14. Edna, Anthony and What I Remember of the Sixth Grade

Ah, the sixth grade. Remember what you learned?  I’m not sure we were taught anything that year.  I think Miss O’Neill went on sabbatical that year and didn’t tell the administration. Punching in every day was the extent of her pedagogical activities. Oh yeah, we went to the UN in New York. Nice bus ride. Other than that, zero recollection of any formal learning.  I know I went to school, because I got an attendance certificate.  I was also an AAA crossing guard (yup, with a badge). Oh, and I was elected class president, much to Miss O’Neill’s disappointment who was hoping Susan Schneider would get the job. And, I managed to get through six years in the school without once having to sit on the bench outside the principal's office!

That doesn’t mean I don’t remember anything from that year.

Edna Rabinowitz, or to be more precise: Edna Michelle Rabinowitz.  Why, after all these years is that name still deposited in my memory bank?

And, I remembered assembly day - actually, one assembly day in particular. No discussion of my recollection of elementary school assembly day and the attendant color guard would be complete without a mention of Edna and that fateful day when Anthony DiLarocca carried the American flag onto the stage at PS 235 as he did every week that year. How fickle we eleven-year-olds can be.  One minute Anthony could do no wrong – the first one chosen for any game, friendly, popular. Then… Bingo!

Let me put things in perspective.  In the pecking order of school status the person who garnered the most respect was Mr. Farrell, the custodian. (The first thing you learn in kindergarten is to never refer to him as the janitor. The janitor reported to Mr. Farrell. Mr. Farrell always came to work in a three-piece suit and carried a brief case. If I had known then what an executive was or looked like, Mr Farrell would be one.) Next in the hierarchy was the sixth grader in the color guard who carried the American flag during assembly. Tied for third place were the school principal and the AV kid who set up the film strip projector. Actually, the kid usually beat out the principal for name recognition.

That honor, that year, was bestowed upon Norman Edwin Wasserman, who early on had mastered a skill that would, no doubt, help in his career goals: don’t hire your replacement unless there is a promotable position for you.  Norman had the AV franchise all to himself. A teacher needed AV equipment? Norman was the main, and only, man. He would schlep the phonograph from the principal’s office to the classroom and set up the record for music appreciation. Or he would set up the film strip projector and gingerly thread the spool of film.  Often, it was the wrong spool, or he had forgotten to bring the screen, necessitating another round trip to the principal’s office.  Those who knew Norman suspected that this screw up was intentional; anything to stall a return to Miss O’Neill’s class.

Norman Edwin Wasserman.  Now that was a name that did not easily roll off your tongue.  There were several theories surrounding his naming: a) his parents were fond of names ending in ‘n’, b) the names would satisfy both sets of grandparents, c) his parents wanted to get even for the unplanned pregnancy or d) all of the above.

Back to Anthony. Anthony was selected after careful consideration by the faculty. Actually, the eligibility pool quickly dried up after Anthony. (“What? You want your precious Arnie he should get a hernia carrying that heavy flag?”)

PS 235 was situated in a mixed Catholic and Jewish neighborhood with a large Catholic elementary school just a block away.  If you were Catholic and of elementary school age and your parents could afford it, you went to St. Catherine’s of Genoa on Albany Avenue.  If the family couldn’t afford it, somehow the Church provided.  Case closed. You didn’t want your kid labeled ‘a public,’ as we public school kids were called by those who went to St. Catherine’s.

Unless you got kicked out. Then you went to PS 235 and became ‘a public.’. Once the word got out that it wasn’t so bad – in fact, that it was good - the discipline problem at St. Catherine’s became more acute.

Hence the defacto segregation in PS 235 with the school demographics - except for the St. Catherines alumni -  resembling Rabbi Solomon Cohen Yeshiva, Talmud Study and Day School of Israel and Brownsville (with satellite yeshivas conveniently located in Boro Park and Williamsburg).  You get the picture.

Anthony never went to St. Catherine’s. He was a ‘public lifer,’ a PS 235 student since the first grade. His parents owned a nice house a block away from the school and by the sixth grade most of the class would hang out there after school.

Part of Anthony’s charm, when, or if, we cared to analyze it, had to do with the fact that his was the only last name in our class that ended with a vowel other than 'O'.  (How could I forget Rose Shapiro, but that's another story.). A nice diversion from a steady diet of names ending in stein, er, berg, witz or smith that made up the rest of the class – except for Mary Ellen.

Mary Ellen was the only kid in our class, maybe in the entire school, to have two first names.  How neat is that?  Her ticket into our class was that her mother taught in the school.  As a result, we all started referring to each other by two names.  This lasted about two weeks until we either forgot what our classmates’ middle names were or Miss O’Neill told us to stop making fun of Mary Ellen.  “No way, Miss O’Neill.  Honest. We think she’s cool!”

Okay, so that was our class’ contribution to diversity. Twenty-nine lower middle-class Jewish kids from the neighborhood; one Jewish-wannabe Italian kid, and one ‘other’ from who-knows-where who got driven to school by her mother.

Until that fateful day, what today would be called a ‘wardrobe malfunction.’ In retrospect, ask any kid in that class what was the most important thing he learned that entire year – the takeaway - something that would remain ingrained in the far reaches of his memory for ever. Something that didn’t even get an honorable mention in Miss O’Neill’s sixth grade curriculum: yep, check your fly!

Thank you, Anthony DiLarocca!

So, what does this have to do with Edna Michelle?  She was in our class, but definitely not in the ‘in’ clique. These were the girls who, once they got into high school just to piss off their parents, would actually date guys like Anthony with tattoos and black leather jackets, and who smoked, 

Edna, like a few other girls in the class, was ‘interested’ in Anthony. We guys weren’t jealous of Anthony and his appeal to the opposite sex. At age eleven our concern was who had the newest Spauldeen. Anthony seemed as oblivious to the attention as the rest of us.  Fast forward to junior high school and see how that would change. (It was at that point that Anthony, having joined me in junior high school, and having gone to many of his classmates' bar mitvahs, toyed with the concept of converting, at least until the Bar Mitzvah season ended.) Think glory, girls, gifts, gelt.  Anthony especially liked the sound of that last one and would often pepper his conversations with the word 'gelt.'  "Hey, Neil, I got gelt.  Wanna go for ice cream?"

But, back to Edna.  It was evident that, even to us less-than-worldly sixth graders, that Edna lacked some of the requisite social graces required to navigate life’s daily struggles and interactions.

For starters, it wasn’t that her clothes were dirty or torn. But by nine o’clock she looked as though she had just gone through two hours of remedial recess or had run the last three blocks or had fought off a bunch of kids from St. Catherine’s. Sometimes her hair looked like it had been used by a boy scout troop practicing knot tying.

Edna was less than cool in expressing her affection for Anthony.  In fact, to her credit, her uncoolness gave her a head start in the race for Anthony’s attention. She didn’t care if she made a fool of herself. Discretion was definitely not her strong suit. She heralded this affection by writing his initials all over the inside of her composition book. Unfortunately for Edna, Anthony was more interested in Angela Benevento at St. Catherine’s; a relationship, even at age eleven, made in heaven according to Anthony’s parents - unless he found a nice (i.e. rich) Jewish girl with lots of gelt.

But, of all the kids in the assembly that day, it was Edna Michelle who first noticed Anthony’s, ahem, problem. It was she who had to poke the kid next to her and point.  That’s what set off the chain reaction to the point where even the first graders in the front of the auditorium were pointing.

I was never in the color guard, but I did know that that flag was heavy and required two hands to hold it up and it was the American flag, after all.  You just can’t put it down and you can’t hand it to the kid on either side of you.  They had their own flags, and, by now, their own problems. Maybe the first graders are pointing at them. I don’t know how long it takes to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and that part about Richard Stance – whoever he was, but I can tell you it must have seemed like an hour to the kids on stage.

Eagle-eye Edna got her fifteen minutes of fame as a result of her discovery.  Actually, in her case the fifteen minutes was discounted to about five.

Anthony finally made it off the stage and spent the rest of the day in the principal’s office, no doubt figuring how he was going to make it out of the building at three o’clock.

“No problem Anthony.  We got your back. We sure don’t got your front.”

“Hey Anthony, what’s up?”

Hi, buddy, what’s goin’ down?”

You can not believe how creative – and cruel – intelligent sixth graders can be, unless you once were one.  It was strictly a guy thing.  If the girls said anything they did it behind Anthony’s back. What’s the purpose in doing that when you can deliver a zinger direct to the victim and savor the joy of seeing him react? Unfortunately for his classmates, Anthony took it good-naturedly which took the fun out of the taunting and by Monday recess we had moved on to other important issues and by next Friday, there was Anthony walking down the center aisle of the auditorium with that big American flag. Now, truth be told, not all eyes were focused on the flag.  

Not only had Edna’s claim to fame flamed out but she also garnered the anger of some of her female classmates who felt it necessary to protect Anthony from any further embarrassment.

In any case, shortly after the event, Edna changed her ‘allegiance’ – no pun intended – and her notebook. Now, when she opened her new notebook we could see plastered on the inside were the letters NEW.  Why would anyone write ‘new’ in a notebook?  Then we realized, it wasn’t ‘NEW.’ They were initials! 

Way to go, Norman Edwin Wasserman!   .

We graduated in June. I went on to junior high school; Edna went to the local elementary school for grades 7 and 8.  That was the end of dealing with Edna Michelle Rabinowitz – until the end of my senior year in Erasmus Hall High School.  (No one who went there ever called it Erasmus Hall.  Like saying Samuel J. Tilden High School. At best it was just Erasmus; usually pronounced ‘Rasmuz,’ or ‘Rasmyass.’) 

Anyway, I get my senior year book and I’m thumbing through it, first to make sure my name is in it and then at all those, you know, team and club group pictures.  I stop at the Arista picture to see if my name was mistakenly included and as I thumb down the list, there is Edna Michelle Rabinowitz and she’s the Arista leader. Whatthe…? The school was large – in excess of 4,000 students – but still, in three years how could our paths not have crossed? I know, she was probably in all those honor classes, but still... The picture is small, but there she is in the center of the front row and there she is again in the cheerleader picture. 

So I turn to the page that has her graduation picture and sure enough, there, sandwiched between Denise Rabino and Leon Rabinowitz is Edna’s smiling face framed by long blond hair.  Of course she’s smiling; she’s graduating with honors, she was Arista leader, she was co-captain on the Cheerleader squad, she had volunteered in the principal’s office, she was going on to college, she’s destined to marry some guy with a ‘3^rd’ after his name and move to Greenwich; she had managed to get the knots out of her hair and she looks nothing like I remember her from the sixth grade. Yeah, she probably weighed about the same as she did in the sixth grade – but she was now about a foot taller and had redistributed some of that weight to her advantage, if you know what I mean.

In fact, she looked good.  Damn! Very good! 

Baby swans and Edna Michelle Rabinowitz.