J u n i o r H i g h
J o n H o r n
Why they gave JHS 240 the official name of Andries Hudde Junior High I’ll never know. Hudde was, I read, a colonial official and big landowner back in NYC’s Dutch days. Maybe he owned the land the school was built on at 2500 Nostrand Avenue. Maybe not. Like who gives a shit, as some of us who passed through the school might or would say, out Flatbush way.
I qualified for R.A. aka S.P. (Rapid Advance or Special Progress), which meant I’d skip eighth grade and just do seventh and ninth at Hudde before moving on some few blocks down to Midwood High for three years more.
Now it goes from 6th thru 8th grade as Middle School. JHS 240 was situated midway between Midwood and Madison High Schools, and my main Hudde bud, Matty, who lived closer to the Highway than to the Avenue, would go on to Madison when I went to Midwood.
A big thing Matty and I had in common, as well as snarky smarts, was our desire not to vibe like the dorky achievers who did those three years in two. By ninth grade we tried to style ourselves like the tougher and dumber kids who did all three years, because being older was being cooler and hipper. Smarts? We were smart enough to successfully cut out of school some days, subwaying into the city to roam around The Village or catch a sleazy double feature at one of the many flea-pit movie houses on 42nd Street between Broadway & 8th Avenue. Matty was partial to olive-drab fatigue pants, I favored black chinos,and maybe we had the backs of our shirt collars up, trying for a “rocky” look – though we studiously avoided truly rocky or “hoody” kids, so we wouldn’t have to be challenged or be revealed as ruff tuff creme puffs.
Back then, if someone, probably an adult, asked you how you were, you said “I’m fine,” you didn’t say “I’m good.” You slept late, you didn’t “sleep in.”
And STDs were still called VD – though I wouldn’t have to think about that subject for another few years.
Girls wore skirts, tennies, clean blouses. No cleavage or midriff showing, no pink or blue hair, no lip or nostril studs. Boys wore collar shirts, khakis or corduroys – t-shirts and jeans wouldn’t be acceptable in school for another decade and change. No tats on boys or girls. Only sailors or prisoners sported tats. Our folks didn’t know, but we smoked cigarettes, Matty and I – “pot” was as yet unobtainable. Smoking cigarettes made us feel older and hipper, callow shmucks that we were. I remember how nauseated I felt behind my first inhales of a Pall Mall or Marlboro – just like behind my first big tastes of alcohol. I got used to the ciggies, foolish me, but never did appreciate hard liquor, or even beer. Lucky me.
Seventh grade, I got in with a group in Matty’s neighborhood. We watched the World Series at David H’s house – both his parents worked – and there was uproarious joy when the Dodgers finally won. Me, I wasn’t uproarious, because I wasn’t into baseball. David H, by the way, didn’t make RA/SP, had to do eighth grade, and fell out with those who, next year, were now a year ahead of him.
1955, 1956. I was into rock and roll, Alan Freed, “Unchained Melody,” the movie “Picnic” (Kim Novak!), the paperback of “Catcher in the Rye,” and my collection of EC comics (put out of business by the strict new Comics Code): Tales from The Crypt, Shock Suspenstories, Weird Fantasy, and MAD. James Dean died in a car crash. Johnny Ace played Russian Roulette and lost. The ’55 Chevy was a classic car. The USA was on top of the world and NYC was Action Central. And those 2 years at Hudde are now a blur of memory shards, evoked “one more once” (as Count Basie said at the end of his 1955 “April in Paris”) as a kind of religious ritual of remembrance. Calling all synapses!
I peer through hindsight goggles, lifting the shroud of Time to peep the remains of yesteryear. Not much there, in fact. Had my first date in 7th grade, with a quiet pretty girl whose name I think I remember, but whose face is but a haze. How did I get up the nerve to ask her out, and how did she accept? I cannot see, I cannot say. But I do know that, in general, I wouldn’t show girls I liked that I liked them, because I didn’t know how to approach them in a cool way and didn’t want to feel like a fool trying. Girls were even better at that game: they could really like a boy and make sure the boy never knew, by word or deed, gesture or glance. The details are blowing in the wind, but it was probably a movie date. I do remember Dad dutifully picking us up and driving her home, (annoyingly) coming up with us in the elevator of her apartment house, seeing her right up to the door. So no goodnight kiss. Damn! Maybe that’s why I didn’t ask her out again. The whole deal was too damn awkward and inchoate then. In the event, that nice girl’s family moved at the end of the school year and out of my life.
We moved that summer too, to Rugby Road, from the apartment to a relative mcmansion now that Dad was a de-facto “producer” on Person to Person. A touching moment I do recall: I, who wasn’t a sickly kid, was out of school for a week with some bug or other, towards the end of seventh grade. And who should show up at our door (3-K, 657 E. 26th St.) but Mr Glantz, our balding, bespectacled middle-aged science teacher. The class had chipped in to buy me a get-well gift, a 45 record, “The Wayward Wind” by Gogi Grant! I didn’t know everyone cared. I was going-going-gone rocknroll, Gogi”s pop hit wasn’t my taste. But I was touched. It wouldn’t happen now, you bet your boots. Just like old Dr. Serri, still making way-cheap house calls well into the 1950s. And he always seemed embarrassed to take your money. Fat chance today! Not saying all was rosy back then, there was a lot of uptight bullshit, including racism, sexism, stupidism (this last one, at least, is still going strong as ever). Some things were better then, others weren’t. Just like some things are better in one country, others better in another. I’m not going there. I’m just looking back.
Using music as a mnemonic device, I can hear Rosie Clooney singing “Hey There” and the equally popular flip side “This Ole House” in the fall of ’54, my first term at Hudde. I was still into pop music then. I heard “Sh-Boom” and bought the 45, but it was the cover by the Crew Cuts. I hadn’t discovered Alan Freed just yet, and didn’t know from The Chords. I liked “Mr. Sandman” by The Chordettes. whitebreadish but sprightly and hooky. Only next spring did rock and roll start to seep in, but it was still Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.” I dug The Moonglows’ original “Sincerely.” The “mambo craze” (which I wasn’t crazy about) peaked with Perez Prado’s Hit Parade-friendly “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” It was that summer I tuned in to “the big beat”: “Ain’t That A Shame” by Fats Domino, “Maybelline” by Chuck Berry, “Tutti Frutti” by the big fruit himself, Little Richard. By Labor Day I was subwaying downtown to the Brooklyn Paramount for the rock & roll show, excited to be surrounded by a lot of Brooklyn kids, pink, brown, whatever, all up for rock and roll. Next January (’56) I bought my last 78 record (45s were taking over):“Why Do Fools Fall In Love” by Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers. Sounds purely puerile now, but then it was the flag-waver for teen-toned r & r. Frankie was 13. I was 13. Sad note: he OD’d and died a has-been at 25, when I published Bondage Trash with M. Girodias. Different strokes for different folks indeed.
I was into Elvis just then, as he was breaking out with “Heartbreak Hotel.” My dad, with an in at CBS, got me tickets to Tommy Dorsey’s TV show. I was all the way in the back of a packed theater and could hardly see Elvis, but the vibe was there. Outside, on the line waiting to get in, an older dude in front of me showed a girl how he burnt his hands with cigarettes, making patterns.
Elvis was the phenom of the hour (as Swoonatra a dozen years earlier, and The Beatles 8 years later). Rock and roll surged. And I was there. Listening to Dr. Jive now every day “from 3:05 to 5:03,” the down sounds from uptown after school, as well as Freed’s Rock & Roll Party in the evening. I remember the music more than the real life moments of those years. The nerdy kids from Doctor’s Row I’d hung with in 6th grade were jettisoned for new kids from off the block, the ones who wanted to act cool.
I was failing Math, but a real nice teacher, Mrs. L, knew I was an underachiever and wanted to pass me, so she had me over to her house – her somewhat older sons were courteous, and I felt at ease – and encouraged me, since I liked to draw and write, to create a little (stapled, mimeographed) 4-page math magazine,
“It Figures,” with number puzzles I either invented or copied from somewhere.
I shouldn’t even have to mention that Mrs. L was Jewish, but now, when the Zionists occupying Palestine are revealed as ethno-centrically evil as their erstwhile persecutors the Nazis, ever trying to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, I am here to tell you I cherish the memory of the many, o so many intelligent, compassionate, sensitive, leftish Jewish folks whose Flatbush culture I imbibed almost as my own, despite my goyishe kopf. Of course I only remember the “good” teachers, who went beyond the call of duty (like Mr. Gendler at Midwood, whose passion put Beowulf over to a class full of kids who couldn’t care less, and who invited some of us over to his house a few blocks away to eat pizza with his kids). These are the teachers you don’t forget, Jews I’ll never forget. So while I’m horrified at Israel’s bombing, starving, and trying to exterminate the Palestinians they view as “human animals,” I must note that the most forcefully eloquent of Israel’s critics are Jewish: Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Miko Peled, Ilan Pappe, Gideon Levy, and Brooklyn’s own Norman Finkelstein. The settler-colonial Zionists are creating anti-semitism by their attempts at their own “final solution.” This is beyond sad. But let me hike myself back to Junior High…
70 freaking years ago! No wonder it all seems a misty muddle in my par-blown mind, “through a glass darkly” if you will, and even if you won’t. Sometimes, in ninth grade, I’d take the long walk home through the tree-lined streets with their laid back homes. Sometimes Matty and I would sulk and posture in a corner of the Hudde playground: while jocks played sports and social kids mingled, we hatched plans to “cut out” one more once, and tried to retain our cool, caj fronts above all. Can’t recall all the girls I was crushing on. Do remember walking the Highway, going to the Avalon or Kingsway to see some “feature presentation,” or the Kings and the Kenmore on and off the Avenue. “The High and the Mighty.” “On The Waterfront.” “Rebel Without A Cause.” “Blackboard Jungle,.” “Love Me Tender.” “The Girl Can’t Help It.”
I wrack my time-boggled brain to recall more of those formative years, the days of my early youth, but these few notes are all I can produce. Ninth grade came and went. Summer brought Matty and me and some other little jagoffs to Brighton Beach, and in particular Brighton Private, a fenced off area of the beach with cabins, games, a pool. It was exclusive, so we wanted in. They stamped the wrists of entrants so you could go out and come back. We got some kid coming out to press his wrist to our own, after we licked our flesh, and if you did it right, the stamp transferred good enough to get you in. There was also a hole in the bottom of the fence for a while where you could wriggle through. Not that there was anything much we wanted to do inside Brighton Private. It was just the challenge of getting in. I can’t recall if I somehow met va-va-voomish Harriet and her homely sidekick whose name I forget in there, but I associate the place with them. Harriet was “stacked way back” for 13 or 14, and had an attitude to go with it. Her friend was like the handmaiden to the star, drab and dowdy next to sexy Harriet, whose long hair was constantly tossed back over a soft shoulder as she styled in short shorts and halter top, both almost too well-filled. Harriet was a little friendly, a little flirtatious, but not too. Her sidekick got me aside and said “She likes you but she doesn’t want to get involved with you.” Thanks. They vanished in summer and smoke.
The Platters’ “My Prayer,” “Fever” by Little Willie John, Clyde McPhatter’s “Treasure of Love,” and The Jayhawks’ “Stranded in the Jungle,” they were big on the soundtrack of that season before High, just after Junior High.
Hey: I tried to use the music as a memory goad but it only made me remember more music. And all I’ve left to say is a lame old Brooklyn disclaimer: “You hadda be there, folks.”
