NO SAFETY

   

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.

Butterflies had colors that I didn’t see anywhere else, except maybe in a big box of Crayola Crayons. The Monarch butterfly had a body that was as black as coal, but dotted with pure white spots. The Tiger Swallowtail had intense yellow wings with long black stripes. The Black Swallowtail really wasn’t black. It was black and blue and purple, all mixed together in a color I had no name for.

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.

PS 69 looked like some kind of institution for housing criminals or lunatics. It had a “Boys Entrance” and a “Girls Entrance.” I did not realize how drab and gloomy it was until I got to Maryland Hall. On the Hopkins campus I felt as if I were in a park. The buildings were separated by grassy lawns. Wide, tree-lined walkways connected one building to another. Instead of the oaks and maples that I was used to in my neighborhood, the walkways near Maryland Hall were lined with flowering trees like dogwood and magnolia, with pink and white blossoms.

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.

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