When we last left this shaggy tale of my "intellectual development," a year or so into my time at St. Bernard's Boys High School, I had fallen in with a geeky crowd of debaters and newspaper and yearbook types. I was about to begin the story of how I became editor of The Sabre, SBBHS's Columbia Scholastic Press Award-winning newsmagazine and, in the course of a year, so mismanaged it that it became a mimeo sheet handout.
But first, after I posted the last installment, my friend and former classmate Garret Condon sent the link around to the group of high school friends we call the Seminar Room Group, and on the little e-mail list serve we use to plan annual Thanksgiving reunions, a number of them commented, bringing forth a gusher of reminiscences and reminding me of things I'd long forgotten (or suppressed). I seem to have a bad memory for a memoirist.
In my memories of The Sabre, I hired a bunch of longhairs, who like me had little interest in the sports that were the lifeblood of much of the school (and, I learned the hard way, the lifeline of many alumni), and to make more room for our cogent essays (Peter Emanuel on Joni Mitchell's freshly released album, Blue) and hard-hitting investigative journalism (what really goes on in Mr. McKenna's humanities class?) , we radically pared back sports coverage. As a consequence, we lost a number of advertisers and with the school administration unwilling to make up the subsidy (I remember a stern dressing-down in the office of Brother Brendan, the principal), we were forced to cut production costs and abandon the offset, two-color magazine format that had won such unusual notice for a small Catholic school in southeastern Connecticut.
My former classmates helped me to remember that it was probably not just what we cut, but what we RAN that plunged The Sabre (where did we get that martial name, I wonder? Was St. Bernard of Clairvaux martyred with one, or did he run around brandishing one?). I'd forgotten, apparently, according to Bob Phillips, that in his "swan song at The Sabre, he compared Muhammad Ali to Jesus Christ and mobilized the religious right against me before they even knew they existed."
Someone else dredged up the group involved, CUFF (Citizens United for the Faith), which indeed, it is all coming back to me, waged a campaign to "take back" St. Bernard's and diocesan Catholic education from the Christian Brothers, whose younger recruits, along with a few lay teachers, we coming a bit apart at the seams in the late 1960's. In the words of Garret Condon, "the typical St. Bernard's student has a casual disrespect for authority," and indeed St. Bernard's was one of the least authoritarian institutions I have ever been affiliated with, despite the presence of a few brothers who were a bit free with their hands (in the slapping, not -- as far as I know -- groping department). Religion classes were more like an ongoing seminar in ethics, Night and Fog was shown and discussed, there were truly innovative classes on myth, fantasy and science fiction, and a number of the teachers -- barely older than the students -- treated us, or so we thought, as peers, almost adults. So not long after we graduated, the Diocese came back in with a heavy hand, and our little Glasnost-on-the-Thames (this being New London, that's THAYMES, not TEMS to you) came to an end.
But it made an impression on me.
Somehow or another, while in high school I developed an attachment to New York. In the StoryCorps interview I did with my mother a few years back, she recalls me as a toddler telling people that I was going to live in New York, but -- naturally -- I have no recollection of that, and it might as well have been California when I was growing up, despite being three hours away by car or train. The only trip I took there before my later teens was on a Greyhound bus with my father and brother (I threw up on the way, which I had a tendency to do on long car trips in those days) to the 1964 New York World's Fair. We came back the same night, and all I remember of that is the Pieta and the ferris wheel in the shape of a giant U.S. Royal tire. But as I got older, the appeal of New York beckoned, maybe because so many of the TV sitcoms I watched -- and in those days, the late night talk shows like Cavett and Carson -- were set or based there. I fell asleep at night to WNBC's clear-channel radio station, call-in talk shows led by Lee Leonard, Brad Crandall and Long John Nebel.
I took out subscriptions to the Village Voice and New York Magazine, both in their exhilarating heydays, and I was surely the only 16-year old subscriber to The New York Review of Books in Westerly, Rhode Island. I could discourse on Mike Quill and the 1966 transit strike, the wars over City College, Leonard Bernstein and the Black Panthers, the Stonewall uprising, and why Mario Procaccino, though a Democrat, had no right to be be New York City's Mayor.
In the fall of 1971, it came time to apply for college. The school guidance counselor -- Brother Vincent, I think -- had a tendency to steer students to Catholic colleges, and as a good student with strong extracurricular activities (I also chaired the Cultural Assembly committee of the Student Council, which failed to entice Spiro Agnew as a speaker but managed to get Up With People), I was encouraged in the direction of Boston College and Georgetown.
But I was by that time too aware of the wider world to want to continue my education among white ethnics like myself. I wanted to be among people who were different. That course might have led me, say, to Howard University, but in the end I decided -- maybe it was my New York-o-philia -- that I wanted to be around Jews. They seemed like interesting and significant people to me. So after a few safety schools, my first choice, where I hoped to go, was Brandeis. I figured they might have an affirmative action program for Catholic school students.
But I didn't get in. My second choice, Yale, wait-listed me, and my third choice, Columbia, took me (I later learned, when I had a friend in the admissions office, because THEY had an affirmative action program for Catholic school students). Though I had no idea at the time, it turned out to be a pretty good place to meet Jews, and in no time I was spending my Saturday evenings strolling down Broadway to pick up H and H Bagels and the Sunday times, smattering my conversation with Yiddishisms.
I never set foot on the Columbia campus -- or any of the colleges I applied to -- before my parents drove me there on September 1, 1972 to register for classes. I did, however, have an alumni interview, in downtown New London, Connecticut, late one afternoon in the office of a lawyer, Seymour Hendel, who later became a judge. I don't remember much of it except one exchange, when he asked me what magazines I read.
to be continued
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