We were living is West Philadelphia, and the story goes that my parents went to a parent teacher conference with my fourth grade teacher, Miss Ousey. (“Don't call her Miss Lousy,” my mother warned, “you'll forget some day and call her that in person!”) “He's doing very well,” she assured my parents, “definitely college material.” That was high praise in her eyes, but my parents thought, such a low bar! And with that, all of us kids were enrolled in Friends Central School, one of the numerous Quaker schools in Philadelphia, this one out on City Line Avenue, about 30 or 40 minutes away on city streets, depending on traffic, and an hour and a half for me coming home on bus to 69th Street Terminal, el (elevated subway train) to 44th Street and Market Street, and bus to home at 47th and Osage Avenue. For those who are interested in some down and dirty, the 69th Street Terminal had some temptations – mostly glazed doughnuts where kids who wanted to be down and dirty assembled, and the 46th Street station was half a block from the studios of WFIL, where American Bandstand was located in the afternoons, so I do to see the kids lined up waiting to get in. Me, I just went home.
Going to Friends' Central in 5th grade was quite a change for me. In fourth grade at the Henry C. Lea Elementary School at 47th and Spruce, I felt as though I were king of the hill. I was the smartest kid in the class, probably the best athlete, our class's representative to student council, we played all sorts of sports in the concrete schoolyard, I had a ring of best friends, and what could be better? FCS,however, was quite another story. Whole new suburban experience, my mother claimed there was a fair amount of anti-Semitism – I imagine there was, but mostly it was a set of kids who had their friends and their social order set before I got there, and new ladders to establish order – was I the best athlete anymore, the smartest, the best card flipper, or what? And yes, there were Jewish kids and WASP kids, and there was a real difference.
And that's where Jonathan Gross enters the picture. He was one of the Jewish kids, as his name implies, and both of us expected to be the smartest kid in the class. He had come to FCS the year before me, in 4th grade. I guess he already was the smartest. I didn't think about it much, I was more interested in competing in sports, I think. But you know what? As I look back on it now, even though it was all pretty unconscious then, and I always try to downplay it – the truth is, I've always been pretty competitive. Not overtly, maybe – it was just starting to be the age of cool in American society, but I was right in there with it early, cool, be cool. No big celebration when you scored your touchdown, just drop the ball as if that's just doing the expected. Cool. I note with great interest that now, maybe 70 years later, as I'm learning French, one of the common words in French remains “cool.” Which I think is cool as hell.
I was probably the best athlete in the class – Bob Hall was pretty good, but as time went on, I played shorlstop, I was the best hitter, I was the best basketball player, and I played halfback in football. The first time I set foot on the touch football field in fifth grade and the PE teacher, Frank Grof, threw his pass and I grabbed it and went for a touchdown, I saw him look at me. OK, the new kid looks pretty good. So I was right where I wanted to be in sports.
Gross sat with me in the gym at the start of 7th grade and we were choosing sports, and he tried to get me to go with him to wrestling. Jon was strong, but slow and not terribly well coordinated. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but when the young PE part time instructors saw me dribble and shoot, they smiled with relief – Here's someone who knows how to play, they said. No wrestling for me.
We moved to Wynnewood after four years at Friends' Central and even though we were closer now to FCSl than when we lived in West Philly, the public schools in Lower Merion were quite good, so my parents stopped paying four private tuitions, and I spent 9th grade at Ardmore Junior High before moving across the driveway to Lower Merion High (years later, this was Kobe Bryant's high school). Imagine my surprise when I found that one of my new classmates at LM was Jonathan Gross. Our class was strong, and I can't say I was the smartest, but neither was Gross, although we both contended. I remember we were in chemistry together, it must have been 11th grade, and we had a standing test like a spelling bee, and if you made a mistake you had to sit down. Jon and I were the last ones standing. Who was smarter? Hard to tell, but I think I always thought that I was. Jon was definitely math and science, but I was across the board.
But I should also mention this. Gross and I were sure we were the smartest in our FCS class, and no doubt we were, no doubt. In 7th grade we had a new kid come into the class as we moved to the Upper School, a little kid with a big blondish pompadour, Barry Sharpless. My Dad knew Sharpless's dad since they were doctors together in Philadelphia. Their family was of Danish descent. Sharpless was smart enough, but not enough to dethrone Gross or me. He was always playing around with a chemistry set over in the corner of our classroom. Some years later in 2001, it was a shock to both Gross and me when Sharpless, then at Scripps in La Jolla in southern California, his pompadour long gone as he had gone bald, was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. And we were surprised as well when he won his second Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2022. Which just goes to show you how corrupt the Nobel Prizes are, when they can't even tell who is the smartest one in the class.
“Known for his groundbreaking work in stereoselective reactions and click chemistry, he is one of only two scientists in history to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry (winning in 2001 and 2022).”
But to get back to the main story here, after Lower Merion I went on to Harvard, and Jon went down the banks of the Charles to MIT. We saw each other sometimes – Jon was not a particularly romantic fellow, it seemed, but somehow around our junior year in college he had gotten the very pretty Sally Ann Ford, daughter of the Penn athletic director Jerry Ford, pregnant and they had gotten married. Amazing. Jon went on to get his doctorate in math and wound up professor of computer science at Columbia, and I wound up going to Harvard Medical School. Somehow, since I was much the better athlete and the better writer and general humanities student, although I had to concede he was far better at math, I thought I still had the high ground, and he probably felt the same way about himself. I really don't know.
Here is his retirement summary from Columbia – I have to say, it's so much more impressive than anything I could claim for myself. https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2016/jonathan-gross-retires/. It's so unreasonable that I should hold myself superior in any way – yet that's the way I feel. He has really been amazing in math and as a professor. Such a devoted teacher. Or maybe it's not a competitive thing at all. I have a tendency to assume a role of a father figure. Jon is so naive in so many endearing ways. Maybe that more faithfully describes our relationship. Maybe I'm being unfair to myself. And after all, Jon had so much of a tougher time than I did with family disruption – I won't go into it, except to say that his father acted very badly toward their family, and our mutual friend John Raezer's father helped out by going over to Gross's house and threatening that if his father did some of his shit again he could come over and beat the shit out of him. I think that was the way it worked.
Our Lower Merion class has stayed in touch over the years, especially since the onset of email, so Jon and I have stayed in touch. We now realize that we are among our oldest friends. Of course my brother and sisters are older friends to me, and Bob Levin, who was my classmate at both Lea School and Friends' Central, and maybe our mutual friend John Raezer who I actually met first in nursery school and who was president of our high school class at Lower Merion and my college roommate for four years and has remained close to both me and Jon for maybe over 70 years now. But other than that, we are each other's oldest friend. And, inevitably, competitor.
He lives just outside of Philadelphia and will soon move to Princeton in New Jersey, but he has come out here to the Bay Area a couple of times to help his daughter when she had a baby a year or two ago, and I drove down maybe twice to visit him and his lovely wife. We correspond on email and he keeps me up on his health. He has Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, the most common inherited neuropathy, which has led to his using a walker for many years. He does very well with it, considering.
So, a complicated relationship. Elements of collegiality, competition, nurturing, all of it. Getting older together. Remembering the past.
And then, a couple of days ago, I got an email from Grossie, as I now call him affectionately. He said,
Hi Budd, We are both on today’s amethyst Duolingo ladder. I see that you’ve been addicted to Duolingo for two years more that I have. Most of the time I’m doing Hebrew. Sometimes I do German. What languages do you do on Duolingo? —Jon
I wrote back:
Budd Shenkin