King of the World
The time that I might have been
happiest was in fourth grade. I was in a public elementary school in
West Philadelphia, where my mother had grown up, and we lived just
two blocks from the Henry C. Lea Elementary School at 47th
and Spruce. I forget who Henry C. Lea was, but I'm afraid to go back
and google it, for fear that he will turn out to have been racist.
But it didn't make any difference to me what he had been, or what the
school was named. I know for sure that my mother had gone to the
more felicitously named West Philly High, which was just around the
corner, I think. My brother and sisters had all been born by then,
and the six of us lived in a three story semi-detached house in a
neighborhood that was influenced by the University of Pennsylvania,
down at 34th and Spruce, where there was the University, a
museum of anthropology called the University Museum, with large cases
and smooth and polished concrete floors that we could slide on if we
ran and had only our socks on, and where there was a big, round
stadium, Franklin Field, where they had football games, which I saw
when I was young once or twice, and where every spring they held the
Penn Relays, a hugely important track and field event, which I had
never gone to, but which I knew about because I read the Philadelphia
Bulletin, our evening newspaper.
By fourth grade, I felt like being a
senior, and so I felt like a king. Our school assemblies were from
kindergarten to fourth grade; when you got to fifth grade, which I
never did because that was when we switched to private school, you
were thrown in with the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders – no
junior high or middle schools then, just the upper section of
elementary school – and you were at the bottom again. But in
fourth grade, you were at the top. You had been there for five
years, you knew the ropes, you knew the games in the big concrete
school yard, games like flipping cards and our version of handball
against the big, concrete wall that separated the school from the
next-door osteopathic college, which I learned from my neurosurgeon
father and homemaker mother to hold in some contempt, although I
didn't quite know why. We also played running bases, catch, and
maybe some touch football. We saw the older kids hanging around,
like the Tjerian brothers, Johnny and Pat, Johnny looking like a thug
in sixth grade. A mixed crowd, and we held our own.
There were three of us in our grade who
were tight, the three musketeers, we called ourselves. Me; Arnold
Bernstein, my best friend; and Irving Gerowitz, who told us one day
that his family had changed their name to Gerwood, and he gave some
sort of explanation that didn't include saying that the new name
sounded less Jewish. We also included a fourth, lesser member, a
smaller kid named Bruce Leanness, who was fast. I Just found out
from my friend Bob that he was also Jewish, and his father was the
soccer coach at Temple and is regarded as the Dean of American
Collegiate Soccer Coaches. It was all a mixed but white
neighborhood, and there were a bunch of neighborhood kids, like
Frankie Collissey who lived across the street, who went to Catholic
school, at St. Francis de Sales. Frankie told us that we learned for
this life but they learned for the afterlife, as though you could
believe that shit, but he apparently did. But at Lea School, we
musketeers viewed ourselves as cream of the crop, the best athletes,
I was probably the smartest in the class, and Arnold was great at
math. His father drove a taxicab, and sometimes I would visit him
and his little brother Stevie and his mother Faye at their apartment
over on Chestnut Street around 48th Street. I was
startled to see that it was small and they all lived there, and their
father was asleep because he drove a cab at night.
By fourth grade, we had weathered the
preliminaries. Fat and jolly and warm Mrs. Huggins for kindergarten.
The more popular teacher (among the mothers, anyway) was Mrs. Tufts,
who was thin and taller and gray haired, but I liked my teacher best,
Mrs. Huggins. I don't think she actually hugged us, but I didn't
miss the implication. Then the more angular Mrs. Anderson in
probably second grade, who once went around the class and asked a
question and someone was standing up and gave the right answer, but
Mrs. Anderson challenged him or her, I think it was a girl, and she
backed down, and then Mrs. Anderson admonished her, “Stick to your
guns!” Wow! How I learned from that!
Later on in fourth grade it was Mrs.
Ousey, whom we of course called Mrs. Lousy when she couldn't hear us
– we were so clever – and my mother warned me not to say it,
because sometime I might forget and say it when she could hear. When
there was a parent teacher conference and my mom and dad met with her
and she gushed about how smart I was, saying “Definitely college
material!” my parents took it as a sign that they couldn't keep me
there, if this was a low-bar school where it wasn't assumed that most
everyone would go to college. The next year all four of us kids
started going to Friends' Central school about 30 or 40 minutes away,
out on City Line, along with some neighborhood friends, including Bob
Levin, one class behind me, who is now my oldest friend, except for
my brother and sisters. Bob remembers that “we didn't like each
other,” but I reply to him, “Well, I liked you.”
Needless to say, at Henry C. Lea
Elementary School, we were prepubescent. Now they talk about
“hormones kicking in,” so prepubescent kids expect that, but I
was blissfully and completely unaware of all that. Girls were there,
and I liked some of them, even though they couldn't play sports. I
was aware that the other kids were different, and I didn't quite know
what to make of it. It just registered. John Lewis was thin and
light haired and gentle, but mostly, he distinguished himself by
being uncoordinated. He ran like a girl, you could say, and maybe we
did say that. Couldn't throw. He wasn't manly, the way Arnold and
Irving and I were, and Bruce. We were all about sports and
manliness, although we were nice and kind and not mean. John was
smart enough, but he didn't fit with us. He hung out more with the
girls, like Patty, a fat girl who sat upright at her desk with her
hands folded in front of her and her lips turned in a little – you
know how you do that? Is there a word for that? It's not pursed, I
think, pursed is like ready to kiss. But this is when you kind of
suck your lips in so they don't show. Anyway, that's what Patty did.
And there was Lenore Cooperstein who was smart and who was a little
reserved and stern, and nice enough and once we went to a birthday
party at her house and Arnold and I tortured her by pulling up her
dress and laughing as she got mad at us. I told my mother and she
told one of her friends and laughed at it, in a way that understood
that this was what boys did. As the oldest kid in the family,
everything I did was new for her.
But mostly, when it comes to the other
kids in the class beyond the musketeers, there was Connie. Connie,
with her blondish hair cut so that it came down around her face and
stopped at her jaw line, whose hair was straight, who I thought was
the prettiest girl anyone could possibly imagine. If there could be
something called a girlfriend in those days, she was my girlfriend,
although I can't recall a single thing we did together except stand
up and look at each other straight on and smile. Except for one
time. That time, we were all at our desks, and we had all been given
Dixie Cups – ice cream in a cup, half chocolate and half vanilla,
with a little wooden spoon. Ice cream! What could be better than
ice cream! But, amazingly, Connie didn't want hers. Why didn't she?
Who can imagine why, but she didn't. So she went up to the teacher,
it might have been Mrs. Anderson, and said that she didn't want hers,
so Mrs. Anderson announced to the class that Connie didn't want hers,
and who did? Me!! Me!! It seemed like the whole class was raising
their hands toward the front, straining with effort, shouting Me!!
Me!! So Connie surveyed the class, and with the sweetest smile
anyone has ever had, she walked down the aisle to the middle of the
class where I was seated and she reached out and gave me the Dixie
Cup. I said, Thanks a lot!!! We looked at each other and smiled. I
still remember that smile. She kept her smile and went back to her
seat and I ate the best Dixie Cup ice cream I have ever had.
Truthfully, I can taste it now. Connie had some complicated last
name, I think it was Greek, that I couldn't seem to remember. My
God, she was beautiful.
But then, of course, we switched to
private school. No more king, no more musketeers, no more class
representative to the student council, no more assemblies where we
were the oldest and most experienced. Out to Friends Central on City
Line, which was beautiful and, to me, bucolic, with a big hill behind
the school property, where they constructed Lankenau Hospital a few
years later and we saw it go up, with orange steel girders on the
green hill. There were some big trees on the Friends' Central
property, some playing fields with grass, where we had mandatory
sports after school, with uniforms and shoulder pads and spikes for
football, and an old gym and a new gym, named after the Linton
family, who owned a chain of modest restaurants (called “Linton's,”
amazingly enough) that competed more or less with Horn and Hardart's,
and whose kids were students there – David in my class, long and
lanky and fair and introverted, fast when he got going with thin
fists clenched, and soccer fields, and a big wide slide for the lower
school kids to use at recess, and some parents who picked their kids
up with woodie station wagons, and who my mother later assured me,
were anti-Semitic. Some were, I'm sure, and the in-group in my class
must have been somewhat, but overall, the biggest difference was that
I was no longer king, and we didn't have the musketeers. I was still
smart and athletic, but it was different. One time Dave Kirk, our
football coach and our history or social studies teacher, took me
aside, probably in 7th or 8th grade, and asked
me, I forget the words, why was I uptight? I had everything, he
said, I was smart and a good athlete, he probably said something
about an outgoing personality and pretty good looks, so why did I
have a chip on my shoulder? I wonder that to this day. I think that
was the same class where he gently and amusedly told me while we were
taking a test to stop giving answers to the girls. It must have been
eighth grade. Some people come to a new situation and rise to the
top, but I just didn't. I was among the smart kids, as always, Jon
Gross thought he was smarter but I don't think he was, and I was
definitely smarter than Barry Sharpless, who went on to win two Nobel
Prizes at Scripps for chemistry, and no one was a better athlete. I
played shortstop and was probably the best hitter. But Bob Hall was
a good runner and well coordinated, and Bob Long was a good pitcher,
so who knows. I had some friends, but no one like Arnold had been.
One time I excelled and was recognized
for it, and was surprised. I did well in our public speaking class,
and our teacher, Mr. Burgess, a very tall and thin man with
close-cropped hair saw some talent, and stooped down in a crouch to
ask me if I wanted to be in the high school senior play. I
immediately said yes, and he was surprised I answered immediately,
and was very pleased and stood up. My mother said that Mr. Burgess
was wonderful, and I believe that to be true. The play was Our Town,
and my part was Wally Webb, little brother of female lead Emily Webb,
and my mother delivered me for many weekends out to rehearsal. I was
part of the play, and treated like everybody's little brother, and
Mr. Burgess taught us to say, “Break a leg!” I had one memorable
line, delivered at the breakfast table when our mother told me to
stop reading at the table, and I protested, “Aw, Ma, by 10 o'clock
I have to know all about Canada!” That line was duly waited for
and savored by every member of my family, all five having packed
themselves in the car to see my one line, sitting proudly in the
audience. I was in other plays later on, receiving impassioned
applause as I exited the stage after declaiming the fate of my
patient if he failed to follow my instructions in The Imaginary
Invalid. If I had continued with that stage life, I truly believe I
could have been a contender. But never a champ. And probably not
really a contender. But what an experience it was, the stage.
I kept up with Arnold for a while, he
would come to visit us for a week at our Long Beach Island, New
Jersey beach house, but then it got too competitive and my father got
angry at him for competing too hard with his son and he didn't come
any more. A few years later my mother took my brother and me to
Frank's Delicatessen on Spruce Street for lunch and Arnold was at a
neighboring table with three or four friends and his brother Stevie
was flitting around the edges, spied us, and excitedly told Arnold,
look who's there, and Arnold sushed him away and didn't look up and
we didn't acknowledge each other and that was that. Kind of a bad
end, after all those years of close friendship. I still regret it.
So, I had friends in my class at
Friends' Central and in other classes (including Brian De Palma who
was a year ahead of me,) but no one like Connie, of course. Puberty
had arrived, much to my confusion, since I was completely unprepared
and no one was about to help me. My parents watched. My mother gave
me two books to read, in one of which they misprinted “vagina” as
“regina.” I asked my mother about it but she was mostly
embarrassed. There were no sex-ed classes in those days. I had kind
of a girl friend a year behind us, Carol Carr might have been her
name, and my very blond classmate Steve Jess told me excitedly at
some event or other, “She really has them!” Which meant breasts.
Which was very confusing for me, since I hadn't much noticed. Was
that desirable? Who wanted them? Steve was all excited about them,
but I was mainly confused. I could see kissing, but that was about
it. The only books I read were about sports and history. Then in
7th grade we had an infusion of new kids and one of them
was Sally Couthy, who I think was southern, and who wore a flower in
her hair, and who wore what I guess I would call flowered exuberant
dresses, or sometimes tight ones, and who for some unknown reason
took a liking to me. She was very exciting, but I was mostly scared,
although I knew she was beautiful and, although I didn't know the
word, sexy. We were at a party with girls and someone turned out the
lights and there was squealing and I hid under a table, literally.
It was a very confusing time.
It was a good thing that my father was
a neurosurgeon, because those private school tuitions for four kids
weren't easy, I'm sure. It speaks a lot to their values that my
parents sprang for those tuitions, because they were careful about
money, but spending it on the kids' education was top of the list.
But finally, something must have snapped, because they had me apply
to go to Central High in Philadelphia for 9th grade, where
my father had gone and which was a top quality high school but where
I didn't want to go, and then instead of going there, we moved to
Wynnewood on the Main Line, named for Sir Thomas Wynn, physician to
William Penn, and first speaker of the first Pennsylvania Assembly,
or so spake the historical signpost. It was a little split level
house in a development that was Jewish, just a few blocks down
Montgomery Avenue from Ardmore Junior High and Lower Merion High
School, which stood side by side. The schools were top quality, and
I think the house cost maybe $35,000. There were four small
bedrooms, and mine, at the end of the short hall, was tiny, enough
room for a bed and they had Mr. Lopez, a carpenter, make built in
shelves and drawers for clothes and a formica surface that would
served as both top of the bureau and a desk, with fluorescent bulbs
underneath the shelves that made for perfect lighting while I
studied. My parents apologized for the small size, but I loved being
down the hall and who needed space? I put up National Geographic
maps on the wall on the theory if they were there I would gradually
absorb all that geographic knowledge without working on it. My
theory didn't work, but my sibs remember that “You loved maps.”
The year at Ardmore Junior High as a
new kid was the way new schools are for kids, and they school had a
tough time interpreting the report card from Friends' Central, that
had O for outstanding for the academics but NI for needs improvement
for behavior, so Ardmore averaged out the grades and put me not in
9R, the top section, or 9H, number two, but in 9S, third section
down. Since I was a little bit ahead of the class in Latin and in
math, coming from private school, and since there was no competition
to speak of, academics was not a challenge for the year, and in fact
the rumor got around that the new kid was smart – He reads Latin
like it's English! And I made the football, the basketball, and the
baseball teams, although I wasn't at the top the way I had been
before. But some of the kids were bigger and more developed than I
was.
And I had some balls. I insisted in
speaking up in the football team meeting, making sure everyone knew I
had been quarterback at Friends' Central, and I was a fierce tackler
at linebacker that the coaches had to double team sometimes, but I
didn't play much. Everyone and his brother went out for the
basketball team, and Mr. Abrams, the coach, divided us into guards,
forwards, and centers. I looked at the horde going to the guard side
and decided, how will I ever be seen there? So despite my average
height I went with the tall guys at forward. Mr. Abrams kind of
gulped, but let it go. We worked out, ran the floor, and I got off a
great shot in full flight as I flipped it in off the board from about
15 feet on the right side. When Mr. Abrams had seen enough and
culled the lot, he said, OK, Shenkin, you can go with the guards now,
and I was on the team.
It wasn't bad with my being with the
average students for a year. I made friends, although not close
ones, and I got to see what it was like. It was a mixed group. I
remember Steve McCoy walking down the halls humming the first wave
of rock and role music – maybe Tutti-Fruity. There were the
Italian kids who made sure that they were the only ones who got to
say Fungoo, because that was “their native language.” It was
probably later on that one afternoon we were playing basketball just
across the street from Ardmore Jr. High's black iron metal stake
fence., at the house of the somewhat feckless Alan Greenough. It
wasn't too late in the afternoon, but his father came out and said it
was time for everyone to go home, and he would drive them. He asked
me if I wanted a ride and I said I didn't need one, I'd walk, and
then the car with all my friends in it passed me and they all waved.
Later on, I found out that Greenough's father had just driven around
the block and taken them all back to the house, and the object had
been to get rid of the Jew. I felt pretty good when the company he
was president of, the Pennsylvania Railroad, went bankrupt. To tell
you the truth, it didn't bother me much. I knew I was better at
everything than Greenough.
Lower Merion High was a fusion of
Ardmore Junior High and Bala Cynwyd Junior High. There were a lot
more Jewish kids from Bala Cynwyd, but by this time I was an Ardmore
kid, where in the end, people had really been so nice to me, and
where I had started to acquire lifelong friends – John Raezer, Bob
“DiGi” DiGiovanni, Bill Birkhead, and even a guy named Charlie
Newsom from Narberth, home of one of the premier Philadelphia
basketball outdoor courts where Guy Rodgers and other pros were known
to play, who told me not to give in to comments about my being
Jewish, and took me to a Catholic club dance of some sort.
In English class I was with Loretta
Siegel, who had fully developed breasts to the admiration of many but
still to the ambivalence of me. Loretta would come over at the
beginning of class and shake my hand, warmly, with feeling, and she
would look into my eyes and say, Budd, don't ever change. It was the
9th or 10th grade equivalent of getting laid,
but to me, it was pretty confusing. What was that all about? I
wondered. My widowed paternal grandmother, Nana, got ahold of that
information and grabbed it – she's Bernie Siegel's daughter, the
great Philadelphia lawyer, Bernie Siegel! Like later on in college
when I mentioned that one of the guys next door was Sam Saltonstall,
a nice, quiet kid who mostly wanted to play the trumpet, and was
probably burdened by the famous name. Nana said, stay close to him!
Saltonstall!
But I digress. Lower Merion was,
looking back on it, an oasis. Our group had a regular weekend poker
games, now legendary, where we played the usual games, and famously,
introduced by a visitor one time, one Bubble Liedman, Itsy-Bitsy With
A Tiddle. Lynn Sherr, my close friend, wrote about it in her
reminiscences, how the smartest kids were the best athletes and the
most popular, all at once, she said. I don't know if that was true,
but I couldn't have been happier and we are still good friends, so
many of us, including Jon Gross, who had been my classmate at
Friends' Central and had moved over to public school, like me. And
we had the best high school class I every had, Special English, with
Mrs. Hay, where we sat in a circle, maybe 18 or 20 of us, and read
and discussed great literature in four areas, tragedy, freedom and
responsibility, and two others – we struggle to remember them –
and where Mrs. Hay cautioned us to be very careful using clichés,
and where we wrote papers and we all read each others. There is a
special part of heaven for Mrs. Hay.
We still have reunions for LM, and we
still go. I don't know if we will anymore. After our 60th,
they said we probably won't have anymore, but I said, hey, at our
age, we shouldn't stick to every five years, time's awasting, we
should move it up. So we did, DiGi taking the lead, and we had
another one last year, but I couldn't go because my wife Ann was so
sick. I was missed, they said, and I believe them.
At the reunions there were people we
knew but weren't real close to, but that was great in itself. One of
the great things about reunions is that they are an antidote to
awkward unacknowledged goodbyes. But for the ones who don't come, the
unacknowledgement remains. I did miss seeing some classmates. There
was a bunch of kids who were kind of goof offs, or how could I
explain it? Who weren't in our group, and I guess whose parents
were lower middle class. We had our working class kids, from
Manayunk, and our black kids from Ardmore, who still sting from the
racism they encountered and which we didn't know what to do with in
those pre Civil Rights times, and these other kids, like David Kirby
and Hughie O'Neill, the motorcycle kids, had their own group. Maybe
they'd go to college, they had parties and there was drinking, I
heard. Not that we didn't drink, we did. There were no drugs in
those days, that I knew about. These classmates don't come to the
reunions. Others do, and I'm thrilled to see them. I introduced my
wife Ann to a couple of them, telling Ann that Carol Arzio was the
prettiest girl in the class, and Ann said, I can see why, and Vicky
Casciatto, who now lives in Marin, and I said that everyone was
jealous of her boyfriend and we all daydreamed about her, and she
turned away a little, and blushed a little, and it seemed she was
just super-pleased. Our friend, our really close friend Ricky
Shryock doesn't come. His father ran a local hifi store, but his
parents were divorced, and he ran from one to the other in his
Kharmann Ghia, and he would stop by our house unannounced and would
put a sandwich in our refrigerator and my mother would say, Ricky,
you don't have to do that, I'll feed you, and he would go down to the
basement with my brother Bobby and they would play cards and Rick
would basically clean him out, and later on Rick had the distinction
of marrying and divorcing one sister and then marrying the other
sister, and the last job I heard he had was selling Snap-On Tools,
but we all loved Ricky and he was such a great athlete, boy could he
hit a baseball and he went to Lafayette College and I don't know if
he graduated, but I think he hit .450 or so, but Rick had such
character, he constructed a little golf course in his father's back
yard where his Dad lived with Pat, his new wife, which Rick would
play alone, and Rick moved back and forth between his mom in Narberth
and his dad and Pat in Gladwyn, as I said. Ricky doesn't come to the
reunions, although we all loved him so much.
Speaking of divorce, at the last
reunion I went to I sat with Lynn and Angela Schrode a long time, and
found out that Angela's days with us at LM were tortured, because her
parents had a bitter divorce and she had to travel very far to come
to school, and she was miserable, and I didn't know about it but Lynn
did, because she explained it was Schrode and Sherr, so seating made
them friends, and Angela became a professor of French literature at
Sarah Lawrence, and just sitting and talking made that night just
wonderful, we could hardly stop. I hadn't known, I think, that her
mother had married Claude Rains, who Angela said was a difficult man.
And Hughie's girlfriend doesn't come.
She was an extroverted girl, with a nice full chest, with kind of
short, straight dark hair, who I thought was just so unobtainable and
we ran in very different circles, she certainly seemed, as we say,
much more advanced socially, and we didn't have any classes together,
but I kind of looked at her, and sometimes, is it my imagination, or
did she sometimes look at me? Maybe once or twice, maybe. Probably
not. We never spoke. I sure wish she had come to some of our
reunions. I'd like to see her again. Maybe she did, but I don't
think so.
Her name was Connie Petropolis, I
think.
Budd Shenkin