Our teacher, Miss Smeaton, got married! She was our fourth- grade teacher at Franklin School in East Orange. The kids all loved her, but none of them loved her more than I did.
One Monday morning she walked into our classroom a few minutes late. She looked so happy! She wrote a strange name on the blackboard: “Mrs. Niedenstein”. She told us she was married now, and that was her new name. She wrote it one more time up in a corner of the board so it wouldn’t get erased. She said some things about how nice her new husband was, and added that she was very happy, as if we couldn’t tell.
The class was quiet, and maybe a little confused at this change to their worldview. Speaking for myself, I think I was a bit jealous: would this interfere with my own relationship with Miss Smeaton? Actually, nothing changed for anyone – if anything, Miss Smeaton, I mean Mrs. Niedenstein, was nicer than ever. However, fourth grade came to an end, and we went on to fifth grade, with a teacher whose name I don’t recall, then on to sixth.
Part way through sixth grade, my family moved from East Orange to Orange, about a mile and a half between houses. Orange had different school days off than East Orange, and I used those extra days to visit Miss Smeaton in her classroom, where she found work for me tutoring a couple of the slower students. Those visits ended when the school year ended, and I never saw Miss Smeaton again.
Writing this 70 years later, I wondered how old she was when she married. Sadly, the way such research usually starts is with a look through the obituaries, and I found one for her husband and one for her. I also found something oddly affecting – I learned that her first name was Alice. I had never thought of Miss Smeaton as having a first name at all.
She and Norman were both about 40 when they married; probably his war service had put their lives on hold, like many others. Later, after they retired, they lived in Ocean Grove for 24 years. Norman died there at 85, then Alice moved to Florida to be near her relatives. She died there at 95.
Kids never think of their teachers as having a life outside teaching, and I guess I’m still a child in that respect: I was surprised, and happy, to read in her obituary that “she was an accomplished ballroom dancer and won numerous awards in dancing competitions.”
So here’s to you, Alice Smeaton Niedenstein, ballroom dancer, and in a way my first love. I hope your last days were peaceful and happy.
5-27-2002 legacy.com9-4-1992, Asbury Park PressFranklin School, now the Whitney Houston Academy
In seventh and eighth grade, we have music class twice a week. The class is divided into two groups for tonal management of the parts we sing. There is an alto group, mostly boys, and a soprano group, girls and boys like myself whose voice hasn’t changed yet. Before each song, Miss Barnett blows a single note on her pitch pipe so we know what we’re supposed to sound like.
Not Miss Barnett
When not accompanying us on the classroom piano, Miss Barnett spends her time correcting and verbally abusing the sopranos. We can do nothing to her satisfaction. After a few weeks, I tell her my voice is changing. There is no test to confirm my claim; she simply tells me to sit on the alto side of the room from now on. Goodbye to twice-weekly stomach cramps.
Our repertoire comes from a long-out-of-print song book of standards, spirituals and other royalty-free music, for example “Comin’ ‘round the Mountain”. Music is timeless, and our thrifty school board agrees.
One song in regular rotation is Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe”. It has of course been modernized since then, but in our classroom Old Black Joe grieves for “my friends from the cotton fields away”, with the chorus
I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low, I hear those darky voices calling “Old Black Joe”.
In our class are two black kids, Joe Stokes and Richie Strickland. I don’t look over to see if they are singing along, but I’ll bet Joe Stokes isn’t.
Richie and I are friendly, and one day he arrives at my house with two fishing poles and we board the Number 20 bus to Branch Brook Park. As we pay our fares, I notice some of the other passengers nudge each other.
We try various spots around the lake but don’t catch anything. We come back to my house and sit in the sunroom, talking about baseball. After an hour or so, my grandmother takes me aside and says “Tell Richie he has to go home, we’re going to have dinner now.”
In grades seven and eight I had a science teacher that I really liked and admired, Mr. Fischer. He knew I liked science and science-fiction books, and was open to such classroom questions as, if light is really particles (turns out it isn’t), can it be used to push a spaceship along, even just a little bit? The atomic bomb and the possibility of atomic energy were also hot subjects in our classroom. Mr. Fischer was a gray-haired bachelor with a slight lisp and some fussy behaviors. Given what we know, or think we know, today, Mr. Fischer was probably gay. He was good friends with our music teacher Miss Barnett, who had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.
Miss Barnett offered Mr. Fischer a pair of tickets to see Aida, and he asked me if I wanted to go. My mom said fine with her, and off we went one Saturday on the bus to New York. On the way, we saw acres of empty steel drums stacked up in the meadowlands along the route. It later turned out they were not empty, as most of the world probably thought, and had been leaking toxic goo into the North Jersey soil for years.
We arrived at the Met, still in the original building at 39th Street, and climbed to our seats. This is not meant as a complaint about the tickets, but we were in nosebleed territory, the highest section in the house. The section was so steep that when I turned around, I was looking straight between the knees of the old lady behind me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the whole outing and thought the opera was fantastic. I know now that a lot of people think Aida is bombastic, not fantastic, but what did I know then, kids love bombast.
Now, here’s what I think happened next, deduced by putting together two and two and based on the available evidence,
One Mr. Grady, who lived two doors down from us on Rayburn Terrace, was the janitor at Cleveland Street School. He was a devout Catholic who went to Mass every morning; he carried a rosary in his back pocket and could be seen fingering it from time to time. Mr. Grady hated Mr. Fischer for the predictable reasons, and had gotten wind of our opera excursion. Mr. Grady put a bug in my mother’s ear that perhaps Mr. Fischer was leading her son astray, and she should beware. My mother then confided in her boss, Mr. Edwards, with whom she was on friendly terms and maybe just a little bit office-romancy – Mr. Edwards would sometimes drive her home at night so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. Was her bookish son being groomed as a Friend of Dorothy? Mr. Edwards considered the issue and came up with an plan.
Next, the only tangible evidence I have of all this speculation.
My mother came home from work one day and said “Mr. Edwards thought you might like this calendar.” Indeed I would, for it was probably the most risqué pinup calendar then available, Vargas Girls in provocative poses and showing as much skin as was legal. “Um, thanks!” I had never been given anything by Mr. Edwards before.
After a decent interval I was upstairs, the staples were out and my top four picks were on the wall alongside my Honor Roll certificates. I was cured.
Back in kindergarten, I wrote my name on the front steps of the school; they made me scrub it off with a brush and bucket of water. They teach you to write your name, then they get all upset when you put that knowledge to work.
The bus stop in Bloomfield center was right in front of a grand old bank building, and kids would hoist themselves up to sit on its window ledge while waiting for the bus. One day I noticed that my brother had etched our family name deep into the sandstone window frame, enclosing it in a perfect rectangle, Roman SPQR style. I could tell it had taken him a long time and many bus waits, and I was very proud.
In high school gym class I wasn’t famous for my athletic ability, so when sides were chosen up for a ball game, I was usually picked about two-thirds of the way back. (“Can’t field, good for a single.”) There was something I liked about rope climbing, though, and once I wrote a small “SMITHEE 56” in black marker on the gym ceiling with my free hand while I was up there. When Mr. Marucci discovered it weeks later and called me on it, he seemed equally annoyed and impressed. He was one of the good ones.
In the army, several guys in my unit went into town and came back with the same tattoo, a stalking panther. These days, every Tom, Dick and waitress seems to have some sort of body art. A girl showing me her ink asked if I had any of my own, then got mad when I said no, I never got that drunk. Actually, I do kind of wish I had gone into town with my buddies that day; I think I missed out on something important.
courtesy lossoprano.tv
courtesy fubar.com
And then there’s street graffiti, the witty kind. Sometimes it’s just a few words of commentary scrawled in the margin of a subway poster.
Finally, there’s serious, wall-commanding, actual art. The world owes a lot to these artists.
At Orange High, I took mechanical drawing, known today as “engineering drawing”, for three years. Basically it’s a way of putting on paper enough design information about an object or machine part to enable its manufacture. The drawing below is not my own, I got it off the internet and don’t know what it is. It looks like some sort of metal wheel, 8 3/4 inches in diameter, made of two separate parts bolted together. There’s a side view and a front view that together provide enough data to enable someone to go to a machine shop and get one made. But what is it? We don’t know; without a name or description on the drawing, we’ll have to ask whoever comes back to pick it up. I would guess it’s part of a boardwalk amusement ride, but that’s the way my mind works.
Typical mechanical drawing
Our classroom was on the Lincoln Avenue side of the school, on the third floor toward the rear, at the top of a flight of stairs that led nowhere else – not a room you’d ever wander into by accident. It had high windows that opened onto a flat, narrow roof with a wall around it about two feet high.
There were usually about 12 or 14 students in the class, all boys. One year there was a girl. I don’t know anything about her or what her story was, but good for her. Maybe she was sent from the future.
Our instructor was Ray Smith, who had a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute. He was a fine teacher, easy to understand and follow. Ray did not tolerate misbehavior in his class; if you acted up or did something particularly stupid, he was likely to punch you, punch your arm. How hard the punch was depended on your offense. Because he had grown up in Orange as friends with my Uncle Bert, Ray expected more from me, and paid me extra attention. One day he punched my arm so hard he almost knocked me off my stool. I don’t remember what it was I did, but I know I deserved it.
I don’t think Ray ever gave me an ‘A’ on a class assignment, because my descriptive lettering – the final, boring fill-out-the-form step necessary to complete a drawing – was rushed and sloppy. When it came to lettering, a downgrade to a ‘B’ was fine with me.
Some teachers punished bad behavior by sending the offender out to stand in the hall, with the next offense bringing a trip to the principal’s office. Ray’s approach was to raise a window sash and with a gesture usher you onto the roof, then close the window behind you. I was banished to roof isolation once, and it’s a strange feeling to be outside, alone and empty-handed, looking in as your classmates work on their projects.
One exile found a lost “spaldeen”, the lively pink rubber ball used in stickball and handball. He fought off boredom by bouncing it against the building, taking the return on the fly. It took Ray a while to figure out what that thumping was.
I kept my best work from Ray’s class for years, including my all-time favorite, a beautiful and perfect rendering of a small steam engine. Each time I changed jobs, I brought those drawings to my next house, in their cardboard box with my stock charts, childhood treasure maps and book reports.
We hired a well-reviewed company, Windsor Moving and Storage, to move us from Princeton, where I had just finished up my last contract-programmer job before retirement, to the Jersey Shore. I whimsically labeled that cardboard box of mementos, useless to anyone in the world but me, “Valuable Historical Documents”. Somewhere between Princeton and the Jersey Shore the box went missing; it was a year before I realized it was gone. I’m sure its contents were a great disappointment to someone.
My father was a Catholic, nominally. I don’t think he ever went to church as an adult. One of my aunts said when he did go to Mass as a child, he always managed to avoid the collection plate.
Similarly, my mother was a Protestant, nominally. I don’t think she ever went to church as an adult either. Her way of staying right with the Lord may have been simply to make sure I attended Sunday School. She accomplished this by finding neighbors who attended a nearby Protestant church and were willing to give me a ride each Sunday. She didn’t seem fussy about which flavor of Protestant services I attended; I remember Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist, depending on where we were living. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Eick, pronounced “Ike”, of Linwood Place, for giving me a weekly ride to the Washington Street Baptist Church in your rumble-seated car, and for sometimes treating me to a second breakfast if I showed up for my ride too early.
Full immersion baptism, Chestnut Mountain Church, Flowery Branch, Georgia
I was baptized a Catholic at the age of one month, so even if the rules about who gets into Heaven are as stringent as I’ve heard from some Catholic sources, I remain eligible. In the Baptist church, baptism (full-immersion, y’all, Acts 8:38, Mark 1:5) is reserved for those “able to make a mature confession of faith”; most baptisms I’ve seen were of people in their early teens or just a little younger; certainly old enough to decide.
Somehow, the Baptists never got around to baptizing me; that’s probably just as well, because there are some doctrinal problems with being baptized twice; your mileage may vary. The closest I have come to professing the Baptist faith openly was having “BAPTIST” stamped on my army dog tags, along with my blood type, “O”.
Soon after I opened my first checking account, a local radio station aired a feature story about an orphanage in Kearney (next to Newark) burning down, and soliciting contributions to rebuild. The fire sounded pretty devastating, and I had once written a book report on Oliver Twist, so I was ripe. I broke out my new checkbook and wrote Sacred Heart Orphanage of Kearney a check for something like five or ten dollars, not a trivial sum then. When my first bank statement arrived, I asked my mother to help me interpret it. As we reviewed the half-dozen or so cashed checks, we came to the one to Sacred Heart, and she said “What’s this?!” I relayed the whole burnt-down orphanage story, which only seemed to anger her. Raising her voice just a little, she said “The Pope doesn’t need your money.” End of discussion.
I married a girl who was raised Catholic; this never posed a problem, because, like me, she was not a churchgoer. Back when Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Friday, she ignored the rule; the only time it ever came up was once when we were out shopping – she said “It won’t feel right to eat meat on Good Friday”, and I said “Okay, let’s get fish then.” We started both our kids along the Catholic path of confirmation and first communion, because that way they can make up their own minds later on, right?
During a confirmation ceremony, the officiating bishop asks the candidates several questions from a list. The kids get advance coaching in the questions and the correct answers from adult volunteers; kids who have not attended parochial school find the questions and concepts more difficult. Despite my protests, I got volunteered into coaching my older son. To keep my own conscience clear while still following the study guide, my practice questions took the form “Now, if the bishop asks you ‘How does the Holy Spirit help us?’, what are you going to say?” On the day of the ceremony, I got some holy water sprinkled on me as the bishop’s procession entered the church. It didn’t burn, so I guess my approach was acceptable.
1947 Pontiac. Imagine this with seven more years of wear, green and much less shiny
One thing I did in high school was definitely a Bad Thing, religion-wise, as was confirmed by Miss Riley, our world history teacher. I had a ’47 Pontiac, and in the morning I might pick up a few friends, then, once at school, if I was not planning to go to classes, ask “Who’s going in?”. Those remaining in the car would cruise around with me for the rest of the day, or at least until it was time for me to go to my afternoon job. I was not at all familiar with the ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and one Ash Wednesday my friends wanted to get their ashes applied before school.
I drove around under their direction, but the churches all had lines. Some of them decided to get out and get on line anyway, leaving just me and one passenger. Knowing that the only excuse to arrive late to school that day was to enter through the attendance office with ashes on our foreheads, I suggested using the ashes in the car’s ashtray. I don’t recall whether my passenger joined in or not, but I decorated my forehead with a smudge similar to those I had seen walking the streets all morning and entered the school without difficulty. I should have thought to wash off the ashes as soon as I got past the attendance office, but did not.
When I got to world history class later that day, Miss Riley, who had attended this very high school with my mother and knew her well, took one look at my smudge and squawked “YOU’RE NOT CATHOLIC!”. She didn’t know, of course, that my ashes were fake; that would have been so much worse. She was angry at my assumed (by her) decision to present myself to a priest as Catholic to obtain an excuse to be late to school. She told me I should be ashamed, and to wash my face and think very hard about what I’d done. I was ashamed, or at least I am now, for disrespecting someone else’s religion; I did wash my face; and I do continue to think about religion, although not so hard any more.
Thoughts
Back in the day, my wife and I liked to explore old cemeteries. While admiring the statuary and mausoleum architecture of a Catholic cemetery in Westchester, we noticed off at one side two rows of tiny headstones. There were maybe 30 or 40 in all, each very close to the next, and marked with numbers instead of names. We wondered what that was all about, and next day my wife called the office to ask. The woman who answered asked her in turn “Are you Catholic, dear?”. Getting a yes, she explained that section was the unconsecrated part of the cemetery, and those were graves of unbaptized babies and stillbirths. I don’t know what we expected, but that made us sad.
Church dogma at the time said the unborn and unbaptized were consigned to Limbo, which Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “Limbo, in Roman Catholic theology, the border place between heaven and hell where dwell those souls who, though not condemned to punishment, are deprived of the joy of eternal existence with God in heaven.”
However, according to Wikipedia, “Recent Catholic theological speculation tends to stress the hope, although not the certainty, that these infants may attain heaven instead of the state of Limbo.” So there’s at least some hope.
The editor of the syndicated newspaper column The Ethicist once responded to a question from a lapsed-Catholic-gone-atheist reader who had been pressed into service as a pallbearer in a Catholic funeral. The main point of his response was “Your participation in the service was not hypocrisy; it was an act of compassion and affection for your family. To join in some parts of the service does not require you to join in every part.” I commented to the editor:
I liked what you wrote in your “pallbearer” segment. As a non-Catholic married into a large Catholic family, I have been in that situation several times. The trick when participating in any Catholic ceremony is to never sit in the first row. One can then take the cue from others to stand, sit, or slide forward in lieu of kneeling – without seeming disrespectful, and optionally without praying.
There is a bumper sticker that says “God is who, evolution is how”, an attractive simplification. The real truth may be so deep and complex that no human has yet imagined it.
Some of the older guys in our group would make an occasional trip to one of the burlesque houses in Newark, either Minsky’s or the Empire. The minimum age for admission was 18, so that left me out.
Later I learned the dancers at Minsky’s would show their breasts sometimes, not so much at the Empire. At Minsky’s, a headliner like Lili St. Cyr might have hers out for most of her act. Wowzers.
And, oh yeah, there were some great comics, too.
Comics doing a bit, courtesy burlesquebabes.wordpress.com
At intermission, the house lights came up and the ushers walked the aisles, hawking overpriced candy and Crackerjack. Sometimes we’d spot one of our teachers in the audience – once Mr. Tischler, who taught social studies; on another occasion Professor Lewis, who taught biology.
I don’t know how Professor Lewis came to be called “Professor”, but that’s what they called him, even the other teachers. Maybe he lost a college position and the high school decided he could keep the title.
In class, the Professor was always dropping things and trying to look up the girls’ skirts – especially the skirt of Grace Scuderi, who sat in the front row and seemed cooperative and well aware of what the Professor was up to.
Sorry, I got ahead of myself there, let’s backtrack.
Being only 16, I worried that if I joined my friends on one of their expeditions, my age might be challenged, so I made a fake birth certificate. I already had an official one, so I knew how it should look. I sent to Newark for two fresh copies (one extra in case I made a mistake), and set to work.
The handwriting on the forms was just regular fountain pen ink. A quick dip in diluted laundry bleach made it disappear; the form’s printing and fancy embossed seal of the City of Newark remained. I rented a typewriter from the stationery store next to the library and filled in the now-empty form with my name and an improved birth date. The only thing still missing was the signature of the Newark city clerk. It’s tricky to imitate someone else’s signature, but after a lot of practice I was able to make a decent copy.
Until I got to be really 18, I carried that fake certificate in my back pocket each time we went to Newark. As it turned out, my worries were groundless – my age was never questioned, and I never needed to show it. But always, in the back of my mind, was the fear that I might need to show it one day, and I’d hear “Wait a minute, that’s not the signature of Harry S. Reichenstein!”
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
— Joyce Kilmer, “Trees”, 1913
Do you remember driving down the Garden State Parkway years ago and there were all those ugly cellphone towers? Then a few years later there were all those ugly fake trees instead?
Well, today’s more modern fake trees have a name, and it’s clever and perfect and I think a credit to the English language. I found out about all this when I read about actor Richard Gere angering his neighbors in rural Bedford, NY by donating a piece of his land to erect a cell tower that would improve the town’s emergency vehicle response times. In a classic example of NIMBY, some of Gere’s wealthy and famous neighbors object to the tower because it would spoil their views of the Bedford countryside.
That cool new name for a fake tree is monopine. If you google “monopine”, wrapped up in double quotes just like that, you’ll see some good examples of cell towers that are not quite as ugly as they used to be.
The above lines from Trees make me think of my 7th-grade teacher Miss Barnett, who loved poetry and taught us kids how to love it too. Beyond Joyce Kilmer, she favored plainspoken, left-leaning poets like Carl Sandburg, but didn’t try to indoctrinate us, letting the words speak for themselves. She treated every one of us as though we were smart.
