Daniel Dickinson Archives - Page 3 of 4

Hail, Daniel Dickinson, pride of our fair Binghamton

Was I an overly sensitive kid?

mom, in first row, near the center, white tights, black shoes

I began writing about how I had started kindergarten in early February 1958 at Daniel S. Dickinson school in the First Ward of Binghamton, NY, named after a 19th-century politician, located at the intersection of Dickinson Street and the curved Starr Avenue.

But then I came across, on one of those Binghamton-specific Facebook sites, this peculiar newspaper article, slamming the neighborhood that I grew up in, while holding up my school as an oasis from whatever scourge existed on the streets. And it wasn’t my experience, for the most part. What I ended up writing, will be in four parts, each titled from a line from my first alma mater.

If my mom didn’t work, at McLean’s department store downtown, first as an elevator operator and then as a bookkeeper, the trajectory of my life would have been quite different. Since we lived at 5 Gaines Street, between Front St and Oak St, I probably would have gone to Oak Street school for K-6.

Instead, the school district used my maternal grandma’s address at 13 Maple Street, between Prospect St and Cypress St, only a few short blocks away, as our address. That’s where my sisters and I went to lunch each day.

If I had gone to Oak Street, I might have met Karen and Carol and Bill, who I’ve in touch with in 2018, or Bernie or Lois, who I’ve seen in recent years, at some later date. Probably we would have been together in junior high, also at DSD, or certainly at Binghamton Central High School. As it is, February 2018 marks 60 years of friendship, which is very rare indeed.

Starting school in February, as well as September was, as I now understand, a peculiar system that almost no other district used. The kids who were turning five in the winter would begin school then. This is why I STILL remember some of their birth months.

I started kindergarten in Miss Cady’s class with Carol, Bill and David T. (December birthdays), Lois, Irene, and Bernie (February), Karen (like me, in March), and Diane (April) and some other kids, including Mary (April) and David D.

Roger singing, Trinity AME Zion Church, age 6

We had clocks that had Roman numerals; I recall the four was shown as IIII rather than IV. My rug for taking a nap on was yellow, which I passed on to my sister Leslie, a year and a half later. One time, I clearly remember waking up at 11:45 when everyone else had gone home for lunch one time.

I have no recollection of what I actually DID in kindergarten. When I went to Karen’s mother’s wake in 2012, Karen’s sister told me how I complained on a local kids’ TV show that Karen snapped my suspenders. I had no recollection.

We had eight teachers between first and fourth grade, in large part because some of teachers went on maternity leave. One in first grade, was Mrs. Goodrich, and one In fourth, was Miss Erickson, maybe? Mrs Waters, in third grade, I remember, came back and taught Leslie.

In second grade, we danced the Minuet in G. I think Karen danced with Bill, and Lois danced with Bernie. I know I danced with Carol.

Also in second grade, some sixth graders forced me to fight a kid named Danny, who was my sister Leslie’s classmates, so about a year and a half younger than I was. We were supposed to make it look good, lest they beat us both up. I inadvertently hit him in the nose and drew blood. I felt awful, but the older kids were thrilled.

I joined the Cub Scouts in third grade. Ray, who ended up in my class in second grade was, in the pack, as was David D. Ray’s mom was our den mother. When Ray married Pam in 1976, I got to escort Ray’s mom to her seat.

Was I an overly sensitive kid? One time, some kids on the playground were playing “keep away” with my hat. I got mad and went home. Legend has it, though I don’t specifically remember, that I hopped a ride on a Crowley’s milk truck. Did that really happen?

More soon.

Vanilla ice cream

Was it a pacifier? Was it a message to us that, as long as we obeyed the rules, we could still be occasionally rewarded with just enough to keep us patriotic and loyal?

Things remind me of other things, all but forgotten.

One of the most peculiar items I came across recently was this: Black people were denied vanilla ice cream in the Jim Crow south – except on Independence Day.

The memory of that all-but-unspoken rule seems to be unique to the generation born between World War I and World War II.
But if Maya Angelou hadn’t said it in her classic autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I doubt anybody would believe it today.
“People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate.”

I’m told that Thomas Jefferson, writer of the document associated with that day, was so addicted to vanilla ice cream that he arranged for vanilla beans to be transported in diplomatic pouches while he was serving in France and their revolution was going on.

Why then this ODD rule? The writer Michael W Twitty wonders:

Was it a pacifier? Was it a message to us that, as long as we obeyed the rules, we could still be occasionally rewarded with just enough to keep us patriotic and loyal?

But perhaps it is pointless to ask for more than context.

That article reminded me of a totally unrelated story, except that it did involve ice cream. Growing up in Binghamton in upstate New York, I was usually the only black kid in my class.

One day in fifth or sixth grade, we were going to get ice cream that came in these little paper cups. We used wooden spoons to eat it. I was out of the room when the voting on the decision on flavors – vanilla or chocolate, was being made.

When I came back to the classroom, I was asked what I wanted, and I said “Vanilla.” The whole class moaned; EVERYBODY else, probably 15 white kids, had picked chocolate. They were disappointed that it had not been a unanimous choice. But I didn’t particularly LIKE that brand of chocolate, as I thought it tasted chalky.

I wondered if chocolate had been a consensus choice, with the kids who thought “I don’t care” going along with the majority. In any case, this made me feel really uncomfortable because it made me feel different when, for the most part, I felt like one of the group. Don’t think it was specifically racial, probably not in their minds, though it may have rattled a bit in mine.

But the earlier story above made my choice of 50 years ago, somehow, a little more OK.

Bullies

I managed to hit poor Danny in the nose, and it drew blood.

I had reason recently to reflect on the bullies in my life. Growing up in the First Ward of Binghamton, NY, it was what I suppose one would call a lower-middle-class life, with some doing well enough to get by, but others living a more hardscrabble existence.

My school, Daniel S. Dickinson, which I loved – and which I wrote about in 2012 – was a K-9 school that, I learned much later, didn’t always get the most current resources. For instance, we had an ancient music book that still had Old Black Joe in it, which prompted an incident I described WAY back in 2006.

Some of the older kids bullied the younger kids. One time, some guys from fifth or sixth grade, none of whom I knew specifically, thought it would be fun to get a couple of little kids to box. They picked me to fight with this kid named Danny Dervey (or Durvey) who was in my sister’s class three semesters behind me. We were to mix it up so it looked real, or they were going to beat the crap out of us.

Somehow or other, I managed to hit poor Danny in the nose, and it drew blood. The bullies were ecstatic, but I was mortified. I held no malice towards the kid. Far as I know, he never held a grudge against me. And I didn’t get in trouble for this, either from the school or my parents.

I have some vague recollection of being in fifth or sixth grade and getting roughed up, but I wasn’t hurt much, and have all but forgotten it.

The only time I ever willingly got into a fight – I thought I wrote about this, but cannot find it – was in fifth grade. This annoying kid named Robert, who was the only other black kid in my class, decided to attack my friend David Doyle, who was the shortest kid of us all; he was not to be confused with David Tita, who was the tallest. Anyway, David Doyle and I were Cub Scouts together, before I quit after a year. An attack on him was like an attack on me, rather like those alliances before World War I.

Robert and I, and there may have been others involved, started mixing it up right in front of the school. But it did not last long; the assistant principal, and junior high school English teacher, Mr. Frenchko, yelled out an upper-floor window, and we scattered.

Robert was academically challenged. He flunked so often, he was eventually in sister Leslie’s class. Later, he somehow managed to pull off a perfect robbery, and only was caught when he told some out-of-town cops so that he might get a ride back home; he went to prison instead.

Then there was the time I was attacked when I was 16, which is a LONG story.

Point is, I’ve somehow managed to avoid the fisticuffs rather well, so far.

(And yes, this is one of those posts that I wrote so I can write about something else.)

Hyperplastic polyps, and other things

It has rained every day for the past couple weeks in Albany, NY.

This is a picture of my mother’s class (kindergarten or first grade, from the 1933 date). Can you find her? My, they all look so sullen. I mean, I know it’s the Depression and all, but dang.

In that TMI category, there were a couple of polyps removed from my colon in late June. They were hyperplastic, a term I had never heard/seen before. This means that not only are they BENIGN, but they also do NOT turn into cancer. Compare this with polyps that are adenoma type, also BENIGN, but need monitoring. Not to mention outcomes that could have been worse. So I won’t bore you with my colonoscopy tales for another decade.

If it wasn’t for people such as Doug Englebart, I wouldn’t be communicating with you. The tools he helped develop in computing are used today on the Internet. I started watching the lengthy video here from 1968(!). At about 19 minutes in, he’s essentially describing the hyperlink; at 30 minutes, the computer mouse; later, Google.

I knew Google RSS feed reader was going away. Now I get an e-mail from Bloglovin every day – found it easier for me than some of the others that were suggested, such as Feedly.

There was so much to write about the Supreme Court cases in June. Yet the only thing I could muster was a piece in my other blog that the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is only partially dead, i.e., Section 3, while Section 2 survives. Those widespread news reports saying otherwise were wrong.

I actually started writing a piece on how crazy Justice Antonin Scalia was in the month of June, but I just lost my mojo for it. Mark Evanier put it well: “I don’t understand a lot of the logic behind [the] rulings on Gay Marriage. Scalia’s dissent in the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act reads to me like the rebuttal to his support the day before in the castration of the Voting Rights Act;” that’s about right. SCOTUS voted 9-0 on the gene patent case, correctly, to my mind, but Scalia’s “reasoning” was bizarre. Yet I actually agreed with the rebuttal of the Supreme Court’s support for DNA testing of arrestees.

Arthur, rightly, was complaining a few weeks ago about the immigration reform bill Marco Rubio (R-FL) co-sponsored but threatened to kill it if gave gay couples immigration rights. So I found it quite entertaining that, as a result of part of the Defense of Marriage Act being struck down, a US citizen who is married to a non-American of the same gender will be able to sponsor his or her spouse for immigration in exactly the same way that legally married opposite-gender couples can. And the first couple approved by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services is from…Florida. Was that REALLY a coincidence?

When I feel discouraged about the body politic, I realize I need to find and read this book: The American Heroes of Social Justice.

Need to wish a belated happy 25th anniversary to Denise Nesbitt, the progenitor of ABC Wednesday, and her husband Jon.

At some point, it has rained every day for the past couple of weeks in Albany, NY. It doesn’t bother me as much as it does others, based on the whining in social media, though it HAS been difficult to mow the wet grass. Now some local towns around here suffered sudden, severe flooding; THOSE people can complain. Still, I prefer it to the arid 100F+ (38C+) temperatures out in the western US.
***
I’m reading The 10 nerdiest jokes of all time, and this one made me literally LOL, with the intro, “Is there ever a wrong moment to make an existential funny?”

“Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, ‘I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.’ The waitress replies, ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?'”

Friend Carol is 60

Carol and I hung out together, doing exciting stuff such as watching, of all things, The Waltons every Thursday night.

I’m referring to my friend since kindergarten, not my wife.

In second grade, the class got to dance a minuet waltz. Bill danced with Karen, Bernie with Lois, and Carol with me; why I remember this so many years later is beyond me. I think I developed a bit of a crush on Carol, because the next year, I hit her with a snowball, unintentionally in the head; I felt terrible.

The whole class got to spend time at her family cottage on a lake in northern Pennsylvania, which was always a treat.

At some point, someone came across a list of IQ scores of our class. No names were associated with the numbers, but it was generally conceded by her classmates that she was the one with the highest ranking.

I used to walk Bill, then Lois, Karen, and Carol home most days, especially when we were in junior high, so Carol and I got to talk with her one-on-one more than most of my friends.

In high school, Carol and I were both involved with student government, and in our junior year, I became president, and Carol, vice-president, a remarkable feat, given the disdain our left-of-center politics had generated when we first got to the high school.

During the summer of 1972, she and her boyfriend at the time, and the Okie and I all went to Syracuse to see The Godfather. At the end of the summer, she, her beau, and my sister Leslie were the three witnesses to my wedding to the Okie. After the Okie and I split, and Carol and her beau broke up, Carol and I hung out together, doing exciting stuff such as watching, of all things, The Waltons every Thursday night.

A few years later, I went to her wedding in Binghamton, after which she moved to the Poughkeepsie area.

One time, some of my FantaCo colleagues and I were coming back from a New York City comic book convention when the car broke down on the Taconic Parkway. Having neither AAA car service or credit cards, we didn’t know what to do. In desperation, I called Carol, and she put our towing charge on her credit card – we DID pay her back – and got us on our way.

She was the only one of my Binghamton friends to make it to a MidWinter’s gathering, in 1991, if memory serves; very good wax magic that season. Soon thereafter, she moved to Texas. So I don’t see her often anymore, though we did get together a few times, not just the 32nd reunion, but a couple of times when she and I both happened to be in Binghamton, and in July 2011, when she, Karen, and I ALL were in Binghamton the same weekend.

I should note that her family’s also great. Her mom was the coolest mom of all my friends’ mothers. Carol asked her mother and sister to represent her at Karen’s mother’s funeral this past summer. Carol’s daughter, who I had never met until fairly recently, sent my daughter a huge unicorn, which continues to be Lydia’s favorite stuffed creature.

Happy birthday, my dear friend Carol.