the 1950s

Dog Net

Another compliment Miss Griffiths paid me on my report card (See my blog “Lower School”) was to note I wrote “fine stories.”
She had us write one a week. She divided us into groups, within which we read our stories to each other. Each group then selected a story to be read to the entire class. My stories were always selected. I wrote an series about a small band of soldiers, either in World War II or Korea, rich in camaraderie, like the Blackhawks, but only one story survives, and it is none of these. [Author’s Note: I wonder if this band and my quest for the right gang of buddies to hang with represented an effort to re-establish the “happy” family that had been lost following my sister’s death. Readers are welcome to keep this in mind.]

“Dog Net,” which is the surviving story, parodied the TV show “Dragnet” and was heavily influenced by my admiration of “MAD” comics. It was also a ground-breaking example of appropriation art. I did not tell Miss Griffiths but the idea – and some of the material – came from my neighborhood pal, Mickey Kipper, who’d regaled me with his recollections of a comedian he’d heard on the tube..
In any event, Miss Griffiths called “Dog Net” to the attention of Mrs. Woerner, the head of the Upper School’s English department, and Mrs Woerner selected it for inclusion in “The Literary Supplement,” a (to me) unheard of honor for a Lower School student. [Mrs. Woerner would become a great champion of mine in the Upper School. She continued to admire my writing – but not my spelling and punctuation – and she never gave me an “O.”]

The distinction of having my story selected for “The Literary Supplement,” at the time, had less impact on my sense of who I was or whom I might become than had my inability to handle overhand pitching, which had eliminated my plans to play first base for the Phillies. But it stuck with me. When you do not have an abundance of successes, you keep those you do accrue, neatly at hand. “Dog Net” was probably in my mind the afternoon I sat down across from Professor Leviathan (See my blog “How I Became a Writer ii”). But I had the good sense not to mention it.
Here is how it began (slightly edited). Be warned, it does not stand the test of time:

“This is the kennel. 2500 dogs. I see ‘em all. I’m a police dog. .ARF… arf-ARF arf.We were working on a homicide detail. My partner’s name is Spotty. The boss is Captain Tige. My name’s Rover. ARF… arf-ARF arf.”

Lower School

I had a good three years.
I had fun with my friends. (My two closest and I formed OYLTO, a Treaty Organization, utilizing the first letters of our last names. NOTE: Since I have a history of fictionalizing my friends’s names, I have fictionalized their initials too.) I played soccer ineptly and baseball semi-eptly. I gave a my generation’s definitive interpretation of the villainous, one-eyed Duke of Coffin Castle, in our fifth grade (unauthorized) adaptation of James Thurber’s “The Thirteen Clocks.” (This performance was slightly sullied by my overlooking my decision to raise my eye patch between acts and re-don my glasses and then resuming my portrayal with my glasses in place and my eye patch in the middle of my forehead.)
I received less critical acclaim when, my spirited, if thoroughly off-key audition performance of “The Halls of Montezuma” failed to win me a seat in the school chorus, and I was cast to stand mute as Joseph in a Nativity scene tableau, while nearly everyone else among my contemporaries sang Christmas carols. My father, among the aisle-sitters, was most critical in his assessment of finding his son in this role.

Friends’ Central’s grades ran, top-to-bottom, “Outstanding,” “Above Usual,” “Usual,” “Below Usual,” and “Seriously Below Usual.” I got “O”s in Reading, Literary Appreciation, Written Composition. I got “A”s in Oral Composition, Arithmetic, and Social Studies, for which I recall composing papers on Peru and Albania, researched entirely in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Jr. I got “U”s in Art, Crafts, Music, and Phys. Ed. So I obviously pre3maturely concentrated on the Core Curriculum aspects of the process.
Even more noteworthy were my teachers’ comments. From the start, I was identified as someone “not… working to (his) full ability,” a judgment whose accuracy I would confirm throughout my academic life. I needed to improve “self-control” and “neatness.” I did not pay attention to “detail.” I lacked “organization.” I was “careless,” easily distracted” and, in class, “disturbing.” [On the other hand, Miss Griffiths, who taught me both in fifth and sixth grades and who penned most of those complaints, also complimented my “fine sense of humor,” “incisive comments,” and “mature grasp of current affairs.” I was, she concluded, “a stimulating person to teach.”]
Each report card afforded space for parents to reply. My mother took the opportunity to note how pleased she was at my “progress” and how I seemed “to be enjoying school…” (Adele, on reading these comments, said they raised my mother even further in her estimation for her ability “to focus on the important things.”)
My father did not commit his thoughts to paper. But he was free with them around the dinner table. Public schools had been fine for him. And if I did not do better at FCS, he would yank me out.

Friends

Friends
As I said (See blog of August 19), I liked Friends’ Central.
Lea School (Grades K – 8) was in a grim grey building. Friends’ Central’s Lower School (Grades K – 6) was in an unimposing one that may have been an estate’s stable or barn. (The Upper School, grades 7 – 12) , elsewhere on the grounds, had been the estate owner’s much grander home.) Lea divided each grade by September and January admissions of 30 0r 40 students per class. FCS’s classes had two 20-student sections. (By the Upper School, there would be an additional section.) Lea School had a macadam playground, where we played softball and varieties of stickball against each other. FCS had fields for soccer, football and baseball, and we competed against other schools. It had two gyms and Lea School none.
My Lea School classes had been predominantly Jewish, maybe a half-dozen gentiles, of whom three or four were black. My FCS class had no blacks and six or seven Jews. (My graduation class of 69 had one black and 15 Jews, which was more than enough for it to be known as “the Jewish Quaker school” among its competitors.) Unlike most private schools in the area, it was co-ed. In my fourth grade class photo, I am the tallest child and the only one with glasses.
Initially, FCS had rejected me. (My father has suspected anti-Semitism.) But just before classes began, a slot opened, and after the intervention of a prominent Quaker – the father of my blonde friend across the street (See blog of August 17), it was offered to me. I was delighted. I had loved those fields. (There was even a patch of woods, with a creek through it.) I liked my classmates and felt comfortable with them. I read the same books – the Hardy Boys and the Landmark Series. I wore the same Davy Crockett and Civil War caps. I was sent from the room to stand in the hall for disruptive behavior enough times to prove myself a regular guy. I could smack an underhand toss over the fence. (Trouble would develop when we switched to hard balls fired overhand.)
I knew from movies and comic books that private schools were not looked upon favorably in some circles. Nor, for that matter, were kids in glasses. These downsides had not yet manifested. The Jewish part had even scantier relevance.

Puddles

This is an expanded version of a piece that appeared on-line at The Broad Street Review, October 4, 2009, misguidedly titled “For the Love of a Dog,” the second of what became an initially unplanned series about growing up in the 1950s.

Until I was three, we lived with my father’s parents in South Philadelphia, at 10th and Baimbridge. My grandfather’s parents had arrived in South Jersey, with a group of Jewish emigres from Russia, for whom the Belgian-born Baron Maurice Hirsch had acquired land to farm in accordance with Socialist principles, though none of the Jews had ever owned land or farmed. My grandfather ran away as a teenager and worked as a machinist, up and down the east coast. (What he thought of the baron’s principles may be divined from his naming his first born, my father, Herbert Spencer Levin.) When my grandfather returned to South Jersey, he married the first girl in the community to have graduated high school.
She had plans for my grandfather and encouraged – some would say forced – him to become a doctor. This was not as difficult as it sounded since, in those days, there were medical schools which advertised on the equivalent of matchbook covers. My grandfather succeeded and established his offices on the first floor of his house. (I remember only its cabinets, whose shelves were enclosed behind glass doors, which folded upwards and which we inherited and two algae-choked fish tanks which returned, occupied often by mutant albino creatures, in my dreams for decades.) His patients, usually first generation Jews, Italians, and Negroes up from the South, whose ranks included Moms Mabley and Peg Leg Bates, paid him in cash or backyard produce or homemade wine. He was also, I learned much later, a drinker, a philanderer, abusive to his wife and children. But I was his first grandchild, and had favored nation status.
My grandfather always had dogs, usually chows or huskies or a mix, and usually mean. (My father spoke with rare respect and awe of Ming, a black chow from before my time, who, if his basic disposition was any indication, had been named for the villain in “Flash Gordon,” not the dynasty.) I grew up among such beasts. My favorite childhood picture is of me in a box, peering over the edge, surrounded by several drooling pups. I was completely at ease with dogs. I petted every one I met on the street or in Rittenhouse Square. And I loved stories about dogs. Dogs who rescued owners from fires and floods. Who fought off wolves and cougars and bears. Who, stolen or lost or cruelly sold, found their way across vast wildernesses to where they belonged.

After my sister Susie was born, we moved into a row house in West Philadelphia, on 46th Street, off Pine. (My grandmother, I also later learned, was to come with us, but she died shortly before the move took place.) When my Uncle Manny came home from World War II, he lived with us. So for a while did my Aunt Esther and Uncle Bernie and their baby daughter Elizabeth. My brother Larry arrived a year after that. One of my earliest correctives to my erroneous thinkings occurred in our first years on 46th Street. Because Susie was blonde, I had reasoned that was what distinguished boys from girls. No one had bothered to correct, but then I met a five-or-six-year-old boy who lived across the street, a Quaker, who was even blonder, so I had to reconsider the issue.
One day, I’m unsure when, my grandfather arrived unexpectedly and announced he had a present for me in his overcoat pocket. I pulled out a squirming, yipping ball of fur. Uncle Bernie, reacting to one of the puppy’s primary proclivities, named it Puddles. Puddles grew into a handsome dog. He had a barrel chest, a thick reddish brown coat, with a white ruff and white paws. He was intelligent, loyal, trustworthy, reverent, clean (within limits), obedient (ditto), and, I am sure, had we only been able to recognize it, as witty as Oscar Wilde. I certainly found him a more valuable addition to the household than my sister or cousin or brother. Then my grandfather arrived to borrow him. (This was not discussed with me at the time either, but Puddles had become old enough to breed.) He put him in his car and off they rode. But when my grandfather opened the door on 10th Street, Puddles, recalling who knows what traumas of his youth, or what confidences his mother may have shared with him, bolted.
There were no tracers-of-lost-dogs then. No one festooned fences with flyers or organized phone banks of inquiry. My parents, exercising the proper standard of care, alerted the pound. My grandfather was remorseful, and I was bereft. “He has tags,” my parents said. “Someone may call.” But when the phone rang, it was only Mrs. Kipper or Mrs. Hartz to discuss ORT with my mother. Then, several days later, the sun not yet risen, Uncle Bernie, readying for work, heard a scratching at the door. A somewhat thinner, somewhat bloodied Puddles, relying on some blend of instinct and intuition and the knowledge gained in his one journey to our house as a six-week old and from it on the occasion of his (to his mind) abduction, had found a street that crossed the Schuylkill and made it the four miles back. He had not crossed the Great Plains or the tundra, but in our lives he loomed heroic.

Puddles lived with us another two or three years. It was a time without leash laws, and urban dogs roamed free to ravage garbage cans, risk crossing Walnut Street, rendevous with one another, and encounter mankind’s varying dispositions. And one day an older, red-headed boy, whom I knew from the Lea School playground, where I was not in attendance, said Puddles had bitten him. Uncle Bernie, Puddles’s greatest champion, could hardly bring himself to think what the boy must have done to have provoked the attack. (For decades, when revisiting the story, he would link it with his walking into the living room and seeing Elizabeth gripping Puddles’s tongue in both hands, seeing how far she could stretch it, and Puddles stoically communicating his wish that this experiment be concluded.) But biting dogs could be gassed upon an unverified accusation and a magistrate’s order.
Somehow, my father brokered a deal. It may have involved payment to the bitten boy’s parents. It may have involved the political capital he had accrued as a Democratic party loyalist. By then Uncle Bernie’s family had moved to Overbrook Park, which was far enough away that Puddles would not endanger the red-headed boy or anyone else within the magistrate’s jurisdiction. It was agreed that if Puddles was banished, charges would dissolve.

I was sorry to see Puddles go, but I recognized the greater good. His new home abutted Cobbs Creek Golf Course, which provided eighteen holes to explore, a rivulet in which to splash, an actual patch of woods with rabbits to chase and skunks by whom he would be saluted. (Hell, at seven or eight, I could have enjoyed such a life myself.) For a time, we visited nearly every weekend, and I believed myself remembered and welcomed. I had other dogs, though none attained his stature. (The most notable was a fox terrier-like mutt who once demonstrated her regard for me by delivering three puppies on my bed without disturbing my sleep.)
Puddles lived a full and happy life. In the end, as with Rocky Raccoon (almost), Jay Gatsby (indirectly), and Stanford White (but without the kinkiness), it was love that did him in. He and a neighboring boxer regularly fought for the affections of a local chippy. On the last occasion, the boxer nearly chewed off one of his ears. After its repair, Puddles developed an infection of the brain. He was old then, and, following the vet’s recommendation, Uncle Bernie and Aunt Esther had him put to sleep.
They wished later they hadn’t, but I am certain that Puddles would have told them it was fine. They had made things fine for him for a long time.