Robert W. Groves High School (Savannah), 1957-61: A Memoir
Hard to believe it has been fifty-four years since I was a high school freshman and that my high school class is planning a fiftieth reunion (Class of 1961) this fall. Just in the nick of time before my memory of those days fades completely. Yet I remember those days somewhat better than my fours years as an undergraduate at Harvard (Class of 1965). In fact, though it may come as a surprise to them, I probably have more in common with my high school classmates than I ever did with my classmates at that august institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I never felt at home in Cambridge as I did in Savannah. Probably why I have never been to a Harvard class reunion since I graduated in 1966. Despite all the highly touted advantages of the Ivy League, I am sorry I did not go to school in the South. I never made a very good Yankee, always yearning for a good fishing hole in some Georgia fresh water creek or a job on a shrimper like Forrest Gump. I even missed the Ogeechee River swamp while buried in some library at Harvard trying to write a paper about some philosophical topic like the Junior Essay I had to write on the topic, Can Man Be So Free As to Create Himself? using the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. I kept falling asleep drifting off into a reverie of waiting in the dawn mist for the fog to lift as I sat with my shotgun in my lap, my back against a great oak tree, hoping to spot a deer as the day began to break. Nietzsche himself preferred the icy bracing air of a mountain walk for thinking. Hunting for philosophical phantoms was a more somnolent activity for me than waiting for game in the Georgia woods. (Nevermind I never shot anything more than a few cones out of a Loblolly pine.) As for Nietsche’s notion of our “terrible freedom” with the so-called “death of God,” I like the graffiti I saw on the wall at Harvard: “God Is Dead, signed Nietzsche” followed by “Nietzsche Is Dead, signed God.”
(I am closer in feeling, even for philosophy, to my grandfather who was a Primitive Baptist Preacher in Statesboro, Georgia. We both have had--and I still have--a visceral faith in the Almighty Creator and both have had--and I still have--an abiding belief in the inspiration of the text of the Bible. For my grandfather it was the beautiful prose of the King James translation; for me, it is both the poetry of the King James prose as well as the original Greek of the New Testament. Were I a better linguist I would learn Hebrew for the Old Testament as well. But I am still learning the demotic Greek in the New Testament. Nietzsche, the arch atheist, once said "it was clever of God to speak Greek so badly." He meant, of course, that the Greek of the New Testament is ordinary Greek spoken by the common people. Nietzsche was a big snob and liked only the 'highfalutin' Greek of Plato and Aristotle--though he tried to destroy even their credibility as moralists with his too-big-for-his britches notions of some nihilistic view "beyond good and evil." I prefer the Abyss of God's Infinity to the Abyss of Nietzsche's so-called "Superman"--a concept made infamous by the Nazis. No, my grandfather's talks with his Creator in his prayerful preparations for a sermon were my first impression of the sanctity of "The Good Book." I say: "Give me that old tyme religion...")
The New High School in Garden City
My freshman year, 1957-58, was the first year for our brand new high school as I recall. It was a modernist building, all one story, rambling around a large site in Garden City, inspired I came to know much later by the atrocious designs of Walter Gropius, one of the Bauhaus architects. When we moved in, the land surrounding the building was still muddy and did not yet have any grass laid down. Fortunately you could walk all over the school under canopied walkways or down long school corridors with lots of light from the translucent plastic coverings of the walkways between buildings. At least this rambling school had plenty of windows and classrooms with views of the surrounding landscape. I was never claustrophobic and could always escape the teaching by drifting off into day dreams looking at the sky or some surrounding oak or pine tree. My teachers were always astonished when I could answer their questions and even summarize class discussion when suddenly called upon. They never quite figured out that I was not paying attention when I looked attentive to every word they were saying. It was always easier to pay attention when I could look outside to keep my mind busy. For that reason I find it easier to this day to write in a crowded café than in a library room with no windows. At the time I did not know I was severely A.D.D. and needed multiple focus points to think about anything. The added stimuli help me to shut out parallel lines of thought so I can stay focused on one train of thought. A little confusing for my high school teachers. I could focus on a train of thought so well I rarely heard directions and had to whisper to a classmate to know what the teacher wanted us to do. They nearly all said: “You’re never going to succeed in college unless you learn to hear instructions.” (They had a point. I always had to have help with lecture notes because of my drifting attention span. I would start thinking about what the speaker said and miss the next half hour of what he or she said next.)
At this distance in time I have memories of grade nine which put us in the center of Savannah, not far from the main branch of the public library which looked a bit like a Greek temple with its columns standing much higher than a pragmatic mindset would permit. For exactly that reason I loved the high ceilings and spaciousness of this wonderful building on Bull Street, the south end of the main axis laid out by General Oglethorpe from the waterfront in 1733. I assume from these memories that we must must have moved into our new building in the middle of our freshman year.
Prelude to High School
What I remember is Richard Arnold Junior High School not far from this library. Most of us were transported into the city via school buses, lined up along the curb in front of the school in the morning and in the afternoon to takes us home. Lots of somewhat rowdy students but rarely any real rough scuffles in the crowds waiting to be taken home. Once I saw a fight, quite one-sided and quick, when a student named Napoleon pushed a girl who possibly said something to him he didn’t like. An ROTC drill team was just coming off the parade ground in front of the buses. An officer in his neat uniform decided to intervene to be a gentleman and he—mistakenly—threw the first punch in his rage that a girl would get pushed. Napoleon backed up slightly out of reach and coolly adopted the pose of a bare knuckle boxer from an earlier era of prize fighting. He jabbed quickly and expertly from behind his boxer’s stance and the punch was so quick you could only see blood running from the nose of the ROTC officer. He swung again in anger and missed. He got another punch to the mouth from the cool pugilist and fell to the ground with blood running from his mouth. Others intervened to stop them from further fighting. Napoleon never said a word. He just walked away after it was clear that his opponent had had enough. Years later I saw Napoleon again--at the courthouse in Savannah escorting a prisoner to the dock; he had become prison guard. He had not lost his cool, silent demeanor. I’m sure no prisoner ever crossed him more than once. Most schoolyard fighting is very amateurish, lots of grunting and clumsy grappling, and rarely a serious punch thrown. Napoleon had the quickest, most skillful punching I ever saw—even in professional boxing matches. A cautionary tale about taking on an unknown opponent. The officer was lucky Napoleon had no desire to beat him senseless. Minimum force, maximum impact. No evident anger at all, just cool precision.
Grade Nine Algebra with Mr. Cohen
What I remember most vividly is my grade nine algebra class. Mr. Cohen, our teacher, was 148 pounds of muscle so solid it made him look more than six foot tall though he barely stood five and a half feet in his white dress shirt and tie. He had hair so dark his beard was a shadow no matter how close he shaved. He was funny but so strict no one dared misbehave in his class. He liked hot pastrami sandwiches from Gottlieb’s Deli just a few blocks from the school. After he realized I understood the material very quickly he would send me out to get him a sandwich while he was explaining it to the rest of the class. I enjoyed the excursion and caught up with the exposition before the class was over. He would call on me whenever he could get no one else to talk. Once he stared disbelievingly as I got the wrong answer again and again. X divided by X? I got X. (In my mind I superimposed the bottom X on the top X in the fraction and got, of course, X.) He had me divide 2 by 2. I got one. He tried 5 divided by 5. I got one. He again tried X divided by X. Again I got X. Then I laughed and realized the answer was obviously one (except for zero). He sighed loudly in relief and I returned to my desk somewhat relieved.
When we moved to the new school location, our teachers came with us. At the new school we got a new student named Winton as I recall. He was not especially intimidated by Mr. Cohen. He never had his homework at the beginning of the class when Mr. Cohen would walk around checking for it. He would say to the student, “Winton, I can almost guarantee you that you will not pass this class if you never do your homework.” Winton seemed unfazed and looked back with the innocence of a totally blank expression. A few minutes later he would raise his hand and ask to go to the bathroom. Mr. Cohen would respond: “Winton, you can go but I can also guarantee you that those cigarettes will ruin your health.” Winton returned in a few minutes taking his seat in the back of the room looking somewhat more relaxed but reeking of tobacco smoke.
Mr.Cohen, the algebra teacher, had another identity out of class. He owned a weight-lifting establishment called Howard’s Gym. There he was Howard Cohen, weight-lifter and Olympic coach, and once Mr. Georgia in a body-building contest. I once saw him jerk 300 pounds over his head, slightly more than twice his 148 pound body weight. Very impressive. I signed up for lessons there and became quite strong for my age though never resembling Arnold Schwartzenegger. Or Howard Cohen. He was so muscle-bound that his students at the gym once egged him on to go to a local traveling carnival to wrestle an ape. For the carnival there was a red-haired, hyperactive orangutang in a cage. For twenty-five dollars you could don a football helmet and go in the cage with the ape for five minutes. He would pummel you around and pound on the helmet and most were happy to come out before the five minute limit. If you could stay in for the full five minutes, the owner of the ape would pay you fifty dollars. Mr. Cohen paid his money and put on the helmet. Then he took off his shirt revealing a very hairy body of solid muscle. According to the students who were there, the man paid Howard fifty dollars to stay out of the cage. He reportedly said: “I don’t want you in there with my ape. He might get hurt.”
Mr. Maxwell, Science Teacher and Genial Philosopher
I remember mostly vividly Mr. Maxwell’s slightly mischievous smile, his flat top haircut, and those dark bright eyes with a slightly devilish glint that suggested it was better not to mistake his humorous asides and witticisms for any kind of softness. He taught general science, and later biology, though his degree and major was in English literature. He loved talking about more philosophical concepts in science, both cosmology and the origins of the earth as well as the evolution of the species on the earth. I suspect he enjoyed teasing out the notions he imagined we had from Sunday School fundamentalism. If so, he was probably a bit disappointed in not getting much opposition to his exposition of evolution—unlike the situation today with so many politically active creationists alert to any assertions in the classroom suggesting our derivation from the lower animals up to our more recent ape-like ancestors. I remember well his explanations of the “survival of the fittest” that happened in the early history of the earth. He took off his glasses and said he would not have survived in more prehistoric times before eyeglasses. (Too many saber tooth tigers, I suppose, with better eyesight who would have made a meal of him.) I was struck by a sense of relief that we no longer relied strictly on that brutal notion—“the survival of the fittest.” I remember hearing about Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of the Species, published in 1859. I remember going to my Aunt Rhetta’s place of work on Whittaker Street in downtown Savannah, Silva’s Bookstore, to purchase a copy, the Modern Library edition—a large but inexpensive hardback. I tried to read it but gave up, lost in the intricacies of pigeon breeding that took up the first part of that volume. Gregor Mendel’s peas and his experiments in a monastery garden with what later came to be called “genetics” was easier to follow as spelled out in our Grade Ten biology textbook. (Had I known of Darwin’s book, the Voyage of the Beagle, with its wonderful adventure tales told in stimulating prose, I might have read him earlier in his own prose rather than in the duller prose of textbook authors. )
So many tantalizing names mentioned by Mr. Maxwell in class. I gave up my grade eight reading habits, tales of adventure and piracy, and turned to reading the scientific works of those wonderful people whose names he dropped into his monologues on the history of science—Albert Einstein, Sir James Jeans (found on the shelf near Einstein’s works), Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell. I’m not sure he expected anyone to take up his ideas and run with them but I did. I think he was just keeping himself amused by talking a little above our heads. I may not have understood much of what I read but it did open my mind to whole realms of thought I never would have encountered otherwise. I was lucky to have an old Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary that enabled me to learn the vocabulary necessary to grapple with these books. The public library became a magical place for exploring the universe of scientific discourse. Mostly, I was too shy to tell anyone about my reading. Just as well since I was called a “know it all” when Perry, a neighborhood friend, wondered--in a cranky mood--how people could know the distances to stars. I foolishly and incautiously started explaining the astronomical technique of using parallax motion in the positions of the earth to estimate star distances. Thereafter I was careful to keep most of my learning to myself. I wanted to share my discoveries but was not willing to endure any more name calling. (It was enough that my favorite storekeeper, Johnny Constantine, called me "Yonny Yanopoulo, kah stieg a stieg a Stohpulo, Ova Kaefalo." He was startled when I translated the Greek "Ova Kaefalo" as "Egg Head." It was close to Latin so it was easy to translate. But he insulted me affectionately because I had taught his son to read using the phonics method of Rudolph Fleisch which worked better for his son than the whole word approach used in his class. I still think phonics is the right way for many students to master reading in the early grades.)
One of the funniest moments—and there were a few such instances—in Mr. Maxwell’s class was when he had been to a party (as we guessed) the night before and was still probably suffering a hangover. He steadied himself on the lab table and lectured on English literature. He brought in records of Shakespeare's plays for us to hear. We laughed at the strange accents of the actors and he got really cross with us, stopping the record and getting up on his high horse to lecture us on the need to have more open minds. I laughed like everyone else but was offended when he stopped the record and gave us some busywork. Usually, though, he was better-humored and content to banter with the class while he lectured on diverse topics. Mostly the worst he would do was use some heavy duty vocabulary on an obstreperous student. Once he used the term “eleemosynary wit” to describe the class clown’s attempt to be funny. His description was funny though we did not know the word at all. I still like that word “eleemosynary,” a wonderful archaic substitute for “charitable” but with delightfully sing-song syllables.
I did surprise him when he was talking about one-celled organisms by asking if they were the same as “animalcules,” an archaic term I had picked up from my reading in the history of science. He looked utterly stunned to hear such a word from a very quiet fellow in the back row, someone who almost never said a word in class in those days. But my favorite moment to use my vocabulary came in the classes on sex education. I did not speak myself but prompted a classmate, Leon Ricketson, to ask what a “vagina” was. Those were the days when candid vocabulary was not used whether technical and medical or more colloquial. His response was just to joke with Leon on the way out of class: “I’m surprised you don’t know that word, Leon. I guess you need to do some reading.” Nowadays the local high school in Amherst actually sponsored a play called “The Vagina Monologues.” I got the word from reading an encyclopedia about “reproductive systems.” My practical knowledge was more likely zero than that of any of my classmates who did not know the technical vocabulary. But I enjoyed seeing Mr. Maxwell wiggle out of explaining it in class.
Years later when I was in Graduate School at the University of Toronto and visiting in Georgia, I looked up Mr. Maxwell who had left teaching to work in a bank as a loans officer. He had changed his name to James Maxwell Belford and had married the Latin and German teacher from Groves High, Miss Sheila Ginsburg. He seemed somewhat apologetic about leaving teaching but I understood very well the need to make more money to support a family. At the time I was studying on fellowships which were hardly more income than being on welfare. I still think he was one of my best teachers. I am glad he was not in banking when I was a high school student.
Mrs. Beulah Harper, Teacher of English and Bourgeois Virtue
It was Grade Eight when I first encountered Mrs. Harper as an English teacher and as a “force of nature.” She had a willfulness and a supreme self-confidence that was positively intimidating on first meeting her. I was so quiet anyhow that she barely noticed me which, I thought, was a very good idea given the overwhelming force of her personality. In a more British cultural context she might have been called “a dowager Queen” like the Queen Mother’s role in the life of Queen Elizabeth II. She had a democratic bearing rather than a regal one but you knew who was boss in the classroom. Yet she was so generous and kind-hearted that you just had to accept that other side of her personality. Respect was essential—and, fortunately, respect was, in her view, a mutual thing. As long as you understood her rules of decorum and behavior, you were safe in her class. But somehow she communicated the feeling that you really did not want to get on the bad side of this woman. She was safer to have as a friend than as an enemy. Since she really was not mean-spirited or nasty it was really not hard to follow her rules of class etiquette. In those days I doubt if I ever heard the word “etiquette” but I sensed the meaning of the term from the way she conducted her class—even from the way she dressed and carried herself which was understated but elegant. Nothing fancy but you knew somehow that she knew how to be fancy if it were necessary.
She once said she did not like pretentiousness or bragging, even about things that might be said to involve "High Culture", like a knowledge of Shakespeare’s Plays; she felt you ought to be able to go to a backyard barbecue and join in any discussion without showing off your knowledge. For her such “higher learning” was a jewel of great value but not to be displayed on more ordinary occasions. She liked knowing things most people did not know but she believed in using tact and discretion in the application of such knowing. The kernel of what she was teaching, I think, was essentially right. Real understanding means a keen understanding of the limitations of both learning and the understanding that accompanies it. We all, no matter who we are, need to be modest in our expression and behavior. In my own explorations I have found that my most brilliant teachers were rarely arrogant and readily admitted when they were baffled by something. Richard Feynman, the great bongo-playing physicist, was always joking about profound matters but was deadly serious when he said “we really do not know much about how the universe works.” And that from a physicist on a par with Albert Einstein. However, Beulah Harper--that is, “Mrs. Harper--would probably not have approved of his playing the bongo drums. (I’m probably wrong about that because she has a good sense of humor.) Her preference for “decorum” and “appropriateness” would make her distinctly uncomfortable among some of my unconventional friends who might show at a fancy cocktail party wearing combat boots and blue jeans. To understand Mrs. Harper you would have to read the Mississippi author, Eudora Welty, to get the right degree of propriety mixed with a mischievous humor—like one of Eudora’s characters whose mother insisted that a Southern lady would not think of traveling on a train without a hat box for her hat. The character in that story did travel very demurely with a hat box on her lap but the box was actually filled with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Proper appearances, class standing, and modesty were fulfilled but the substance could be rather different. Beulah taught a kind of “courteous irony”—the noblesse oblige of the genteel middle class; hence, my description of her as a teacher of “bourgeois virtue.” I could safely describe to her my attendance at a concert of classical music with Zubin Mehta on the podium or watching Arthur Rubinstein play Beethoven at age eighty on a none foot grand piano. But I would be wise not to describe the place where I went to hear Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Mose Allison in Montreal, called “The House of The Rising Sun” because those surroundings would not appeal to her at all—though she would like some of the music.
I fear I most remember Mrs. Harper for her attempts, like those of Mr. Maxwell, to teach us the greatness of Shakespeare. We had to read, as I recall, the play Julius Caesar and, alas, to recite from memory the speech of Antony about the death of Caesar. It wasn’t so much the memory work as the public speaking that got to me. I had so much stage fright that I kept getting lost in the speech. I could do it by myself but never in the full glare of “the footlights” in public and on display. To this day I do not like public speaking and rarely attempt it if at all possible. I liked being invisible as much as possible in high school and I like it now.
Mrs. Harper never really understood my reluctance to speak despite her understanding of the need for modesty. But I do appreciate her attempt “to civilize me.” It just didn’t really take. I grew up like Crocodile Dundee but with alligators. I can still throw a knife with deadly accuracy but it wouldn’t go over so well in a barbecue setting. I love the scene in the movie of Crocodile Dundee out in the New York harbor throwing dynamite in the water. When confronted by the harbor police who asked him what he was doing, he said: “Oh, just doing a little fishing, officer.” Mrs. Harper did have an excellent sense of humor but Crocodile Dundee and Robin Williams would have pushed all her buttons. My mind works a lot like that of Robin Williams. I’m glad I was quiet in Beulah’s class, especially for the ones on “bourgeois virtue.
Mrs. Sylvia Feuerstein--Teacher, Mentor, and Wise Woman
Self-Reflective Preface
Now that I have long since retired from the classroom as a teacher, I cannot imagine how I ever did it. Surely no one in his or her right mind would stand in front of a group of children and try to teach them anything. What presumption! At best, it assumes you have something to teach them that they more or less agree to try to learn. A shaky assumption. Unless each student enters into that agreement tacitly or explicitly, you have very little reason to be wasting your time in front of these students. You might as well be a pastry chef. At least no one will say, “Do we really have to eat this?” And if you do your job well, you will see a smile as the customer chomps down on your pastry. But teaching? And something to teach them? How often do teachers get asked to teach something they know very little about? All too often. These the are melancholy reflections of a retired teacher who looks back in wonder and astonishment at a career of more than thirty years as a teacher in various classrooms trying to teach a variety of subjects. I must have been in a trance surely or simply out of my mind. What could I have been thinking?
Remembering some of my teachers, as I have been trying to do, I wish I could ask them about their own reflections about teaching after they retired from the classroom. I did attend the 90th birthday celebration for one of my teachers at Groves High School. She was amazingy lucid and coherent for such an age. She only noted that it was very lonely to have arrived at her age without intelligent people around to talk to for stimulation and company. A slightly terrifying honesty. She was never a person to mince words. Her children visited, of course, but she had outlived her husband and I imagined for a moment her life in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn without the company of others or the stimulus of good conversation. One reads, of course, and she always was a reader. Reading is a kind of conversation with others distant in time or locale. But reading is no substitute for friendship and conversation with others of a like mind. The Ancient Greeks had a very intimidating saying: koina ta ton philon (Friends have all things in common). How hard, then, must it be to find a good friend? We all have friends with some things in common but all things in common is a tough requirement. Sylvia Feuerstein did not find friendship an easy matter. Her long career of teaching, much longer than my own and extended in retirement by helping university students, certainly kept loneliness at bay and was an enormous help to those students lucky enough to receive her assistance. But out of the classroom for her, I suspect, was like a fish out of water. A kind of gasping for the oxygen of human interaction.
A Model of Teaching and Learning
My first encounter with Mrs. Feuerstein was not too promising. I got into trouble with her while misbehaving in the period after school while waiting for our school bus just outside the school. I was in Grade Eight at the time—about fourteen years old and full of the friskiness of the first stirring of hormones as well as the energetic release that comes from a day spend unnaturally confined in a desks in closed up classroom. We were all full of laughter and horseplay—pushing each other, joking around, and indulging in a lot of horseplay. Mrs. Feuerstein was unlucky enough to be on bus duty in front of the school. We were unlucky enough to be spotted by her while pushing the limits of acceptable behavior. I had just been hit over the head from behind with a history textbook by a girl in my class who though her actions a good way to flirt. I thought an appropriate response was to lift her up with the aid of a friend and slide her into one of the tall trash bins in front of the school. butt first. She folded up instantly and could not get out. It was all less than a minute or two of interaction. We laughed and began to pull her out—but not before Mrs. Feuerstein saw us. What an embarrassment! We got a good dressing down for what we did and had to sit on a bench for the remainder of the waiting time. I was mortified, almost never doing anything to get a reprimand so sharp and so fierce as I got. I hoped she would not remember my face.
Four years later I signed up in my senior year to take a course in “American government.” I walked into the class the first day only to see that it was taught by Mrs. Feuerstein. I hoped she would not remember my shenanigans in Grade Eight. If she did, she never let me know it. Nevertheless, I was on my best behavior in that class. Mrs. Feuerstein was notorious as a stern disciplinarian. Her sons confirmed at her 90th birthday celebration, decades later, that she was just as tough with them in their upbringing—a no nonsense but loving mother. She was the same in the classroom. Apart from her firm insistence on class decorum, she was an affectionate and caring teacher who genuinely loved interactions with her students in mastering the class material.
She was excited about John Kennedy’s possible election as President in 1960 in the November of my senior year. She expressed her hope that an intelligent man in the White House would make a real difference. I raised my hand somewhat diffidently to make the point that an intelligent man could also make more mischief if he were not a good man. She was startled but agreed and went on to extol the moral virtues of the candidate. I do not remember anything she said about Nixon. I suspect she let him suffer a much harsher appraisal but she was silent about his candidacy. In retrospect I can see she was right but also out of step with the conventions of Southern politics which would have seen Nixon’s stance on communism and his involvement with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attempt to flush the communists out of Hollywood as a good thing. Indeed, Mrs. Feuerstein had bravely undertaken a course for teachers the previous summer on “the nature of communism.” One book I remember from her list of summer readings was Three Who Made a Revolution, a solidly reliable and scholarly work. Going to the Savannah Public Library that same year to do some reading on “communism,” I had to get special permission to access the books on that topic which were kept in a locked case—to avoid, I suppose, contaminating the shelves with the taint of that topic. Amusingly enough, the only two books available in that locked case were Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover and What We Must Know About Communism by Harry and Bonaro Overstreet. Both books were reliably anti-communist and hardly needed a lock down.
Mrs. Feuerstein, at least, had a scholarly understanding of “communism” and, unlike many Southerners, did not think any doctrine slightly to left of Barry Goodwater was “communistic.” At the time I had visitors to my Baptist Sunday School who said that President Eisenhower was a suspected communist (for having uttered a warning about America’s “military/industrial complex,” I suppose—though he was right to do so). Years later I came to know that such a view, Eisenhower as communist, was that espoused by the John Birch Society in their rabid journal called American Opinion. Such ignorance was not really helpful in combating the dangers of communist ideology. The work of the Frenchman, Raymond Aron, would have been a better source for really understanding the narrow constraints of communist theory and practice. The ignorant red-baiting that I heard outside the classroom was enough to make me think there might be some good in communism—before I studied it and learned its defects. I’m not surprised that Mrs. Feuerstein finally returned to New York to teach. Ignorance there she found in abundance but not quite the same degree as that espoused by the John Birchers.
When it came time to find someone to read my essay for college admissions, I chose Mrs. Feuerstin for my editor. I had come to see her as an intelligent and reliable reader.
In the essay I tried to explain how I had come to my own “personal philosophy.” It was a little precocious and overreaching—but she was kind enough not to point that out at the time; she confined herself to a few grammatical points and suggestions about the structure of my paragraphs. My essay was a kind of naïve demolition of “existentialism” and an affrmation of the scientific modesty of P.W. Bridgman’s “operationalism”—which if I had really understood what I was writing about would have distressed me. Only much later at Harvard where Bridgman taught physics would I discover the aridity of “logical positvism” and its many variants. For a more humanistic approach to philosophy I would have to wait for my discovery of the writings of Plutarch, a Greek writer in the period of the Roman Empire. I’m not sure what Mrs. Feuerstein would think of my self-designation as a “Plutarchan conservative.” She belongs to those brave souls for whom the term “liberal” still has an honorific connotation. But I will never know as we did not discuss politics at her 90th birthday celebration.
... (To Be Continued)
