Book introduction
This is, in part, the story of a fifth grade on the Lower East Side, that I taught during the time Kennedy was president and I was finishing my teaching degree. The bigger part of the story happened about 40 years later, when I found a class photo and decided to see if I could locate and gather my students, so they and I could meet again and see what happened to them.
As it was while I was teaching, I learned more from seeking them than I ever taught. More than that, I discovered that it was anywhere from difficult to impossible to locate them. With help from services and tech geek friends who didn’t care if I was crazy, I collected about a dozen of what will now be called “my kids,” and we had, among other events, a thrilling evening at my home--no milk and cookies--with food and beer, and Rita telephoning from Ponce, Puerto Rico, on the table, on a pre-paid phone card.
The school’s file box of records did not move to the next grade with the students. Each file followed each student to several different next years. Many boys had quit their senior year in high school and joined the army or the marines to fight in Vietnam. Not all came back. Among those that did were dope addicts--they blamed the US for making drugs available, so they wouldn’t mind the risks they took, or the murders they were ordered to commit. Others had learned about crimes, and went on to prison. Still others hid at home, relying on the veterans center for different kinds of help.
The girls were harder to find. If they got married, their names changed and they disappeared into the system. Records of any kind were forbidden to anyone outside the immediate family.
We sang songs from our class play and listened to classroom recordings I made back then: “Andrew will now see how far he can get in The Star-Spangled Banner before making a mistake” or “Gary will now tell us how he learned to box a kangaroo.” “It’s time for us to write to the president of the United States and see what happens. Pencils!” We reminisced about class trips, and laughed together.
I realized that our lives in that room were took place against the pile driving sound track of what would be the Rutgers housing project. Hearing that on the tape, my stomach clenched; I realized it had done so then, and wondered if the kids’ had too.
During the years after our class party, we did things in small groups: movie, restaurant, art show. They began to contact one another. And the teacher down the hall, deafer than I but still alive, told me something I didn’t know but that was known to all the other teachers: “We knew you came from money.” My childhood experiences were informing my teaching, and in more than one way I took the class to places they had never heard of.
And I, in turn, had never heard of lousy medical care. Now I go to their funerals.
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