I managed three posts in this series while on vacation this summer, have been away from it for a while. It's an attempt to look back and see how I may have come to think the way I do. At the end of the last one, I was ending eight years at Immaculate Conception School and off to start high school twenty miles away in Uncasville, Connecticut.
It wasn't predetermined that I would go to St. Bernard's Boys High School. My parents had gone to the local public high schools, and as a family we weren't that devoted to Catholic education. It's always hard to explain to non-Catholics that although there were crucifixes in all the bedrooms in our house and the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the wall in the foyer, we weren't particularly devout, just normal Catholics of the time who didn't question the standard rituals and symbols. People who went to Novena or had the priest come to bless their house -- now they were devout! Not us.
My cousin Steve, who I grew up with and remain close to, was nine months older than me, and when he graduated from St. Michael's elementary school across the river in Pawcatuck, he went to St. Bernard's, which I had never heard of. I am pretty sure he suggested to me that I think of going there, though it was a 35-minute bus ride away, and wanting to be cool like Steve, I must have convinced my parents, who had to fork over some hundreds of 1968 dollars in tuition and, until I was old enough to drive, come pick me up after extracurricular activities. I took the entrance exam, and was accepted.
I didn't think much at the time about the fact that it was an all-boys school (the girls' counterpart was in New London, Connecticut, some ten miles down the road), and that wasn't much of an element in the decision, though in retrospect it is the one aspect of my schooling there that I regret, because it retarded my social development with girls quite a bit, at least until I had summer jobs later in high school where I could hang out with them a bit in normal settings.
The campus of St. Bernard's was just a year old when I got there, and still felt fresh and spacious. It was a diocesan school run by the Christian Brothers. In the first year I was there, they relaxed the rules about the brothers' "habits," and some began to dress in blazers and ties, just like the lay teachers, and often quite nattily. My father taught me how to care for clothes and shoes and groom myself, but a few of my teachers were more of a model for style, as my Dad rarely varied from a gray suit, white shirt, dark tie Mad Men kind of look. Other brothers preferred a black suit and collar, not too different from the look of priests, and the older ones wore floor length tunics with a starched bib -- on a nun it would be called a wimple, I think, but I'm not sure if that is the right term for male religious -- that looked like a blank version of the Ten Commandments.
Although it didn't register with me at the time, since they were adult authority figures, the vast majority of my teachers were quite young men, barely out of college themselves, 23 or 24, and in their first teaching posts. But I don't remember their inexperience as much as their enthusiasm, and in some cases, passion, for what they were doing, whether it was leading the debate club or newspaper, teaching about The Red Badge of Courage or Greek myths, or navigating the shoals of algebra and geometry. While, as I have written in earlier installments of these musings, I don't remember much of what I was taught in elementary school, I do remember a lot of high school, particularly the English and humanities classes.
I recently came across one of the first papers I did for Mr. Lamoureux in English I -- as it happens, a "critical review" of The Red Badge of Courage. I cherished the A, and his red-penned cover comment, "You explain yourself well." Inside, I see, I tried to explain my lack of enthusiasm for the book, and ended "If a classic is not enjoyed, has it not been understood? Does a classic have to be enjoyed?" To which he wrote, again in red, "NO! A classic is judged by the mass of generally educated people, some of whom are not going to enjoy the particular 'classic' in question." Whatever that means.
In any case, I was being taken seriously in, if you will, intellectual terms, and as I look back on it, the chief value of my classroom education at St. Bernard's, whatever I may or may not retain about the content, was just that: I was on my way to being an adult, and being treated as one. I think all the best secondary education has that in common.
I grew up in a very small town, and went to elementary school with the same 25-30 kids for eight years. I had been used to being stereotyped as the geeky, non-athletic smart boy, and felt constrained and unchallenged by it. St. Bernard's was larger, drawing from a thirty-mile radius in southeastern Connecticut, and as a consequence, there was a critical mass of other geeky non-athletic smart boys. I had some company. I experienced the shock, and satisfaction, of recognition -- of kindred spirits who were as odd as me and in many ways odder.
I also had a bigger platform available to me, and early on I tried to step up to it. In the early weeks of my freshman year, a notice went up announcing a freshman public speaking contest. Anyone could enter with a three-minute speech on any subject. The winner would be given a spot on the junior varsity debate team.
I don't remember the earlier rounds of the competition, which was judged by Brother Philip, the debate team moderator, and probably a few other teachers. But I do remember making it to the finals in mid-November 1968 with two other boys, in the auditorium before an audience -- could it have been an assembly of the entire school? -- and feeling the thrill of nailing it with my passionate call for the country to rally behind the newly-elected President, Richard M. Nixon. After a short consultation among the judges, the results were announced, American Idol-style, and I was the newest member of the debate team.
Debate was a pivotal experience in my life because it made me comfortable with extemporaneous public speaking and disciplined me intellectally in ways that would resonate again and again in my later life and career. You not only had to muster the best arguments for your side, you had to understand the other side's arguments well so you could demolish them, too. In switch-side debating, which we occasionally did, you might have to argue both sides of a case in the same day, inevitably -- if you had strong political views, as I was coming to have -- making a case you disagreed with as soundly and passionately as you could. Each year we had a debate topic chosen by the National Forensic League (as close as I have ever gotten to the NFL) -- one year it was "unilateral military intervention," the next pollution.
I wasn't a great debater, making the rounds most weekends in tournaments at other Catholic high schools in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. I was good on my feet, so could get by without much work, as I always did in school, but I never had the discipline, distracted as I was by a million other pursuits, to prepare and practice as I should have, or as anyone needs to in order to really excel, as opposed to get by. I notched a few trophies, but wasn't in it for that. What I most enjoyed was the companionship and camaraderie of my fellow debaters. Here is the 1970 yearbook photo of the varsity team, which I had by that time been promoted to:
The debate team had a room to itself in a far corner of an upper floor of the school, called the Seminar Room, though to the best of my knowledge no seminars took place there. We had exclusive access, and we each had a key. When we didn't have classes -- and probably, sometimes when we did -- we would gather there and talk, fancying ourselves a kind of Algonquin Round Table of working-class white ethnic Connecticut. Despite my naive embrace of Nixon -- naive because it was grounded in my belief that he would end the Vietnam War, which I hated -- I was developing a personal politics that trended liberal, and the kids I hung around with in debate, and later, the school newspaper and student council, tilted that way, too. I had come from a family where politics was rarely discussed, and though my father was well-read and versed in current affairs, he was -- I now fondly recall -- the quintessial independent-minded voter, having angered my grandfather, with his French-Canadian shopkeeper Republican leanings, with his first vote for President, for Harry Truman in 1948, and disappointing himself, he periodically told me, by having chosen Eisenhower over Stevenson not once but twice in the 1950s. Somewhere in high school, I began to develop an ideology, a framework for making political choices that has to this day never found me standing in the polling booth agonized about which lever to pull or which box to fill in. How did that happen?
to be continued
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