Starting Boy @ The Window, 10 Years Later

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Friendships, Harold I. Meltzer, Interviews, Lumina Foundation, Memoir, Narcissism, Partnerships for College Access and Success, Sacramento CA, Salutatorian, Sam, Vanity, Vanity Project

Full-length vanity mirror, accessed March 9, 2016. (http://etsy.com).

On this week a decade ago, I began work on Boy @ The Window as a memoir. That sentence sounds so definitive and simple. The fact was, I’d been writing the book in my head for nearly three years, and had been doing interviews and other iterations of what would become Boy @ The Window off and on since the fall of ’89. But the first full week in ’06 marked a clear delineation between all of the hemming and hawing over writing the book and the actual process of interviewing former teachers and classmates. For some, though, I was devoting serious time and resources to what they called a vanity project.

I had already interviewed my late former teacher Harold Meltzer twice in ’02, and had done some reaching out off and on between the spring of ’03 and March ’06. It took a work trip to Indianapolis and then Sacramento for me to actually begin the process for real. The trip was about convincing Lumina Foundation for Education to continue funding the college access and retention initiative I was deputy director of after the end of ’06, as well as for me to take oversight over a grantee’s work in Sacramento. It just so happened that about two weeks before the trip, I learned that one of my former classmates, the salutatorian Sam, lived in Northern California. Despite my qualms, I decided to reach out and see if he’d want to meet up and catch up.

Why qualms? Short of a high school reunion, most folks who were outcasts or (really, in my case) misfits aren’t exactly jumping for joy to see people who helped make them feel that way. Sam for me was someone who made me feel as if I had no business being smart, Black, and male. Whether he meant for me to feel that way or not was irrelevant at the time.

The Sacramento skyline, as seen from The Ziggurat in West Sacramento, California (never looked like this in my 3 visits there), October 16, 2008. (J. Smith via Wikipedia). Released via CC-SA-3.0.

The irony was that by the time I’d last seen Sam — the fourth Friday of June ’89 — I no longer saw him as an arbiter of anything, much less someone to aspire to imitate. I realized from a short three-minute conversation that Sam may have had more identity issues than even I had faced in the previous eight years. That it was also the last time that I’d see nearly all of my classmates (I bumped into Wendy ten minutes earlier on this particular walk) prior to working on Boy @ The Window was also interesting, if not ironic.

That and the large amount of work that a book about myself and the worlds I inhabited — in my own mind, in reality at home, with family, with classmates, and throughout Mount Vernon and New York — was on my mind all week long. This was going to be a daunting task, diving deep into my mindset and my past. Dredging up old feelings and conjuring up old conversations that otherwise would best be forgotten.

And of course, meeting up with folks who were never “friends” or “girlfriends” or even often just friendly to me. There was a reason why I only called them “my classmates” or “acquaintances” when talking with family and my actual friends in the years since high school and Humanities. They had been larger-than-life characters in a very stretched out nightmare of a Harry Potter book.

Even with that, I also knew that I needed to meet up with and interview these folks. If only to provide some catharsis or to put myself in a mindset I had abandoned with the last year of the Reagan era. So when Sam said he was okay with meeting up, I didn’t hesitate, and I didn’t kvetch over it.

We ended up talking for nearly three hours, about much more than Humanities or Mount Vernon High School. It was a pleasant conversation. Mostly because I allowed Sam to do what most people do in those situations. I allowed him the opportunity to spin his story, to put his best foot forward about his experiences and his life in the present. I made a point to only press him with questions on the stuff that was most important to me and to Boy @ The Window. After all, between Meltzer, other interviews I had planned, and my own steel-trap memories, I could note glaring contradictions when it came time to write.

Kim Kardashian, another boring vanity project, March 7, 2016. (http://twitter.com).

Still, Sam didn’t answer a key question, at least not directly for me. After I answered his question, “What do you think I thought of you?,” I asked him if wanted to correct or add anything to my answer. Sam was the only one I interviewed who dodged the question. That deflection to the burdens of Humanities and high school told me everything I needed to know. It told me that in Sam’s mind, I had been irrelevant, that his occasional put-downs were in fact deliberate.

There are some who have read Boy @ The Window since I put it out in 2013 who’ve said that they found the Humanities and high school parts of the memoir “boring.” I concede that point. Even with interviews and with Facebook, some of my classmates remain either an enigma to me, or more often, there wasn’t much exciting about them as people beyond grinding for A’s to begin with. Ten years ago, I was only beginning to learn this truth.

Remembering Harold Meltzer

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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AP US History, Bitterness, Confirmed Bachelor, Death, Dedication, Egalitarianism, Eulogy, Friendship, Harold I. Meltzer, Harold Meltzer, Homophobia, Humanities, Humanities Program, Learning, Life, Mentoring, Metropolitan Opera House, Morison & Commanger, Perseverance, Politics of Education, Self-Discovery, Teaching

Harold Meltzer obituary (via Frank Pandolfo), January 9, 2003. (Westchester Journal News).

Harold Meltzer obituary (via Frank Pandolfo), January 9, 2003. (The Journal News).

Harold Meltzer, my favorite and best teacher of all, died on January 2, 2003 at the age of sixty-six, ten years ago last week. He was all too young and all too bitter about his years as a history teacher at Mount Vernon High School. But then, dealing with entitled parents and unrepentant administrators in Mount Vernon, New York for thirty-five years would do that to most people. Despite that, Meltzer was a rock, the first teacher since my elementary school years that I genuinely trusted with my family secrets and my inner self. He was the first and maybe only teacher I had in my six years of Humanities who actually seemed like he wanted to teach us (see my post “No Good Teaching Deed Goes Unpunished” from May ’11).

I met Meltzer on our last day of tenth grade, after three days of finals and Regents exams, on June 21, ’85. He had summoned fourteen of us to “Room 275 of Mount Vernon High School,” as the invitation read. We had all registered to take Meltzer’s AP American History class in eleventh grade, our first opportunity to earn college credit while in high school.

Meltzer started off talking to us about Morison and Commager — who I now know as the great consensus historians of the ’50s, until the social history revolution made their textbooks irrelevant by the ’80s — as we sat in this classroom of old history books and even older dust and chalk. Meltzer himself looked to be in his late-fifties (he was actually a day away from his forty-ninth birthday), tall and lanky except for the protruding pouch in the tummy section. His hair was a mutt-like mixture of silver, white and dull gray, and his beard was a long, tangled mess.

Met Logo and A full house, seen from rear of stage, at the Metropolitan Opera House (former bldg, 39th Street), for a concert by pianist Josef Hofmann, November 28, 1937. (National Archives via Wikimedia). In public domain.

The way he spoke, and the way his eyes looked when he spoke made me see him as a yarmulke-wearing preteen on his way to temple. The force with which his words would leave his mouth hit me immediately. As much as I noticed how frequently spit would spew out of Meltzer’s mouth, the rhythm of his speech was slow and sing-song, like an elder or grandfather taking you on a long, winding, roller-coaster-ride of a story. Most of all, I knew that he cared — about history, about teaching, about us learning, about each of us as people. Maybe, just maybe, for some of us, he cared too much.

But for at least for me, Meltzer’s eccentric space in which he told Metropolitan Opera House stories and talked about egalitarianism extended beyond the historical. He was the first teacher I had since before Humanities who’d ask me if things at home were all right, and knew intuitively that things weren’t. He was the first to ask me about how poor my family was and about hunger. And he was the first teacher ever to ask if I had a girlfriend. Needless to say, these questions were unexpected. Yet through these questions, Meltzer had begun to crack my thin, hard wall of separation between school and family.

Because Meltzer cared deeply about reaching students — about reaching me — our student-teacher relationship because a friendship after high school and a mentoring one as well. I wasn’t looking for a mentor, and Meltzer was only being Meltzer. Still, his stories about his battles with MVHS administrators, Board of Education folk, and with upper-crust parents who believed their kids were entitled to A’s just for showing up, were filled with lessons of perseverance, patience, and looking beyond everyday headaches in order to reach people. While this wasn’t a factor in my going to graduate school and spending a significant part of my life as a history professor and educator, these stories have helped me over the years.

1972 Dodge Dart Dark Green (similar to ’74 Dodge Dart Meltzer owned when I was at MVHS), December 25, 2009. (http://www.fotosdecarros.com).

But unfortunately, it was a factor in why Meltzer became embittered and took early retirement in June ’93. The end of the Humanities Program, the intolerance of some administrators toward Meltzer as a “confirmed bachelor,” the lack of decency — forget about gratitude — from many of his most successful students. Those changes, these things, all would take a toll on any teacher who’d stay after school day after day to run Mock Trial, to facilitate study groups, to work on letters of recommendation for students. But no, most of my former classmates who had Meltzer between ’85 and ’87, all they could say was that “Meltzer was weird” or that “I didn’t understand” his lessons.

I’m thankful that I did have Meltzer as a teacher, friend and mentor between ’85 and ’02. I’m thankful that I had a chance to interview him for what is now my Boy @ The Window manuscript in August and November ’02, just a couple of months before he passed (see my post “Mr. Meltzer” from June ’09). I’m glad that despite his physical and psychological pain, Meltzer welcomed me with open arms and answered my questions about his life and his career. I just wish that my former classmates and some of Meltzer’s more cut-throat colleagues had taken the time to really know the man.