The Education of a Reporter and Teachers' Salaries

When I began my journalism career at The New Haven Register back in 1972, my immediate boss, Don Anderson, a gruff, cigar-chomping-but-never-smoking old-line bureau chief with a crusty exterior but a soft heart, instilled in me several principles. First and foremost, no matter what a source tells you, there’s always a story to be found and retold in the paper. I learned that the hard way on my first assignment. 

I was to find out why a multi-unit housing development in Derby, Conn., had not been completed. After telling Don several times there was nothing to report, he suggested two alternatives. Either I could go back out and find the real story behind the delay in construction or I could pack up my desk and never come back. As if to emphasize he was not kidding about the latter option, he picked up my heavy Royal manual typewriter and flung it across the newsroom. Hardly anyone stopped what they were doing. Apparently he had done that before. 

He wasn’t finished with my “training.” He appeared ready to heave me out a third floor window. I wisely deferred to his experienced take on the respectability and credibility of developers following through on their real estate promises. I soon discovered the Derby project had been mothballed so the developer could pour more of his resources into a different project in nearby Oxford. 

Another of Don’s biases expressed itself in his disdain for teacher union contracts. Like too many of the residents of the Lower Naugatuck Valley—the mill towns of Ansonia, Derby, Seymour and Shelton—Don thought teachers were overpaid considering they “worked” just 180 days a year and then only from around 8 am to 3 pm, with two months off during the summer and assorted national and religious holidays the rest of the year. 

Perhaps he was relating their salaries to the paltry compensation The Register paid its reportorial staff. I don’t know what Don made, but two years later, when I became the bureau chief of West Haven, Bethany, Orange and Woodbridge, I earned just $200 a week. I was one of seven bureau chiefs on a staff of 100 reporters. Even in early 1970s incomes, Register salaries were low. You no doubt can understand why the Newspaper Guild won a unionization ballot in 1974. Our salaries were immediately frozen pending a contract agreement. More than two years later, some six months after I left The Register, a contract settlement raised a bureau chief's salary to close to $400 a week. 

I was reminded of Don’s antipathy toward teachers by the passing of a respected high school teacher described in my previous blog post and by a Facebook posting by a recent Meredith Menden about the value the public receives from educators. I’ve reprinted it for your edification (full disclosure—my sister Lee’s a retired elementary school teacher and brought Meredith’s commentary to my attention):

Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work nine or ten months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do—babysit!

We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and planning—that equals 6-1/2 hours).

So each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now, how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585 a day.

However, remember, they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET’S SEE ...

That’s $585 X 180 = $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6-1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute—there’s something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher’s salary (nationwide) is $50,000.

$50,000/180 days = $277.77 per day / 30 students = $9.25 / 6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student—a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!)

WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Slip Slidin' Away

Did you see televised footage of cars and trucks skidding on icy roadways across the country Sunday? It was further validation of the reason Gilda and I chose not to live in one of the river towns of Westchester when we moved here 37 years ago and a reminder of one of my scariest moments driving a car.

During the winter of 1973 I was a reporter for The New Haven Register. My beat covered the suburban towns of Seymour and Derby, Conn., two communities along the Naugatuck River, separated by the larger but still small city of Ansonia. Municipal boards met at night, after which I would drive about 15 minutes to the Register’s bureau office in Ansonia, type my story and transmit it before midnight by Scan-a-tron to copy editors in New Haven. 

After a city council meeting in Derby ended around 10 one wintry, freezing-rain night, I headed my usual way to the office. It was a switchback route, each leg of the trip descending deeper to the bridge on Division Street, the link to Ansonia. But when I made a right turn down one sloped road I quickly noticed cars lined up not parallel to the street but rather perpendicular to it. In fact, three were wedged across the width of the entire street, each about 15 feet above the other. 

Immediately after hitting the brake, my Buick Skylark started slip-slidin’ away on the ice. Seconds later it, too, was perpendicular to the road, coasting sideways downhill. Amazingly, the car came to rest snugly secure between two parked cars. Not a scratch or dent suffered by any of the cars. I was not out of danger, however. 

Suspended midway down the street, I was the bulls-eye (did I mention the color of my car was red?) for the next vehicle that was bound for Ansonia. I didn’t have to wait too long. Once more I watched in amazement as that car as well skidded into a perfect fit between two parked cars some 15 feet above mine. 

The police finally arrived, though they could do nothing to free our cars until the freezing rain stopped overnight. They did get me home to Seymour. 

A few years later, after I started working in Manhattan and Gilda and I decided to move to Westchester, we looked at apartments in Hastings, Tarrytown, Dobbs Ferry and Irvington, but the steep hills of those river towns reminded me of my night of terror. No way would I knowingly subject either of us to a similar escapade on icy, steep roads. 

Present and Past Stories of Tragedy and War

The present has a way of intruding into my past. 

The Associated Press ran a story Monday about the discovery in the Everglades of a piece of jewelry thought to be from a passenger on one of two planes that crashed in the swampy muck. The crashes occurred 17 and 40 years ago. All 109 people aboard ValuJet Flight 592 perished in the 1996 crash; 99 of 176 aboard Eastern Airlines Flight 401 died (http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_289563/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=ueMPa6OF).

I’m not sure what attracted me to read the article as the headline gave no clue to the tragedies. The headline: “Man hunting for pythons finds mysterious jewelry.” But as I read the story it struck a chord. My first year as a reporter for The New Haven Register, in Seymour, Conn., I interviewed a man who survived Eastern Airlines Flight 401 from New York to Miami when it went down in the Everglades December 29, 1972. I didn’t remember his name but I did recall he was a big man, that his legs were broken and deeply lacerated, the latter injury causing lingering pain for months as the guck from the Everglades infected his body. 

This being the age of the Internet, I trolled the Web deep into the night looking for a report on the crash. Here’s what I found, an excerpt from Crash by Rob and Sarah Elder:

“Quietly, during the flight, Edward Ulrich proposed to Sandra Burt; she accepted. He was forty-four, fair haired and balding, a big man who used to play college football. She was thirty-two and as slight as he was large. They both lived in Seymour, Connecticut, where he was a salesman for a copper company and she was a secretary in a bank. ‘I thought you'd like to see this,’ he said reaching into his pocket and producing a diamond ring. She looked at the ring, smiled and said ‘Thank you.’ They laughed and drank a champagne cocktail. It was ironic that the flight had more than five dozen empty seats, for when they booked, they were told the only seats available were in first class. Burt bought the tickets anyway. He and Sandra boarded the plane early and sat near the front in seats 4A and 4B. Directly ahead of them were a row of seats and the first class lounge, where there were several additional empty seats and a buffet of cheese and crackers. To their right were more empty seats. And behind them, an airplane carrying 176 people. Yet, Ed and Sandra were very much alone.”

I interviewed Ulrich several weeks after the crash in his home in Seymour. I can’t tell you if he and Sandra married, though I believe they did. Several months later I was transferred to another beat. I haven’t thought about that crash or my interview with Ulrich for decades, even though one of the retail industry leaders I covered, the head of Target, Robert Ulrich, shared the same last name. Why I chose to read the story about a python hunt is beyond my ken. Just another example of my life intersecting with events beyond my sphere of daily influence.

On the other hand, I do know why I was attracted to the following article about Jewish veterans of the Red Army in World War II (http://nyti.ms/18zNEUY). 

My Uncle Willy’s wartime experience had all the suspense and plot twists of a Hollywood movie. Unlike my father who moved from Ottynia, a shtetl in Galicia, the southeastern part of Poland, to Danzig, and from there to New York, in January 1939, his brother Willy returned from Danzig to their small town where he married and had a son. At the outbreak of World War II, the Soviet Union took control of the area as part of the Polish Partition agreement it secretly negotiated with Nazi Germany. 

In June 1941 Germany invaded Russian territory, quickly occupying the Galicia region. Mass executions of Jews began. Willy survived the first mass killings because he happened to be away from the village that day. He would sneak back into town to see his mother until it was no longer possible to do so before she too was murdered with the rest of the known Jewish residents in October. For the next two years he hid out in barns and fields as German soldiers and their Ukrainian sympathizers searched for the few who had managed to escape. His existence depended on an ability to stay one step ahead of the Nazis and to find Polish peasants willing to risk their lives to shield Jews. Moving from one hiding place to another. Staying stone silent inside a hidden chamber of a potato bin as a soldier banged his rifle butt on the side listening for a hollow sound. Jumping into an open cesspool when German troops came to the barn he was hiding in. Finally, joining up with partisans to fight, eventually being liberated by the advancing Russian army which conscripted him and sent him to Siberia for basic training where he ate grass to survive for lack of food. 

When it was time to go to the front Willy was saved by a peculiar Russian military custom. When his unit was ready to be sent to the Western Front to fight the Germans, they mustered at the base. The commandant asked if any soldier had reason not to be sent to the battle lines. Willy and several other Jewish soldiers stepped forward. They told the officer they did not fear the Germans. What they feared was getting shot in the back by their fellow soldiers, many of whom were anti-Semitic Ukraines. The commandant kept them in Siberia. Willy always suspected he was sympathetic because secretly he might have been Jewish.

Could be. Some 500,000 Jews served in the Red Army during the war. Here’s a link from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, that details the participation of Jews in the armed forces of the Allies who fought Nazi Germany: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/07/jewish_soldiers.asp.

Down Memory Lane

I was less than enthusiastic about what Gilda was set to do. I couldn't stop her from knocking on the front door of the home we lived in 38 years ago in Seymour, Conn. I'm glad she did. She is so much braver than I when it comes to nostalgia tours and necessary, potentially embarrassing, intrusions if one truly wants to go back in time and place.

With our lucky 11:11 date buttressing our plan, Gilda and I set out last Friday to retrace our early roots together, our first four years of married life when I was a cub reporter and then a bureau chief for the New Haven Register and Gilda was a nursing student at the University of Bridgeport and then a newborn intensive care nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

We drove up Route 8 from Bridgeport to Shelton, my second year beat assignment and scene of the largest industrial arson in U.S. history. We had just gone to bed Saturday night, March 1, 1975, in our Seymour apartment when my boss, Don Anderson, called from nearby Ansonia to ask what I was doing home when half of downtown Shelton was ablaze. I quickly rushed to the fire and stayed there most of the night as the Sponge Rubber Products Company plant (formerly owned by B.F. Goodrich) burned down. Authorities quickly determined it was a case of arson and who did it. But the already depressed economy of the Lower Naugatuck Valley towns of Shelton, Seymour, Ansonia and Derby took a hit as 1,200 jobs were lost. Today, the site of the factory is a park along the Housatonic River.

Driving over the aptly named Bridge Street, we made out way into downtown Derby. Thirty-nine years ago, as I drove through Derby for the first time during my job hunting travels, I thought it looked like Dresden after World War II, with dark, hulking, dilapidated buildings blotting out the sun. Hours later, when the co-managing editor of the New Haven Register, Murray Farber, offered me a job, he said the assignment would be covering Seymour and Derby. I inwardly cringed at the prospect of revisiting Derby on a daily basis but quickly accepted the $150 a week position ($773 in today’s values).

Derby’s downtown is brighter today. Gone are the turn of the 20th century buildings along the riverfront. Though still not vibrant, the area is less depressing. Deeper into the city, along Elizabeth Street, Griffin Hospital, where Gilda did some of her nursing school training, where they clung to the tradition of wearing uniform hats and pins, where the nursing stations were at the far end of each corridor and the head nurses ruled with iron fists, the hospital still stands and is now affiliated with the Yale School of Medicine.

Also on Elizabeth Street is the now shuttered Dworkin Chevrolet where we bought our first car, a Vega, in 1973. A few blocks closer to the downtown the temple we attended, Beth Israel, has been turned into a New Life Community Church, the only outward sign of its previous calling being the Hebrew words etched into the façade near the roof: “The world stands on three things: justice, truth and peace." It was in Beth Israel that we sat with other congregants Yom Kippur morning 1973 wondering about and praying for the fate of Israel after the surprise attacks by Syria and Egypt.

The women of Beth Israel always were amazed Gilda had met and married a Jewish man at college. She’d gently respond that with 95% of Brooklyn College’s 30,000 student population being Jewish it would have been hard not to find a mate from the “chosen” religion.

As we drove north toward Ansonia, we passed the restaurant where we’d treat ourselves to a meal away from home, the McDonald’s on Division Street straddling the border with Derby. Spector Furniture in Ansonia is still open for business. We bought our first TV there, a Magnavox, plus a desk we still have, now consigned to our garage. Around the corner, the Register’s bureau office is long closed. It was in that office I first heard the phrase “to Jew someone down.” It was not a saying common to the Brooklyn shtetl I grew up in.

Before visiting our first home, we entered downtown Seymour, dominated by a post office two to three times the size required for a town of 13,000. As related by local historians, the town benefited from a bureaucratic mistake. Seems the post office the head of the congressional oversight committee had earmarked for his hometown of Seymour, Ind., had mistakenly been erected in Seymour, Conn.

The locals are trying to remake downtown Seymour into an artsy community, with antique and curio shops. They need more restaurants, though the one we lunched in, Jimmie’s Place, was a classic throwback saloon with lobster roll, French fries and cole slaw for $8.99, a hard to beat price.

The house we lived in had been divided into a two-family dwelling. We had three rooms on the first floor: a big country kitchen where Gilda learned to cook, a living room and a bedroom with bright red walls when we first moved in but quickly painted over to reflect Gilda’s more refined sensibilities. Upstairs, our landlord’s daughter and son-in-law lived.

As I stood at the bottom of the porch steps, Gilda knocked on the door. The twenty-something woman who opened the door cheerfully let us in. Her big dog, and really big husband, gave her the confidence we weren’t going to harm her. Their family had bought the house from the previous owner and converted it back to a one family home. Our bedroom was now an office. The kitchen had been expanded and updated. They seemed happy there.

As we drove to and through New Haven where we lived for two years in a subdivided Tudor mansion off Forest Road (Gilda’ couldn’t gain access to that apartment unit), we reflected on how far we had come during the last 39 years. More on that, perhaps, another day.

Eleven Eleven

Look at your calendar. It’s the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of the millennium.

For Gilda and me it couldn’t be a more auspicious day for, you see, 11 is our lucky number, and by extension so is 11:11 and 11:11:11. It began our first night of marriage in our first apartment in Seymour, Conn., nearly 39 years ago. As we cuddled in bed, we glanced at one of our wedding presents, a digital alarm clock, the type back then that flipped over numbers in the way airport terminals would display flight information. The clock had been a gift from one of my father’s friends from Israel. The clock read 11:11.

Since then we’ve noticed how elevens have intersected our lives. I am 11 days older than Gilda. In 1984, we moved into our current house, 11 years after we married. The street address number is 11. Dan’s favorite NY Giants football player growing up, Phil Simms, wore number 11 on his uniform. It’s the number Dan has always chosen for his sports activities. Dan and Allison started dating 11 years ago. My mother’s birthday was November 11.

Today’s Veterans’ Day, a time to remember all who selflessly devoted their energies and sometimes their lives in defense of our freedoms and those of many oppressed people. Gilda and I won’t forget them, but we’ll also commemorate the special intersection of elevens with our lives together.