***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of…..Intellectuals 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

For those who have been following this series about the old days in my old home town of North Adamsville, particularly the high school day as the 50^th anniversary of my graduation creeps up, you will notice that recently I have been doing sketches based on my reaction to various e-mails sent by fellow classmates via the class website. So I have taken on the tough tasks of sending kisses to raging grandmothers, talking up old flames with guys I used to hang around the corners with, remembering those long ago searches for the heart of Saturday night, getting wistful about elementary school daydreams, taking up the cudgels for be-bop lost boys and the like. That is no accident as I have of late been avidly perusing the personal profiles of various members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964 website as fellow classmates have come on to the site and lost their shyness about telling their life stories (or have increased their computer technology capacities, not an unimportant consideration for the generation of ’68, a generation on the cusp of the computer revolution and so not necessarily as savvy as the average eight-year old today).

Of course not everybody who graduated with me in that baby-boomer times class of over five hundred students had a literary flare or could articulate their dreams in the most coherent way. But they had dreams, and they have today when we have all been through about seven thousand of life’s battles, good and bad, a vehicle to express whatever they want. As I have mentioned before in other sketches I have spent not a little time lately touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies to communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later on a class website recently set up to gather in classmates for our 50^th anniversary reunion.  (Some will never be found by choice or by being excluded from the “information super-highway” that they have not been able to navigate.) Interestingly those who have joined the site have, more or less, felt free to send me private e-mails telling me stories about what happened back in the day in school or what has happened to them since their jailbreak from the confines of the old town.

Some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, including those endless tales about the doings and not doings of the grandchildren mentioned above, odd hobbies and other ventures taken up in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand commentary on. Some stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did, or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has naturally perked my interest. Other stuff as here defies simple classification as I am taking the high road, taking on a discussion about the class intellectuals, the ones who I admired from a distance, silently. My latest correspondence with Marilyn Madden, who as will be pointed out below was voted our senior class genius-female version, centered on an after-school club that she belonged to, The Great Books club, that I would have loved to have joined if I had known about it. Oh yeah, and if I hadn’t had about seven tons of teenage angst and alienation that made me a loner.  Here is my side of the thing anyway and a little tribute I put together to honor the “smart kids” of the class as a result of the e-mail exchanges between us:

 

[Marilyn and I originally “met” on site (I did not know her in school, no way) after I had noticed that her yearbook class photograph had not been on her profile page, send an e-mail to her about the omission,  and had notified the webmaster, Donna, of that fact which she subsequently rectified. That gave me an opening to mention to Marilyn her having been voted the class genius-female side and my take on that, and hers too. And we were off from there.]        

 

 “Hi Marilyn - Thank for note and thanks for agreeing with me that we should show generous appreciation whenever we can for the efforts of our reunion committee in putting together this website so we can cut up old torches.  As for your photo Donna, our super-wizard webmistress, placed yours on your profile page today. Check it out.  You look properly professorial there. It must be in the genes. [Marilyn’s forbears for three generations had been professors at a local religious college.]   As for the Madden-Smith name that is the way your name is listed on a related North Adamsville High School-website so I used that to address you. From now on I will use just Smith as you requested. [This concerned the way her name was listed in hyphenated form as is still somewhat popular in certain circles to not drown out forever maiden names (and identities).]

Now for the serious stuff-the writing stuff-I am surprised after reviewing your yearbook class photo resume that you said that you were isolated from other classmates. I thought I was the classic loner/outsider. In any case you have at least one thing on your resume I (and others) would be greatly interested in hearing about-the Great Books Club. I swear I didn’t know that we even had such a thing at school. I could have used that kind of club because I was filled to the brill with half-formed social/political/literary ideas and could have used such discussions to sort things out. What books did you discuss?

Here are some other questions you can answer at your leisure- how did North help or hinder you in your career as an editor? [Marilyn had recently retired after a career as an editor as various journals, newspapers, and publishing houses, some well-known.] Any particular teachers influence you? [Marilyn had commented favorably on my appreciation of Miss (Ms.) Sonos, my senior year English teacher placed on the Message Forum page for all to read.] If you don’t want to write about North times then how about your editing career. I hope it was for literary magazines and journals. We would be glad to read anything you could write. Look, we have an exceptional opportunity with the new technology to put together a collective memory of our times to show the stuff we were made of. We need you to help us.            

As for the genius thing I will keep quiet on that but I must confess since I believe the statute of limitations has run out on this “crime” that I actually voted for Sarah Stein for class genius. Forgive me. [Marilyn, too modest since her resume was worthy of such recognition, expressed surprise that she won the “class genius” designation and told me that she too had voted for Sarah. Keep that under your hat.] Later Frank Jackman.‘’

All of which spawned the following appreciation:

“***The Intellectuals Or The Jocks?

Every school since back in Socrates’ time has had discernable social groupings within so I was not surprised when I was asked recently what group(s) I hung around with, if any, at North. Here is my answer and I solicit yours as well…      

I did not then, nor do I now, know Sarah Stein, Marilyn Madden, or Irvin Jack Rubin, fellow classmates at North Adamsville High, Class of 1964 and among the smart set, the class geniuses. I don’t remember if my old “jock” running buddy Brad Badger,  whose very existence prompted me to recently write some teary-eyed thing about him running amok on the streets of North Adamsville in the old days knew them or not, but it was with them in mind that I wrote the following. I, today, strongly believe that I could have learned a lot from that trio and maybe Brad  believes that as well but you will have to ask him that question yourself. No way, no way on god’s good green earth in the year 2014 and while I am still breathing, old time “jock” buddies or not, am I going to vouch for that maniac. Here goes:

Every September, like clockwork, I am transported to a place called the beginning of the year. No, not New Year’s Day like any rational person would expect, but the school year for most students, younger or older. That is a frame of reference that I have not changed in all these years. And every year, or in many of those years anyway, my thoughts go back to the road not taken, or really not taken then, when I ask myself the following question that I am posing in such a way here so that you can ask it to yourself as well: What group(s) did you hang around with in high school?

This question is meant to be generic and more expansive that the two categories listed in the headline. The intellectuals and the jocks were hardly the only social groupings that existed at our high school (or any high school, then or now, for that matter) but the ones that I am interested in personally for the purpose of this sketch. The list of other possibilities is long: white tee-shirt, denim jeans, leather jacket, engineer boots complete with whipsaw chain corner boy devotees; wanna-be gangster hoods hanging out one knee bent against the school wall menacing all who entered; the latest Seventeen magazine-attired social butterflies, girl social butterflies, populating the spirit and dance committees and come senior year that prized prom committee looking down their noses at the peasantry below;  teases, male and female, also a sub-genre of social butterflies, avoiding furtive glances thrown their way and then “hurt” when no one pays attention after a while; school administration “brown noses” (really “snitches,” the bastards) who had been in that condition since some ill-disposed elementary school-teacher made them hall monitor; nerdy four-eyed science nuts ready to blow the whole school up to satisfy some morbid curiosity; oil-stained auto mechanics grease monkeys forever talking about engine compression, riding around town in their customized ‘57 Chevys, and strangely leaving a trail of broken-hearted lovely foxy girls behind; incipient Bolsheviks just waiting for the word; black-sweatered  faux “beats” ready to hang “square” on a candid world; choral music nation devotees (okay, okay glee club) ready to sing at the drop of a hat; could-care-if-school-kept-or-not-ers, no explanation necessary; chronic school skippers; drop-outs, religious nuts, and who knows what other “social network” combines, maybe bowling. All of those listed group members can relate your own thoughts on behalf of your high school “community.” I have other thoughts this day.

You, fellow alumni from North Adamsville High School, Adamsville, Massachusetts, U.S.A. may also feel free to present your own categories of hang-out groups in case I missed anything above like baton-twirling, the infamous band (the stories I have heard about after practice in the band room shocked me, made me blush), square-dancing, bird-watchers, or stamp collectors, or all of them intertwined, if your tastes ran that way then. However, for me, and perhaps some of you, there was an unequal running battle between the two choices presented in the title. Or maybe what I wished I had chosen is a better way to put the matter.

Should I have hung out with the intellectuals, formerly known as the "smart kids.” You know, the ones that your mother was always, usually unfavorably, comparing you to come report card time in order to embarrass you or get you to buckle down in the great getting out from under the graying nowhere working- class night and make something of yourself that she (and dad) could be proud of. Yes, those kids who could be seen at the library after school, and even on Saturday, Saturdays if you can believe that, and endlessly trudging, trudging like some Promethean wanderers with about forty- six pounds of books, books large and small, books in all colors, and here is the kicker, well-thumbed, very well-thumbed.

Or with the “jocks.” The jocks, to the extent I could be identified with any school group, were the ones who I hung around with. You know, the guys and in those days it was almost exclusively guys (girls came in as cheer-leaders or girlfriends-sometimes the same thing) who lived to throw, heave, punch, pull, leap upon, trample, block, jump, pummel, everything in sight but, ah, books. You know, mainly, the Goliaths of the gridiron, their hangers-on, wannabes and "slaves." The guys who were not carrying any forty-six pounds of books, although maybe they were wearing that much poundage in sports gear. And any books that needed carrying was done by either girlfriends or the previously mentioned slaves. Other sports may have had some shine but the “big men” on campus were the fall classic guys. Some sports such as cross-country and track and field, my sports, didn’t usually rate even honorable mention compared to say a social butterfly-driven senior bake sale or some high school confidential school dance in the school social pecking order.

Frankly, although I was in one grouping and thought about the other in high school I was mainly a "loner" for reasons that are beyond what I want to discuss here except it very definitely had to do with confusion about the way to get out from under that graying working- class nowhere night. And about “fitting” in somewhere in the school social order that had little room for guys (or girls for that matter) who didn’t fit into some classifiable niche. Room for teen angst and alienated guys, 1960s shorts-wearing track guys, running the streets of old North Adamsville to the honks of automobiles trying to scare us off the road (no “share the road with a runner” then) and jeers, the awful jeers of the girls, that space was very small. The most one could hope for was a “nod” from the football guys (or basketball in winter) in recognition that you were a fellow athlete, of sorts. Yeah, times were tough.

But as this is a confessional age I can now come out of the closet, at last. I read books back then. Yes, I read them, no devoured them endlessly (and still do), and as frequently as I could (can). I LIKED reading, let’s say, “max daddy” English poet John Milton’s tangled Paradise Lost. I lived to read footnotes in arcane history books. You know the sources for the big controversy over whether the Cromwell’s time 17^th English Revolution was driven by declining or rising gentry. Yeah stuff like that. Did you see me carrying tons of books over my shoulder in public though? Be serious, please. Here is the long held secret (even from Brad). I used to go over to the library on the other side of town, the Adamsville Square side, where no one, no one who counted anyway (meaning no jock, of course), would know me. One summer I did that almost every day for at least part of the day. So there you have it. Well, not quite.

In recent perusals of our class yearbook I have been drawn continually to the page where the description of the Great Books Club is presented. I was unaware of this club, didn’t know it existed, at the time but, apparently, it met after school and discussed Plato, John Stuart Mill, Shakespeare, Karl Marx and others. (See below.) Sarah, Marilyn and  others were members. Hell, after I read the description of what went on there that club sounded like great fun. One of the defining characteristics of my life has been, not always to my benefit, an overweening attachment to books and ideas. So what was the problem? What didn't I hang with that group?

Well, uh..., you know, they were, uh, nerds, dweebs, squares, not cool (although we did not use some of those exact terms in those days). That, at least, was the public reason, but here are some other more valid possibilities. Coming from my “shanty” background, where the corner boys had a certain cachet, I was somewhat afraid of mixing in with the "smart kids." The corner boys counted, after school anyway, and if they didn’t count then it was better to keep a wide, down low berth from anything that looked like a book reader in their eyes. I, moreover, feared that I wouldn't measure up, that the intellectuals seemed more virtuous somehow. I might also add that a little religiously-driven plebeian Irish Catholic anti-intellectualism (you know, be “street” smart but not too “book” smart in order to get ahead in one version of that getting out from under graying working -class nowhere night my family kept harping on) might have entered into the mix as well.

But, damn, I sure could have used the discussions and fighting for ideas that such groups like that book club would have provided. I had to do it the hard way later. As for the jocks one should notice that I have not mentioned a thing about their long- term effects on me. And, in the scheme of things, that is about right. So now you know my belated choice, except to steal a phrase from something that I wrote recently honoring my senior English teacher, Miss Sonos-"Literature matters. Words matter." I would only add here that ideas matter as well. Hats Off to the North Adamsville  Class of 1964 intellectuals!

This list is from a letter written in the early 1950s by the late American writer, Norman Mailer, and printed in The New York Review Of Books a few years ago, detailing his choices for "must reads" in the American literary canon. What would your ten choices be?

 

Norman Mailer
Ten Favorite American Novels

U.S.A.- John Dos Passos

Huckleberry Finn- Mark Twain

Studs Lonigan -James T. Farrell

Look Homeward, Angel- Thomas Wolfe

The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald-1^st on my list

The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway

Appointment in Samarra- John O'Hara

The Postman Always Rings Twice- James M. Cain

Moby-Dick- Herman Melville

This would be my list as well sticking to Mailer’s selection time period except instead of Moby Dick I would put Nelson Algren’s Walk On The Wild Side and instead of Huckleberry Finn I would put J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.