Toting a Briefcase: School Days Sans Backpacks

You see them everywhere. Now that school has reconvened I am treated to the adorable vision of children walking city streets with a backpack chock full of books, pencils, erasers and other supplies strapped to their backs. The older they get the fuller and weightier the backpacks appear.

I didn’t have a backpack when I attended elementary school back in the 1950s. I lugged around a leather briefcase that weighed almost as much as I did (I kid you not. I was severely underweight as a youngster, so much so that my sister every day prepared a milk shake enhanced with a raw egg for me, alas to no avail. I remained a stick figure of bones barely covered by skin. My parents, especially my mother, threatened to send me to the polar opposite of a fat farm, a place where skinny kids were bulked up. Of course, my overly skinny childhood and teenage years paid off when I failed my military draft physical as a 21-year-old but that’s a story for another day—if you can’t wait for that day, here’s a link to a previous blog about my draft physical: http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2009/11/veterans-day-salutes.html).

As a youngster toting a heavy briefcase my hands would develop blisters at the base of my fingers. The briefcase was golden brown in color and a size that would have made any first year law associate proud. That’s the closest I ever came to experiencing life as a lawyer. 

I leaned to the opposite side of the hand grasping the handle, the better to maintain balance. I could barely walk half a block before switching hands for relief. The only benefit from the heavy load was it anchored me to earth should a brisk wind threaten to lift my slight frame off the ground.

My elementary school didn’t have lockers to store books overnight. Neither did our desks have large storage wells. We had to schlep books to and from school each day. And since I attended a Jewish day school in Brooklyn (Yeshiva Rambam) we had more books than public school kids because of the extra courses in Hebrew and religious studies.

Now, you might be wondering why I am making such a big deal about lugging a heavy briefcase. Didn’t I ride a  school bus? Not after first grade. From second grade on I took two city buses, the B49 from Avenue W up Ocean Avenue to Kings Highway, then the B7 along Kings Highway to East 31st Street.

Ocean Avenue was a block and a half from our home on Avenue W. School started at 9 am. The trip to school, if the buses were on time, took 30 minutes. On many a morning my brother, sister and I would be challenged to arrive at the bus stop in time to catch the 8:30 bus. Often it was late.

There were no bus shelters, not along Ocean Avenue or at the transfer point at Kings Highway, no place to seek shelter from the weather. If it rained we got wet. If it snowed we got wet and froze. If it was just cold and windy, we froze. If it were hot and sticky, we sweated. 

Each month we’d get a different colored bus pass. Five dollars for unlimited travel. 

All in all, while going to and from school wasn’t as arduous as the process recounted by my father in his shtetl in Poland (“We had to walk miles in snow up to our knees”), my experience was not pleasant. 

As long as I’m recalling early school days, the recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida evoked an enduring memory. It was early in the school year. I was in either first, second or, most probably, third grade. I remember strong winds lashing leafy tree limbs across the windows of our classroom. Our teacher, probably Mrs. Schlesinger, tried to assure her 35 seven- and eight-year-old students there was nothing to fear, but as dismissal time approached, no one was eager to head home. Fortunately, at 4:30 the storm subsided and we hurried to our respective school or city buses for the ride home.

Brooklyn on My Mind and Everyone Else's

Brooklyn is enjoying another moment in the sun, not that it was ever truly dark. Lately, however, the cognoscente have seemingly rediscovered my native borough, driving up real estate prices, populating the byways with flavorful, exotic fare, building skyscraper apartment houses, even turning the once tallest structure in the county—the Williamsburg Savings Bank on Flatbush Avenue—into a co-op with multi-million dollar penthouse units.   

The latest enchantment to illuminate Brooklyn is a film adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn. The movie opened Wednesday (http://nyti.ms/1iBkP1T); the book was published in 2009. I didn’t read the book, haven’t yet seen the film. But I did grow up in the time and place the heroine of Tóibín’s tale emigrated to from Ireland in the 1950s.

There’s a lot of nostalgia surrounding Brooklyn these days, an emotion that has engulfed me as well. Perhaps it is pushed forward by Bernie Sanders’ quixotic campaign for the presidency as evidenced by an article a few months ago chronicling his Kings County roots (http://nyti.ms/1VFhZZi).

A few weeks earlier The New York Times ran a story about ex- Brooklynites returning to live in, or at least visit, the borough (http://nyti.ms/1JXIeno). 

Truth be told, the parts of Brooklyn mostly and longingly portrayed in film and print—areas such as Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, Brooklyn Heights—are far removed from the Brooklyn of my childhood, the northern part of Sheepshead Bay along Avenue W between East 18th and East 19th Streets, a block west of Ocean Avenue. It was on the southern side of this treelined street of attached single-family row houses with the occasional (to my knowledge, illegal) ground floor tenant where I enjoyed a pleasant, if not idyllic, upbringing.

Small things now evoke long-cached memories. 

The other day I spotted a tennis ball atop a grated storm sewer cover. I was transported back to the street stickball games I played. The leafy maple and sycamore trees along Avenue W posed one type of hazard to be overcome—if you caught a ball on its way down from a tree you recorded an out, but if it fell to the ground you would call “hindoo,” and a do-over was in order. 

The trees, however, were not the biggest obstacle. Balls, usually pink Spaldeens, falling into storm drains could wash out any game. Unless, unless you had a wire clothes hanger you could stretch out and, lowering the hook end into the sewer basin, fish the ball up from the murky bottom.  

Our grandson Finley loves playing with toy trucks, usually in his home’s carpeted basement or living room. I, on the other hand, played “dump truck” outside, on the dirt edge of the grass of our front lawn. 

As we got older, my friends and I shifted our play spot to the dirt under the trees between the street and the sidewalk. Our choice of “toy” also “matured” into pen knives. We’d play a game called “Territory.” You would start off with equal plots of land. By throwing your knife into your adversary’s dirt adjacent to your plot, you could claim more territory, but only if the blade stood the knife upright with at least two fingers’ worth of clearance from the ground. 

Oh, I neglected to mention an important part of the game. When your foe threw his knife you were required to stand astride your territory, an act of courage made all the more challenging as your territory diminished in size. I don’t recall any foot injuries, though I would not be surprised to know I am repressing memories of mishaps. 

One doesn’t see any yellow Checker cabs anymore, but they were the preferred and common conveyance when our mother took us to the beach back in the 1950s. Their back seats were deep enough to accommodate two round jump seats that folded into the floorboard when not used. We’d go to Brighton Beach, eat cold meatloaf or hamburger sandwiches our mother made and buy cool orange drinks in short, cardboard containers from vendors who pushed through the sand with hot ice boxes slung over their shoulders while wearing safari hats to shield the burning rays of the sun. 

Sometimes, Saturday nights during the summer, our whole family would go to Coney Island. My favorite ride was a train ride on a track that circumvented the entire kiddie park. When darkness veiled the night, we would sit on the sand and take in the weekly fireworks display. Afterward we’d bundle back into the car and as we approached home our father would sing one of the few American western songs he knew, “Home, home on the range/ where the deer and the antelope play/ where seldom is heard, a discouraging word/ and the sky is not cloudy all day.”

Graduation Day

Fifty years ago I graduated from Yeshiva Rambam, a Jewish elementary day school in Brooklyn, the most notable feature of which was its playground on the roof of its building at 3121 Kings Highway. Thirty-one boys, 13 girls were in my eighth grade class, some of whom have gone on to notable careers, previously mentioned in this blog entry: http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2012/01/elementary-ties.html. 

We studied Jewish material—Bible, Talmud, Hebrew language, ritual practices—in the morning, English subjects in the afternoon. Classes began at 9; by the time we were in eighth grade they finished at 5. It was a long day, interrupted only three times, for 20 minute outdoor recesses on the roof in the morning and afternoon plus a 30-minute hot lunch in the school auditorium. 

I was among the youngest in my grade, my birthday falling as it did in March. Just 5-1/2 years old when I entered first grade, by rights I should have been placed in kindergarten. But with the leverage of paying for two other children at Rambam, my mother insisted I be a first grader. 

Rambam was just under three miles from our home on Avenue W. When I started, my brother, sister and I rode a school bus to Rambam. As a first grader, however, my dismissal was at 3, theirs at 5. That first day I boarded the bus for the return trip home all by myself. The next thing I knew I was back at school. I had slept through my stop and did not awaken until the bus had returned to school for its next round of deliveries. Being disoriented, I panicked. Fortunately, my sister arrived on the scene to calm me down. (In case you’re wondering, my mother had gone back to work so she wasn’t home when the bus pulled up in front of our house.)

By second grade I had matriculated with my siblings to public transportation, the B-49 Ocean Avenue bus, a block and a half from our home, to Kings Highway where we transferred to a bus going east to 31st Street. We had student bus passes which, if I remember correctly, cost $1 each month for unlimited rides. 

Two things made those rides memorable. First, it was a lot colder back in the 1950s. I know I sound like our parents and grandparents who would regale us with tales of their slogging through the snow to get to school. But trust me, it was colder when I grew up, especially if you had to stand waiting for a bus to arrive. There were no bus shelters along our route, no stores you could pop into to catch a few moments of warmth while you waited. 

Second, books were heavier back then. I used to shlep to school each day a big leather briefcase packed with thick textbooks. My family teased me that the weight of the briefcase was the only thing keeping me grounded against strong gusts of wind given my skinny-malink status. 

My first grade English teacher was Mrs. Malka. She was probably just around 25 at the time, but seemed older to me. Years later, some 40 years later actually, on Rosh Hashanah eve in our temple in White Plains, I sat behind a fellow congregant whose sister was visiting him. It was Mrs. Malka. She looked the same. I’d see her every year. She passed away a few years ago.

Second grade introduced us to corporal punishment. Our English teacher exacted discipline by either pinching your nose tightly or by bracing your arms while standing behind you and thrusting her knee into your back. When we complained to our parents they, naturally, sided with her, reasoning we must have done something bad to merit such cruel punishment. 

Our third grade English teacher opted for solitary confinement as her preferred means of discipline. She’d place you in a dark coat closet, a practice the administration ultimately forced her to abandon after she forgot to liberate a student when the dismissal bell rang and he was left at school. 

Her Hebrew counterpart was much beloved, especially for the concertina he would play. His most memorable foible was not allowing you to use the footrest in the back of the desk in front of you. “When your feet go up, your brains go down,” he would admonish us. 

Almost all of the Hebrew teachers were either Israeli or from Europe. Our eighth grade Hebrew teacher was thin, bespectacled, with an air of Peter Lorre about him. He’d break cigarettes in half and smoke them in class, holding them like a pincer in his forefinger and thumb, just as we’d seen too many Germans do in too many World War II movies. It gave us the willies.  

There are lots more memories, but this blog, no doubt, already has exceeded most of your tolerances. The elementary school is no more, the building transformed into a wing of Kings Highway Hospital. Yeshiva Rambam, as the saying goes, was very good to me.