No Safety
Going to college was not something I thought very much about as a kid. No one in my family had ever gone to college. I certainly never expected to go when I was only eleven.
But
I did.
Here’s
how it happened.
It’s
spring—1948. I’m eleven years old. I’m much smaller than the other boys my age,
and I’m not very strong. Every week I get to embarrass myself in gym. Of all
the things I’m not good at, climbing the rope is the worst.
A
long thick rope hangs down from the ceiling of the gym. It ends just a few
inches above the floor. When Miss Frissel blows her whistle, I’m supposed to
leap up, grab the rope and pull myself up, hand over hand, until I reach the
top. Most of the boys scamper up like monkeys. When it’s my turn, I just hang
there, grunting and flailing, my sneakers barely off the ground. My hands sweat
and slip on the rope as the other kids wait behind me and watch. Miss Frissel
leaves me to my misery. I swing back and forth for a few more seconds,
then—mercifully—she blows her whistle and the next boy begins his climb. Head
down, I shuffle over to stand with the kids who have finished, wishing I were
invisible.
This
pathetic performance goes on week after week, from February to June.
Imagine
my surprise then, when a few weeks before summer vacation, my classmates elect
me to be the next Captain of the Safety Patrol—the greatest honor you can
achieve in the sixth grade. Maybe—I think—being able to climb a rope is not so
important after all.
Safeties
stand at the street corners before and after school and at lunchtime, and stop
traffic so the younger kids can cross safely. As Captain, I get to assign the
other Patrol members to their street corners, and make sure they show up on
time and know their duties. This is a very big responsibility!
Safeties
get to wear a uniform: white pants and a white shirt. Instead of a badge, they
have a shoulder belt that goes diagonally across their chests, from the right
shoulder down to the left hip. The belt is a couple of inches wide, thicker
than a car safety belt, and it has “Safety
patrol” written along its length in big orange letters. I think about
how good I will look, and how proud I will feel, running (not shuffling) from
corner to corner, checking up on my
Safeties.
As
Captain, I wouldn’t just stand on the corner. I would really stand out,
every day, several times a day as the whole school passes by. This would feel a
lot better than standing out in gym every week as a clumsy hopeless
rope-climber.
Because
I’m a “midyear” (kids who turned five after September were called
“midyears,” because we had to wait until January—the middle of the school
year—to begin Kindergarten. For me, the second half of sixth grade would be
from September to January) I can’t
begin my new post until September. That’s a long time to wait! Luckily, I have summer
vacation to look forward to, so I comfort myself with thoughts of the things I
will do until I go back to school in the fall.
My
summer days were always special because I had the freedom to explore. Some of
the explorations were done on my own. I loved Nature, and I often spent time
just searching for the world that was hidden in the underbrush in my
neighborhood. There were colorful flowers and berries, along with the insects
that crawled on and under them, like the spiders that hid deep in the branches
of bushes. Sometimes I would poke a long stick into one of their webs and twirl
it, winding a thick silk covering onto it. Then I could touch the silk without
worrying that the spider would get me. Its texture was sticky and rough at the
same time, like nothing I had ever felt before.
And
summer was butterfly season. Whenever an especially large and colorful one flew
by I would watch it flit and glide toward a flowering bush. When it finally
landed on a blossom I would sneak up behind it. Quickly, with my heart
pounding, I would grasp it between my thumb and forefinger, just above the
place where the wings joined the body. That way I wouldn’t harm it, and it
couldn't flap its wings and get away.
When
I held it up close I could see the little hooks at the ends of its legs that
helped it to hang on to the flowers it drank from. If I had hooks like that, I
could have climbed the rope in gym. The butterfly’s tongue was long, but it was
all coiled up until it was ready to suck nectar. Each antenna was like a long
thin stalk, but it had a little club on the end.
But
crayons were hard and waxy. Butterfly wings were soft and delicate. If I
gripped the wings too roughly, the color would flake right off on my
fingertips. So I tried to hold on very carefully while I studied it. Then I
would let it go and watch it fly off to another flower. This was so much better than looking at the black and white
drawings in nature books.
Another
thing I looked forward to in the summer was exploring with my friends. We were
Cub Scouts, so we knew how to make a fire and cook food over it. We would walk
to Leakin Park, which was four or five miles away. It had woods and picnic
tables and barbeque pits that we knew were safe to build a fire in. We cooked
hot dogs, baked beans and marshmallows, and even when they got burnt they
tasted much better than anything our mothers ever cooked for us. We ate no
vegetables, and we didn’t even wash our hands. We could eat seconds or even
thirds if we wanted, and no one told us we would make ourselves sick. We
learned that for ourselves.
If
it rained we all ganged up on someone’s covered porch and read comics all day.
My favorite was Captain Marvel, but Herbie thought Superman could beat him any
day. Sheldon was a Batman fan. We argued about whether Plastic Man’s
flexibility was better than the supersonic speed of The Whiz. We wondered if
The Heap would ever get a girlfriend.
Some
days we built model airplanes or played cards or Monopoly. Every day would be
like going to summer camp, but without the counselors to tell us what to do—or not to do!
But
I never got to be Captain of the Safety Patrol, and I never had the summer
vacation I was expecting either. This happened because of another honor that
was bestowed or—really—imposed on
me.
It
was all because I was such a good student. Each summer throughout the city,
some sixth grade midyear students were given the opportunity to “skip” the
second half of the sixth grade, and begin junior high school (seventh grade) in
the fall. I was one of two students who were selected from my class. My parents
said I had to go to Summer School.
I
was outraged by this! I didn’t just want to be Captain of the Safeties: I needed to be Captain. I finally had a way to prove to the
kids in my class that I could be a leader—not just the skinny kid dangling
helplessly at the end of a rope. How could skipping half a grade be more
important than this? I felt that my mother and father had betrayed me.
Looking
back on this now, I think my parents must have realized that if my grades were
good enough to skip, there was a chance I might be able to win a scholarship to
go to college. They had no money to send me to college. The only way I could go
would be on a scholarship.
But
if I was a midyear student, there could be a problem. Since colleges did not
have midyear classes, those of us who would eventually graduate high school in
January would not be able to begin a regular four-year academic program until
the following September. That meant I would be out of school for nearly nine
months.
If
that was their concern, no one
explained it to me. And if they had, I would not have understood. To a
twelve-year-old, a nine-month vacation from school would have sounded good. To
a parent, it was an enormous waste of time—or worse. In nine months I could
lose interest in going to college. At that time in my life my father, who had
only a high-school education, went from job to job. He had no security. He
wanted something better for me, and a college degree was the way to get it.
I
announced to my class that they had to choose another Captain. I felt sad
because I had to give up something that I felt I had earned. I remember being
so angry that I declared, as well, that I planned to fail Summer School so that I could return to my class in the fall and claim my honor.
Summer
School turned out to be a great adventure. Up to that point, the only school I
had ever gone to was just a half-block from my home at 4008 Oakford Avenue. For
six years I walked two minutes to school. Then two minutes home for lunch. Then
two minutes back to school. And at the end of the school day, two minutes home.
But
the first morning of Summer School I was picked up by a bus, and returned home
in the afternoon. I had never been on a bus that was entirely dedicated to
getting me from my house to my destination. It was door-to-door service. The
only stops were to pick up the other kids, who lived in neighborhoods I had
never been in.
And
our destination? That was the best part. Summer School was held on the campus
of The Johns Hopkins University. We met all day in a single classroom in a
building called Maryland Hall. Our room was on a corner of the building, on the
first floor. This photo shows that very corner.
In
the basement of Maryland Hall were the laboratories in which engineering
students did research toward completion of their Masters and Doctoral degrees.
The room in which we met, that summer of 1948, was directly above the basement
laboratory in which I would carry on my own PhD research, ten years later.
I had no idea, of course, that this building—actually this very
classroom—would be a part of my future. In that one room I would later take
classes with names like Thermodynamics, and Transport Phenomena, and Chemical
Kinetics and Applied Mathematics. The bulk of my engineering education would
take place in that single room. All I knew then, in the summer of 1948, was
that I had been transported—literally—to a world I had not known existed.
It’s
hard to describe how different Summer School on the Hopkins campus was from
regular school at PS 69. Maybe this next picture helps.

In addition, I had new classmates. Until that summer I
had spent six years with the same kids. Once in a while someone new moved into
the neighborhood and I had a new classmate and friend. But it really was only
once in a while. In six years I remember only four “newcomers” to PS 69. They
were Leroy Frazier, Skippy Loss, Leonard Miller and Herbie Press. But now in my
new class there were twenty boys and girls from all over the city. We were
all bright and verbal and excited
to be there. Instead of walking home for lunch every day we sat outside on the
lawns and had picnics.
I
got along well with my new classmates. I felt good about myself. I suppose part
of this was that I was somehow able to leave PS 69 behind as I boarded the bus
each morning. I was having fun, and the disappointment of missing out on summer
vacation was quickly forgotten.
And
just as rapidly, summer itself ended and I found myself starting the seventh
grade at Garrison Junior High School. I no longer needed to be Captain of the
Safety Patrol. I had new classmates, new friends, and a school that was more
than two minutes from my home. Not that much more! Now it took me about ten
minutes to walk four blocks to school.
Still:
it was a beginning. My world was expanding. I was getting ready to grow.