One picture can prompt a thousand words. And two thousand memories.
With a gracious cap tip to my long time friend and fellow elementary school classmate Cheryl (back row, second from right, the blonde with the blue dress), this photo transports me back to the third grade at Grimes Elementary School in Mount Vernon, New York.
And the floodgates of my mind open again...
First of all, our teacher is there at the far left. Mrs. Rita Popper. I'm including her whole name here in the event she ever shamelessly Googles her own name. And she'll learn that I thought she was a fox. Pure and simple. The best looking of any teacher that I had throughout all my school years. But, I have written of her before. Remember?
There was my third grade teacher. Mrs. Popper. Fresh out of teacher college. New to the game. And an incredibly hot chick. Or however a third grade student would describe a fine looking lady.
Other than her smoking hot legs, there are two things I remember distinctly about Mrs. Popper. Inexplicably, our homework one night was to watch the Academy Awards. Why? Who knew? Except the next day we spent an hour in class discussing who won, who lost, and whether the winning movie was really the best picture of the year. We had never done anything so interesting in school yet. This was not math or English or social studies. My very first notion that learning, yes, could be fun.
One day, I had aced a test. Mrs. Popper was particularly pleased with me and let my mother know when she came to pick me up after school. Out on the playground, Mrs. Popper was telling my mom what a model student I was. She was so enamored that she gave me a bear hug and then kissed me on the cheek.
You're kidding, right??
I blushed at the attention. The shade of red darkened when I immediately realized that half my class had seen this display of affection.
"WHOA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
I dreaded going back to school the next day. I would be getting all sorts of shit about this. In the middle of the night, I started to sweat profusely. Was I that worked up?
No, I was coming down with chicken pox. My next day back at school wouldn't happen for another two weeks.
And, then, there was another nagging thought. It was the first time ever that a teacher had kissed me and I wound up with a disease. During my nighttime prayers, I asked for God's help.
"Please don't let Mrs. Popper get the chicken pox, too."
Just so you know that the Google search can cut both ways, I myself did an internet hunt on said teacher when I first ran the above piece. I tracked her down to the borough of Manhattan, where she apparently is some sort of, ahem, "community activist." I doubt she'll parlay this into a Presidential career, but she'd get my vote if she was on the ballot.
Moving on....
You can find me in this snapshot. Second row, third kid from the right. On a zoom view, I am wearing a purple shirt with a belt that almost matches. Thanks, Mom. You've created the very first preppy and the earliest edition of a metrosexual. I'm seeing half the guys in ties and the other half not. Did the memo not reach everybody?
The dude in the red shirt on the end of the second row near me is Russell and he was probably my best male friend in the class. It wasn't hard for us to connect if you look at the composition of the group...ahem. He used to come over and play at my house on Saturday afternoons. He was another one of those kids who had the TV show "Combat" on the brain. We'd head off to a vacant lot and re-enact the Battle of Anzio or whatever he had seen Vic Morrow do earlier that week. Somebody told me a few years ago that he wound up with a life-long career in the military and I wish I had bet those odds. Whenever I hear of some Army lifer going postal at a place like Fort Hood, I wonder for a second where Russell wound up.
My other two chums in class were the aforementioned Cheryl, who offered up this photo and Diane in the back row on the far left and standing next to our teacher/sex symbol. Again, when you look at the photo, you can figure out how we matched up...ahem anew. Back in those days, degrees of friendship were dictated by very simple criteria. In the case of Cheryl and Diane, I had both their phone numbers. Okay, gang, this was the third grade so we're not talking THAT. But, we used to burn up the wires all the time. Ostensibly to share homework, but most usually to gossip or talk about what we were going to watch on television that night.
Cheryl has the dubious/unlucky/historical/heroic distinction of being in the same school as me for every year from second grade all the way to senior year at Fordham University, although I probably only saw her once on campus the entire four years. Yet, she and I have never had a Christmas without sharing cards and I even got to see her family in Los Angeles about a dozen years ago.
Diane is a recent and wonderful re-connection, compliments of the new town square called Facebook. From what I can see in photos on Facebook, she seems to have dozens and dozens of grandchildren and I'm going to ask her if she'd be willing to rent me a couple.
As for the rest of the faces, I'm drawing mostly blanks. The names will come to me in the middle of the night and watch for those memories to show up here on future Sundays. Truth be told, this was the third grade class but about a third of them disappeared for large chunks of the day. They went and had their lessons in a special classroom down in the basement. They were in what we called the "PAD" class. I don't recall what "PAD" really stood for, but we quickly made up her own translation for the letters.
"People Are Dumb."
Now, back in this day of grade schooling, there was a lot going on in the world. Tons of chatter about busing and integration and segregation.
Take a look at this picture and you can see why all that stuff was lost on us. Not only was the Grimes School fully integrated, the so-called White kids were way outnumbered. This was life in racially divided Mount Vernon, New York. The New Haven railroad line that cut through the center of the city effectively created two distinctly different halves of a community. On the north side, you had mostly White and Italian or Jewish families. On the south side, you had a smattering of White families amidst mostly Black households.
Guess where I lived?
Of course, none of us really knew the difference so everybody lived together in the classroom pretty harmoniously. Once in a while, a rumor would cut through the school hallways about an impending battle at 3PM. Two schmucks were going to solve their problems by smashing each other around the schoolyard. When it was ready to erupt, you would hear the chant go up.
"A fight, a fight, a Nigger and a White."
Hey, I'm just writing what I heard.
For the most part, my world there at Grimes was peaceful. We all got along and probably could have been one of the earliest benchmarks of racial harmony. It would help that, usually, the official class mother was either my mom or Cheryl's mom or Diane's mother. You don't want to piss off the kid whose parent was showing up on Halloween with some really tasty cupcakes.
Yep, it was all comfortable.
Although....
I'm thinking back to a class project. We all had to break off in pairs and build something "geographic." My partner wound up being a kid named Thomas. If memory serves me correctly, he is the third kid from the left in the second row. The one who looks like an eight-year-old version of Malcolm X.
Thomas' big claim to fame was he could play the piano and wound up doing so at most assemblies. For all I know, he wound up working in a supper club and accepting dollar tips in a martini glass. But, at this time in this school year, he and I had something to build. We were going to construct a volcano. Complete with flowing lava.
Production values that were definitely too ambitious for either one of us.
Nevertheless, we pressed on and needed to meet after hours to decide how we could recreate Krakatoa-East of Java. I offered up a place where we could spread out with our art materials that were destined to be adorning our clothes sooner than later. The logical place of origin for our spectacular volcano was my basement. We settled on a Saturday afternoon when I wasn't necessarily landing on Normandy with Russell.
After about an hour in the cellar, Thomas and I decided we had bitten off way more than we chew. And, speaking of which, let's go upstairs to my house and get something better to eat.
Up the stairs we bounded. And ran right into my father.
Who was not aware that I was entertaining a school friend.
Who happened to be Black.
In a life of facial memories of my parents, I will never forget the look on my dad's face that afternoon. It was one I still can't describe. But, clearly, it wasn't conveying the emotion of "hot diggity dog, I just hit the Daily Double at Yonkers Raceway." Thinking back, Thomas may have been the first Black person to step inside our home. Not counting, of course, the guy who delivered Grandpa's beer every Wednesday morning or the Jehovah Witnesses who showed up on the porch like clockwork every Sunday afternoon.
Dad simply nodded and walked away. He never mentioned the moment ever again. And I certainly didn't bring it up as a fond memory. It would just reside in quiet silence for the rest of eternity.
A different time. A different place.
It was okay for us to stand side-by-side in unison for the school class picture.
For my father, that's as far as the unity would go.
Dinner last night: Bacon and mushroom turkey burger at Go Burger.
