1948-Wallace Convention in Philadelphia, Truman Election, Editor for Lou Relin's Lincoln High Landmarks.
Worked as editor for my high school English teacher's yearbook. Also kept his classes attendance logs. Students were taking their photos for the book.
Time of Slavin's Solid Geometry course and run-in with Orgel with George Gabin, who now, at the age of 80, is incredibly a world class European artist! Thank God sister Roz helped me out of that mess.
It was a period of intense shyness and feelings of physical inadequacy which was not helped by acne.
Decided to switch to night high school (Seward Park) to avoid some of the difficulties I was having in my senior year at Lincoln High. Murray Liebman encouraged me to make the switch since he wanted an intelligent companion to help him through some of the courses he was taking, like English, American History, and Economics. He really seemed to enjoy listening and talking to our Economics teacher on the subject of the Wall Street Stock Market.
2/49
Switch to Night School. In English and American History class with Murray Liebman. We took the American History Regents together and the night the teacher handed out our grades I was absent. When I asked him how I did he first teased me and then fessed up that I had received the highest mark in the class, and that the teacher told the class that in all his many years of teaching American History he had never read such a brillant analysis of the Spanish-American War period in United States History on a Regent's Examination!
After that bit of suprising news I realized what a good friend Murray was and has been from 18 to 80.
It is strange how the act of reminiscing and writing are so much at odds with each other. Writing about the past seems to always be pushing you into the present and demands that you organize, shape, and polish the stream of consciousness of your past life.
Summer of 1949
I can't remember at all what I did then. I think it may have been carrying beach chairs? A really weird Coney Island type Summer job.
Going back to January of 1948 I went back to Lincoln High to pick up my grades in physics. I had an interesting teacher who had been Irving Ziller's teacher and had nominated him for the Physics Medal at his Graduation. That teacher (Edelman, or something like that) was from England, very dignified--he wanted me to take the Westinghouse Science Test!!! I won his attention by my first hand knowledge of vibrating strings from my study of the violin, an important subject which goes back to Greek Pythagorean Philosophers and endorsed by Plato.
The day I picked up my Physics grades was after the night of sister Shirley's marriage to the Columbia Grad school novelist, Eugene Ziller. There was an orgy of drinking at that wedding and I remember being put to bed by an old family friend, Irving Kaufman, who was nicknamed 'Red' for his red hair, which is now gray. Is that the fate of all red heads? Like the Mentalist's "Red John?"
He folded my arms as if I were a corpse and smilingly consoled me that Eugene and Shirley were off to New England for their Honeymoon and that it was time for me to, "Gay Schloffen," Yiddish for me to go to sleep. And then he placed a small bouquet of red roses in my folded hands.
When I woke up it was a rainy, miserable cold day. I went to our corner candy store for a cup of coffee and I felt like hell with my first hangover from the night before. Although I felt encouraged by the good grades I received in Physics, it was then that I resolved to go to night school.
To be continued
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