On the troopship back, Winterside sank into a mood of retreat and decline. The Chinese could march farther with less food and fight harder with weaker weapons and less ammo. They had stronger convictions. America’s World War II toughness and resolve were gone. But for the quad fifties and the air strikes, his cohort of citizen soldier might have got swept from the peninsula the way the Romans got swept from Gaul. Read the rest of this entry »
Because of her age, Miss Magill would leave the room for a few minutes from time to time. When she did, she brought in one of her former students, now in the upper grades, to serve as monitors. (This was before they opened Joan of Arc Junior High; P.S. 166 still went up to eighth grade.)The monitors–always girls–were taller and older, intimidating not just through residual fear of Miss Magill, but through their size and age. Any sign of disorder and a glance from them stopped us cold. Read the rest of this entry »
First, children must want to read,” Miss Anna F. Magill would tell the teachers who came from all over the United States to learn her methods. “And second, they must have something worthreading.” She’d taught longer than any other teacher in any other school in New York City and always at P.S. 166 on Eighty-Ninth between Amsterdam and Columbus. She was the author of nine Anna F. Magill Readers and three Anna F. Magill teaching manuals, published by Ginn and Company of Boston and year after year, she terrified the first grade students in our school. She terrified their parents, too. She even terrified the principal. Or maybe it was awe. Read the rest of this entry »
Following their Horrors Of War cards, Gum Inc. brought out a series Play Ball cards in the late 1930s and early ‘forties. They came two to a penny pack of bubble gum with a ballplayer’s picture on the front of the card, and on the back, the name of his team, his position, his birth date and a paragraph about how good he was.The first set came out in 1939, with players from all sixteen Major League teams except the Chicago Cubs. Read the rest of this entry »
One day when I came home from school, a woman who didn’t speak English was in our living room sewing a dress on my mother’s sewing machine. My mother spoke to her by using the dictionary she’d bought for her Spanish class. After the woman left, my mother said she was from Barcelona. Her husband had been a doctor, like my father, but he’d been killed in one of Franco’s air raids. Now she was a refugee and had to support herself by making dresses. Read the rest of this entry »
After card eighteen the compositions of the Horrors of War cards seemed to open up and grow less crowded. In addition, the subject matter expanded from the Sino-Japanese War to the Spanish Civil War that began in July of 1936 and to the October 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The Sino-Japanese war cards continued to be clearly anti-Japanese. They called the Japanese “Japs” and dwelled on their brutality. Indeed, they were so vigorously anti-Japanese that some members of Congress complained and accused GUM, INC., Phila. Pa. of conducting ”Bubblegum Diplomacy.” Read the rest of this entry »
The pastel-colored scenes on the front had a yellowish tint and depicted so much death and violence some parents forbade their children to buy them. The first twenty in the series were as lacking in perspective and packed with figures and incident as a pre-Giotto narrative painting.
‘To know the HORRORS OF WAR is to want PEACE,” it said on the back of every gory card. “This is one of a series of 240 Picture Cards. Save to get them all.Pictures and Text Copyright 1938, GUM INC. Phila. Pa.” Read the rest of this entry »
I left the café, strolled up the boulevard, took a table in a seafood restaurant and ordered mussels, a green salad and a bottle of Rhone red. As I finished Camus’ chapter on nihilism through history, the waiter returned and displayed my wine. I read the label, nodded and watched him extract the cork. I gave it a cursory glance, twirled and sniffed the sample he poured, tilted the glass to examine the opacity, twirled it again to watch the tracks run down the far side, allowed some onto my tongue, rolled it from the front of my mouth to the rear, stared into the middle distance for a count of three, all more for the waiter’s benefit than my own, (I can’t always distinguish table wine from Origin Controlled) and nodded for him to fill my glass. Read the rest of this entry »
Part 1—Camus and Lincoln
A couple of months ago, I was sitting in a cafe on Boulevard du Montparnasse, having a drink before dinner, rereading THE REBEL, half-hoping to be interrupted by some intellectual Parisienne, fluent in English or willing to speak French slowly. As always with Camus, I understood the words and sentences but didn’t feel certain of his point. The book seemed to be an elaboration of his MYTH OF SYSIPHUS complaint about the absurdity of the universe, but if you’re right about the gods being dead, what does it profit you to condemn their craftsmanship of the universe? Read the rest of this entry »
When you walked into Ma’s Junk Shop on west Eighty-Ninth in Manhattan, you saw a small soda fountain with three stools to your left, and then a long glass display case filled with the hundred different kinds of penny candy they made back before the War. Ma, four foot ten and grouchy stood on raised flooring that gave her the height to operate the malted milk mixers, push the handles that squirted syrup into the soda glasses and, if you were a kid, to glare down at you as if you were about to smash her display case with your book-bag, grab one of her two-for-a-penny root beer barrels and run. Read the rest of this entry »
