”
He would stride around the front of the room, criticizing our obtuseness, and then provide us a recitation of the excerpt as it should be done. He was probably right, but all we could see was a second class actor explaining why his interpretation was always misunderstood.
We also watched films of Shakespearean plays, particularly if the lead part was played by Lawrence Olivier (which, in those days, was almost all the time). Every once in a while, he’d have the reel stopped so he could ask us a question about the particular scene.
I remember this instance in Hamlet: after Hamlet leaves the room mumbling about the book he is reading, the King says, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” The reel stops and the teacher asks, “who is he talking about here?” We all shouted out, almost in unison, “Hamlet!” Then the Teacher said, “No, no, I don’t mean ‘who is the King talking about’; I mean, ‘who is Shakespeare talking about?’” We were stumped – we didn’t know what our teacher was talking about. He went on to explain some aspects of European history and English politics at the time, and made the point that in many instances in Shakespearean drama, the author is talking directly in the audience. Then, in the play-within-the-play scene, after Hamlet rhapsodizes over the work of being an actor, our teacher stopped the film and said, “you see what I mean? Here Shakespeare is admonishing the audience to show more appreciation of the art of acting.”
Creative Writing
In the second semester of my junior year, I had an opportunity to opt out of the literature class and instead take a semester of “Creative Writing,” with Dr. Astrakhan. The class was centered around short stories. We read stories of Poe, O. Henry, and other general literature classics, including some of Sherlock Holmes, Ernest Hemingway.
Dr. Astrakhan had a very strict set of rules for short stories. Here are those I remember:
There is only one story line, and every character, every utterance, every action is relevant to that line.
In fact, every word is relevant and has to be justified in the context of the story line. If it cannot be, take the word out.
Do not overadjectify. (and don’t be afraid to make up words that best convey your meaning.)I remember this example: if you use the phrase “cool, clear evening,” then the subsequent action has to involve the coolness and the clarity. If the protagonist does not comfort the shivering woman, drop the word “cool,” and if, while on the beach, they do not see across the bay to some incident relevant to the plot, drop the word “clear.”
After reading Hemingway’s “The Killers,” Dr. Astrakhan began a discussion of the text by passing out a list of words in the story, the point of which was to get us to understand the role each such word plays in the advancement of the story. One word I remember is “overcoat.” No one understood the significance of that word (in fact we did terribly during the whole exercise). He prodded us, “in modern cinema, can we tell the bad guys from the good guys?” OK, now we understood: the bad guys always wear overcoats. “No, not good enough! In winter everyone wears overcoats. In this story what is it that is important about the overcoats?” We were nonplussed. He was right: Elliot Ness wore an over coat, James Cagney and George Raft are always in overcoats . Dr. Astrakhan continued to prod us, but to no avail. So, he read out the phrase that the men wore “too-tight” overcoats. “Why,” he asked, were they “too-tight” and not just “tight?” He was appalled by our lack of appreciation of Hemingway’s minimalism, and slowly explained to us the significance: “‘too-tight’ tells us that they were carrying weapons, and that every one in the diner knew it.” He then assigned to us the task of finding every one of the words on his list, and explaining what it was doing there. For the next class!
And in the next class, he did not ask us to turn in our assignments. Instead, we went to the auditorium for a viewing of the movie “The Killers,” after which he announced that our next essay was to explain the relation of the movie to the short story. In detail: in what ways does the movie elaborate the words in Hemingway’s short story, and in what ways does the film make things up, not at all hinted at in Hemingway.
I don’t clearly remember the class after that, but what I do remember is that no one in the class had read the story, or watched the film, in the depth that Dr. Astrakhan hoped for.
Of course we had to write; after all that was the name of the class. Dr. Astrakhan asked us to write short stories
- about any incident in our life;
- about any article in today’s paper;
- based on fantasy, having nothing to do with real incidents nor anything in the
newspapers.Although some of our classmates wrote some greatly imaginative stuff, Dr. Astrakhan’s main thesis is that the third category doesn’t really exist; everything is based on experience. Of course, he also required us to write an essay on that idea.
Senior Year at Stuyvesant
The courses I took in my senior year at Stuyvesant were: Civics and Economics, Advanced Algebra, Earth Sciences, French and Band. This amounts to six 45 minute classes, with Band counting for two.
In the algebra and French classes, I became close friends with Freddie Lipshitz. First, he was also a math major, and second, he was from French-speaking Belgium. His family, being Jewish, realized in 1939, when World War II was declared (but had not yet started) that they had to leave Belgium. They migrated to England and from there to New York. In New York, Freddie went to French-speaking schools until he was admitted to Stuyvesant. Of course, he spoke English well, but his first language was French. I loved speaking French, so - since he was also a math major - we got along well.
What I remember well is the Economics class in my last semester at Stuyvesant. It was formative for me. The teacher, Mrs. Posner, was a tall, lean woman with an imposing demeanor. In our first class, once we were seated and attendance was taken, she informed us that there would be little economics in the course: for those of us going to College, we’ll get a course in economics, and for those others, there is no need for a course in Economics. No, this being 1952, we have a great - and important - opportunity to learn how what we learned in our Civics course plays out in an election year. “For this purpose,” she said, “students will buy and read the New York Herald Tribune every morning before class. For those who cannot afford the three cents daily, I will bring several copies of the paper to our room each day.” Since she was our home room teacher, and her class was the first class of the day, this made sense. One student asked, “would any New York daily work?” At this suggestion, she stiffened and glared at the student. “The Post is a communist rag, the News is a dirty rag and the Sun is a rag. The New York Times is an arm of the democratic party. This leaves only the Herald Tribune, which fortunately presents the news of the day in a truthful and unbiased way.” Freddie whispered to me “isn’t the Herald Tribune an arm of the republican party?” I responded that it is best at this time not to point that out. “Just look at the picture of Wendell Willkie right behind Mrs Posner.”
At home, we had grown accustomed to staying up late: my father didn’t really work until the rest of us were asleep, my brother was going to night school at CCNY, and I didn’t have to be in school until afternoon. My mother was the only one in the house with a “job,” but this worked fine for her as well. She worked from 8 am to 4, came home and made dinner, and then took a nap. In those days, newspapers were “morning” or “evening” and the morning papers appeared at the newsstands at about 10:30 pm. So, my brother or I would go out to get those papers so that we’d have them available when the whole family got together for coffee and the 11 o’clock news. It was our habit to listen to the news, have espresso and talk about the news before going to bed - and my father to work. Because of that I had already read the Times and the Herald when I got to class the next morning.
During the first few weeks of our “Economics” class we were all resigned to live with and obey Mrs. Posner’s “class of indoctrination.” But then, Freddie got up and said that he disagreed with the conclusion of one particular editorial in the Herald Tribune. We all trembled, assuming that this was the end of Freddie’s education. But Mrs. Posner sat down, smiled and said “Please, Mr. Lipshitz, explain your disagreement.” Freddie did that for a while, but then he seemed to realize what he had done to his future, and sat down. Mrs. Posner then asked, “anyone else want to talk about this editorial?” Quiet for a while; then a hispanic student stood up and said,”The editorial assumes that people who are poor are poor because they don’t know how to, or care to, improve their lot.” Mrs. Posner then asked, “is that a fair assumption, or not?” That opened the flood gates, and almost all of us had a chance to respond. When the bell rang, we didn’t want to go. Mrs. Posner said, “I love what happened here today, let’s do it again.”
And that’s the way the class went after that. She was not shy about telling us her views on all political subjects, but she also genuinely wanted us to express ours. Sure, Mrs. Posner made clear that she felt that FDR brought us into and through the war, and that was good, but he did not prepare us for the threat of communism; that the democratic party does not understand its severity; that only a Republican President could handle that threat. She even made sure that we knew how to get under our desks in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. But most importantly of all, she encouraged us to express our views, and listened attentively to other points of view.
Toward the end of the semester, in order to stem the growth of communist sympathy, the state of New York required all high school seniors, as a condition on graduation, to sign an oath of allegiance to the Constitutions of the United States and that of the state of New York. As part of our civics course the preceding semester we had learned about both constitutions. The first is short and generic, the second, long and specific, and not possible to cover in a semester. However, one article in it was important (insisted upon by Alexander Hamilton): every 20 years the residents of New York vote yea or nay to call a Constitutional Convention. If the ayes have it, the Convention to revise the Constitution is called, and if the nays have it, the Constitution stands for another 20 years. As an aside, I should point out that the nays have always had it; mainly because the Governor made clear that the cost of a Constitutional Convention would have to be covered by additional taxes.
I had no problem with the U. S. Constitution; it was a fine document, parts of which we were required to memorize. But how was I to pledge allegiance to a document that, according to my Civics teacher, was too long to be read before graduation, and which also is subject to change every 20 years? This was a question discussed fervently in band practice, in the breaks between pieces, and after that in the park just outside of Stuyvesant. Many felt that it was irresponsible to sign the pledge; as many others said that nobody really cares if you sign or not. . In my physics class however, there was no such discussion – all agreed that going to College was imperative, and a high school diploma was needed to do so. Besides, the alternative to College was the Korean War. Patriotic fervor was not high at Stuyvesant High.
I discussed this problem with my parents. My mother agreed with the Physics class: College was an imperative, and lack of a high school diploma could deny me admission. My father took a page out of the political history books. He pointed out that, if you signed the pledge, it could happen sooner or later that you are accused of treason. On the other hand, if you don’t sign, you could be so accused sooner than later. In either case, at some time, you will have to go underground. So, now, you should just follow your conscience.
In late April I received notice that I will be admitted to the College of the City of New York. Since that was the only place to which I had applied, it was really good news. I felt that I didn’t have to sign the pledge. Or maybe, I did – was the offer contingent upon my actually getting a high school diploma? According to my more radical band colleagues, the offer expressed no contingencies. And, if that was incorrect, those affected will march against the pledge edict. In fact students at CCNY were already doing so.
That argument made sense: CCNY already had all my graduation documents, and most likely didn’t have the interest to check whether or not I’d signed the pledge. So I went to the Stuyvesant High School graduation ceremonies, at the Academy of Music on 14th street. When I picked up my graduation folder, there was no diploma in it - just a note that I had completed my studies at Stuyvesant with honors, and that this document will be honored at many postgraduate institutions. And so it was at CCNY.