Class Acts

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Parents exert an overwhelming effect upon their children by their words, their deeds, their omissions and their concealments, but children simultaneously conduct their own education, absorbing everything that crosses their field of perception, and that is a matter over which parents have little or no control.
                                                                ---Luc Sante, "THE FACTORY OF FACTS"

My education in social differences began when I was in fifth grade and we moved into our first house. Years of shift work at the Buffalo Water Works, supplemented by moonlighting as a radio and TV repairman had allowed my father to put away enough money for the downpayment on that "handyman's dream," a modest three-bedroom bungalow on Weston Street on Buffalo's east side. That first year, he spent his days off and the all of his summer vacation, repairing its badly neglected, weathered shingles. Fixed in my memory is the image of him standing high up on an extension ladder in the hot sun, his forehead beaded with sweat, a red bandanna covering his nose and mouth against paint flakes and sawdust, applying his electric rotary sander in an effort to strip the shingles down to healthy, bare wood before repainting--because he couldn't afford to replace them.

Before the move to Weston Street, we had lived in public housing in the Langfield Housing Development, just a few blocks away from our new residence. The projects, as they were better known, were laid out within a large rectangular plot, bordered on the north side by an a broad waste-lot, where the expressway would eventually be built to connect the working class suburbs with the city's business and manufacturing areas. Kensington High School and its playing fields formed the western border. To the east was a seemingly endless expanse of cemeteries stretching to the city limits and beyond. Weston Street was the fourth side. A high wooden fence--actually, a succession of high wooden fences, one per house lot--ran the length of Weston as a line of demarcation. The only breech in this palisade was an alley halfway down the street that cut through to the projects behind.

Soon after we had settled on the other side of this wall my parents made me to understand that we were now different from our former friends and neighbors. I got the message that as homeowners we were "better" than those who lived on the other side by reason of now being "better off." The bedroom I had all to myself as eldest son was pointed to as evidence of our elevated status. Such a privilege was unthinkable in the standard two-bedroom project apartment where I had shared a room with my two brothers. This and related lessons were sometimes delivered as lectures, other times as reprimands. For example, I could count on a severe scolding if my mother caught me at the back of our modest yard clambering up the fence to peer over the top or calling out to school friends and acquaintances on the other side. Upward mobility, I learned, was all about keeping eyes focussed forward and never looking back over your shoulder at where you had come from.

After we moved, I continued to attend Immaculate Heart of Mary elementary school on the far side of the housing project, a fifteen-minute walk from our Weston Street home. I always took the short-cut through the alley, then followed a diagonal path across the projects, passing our old apartment on my way. With my brother Chuck, two years younger as companion, I made this journey to and from school four times each day the remaining years until I graduated from eighth grade. (Immaculate Heart had no cafeteria, so we went home for lunch.) Friendships with classmates from my old neighborhood didn't stop abruptly, but those bonds grew weaker over time. For reasons of convenience--and encouraged by my parents--I made new friends among the kids on Weston Street. Their fathers were, for the most part, blue collar workers like my own--like fathers on the other side of the fence, too; but, in the eyes of my parents, they stood apart from those other breadwinners in an important way: they had aspirations and the motivation to better themselves. It was these values my parents hoped I would absorb through association with Weston Street kids.

2.

This was also the time--fifth grade--when I acquired my first paper route. Here was a further irony: my customers all lived in the projects (I later added Weston Street to my route). Early each morning, seven days a week for the next four years, I shouldered my bag of Buffalo Courier Express newspapers and crossed to the other side of the fence. In the summer, I opened one standard issue, public housing screen door after another, all painted the same forest green, and I tossed a paper inside. In fall and winter, I folded the paper in thirds and pushed it through the uniform-size mail slots in the heavy wooden front doors, behind which many of my classmates soundly slept. When finished my route, I would enter our house through the kitchen door, throw down my bag, throw off my clothes and climb upstairs to my bed for a short nap before rising again. If, as sometimes happened, a customer called to complain of a missing paper, I was able to drop one off on my way to school.

My daily route consisted of about 60 households. On Sundays, when it swelled to about 150, my brother Chuck helped me. And every Saturday afternoon, I slipped a chrome-plated coin changer onto my belt, placed a receipt book under my arm, and I headed off into the projects to collect payments. This weekly ritual, conducted in the light of day instead of the pre-dawn dark, afforded me an opportunity to see with new eyes the life that I had formerly led. As my route encompassed most of the Langfield Housing Development, I also became acquainted with households and courtyard communities that I hadn't previously known. I recall my surprise, for example, to discover that the tower building just behind our old courtyard, a building I had never ventured into when we lived there, was a honeycomb of studio apartments, each one occupied by an elderly woman--widows living off their deceased husbands' pensions.

The project row houses were laid out around courtyards, onto which the back door of each unit opened--six units per row house in the section where we had lived. Traffic, in and out of the houses was by way of the back door, rarely the front. This arrangement made for a feeling of neighborliness. Each courtyard was a distinct little community. My routine was to visit every customer in one courtyard before moving on to the next. I'd knock; call out, "Paper Boy;" the back door would open to me; and while the child who answered went to fetch its mother, or the housewife went to find her change purse, I stood in the doorway looking into a kitchen right out of my childhood. "Going Collecting," as I called it, was my schooling in the socio-economics of public housing. Many of my customers paid up weekly; but others regularly asked me to come back another day or the next week when they hoped not to be so short of cash. A few showed me their empty change purses week after week; still others just stopped answering my knock.

On my Saturday afternoon rounds I saw clean scrubbed, neatly organized kitchens, and I saw kitchens with dirty dinner dishes left on the table and pots and pans piled in the sink. I was greeted at the door by mothers in housedresses, sometimes with broom or dust mop in hand; and I was greeted by women dressed in slacks just back from grocery shopping or just about to go out. There was one house where I could count on a sleepy-eyed woman to answer my knock wearing her bathrobe in mid-afternoon, and there were more than a few houses overrun with small children where the parents were never home when I called. Men seldom came to the door, but now and again I'd catch a glimpse of one through a doorway, asleep on the living room couch. Sometimes classmates of mine answered my knock, then we would exchange pleasantries while I conducted my business; but these occasions could turn uncomfortable--or worse, embarrassing. At one house, where the bill was often weeks in arrears, lived a girl I had a crush on from school. I prayed every time I stood before her door that she would not be the one to open it. It pained me to see her blush when forced to make the excuse that her mother had gone out and, once again, forgotten to leave money to pay me.

3.

The other lesson I learned at this time had to do with race. In our project courtyard there had been but two black families (which in hindsight suggests that there may have been a quota). Willie Wells and all the members of his large family were noticeably dark skinned, but otherwise I viewed him as no different from the rest of us kids. Friendship at that age consisted of playing together in and about the courtyard and in the school playground during recess. Willie was one of our gang and joined us at our games. Together we played dodgeball, kickball, baseball, tag, hide-'n'-seek....Like Stephanie, another courtyard playmate, Willie was admired for his quickness and athleticism. Another bond of friendship among us kids was our shared experience of the classroom, where we endured together the strict discipline of the Franciscan nuns. In this respect, I considered Willie to be more my brother's friend than mine because he and Chuck were classmates. If my mother had anything disparaging to say at that time about Willie, his family, or blacks in general, I don't remember it.

My best friend, just prior to our move to Weston Street, was Michael Britt. He and his mother had recently moved into the courtyard. His skin was the color of caramel and he spoke a proper English with a hint of British diction (they were probably West Indian). Michael was an only child, where everyone else had siblings (I had two brothers, most others had many more). His mother was a single parent. She worked outside the home--a rarity among the mothers I knew. She dressed primly, went off in the morning to work at an office and returned home at dinner time, making Michael a latch-key kid. I spent many afternoons hanging out with him in his house, just the two of us. We played checkers and chess, traded baseball cards, and read comic books together. This was a friendship my mother actively encouraged.

The fact that Langfield public housing also had its social stratification I was only dimly aware of while we lived there, but this became clear to me after we had moved out. Between Weston Street and the brick row houses of my former neighborhood, there was a band of wood-frame row houses, one city block in width and several blocks in length. They stood behind our back fence and stretched the length of Weston Street. Now I passed among them every day when delivering papers and when walking to and from school. The wooden row houses were public housing for the least well off and had a noticeable population of blacks. If I didn't take this in at first, my mother brought it to my attention when she reprimanded me for associating with "those colored boys" on the other side of the fence.

In joining the home-owning class, my parents absorbed the values of their new neighbors. In a short time, they became obsessively fearful of blacks, viewing them as the principal threat to their investment and aspirations. It was as if the bogeyman of their nightmares lived behind the back fence. I began to overhear, with greater and greater frequency, adult conversations on this subject. Stories were told and retold of the black family that moved onto a previously all-white street, after which property values dropped and the neighborhood "went downhill." No one of my acquaintance in early 1960s Buffalo knew about the banking practice of red-lining. In their view the cause was blacks "taking over" what had been traditionally blue collar, white, ethnic neighborhoods. The failures of "urban redevelopment" only fueled their racial fears. The mere rumor of a black family buying a house on one's street was enough to raise a thicket of "for sale" signs on front lawns.

"White flight," although it didn't yet have a name, quickly gathered momentum in those years. Blue collar, tract-housing sprouted in the Buffalo suburbs of Cheektowaga, Depew, Tonawanda. Soon after we moved to Weston Street, my father passed a civil service exam to qualify as a radio technician. Shortly after that, certificate in hand, he landed a job with the Buffalo Police department at higher pay. Five years after we first moved into our Weston Street house my father put it up for sale and we joined the exodus to Cheektowaga.

4.

When it came time for me to attend high school, I chose Kensington, the public school on the border of the projects, a short two block walk from my Weston Street home. My decision went contrary to my mother's wishes and to the advice and expectations of the nuns at Immaculate Heart; but my father supported it. Unlike my mother, who went through twelve years of Catholic schooling, graduating from Villa Maria Academy where she was a favorite of the nuns, there was no love lost between my father and those holy women. He had bridled at their harsh discipline in the parish school he briefly attended. My father relished telling the story of how, in second grade, he stopped going to the parochial school and enrolled himself in the local public school instead, his mother giving her grudging approval after the fact. He continued in public schools throughout, although he never finished high school.

My reason for picking Kensington High School was the curriculum. I wanted to become a scientist. It was 1962. Sputnik had rocketed into orbit four years before. The Race for Space was on and my imagination was fired by it. The rigid Catholic high school curriculum would have required me to study Latin and general science in my first year. In public school, I could study German (Werner von Braun, head of the U.S. space program, was German), and I could start right in with rigorous science coursework in biology, followed, in subsequent years, by chemistry and physics. To my thinking, that was the ticket.

High school at Kensington was, for me, an adjustment of major proportions. Lay teachers in professional attire, both male and female, replaced the nuns wearing brown habits cinched with cord and adorned with rosary beads. There were no more catechism lessons and no more visits to church to celebrate saints' feast days; no longer was history taught with a Roman Catholic slant. But these differences were minor. It was the scale of Kensington that I found to be overwhelming. In comparison to Immaculate Heart, the physical plant was enormous--four stories tall, taking up an entire city block to accommodate 2500 teenagers. The school was a microcosm of the City of Buffalo, drawing students from all neighborhoods and social classes. Thrown together were Irish, Polish, Italian and German kids; WASPs, blacks, and Jews. I recall several occasions when this resulted in "rumbles" breaking out behind the school--turf fights between rival neighborhood gangs. My cousin Louie, who was a year ahead of me at Kensington, had to traveled by city bus to and from school each day from his mixed German and Italian neighborhood several miles away. Others I befriended traveled even greater distances. At Immaculate Heart there had been one over-crowded classroom per grade, thirty or so kids in a room overseen by a single nun who taught us all subjects--but not all equally well. At Kensington the teachers were each specialists in their subject--and demanding. Now the hundreds of students in a single grade were grouped by expected levels of achievement into vocational, general, college, and honors tracks, mixing only in the cafeteria at lunchtime and in the gymnasium or swimming pool during phys. ed.

I'm not exactly sure how I got placed into the honors track. I had no prior knowledge that such a thing existed, and I doubt that my father did either. He went with me to meet the guidance counselor when I enrolled. I suspect it resulted from my ambition to study science, which I must have conveyed persuasively to the counselor. I also had the recommendations of my Immaculate Heart teachers, originally written to secure my admission to the Catholic high school, but which now worked to my advantage at Kensington. We numbered about twenty students in the freshman honors courses. Together we studied biology, history, English, and algebra. I saw the same faces, one class period after another, with the exception of when we dispersed for instruction in the foreign language of our choice. It was at Kensington that I mixed for the first time with the children of the professional middle class--sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, and teachers. There I learned first hand about the privileges of social status.

It was obvious to me from the start that I had a lot of catching up to do. I also felt out of the loop but didn't understand why. The others seemed to already know one another. Later, I found out that many of them had attended the same elementary school, where they had been grouped together as high achievers since first grade. How different from Immaculate Heart where we were all on a par.

Another thing I discovered was that my new classmates started high school with reputations that preceded them. PS 80, the elementary school many had come from was considered one of the best in the city. This caché, along with individual rankings was transferred from 8th to 9th grades along with their school records. Each one's talents, interests, avocations was already known to the high school teachers before the first day of school. They were expected to stand out from the masses of other students by virtue of their better preparation, social standing and family income. All this gave them an air of entitlement. They expected special attention from teachers and got it. I marveled at how naturally some of my new classmates took to being paraded onto the stage of the school auditorium during the academic awards assembly after the first marking period.

I was left feeling privileged to be in the same classes with them, and I realized that I would need to work hard to prove myself in their eyes and in the eyes of my teachers. Prodded by my mother, encouraged by my father, I tested myself against them and found, in one subject after another, that these children of means really weren't any smarter. By the third marking period, I was called up to the auditorium stage to stand beside them in front of the assembled faculty and students; but I was never first, one or two others always had a higher grade point average. Some previously determined ranking seemed to be at work when the teachers tallied the marks. My mother, with whom I discussed such things, chalked it up to favoritism. At Immaculate Heart, it had never crossed my mind that the neighborhood in which your family lived, or the means by which your father earned his living might be related to the way a teacher treated you in the classroom.

If I was surprised to find myself in such company, I was just as surprised to discovered I wasn't the only Immaculate Heart alumnus enrolled in the Kensington honors courses. Seated in English class several rows away I noticed Cathy Sullivan's familiar moon-face. Cathy was short, stockily built, freckle-faced, with carrot-color hair. We had been classmates at Immaculate Heart since third grade; acquaintances, but nothing more. She had lived in a different section of the projects; had had her own circle of school friends. Those first weeks at Kensington, when everything was so new and intimidating, we traded nervous glances. We shared an understanding, communicated silently when our eyes met, that we two did not belong among these "bright," privileged children of the professional class. But trade glances was all we ever did. We never publicly acknowledged our bond. We seldom said more than hello and we avoided sitting any closer, partly out of shyness--we were a girl and a boy, after all. But, I think now, more than anything, we were afraid to associate lest one of us slip up and expose both of us to our classmates as the interlopers we truly were.