Friends Central School

Mrs. Woerner

For our 55th high school reunion, my class made a gift in honor of a former English teacher, Berenice Woerner. We were also asked to write a reminiscence about her. Here is mine. But first some background for those of you her weren’t at Friends Central with me.

I entered FCS in 4th grade in 1951 and graduated in 1960. It had a Lower School (K – 6th) and an Upper School (7th – 12th). Mrs. Woerner headed the Upper School’s English Department. She also supervised the school paper, whose editors, as I recall, she appointed, and the yearbook, whose editors were elected. Mr. Farraday, whom I mention, was the Dean of Boys and taught biology and, I think, religion. The grading system ran O (Outstanding), A (Above Usual), U (Usual), BU (Below Usual) and SBU (Seriously Below Usual). Now that that’s clear…

After I was elected co-editor of my class yearbook, a position I hadn’t contemplated seeking, a pal in the English section that Mrs Woerner taught, besides the one in which I sat, explained that she had touted my qualifications to it. Those votes that endorsement swayed had swept to victory a candidacy I hadn’t known existed.
But I owe Mrs. Woerner for more than that.

For one thing, by selecting my 6th grade, Mad-comic-influenced story, “Dog Net,” for inclusion in The Literary Supplement, she gave me my first publication credit, a fact omitted from my official CV. Then when I reached the Upper School, she became, with Mr. Farraday, one of my two champions. And, boy, in adolescence, did I need champions.
Mrs. Woerner always liked my writing, but she set tough standards for me. Never gave me a final grade of “A”… I mean, “O.” Told me to read Hemingway and Kerouac, when my idea of a café was the Hot Shoppe, and “The Road,” for me, ran no further than the Schuylkill Expressway.
But when my college Hum. II instructor suggested I take a Creative Writing class, and between me and it loomed this praetorian guard of aspiring Creative Writers, uniformed in black turtlenecks and wielding green bookbags, past whom I could see no way to slip, I thought, Well Mrs. Woerner liked my writing too… And in that class, I found, not only this calling, but more importantly, I met my wife. Sure, it took a couple years to bring all that together, but nevertheless…
Life turns on luck and effort and corners turned, left or right. Remove one straw and the entire structure changes.

I understand that, since she had by then lost her sight, Mr. Farraday read my first novel to her. Hearing of that continued caring touched my heart, and thinking I had fulfilled a promise that she had spotted before it had occurred to the awkward kid in whom she saw it made me feel, yeah, proud. Though I must admit, there are passages in that book, at which my image of this reading, makes me softly cringe – and smile.

Bar Mitzvah, Boy!

This blog appeared, re-punctuated to its detriment, as “Bar Mitzvah Boy,” on line, in the January 29, 2010, Broadstreet Review. I have edited it to better fit the stream I have underway here.

In 1953, when I was in fourth grade at Friends’ Central, my father, partly because the contacts might help his law practice, and partly because three doses of Hebrew School a week might immunize me against the identity eroding effects of the Gentiles, who, for the first time, would form a majority of my associates, had our family join Beth Zion.
I thought this a terrible idea. I do not know when I learned the word “hypocrisy,” but once I did, I knew it applied. If religion was important, my pre-adolescent mind reasoned, why hadn’t we always belonged to a synagogue? If we were going to belong, why didn’t we attend services every weekend? Then there was the fact that, at nine or ten, I wanted to fit in with my new friends. I wanted to stay after school and play baseball. (My development seemed to cry louder for an ability to hit the curve than the mastery of any Four Questions.) I did not want to trek by Red Arrow and D bus, from the suburbs into Center City.
I also did not feature, once I arrived, facing the glistening novelty of finding myself stupid. I was placed with children who had already studied Hebrew for a year. I did fine learning about Abraham and Isaac and Judah Maccabee in our history text, which, sensibly, like all good things, was in English; but when it came to reading or writing or speaking those cryptic squiggles, I would have stood more chance wrestling, one-armed, Mr. Moto. (From four years attendance, I retain that “baruch” means “blessed” and “yelda” “girl” – unless it means “boy.”) The highlights of my matriculation were (a) Carol E., a classmate of great sophistication, explaining menstruation; (b) a take-no-crap teacher, recently emigrated from eastern Europe, hypnotizing Max Garden and setting him clucking like a chicken; and (c) cutting class one rainy afternoon, spotting Stan Musial and Red Schoendist in the lobby of a downtown movie theater, and having them autograph my lesson book. I was, otherwise, lost.

The Minotaur lurking at the end of this labyrinth was my bar mitzvah, an experience destined to limn Goya-esq depth into the term “travesty.” Once lessons began, my voice proved as incapable of carrying a tune as Richard Nixon an ADA-friendly precinct. Cantor Mandleblatt, a friendly and decent man, offered the dispensation that I might read my haftorah portion. But my reading was so strained and imbecilic, he was forced to reduce it by three quarters. I mean, I could sound out the letters, but I had no clue whether I was producing noun or verb or preposition. Emphasis? intonation? rhythm? I was at sea on a raft of squawks. The only portion of the experience that provided pleasure was reading “Battle Cry” in the back seat of my father’s Lincoln as we cruised toward the synagogue on my performance day – distracting myself with the adventures of “Andy,” “Danny” and “Ski” as the blue-and-white chromed tumbil headed toward the guillotine. I suppose I understood that the pass:fail ratio I faced was more propitious than, say, that of those aspirants-for-manhood sent by their tribes into the wilderness, armed only with a dagger, and told to retrieve the heart of a grizzly. But if, as we crossed the South Street Bridge, I had been offered a penknife, Center City, and Weimaraner as an option, I am not sure how I would have jumped.
Of the event, I recall mercifully little. No cabbages were thrown by the assembled Levins and Levines. No guffaws issued from the Rothmans and Rosenbaums. Neither Kelner nor Kelmer nor Kessler nor Katz demanded the re-attachment of my foreskin. This was a time before circus tests were required for post-ceremony festivities or acrobatic troupes deemed necessary to entertain the assembled, so everyone marched upstairs for a modest luncheon. I was released to a table with neighborhood friends, who, their own days of reckoning looming, regarded me as if I was departing Guadalcanal as they were wading ashore, and a few from FCS, who had come to experience another sect’s rituals like Margaret Meade to Pago Pago. I worked the room, and Buick dealers and GE distributors, car wash owners and cold cuts magnates thrust envelopes into my hand or pocket.

Even from the perspective five decades has provided, my passage seems to have had little to do with who I was – or was slated to become. Some things I found painful, like inoculations, or demeaning, like having to wait an extra year for my driver’s license, I am now fully – or in the latter case, mostly – able to credit to my parents acting in my best interests. But my bar mitzvah still seems mandated solely by my father’s need to shape me in his image. A part of him scorned his friends who’d discharged their sons from this obligation. It seemed to taint them with a weakness he would not allow others to perceive in him.
My father had come out of 10th & Baimbridge at a time when ethnicity drafted one into bloodier wars than it would me after we’d reached 46th & Pine. It had denied him jobs and barred him from clubs and taught him that, when our family stopped for the night on automobile trips, to send my mother into the motel to ask for a room because her eyes were blue. He took pride in how he had established himself in the face of these blows and constrictions, and he would not have his son drawn further from whom he perceived himself to be than seemed absolutely necessary. “Jewish boys don’t hunt,” he told me, when I came back from FCS one evening, asking for a .22 rifle like certain privileged classmates. “Jewish boys don’t play football,” he told me in fifth grade, when that option became available as a fall sport. By eighth grade, he’d changed his mind there; but my bar mitzvah had been non-negotiable, occasioned no second thoughts, stood a banner planted in the sand.
It does not surprise me now to think, given the cloak of infallibility within which my father presented himself in all matters, from the worth of Adlai Stevenson to the uselessness of Del Ennis in clutch situations, that despite my protestations, I may have adopted a portion of his belief as to the significance of the ceremony in question. For I also recall that when, following its conclusion, my family having flown to Coral Gables, on my first day in the Atlantic, a Portugese Man o’ War lanced me squarely on the tuchis, the pain nearly convinced me that there was a God, that a recording of my performance had just reached him, and this had been his fitting, critical judgment.

Friends

Friends
As I said (See blog of August 19), I liked Friends’ Central.
Lea School (Grades K – 8) was in a grim grey building. Friends’ Central’s Lower School (Grades K – 6) was in an unimposing one that may have been an estate’s stable or barn. (The Upper School, grades 7 – 12) , elsewhere on the grounds, had been the estate owner’s much grander home.) Lea divided each grade by September and January admissions of 30 0r 40 students per class. FCS’s classes had two 20-student sections. (By the Upper School, there would be an additional section.) Lea School had a macadam playground, where we played softball and varieties of stickball against each other. FCS had fields for soccer, football and baseball, and we competed against other schools. It had two gyms and Lea School none.
My Lea School classes had been predominantly Jewish, maybe a half-dozen gentiles, of whom three or four were black. My FCS class had no blacks and six or seven Jews. (My graduation class of 69 had one black and 15 Jews, which was more than enough for it to be known as “the Jewish Quaker school” among its competitors.) Unlike most private schools in the area, it was co-ed. In my fourth grade class photo, I am the tallest child and the only one with glasses.
Initially, FCS had rejected me. (My father has suspected anti-Semitism.) But just before classes began, a slot opened, and after the intervention of a prominent Quaker – the father of my blonde friend across the street (See blog of August 17), it was offered to me. I was delighted. I had loved those fields. (There was even a patch of woods, with a creek through it.) I liked my classmates and felt comfortable with them. I read the same books – the Hardy Boys and the Landmark Series. I wore the same Davy Crockett and Civil War caps. I was sent from the room to stand in the hall for disruptive behavior enough times to prove myself a regular guy. I could smack an underhand toss over the fence. (Trouble would develop when we switched to hard balls fired overhand.)
I knew from movies and comic books that private schools were not looked upon favorably in some circles. Nor, for that matter, were kids in glasses. These downsides had not yet manifested. The Jewish part had even scantier relevance.