At age four, I attended the local nursery school which was physically situated on Hillside Avenue between Temple Emanuel synagogue, the skating rink, and the giant food center. The Jewish place of worship was where I would later go to religious services on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. The Skateland ice rink was the practice facility of the New York Rangers National Hockey League team. The Big Apple supermarket was where I bought powdered sugar donuts and inserted a nickel into a bubble gum machine to get a pack of five “Mars Attacks!” cards. Starting at Card Number 46 of the 55-card series, the Earthlings launch their counterattack against the brutal and hideous Martian would-be colonizers. After their “Blast Off for Mars,” the heroic human volunteers bomb the Red Planet and leave the Martian cities in ruins. It was an echo of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and a metaphor for America’s paranoid fear of a mythical imminent assault by the international Communists.
The preschool romper room was contained within a small building more suitable for a bakery or a take-out food restaurant. There were two groups of about twenty kids each. To temper the chaos, the other young children and I took a lot of mid-morning naps on broadloom carpet. We listened to a scratchy vinyl record of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. The following year, at age five, I was in kindergarten at the public Center Street Elementary School that was behind the baseball field that was behind the backyard of our house. In kindergarten, I danced “the twist” to Chubby Checkers’ popular song promoted by the music industry. Then I made gyrating movements with my body (resembling the solo Twist dance) while keeping a Wham-O plastic toy hula hoop in place. I twirled the bright red hula hoop around my waist for as long as possible before eventually losing control and gravity pulled it to the ground.
Since I had tested at an IQ of 165, my mother decided that I was bored in kindergarten. She thought that I would continue to be bored with the learning curriculum the next year if I stayed at the level and in the company of other pupils of my own age group in the first grade. She had a meeting with the school principal and tried to persuade him to let me advance or “skip” immediately into the second grade that coming September. He refused her request. The administrative and educational leader believed that “skipping” was a bad idea. He thought that the scholastic, intellectual, and “achievement-oriented” dimension of my existence was not everything. His view was that my being in a grade where I was younger than my classmates would be socially, psychologically, and emotionally damaging to me. My mother left the meeting in anger. She withdrew me from the public school and enrolled me in the private Sands Point Country Day School for Gifted Children.
The Sands Point School was housed in a sumptuous mansion on a sprawling real estate property that was adjacent to the sometime rough waters of the Long Island Sound estuary at Hempstead Harbor. The regal manor house on Elm Court was originally built with “old money” wealth around 1921, at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. The famous architect Egerton Swartwout had designed the stately home of twenty-two rooms, built with concrete and stucco, for the shipping magnate Edgar F. Luckenbach, President of the Luckenbach Steamship Company. Luckenbach’s wealth was inherited. The estate became renowned for the Sands Point Horse Show which was held on its grounds. Luckenbach’s third wife Andrea Fenwick Luckenbach was a dedicated breeder of exhibition horses. The celebrated French landscape creator Jacques Gréber (planner of the Ben Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia) added sumptuary formal gardens, lawns, orchards, greenhouses, elaborate fountains, and an intricate hedge maze to the idyllic environs around the villa. The imposing residence-converted-to-an-elementary-school stood proudly in the center of 140 acres (57 hectares) of land, forest, and beachfront. The Sands Point Gold Coast was the geographical locale corresponding to the fictionalized East Egg where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel The Great Gatsby partly takes place.
My successful structural engineer father paid tuition money to the private school. The owners agreed in advance to let me “skip” my way through grade school as fast as my “big brain” capabilities could carry me. Many times, up until my mother’s death at age ninety-one, I tried to get her to acknowledge that maybe the skipping had been a big mistake that had harmed me, or at least had caused me suffering and had made my life difficult. She never budged in her position. Every time I brought up the subject, my mother repeated insistently her stance that I would have become a “discipline problem” if I had been left at age six in the original grade track of children my age. My mother never apologized nor developed any self-criticism about the action that she had taken that so deeply affected and shaped my life.
Ironically the Sands Point School was in fact a haven for pupils with “discipline problems.” Many articles about the school appeared in prestigious New York newspapers and national magazines in the 1960s, praising it as an advanced enlightened project which was allegedly of vital importance to America’s future. The school was showered with accolades. It could serve as a model for how gifted children of high intelligence and extraordinary creativity could be pedagogically nurtured. The school came to the attention of national TV network news programs, the U.S. Congress, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche. The bottom-line dirty secret, however, was that the business enterprise that was the school was keenly in need of money. It was willing to take almost any pupil whose parents could afford to pay the tuition. A significant minority of the kids were indeed gifted with high “measurable” IQ intelligence. But there were many who were problem cases who had been expelled from their public schools for engaging in various mischiefs and who needed to be taken in somewhere. Perhaps the parents wanted to believe that the juvenile delinquency of their son or daughter was a spot-on marker of great genius. There was a third large category of ordinary kids with average intelligence whose parents had money and wanted to feel that their child was special. Everything in America was the reign of the image, the society of the spectacle. Sands Point was the simulacrum of being “gifted.”
I had to wake up early five days a week for the bus ride to the private school. It was required of me to be at the appointed spot on the sidewalk of the thoroughfare of Herricks Road at the appointed time of 8 AM. Gordon Drive was connected to Herricks Road at both ends of our short C-shaped lane. The school van picked me up to begin the seemingly interminable drive to the Sands Point mansion. The bus made several further stops to collect other children. The trip could take one hour, depending on the heaviness of the “rush hour” traffic and the weather. It could be miserably cold and snowy in the depths of winter. When we finally arrived, I was exhausted and freezing and felt like my energy for the day had already been spent.
Now I close my eyes and remember. The concept of memory is one-sided. It is valid but not sufficient. Each moment that I lived can be circumscribed by the past tense but is also vital independently of time.
The bus turns off Middle Neck Road onto the tight secluded pathway of Elm Court. The speed limit is nearly zero and the vehicle proceeds deliberately and with caution. The driver is attentively looking for detached tree branches which may have fallen during the night’s storm. At the end of the pastoral road is the circular driveway in front of the main school entrance.
The manually operated whole frame folding door of the bus-sized van finally opens. I descend to the ground. I take a few steps up to the portico gateway that shelters those who arrive from inclement weather. I observe its roof structure that is supported by elegantly chiseled columns.
I glance behind the grandiose edifice at the complex labyrinth devised within manicured evergreen shrubbery inside of which I often intentionally get lost during recreational recess or lunch hour. I then find my way out like ancient Theseus seeking Cretan Princess Ariadne’s thread to escape the menacing Minotaur.
Now it is just before 9 AM and I step into the vestibule. I walk through a wide corridor hallway. There are important rooms on the ground floor: the headmaster’s office, the music room, the science room, the library, dining halls, the kitchen, and the walk-in closet for mimeographing.
My legs, however, guide me towards the “grand stair” – a wide winding staircase veering left that leads majestically up to the second floor. I ascend with my left hand on the metal handrail next to the mahogany banister, espying the ornate chandelier light fixture hanging overhead.
I reach the second floor. To my proximate left a few meters away and to my immediate right, and in front of me beyond an open space, and to the distant left and to the far right, I see the four classrooms where my life’s fate would soon play itself out as early in the metaphorical day as the rooster rises in the morning on the proverbial farm.
The four classrooms were converted from the bedrooms they had been at the time of the Luckenbach family. I enter the room directly on my right. The other rooms are the homes of my future second, third, and fourth grade.
The first-grade chamber is mine at age six. It is about 17 feet by 17 feet (five meters by five meters). It has its own bathroom and a sleeping porch enclosed by mesh screens. Tall arched Palladian windows adorn the side opposite the door to the room.
There were fifteen kids in the class. The teacher was the young and kindly Mrs. Wagner, the daughter of the school principal. She had brown hair and wore glasses. It was she and my mother who taught me to read. The other boys and I spent a lot of our time tossing and flipping baseball cards. You stood at a certain distance from the wall. You and your opponents tried to toss your cards, one by one, as close as possible to the wall. The best result of the toss would be the card touching the wall with one edge while it stood up diagonally. The winner gathered up all the cards in play. In another variation of tossing, you tried to cover the card of an adversary with your card. Flipping was a heads or tails game. Your card landed face up (showing the image of the baseball player) or face down (showing the back of the card with the player’s career statistics). The second flipper then tries to match the heads or tails result.
We had French classes already in the first grade. That was a simulacrum meant to signify how smart we were. Four first-grade pupils, including me, were chosen to learn the advanced second grade curriculum in reading, writing, science, and arithmetic. We were tutored part of the time separately from the others by Mrs. Wagner. We felt proud of our special advancement through the educational system. It was understood that our task was to complete the first and second grades combined into one year. It was understood that in the autumn we would go into the third-grade class.
The other three kids in the accelerated group were Lisa Schwartz, Barbara, and Danny. I spent a lot of time with Lisa and Barbara. Years later the moments with them became like a lost paradise in my mind. I would not have a girlfriend again until age eighteen. I was in love with Lisa Schwartz. But I was even more in love with Barbara, who had blonde hair. What made me especially enamored of Barbara was that she had the same last name as me. It felt in a way like we were married.
Danny was the most popular kid. He was smart, but nowhere near as smart as me. He was extroverted, self-confident, and good-looking. He was cool. But he was a small-time thug, somewhat of a bully. He was dishonest, devious, never to be trusted. I was almost as popular as Danny. But I didn’t care much at the time about being popular. Years later being liked and admired by the whole class became like another lost paradise. I would never experience that again in all my school years.
Danny declared to me and everyone else that I was his best friend. I would have made a good vice-president or prince to his rule as president or king. I humored him that I was indeed his best friend. But in my mind, I disliked him.
One day it was decided that there was going to be an election for class president and other officer positions. We were going to do the nominations today and the voting would happen on Monday. But Danny was out sick that Friday. No one nominated him. Despite his apparent popularity, he was not there so he was forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe secretly no one liked him. They were just afraid of him. I thought about Danny, considered if I should nominate him for president in his absence, but decided against it. It was my revenge, my way of expressing that I did not like him. I was nominated for president, and so were two other boys.
At the beginning of the next week, Danny was healthy. He was there again, and he was furious. He was especially angry at me. According to the rules, it was too late for him to be nominated for president. As his next best option, he launched the “Don’t vote for Alan” campaign. All the kids, except for Lisa who was my true friend, fell into line behind him. They made signs that said: “Don’t vote for Alan.” The negative posters were hung up all over the classroom and in the hall corridor.
“Don’t vote for Alan! Don’t vote for Alan!” they shouted.
I got two votes: Lisa and me. I felt terrible. Mrs. Wagner felt bad for me.
“What lesson did you learn from this experience?” she asked me.
“I learned that the world is full of strife,” I replied.
I don’t think I felt humiliated. I thought that everything in the world was ridiculous and absurd. When you have that kind of heartfelt detachment, you don’t feel humiliated by anything. But you can feel very bad.
Egerton Swartwout the Beaux-Arts architect had built a six-car stucco garage or horse shed for the super-rich Luckenbachs in the 1920s. It had six rooms and a bath and living quarters on the second floor, presumably for the chauffeur or horse trainer and their respective families. This dépendance of the main house had been converted to the art classroom of the school. My mother was a realist and slightly impressionist painter of natural and nautical scenes who had paradoxically studied with the abstract master Mark Rothko, so I was encouraged to develop my artistic talent. The walking and car path to the art room house was a downward sloping branch off from the circular driveway. I made several flower vases from clay by pinching, making coils, then flicking paint colors with a brush at the solidifying object as it spun around.
At both ends of the vast schoolgrounds, at the edges of the far east and the far west, there were trails of several hundred meters leading to the beach. The eastern path was less spectacular. You walked on an abandoned road of dirt and pebbles where some lespedeza and grassy weeds had sprouted up. The vehicle passage which had devolved into a footpath and the Long Island Sound were on the same land level. The trail ended before you saw the beach. In the final meters, you had to fight your way through thorny bushes to get to the opening.
The pathway to the beach at the far west end of the property was the most enchanting site of my childhood. After passing through the gate of a metal fence that was often locked, you entered a wide arboretum strip with many species of trees and sculpted greenery vines overhead. It was filled with the sounds of birds and crickets as summer approached. This immersion in the sensorium of magnificent nature continued for many minutes as you neared the water frontage. At the termination of the path, you arrived at high cliffs far above Long Island Sound. I ran down the steep slope of plentiful loose moist sand in fearless joy, propelled forward at high speed by the force of gravity, landing comfortably and safely on the horizontal strand. When I later read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, it was that cliff which I pictured in my mind’s eye as the place where Holden Caulfied, in his fantasy, catches the children who play with abandon in the rye fields close to the edge where they, literally in the scenario, risk tumbling to injury or something worse, or, metaphorically, lose the innocence of childhood.