Archives

Categories

How I Passed High School Journalism and Lived to Tell About It

Without realizing it, I’d been a writer for years. In elementary school I wrote stories about relatives arriving from Eastern Europe. (Later I learned that I actually did have relatives in Eastern Europe.) I wrote a mystery play that was a take-off on Disney’s “Spin and Marty,” and found willing victims to act in it. When our new high school opened its doors in my sophomore year, releasing me from junior high hell, I couldn’t wait to take journalism. I imagined that a brilliant and enthusiastic mentor would prod me toward greatness, day by day revealing the mysteries of the newspaper world.

Unfortunately, I had to wait a year to take the class, which was only offered to juniors. By then my motor was running.

The class turned out very differently than I had hoped. Every afternoon Mr. Blaine* sat on the edge of his desk and quizzed the popular girls, the ones who dated, about their cute boyfriends: What did the boys wear to the dance? What did they say? He loved all the gossip.

He wore flamboyant plaid jackets and threw his head back when he laughed, eyes twinkling through dark horn-rimmed glasses. His neatly coiffed hair just grazed his forehead. Unlike some of the other male teachers, Mr. Blaine didn’t have a buzz cut. As a class we organized a subscription drive soirée and a spaghetti dinner complete with an accordianist. But we never opened a book.

I soon realized that Mr. Blaine had no intention of teaching us anything. How does a sixteen year-old tell a teacher he’s supposed to teach? Every day opened a new chapter in disappointment.

And so the year progressed. We never said a word about the lack of teaching and wrote our stories outside of class. Once I took a story to Mr. Blaine for approval – not during class-time, of course.  He didn’t like the lead. Instead of teaching me the components of a good lead or referring me to instructional resources, he simply rewrote it. I felt cheated. How was I supposed to know where to learn this stuff? I didn’t even know what questions to ask.

We were a protected bunch at our suburban high school, and in the last years of the 1960s I barely knew what was going on in the world. No one at school debated the war in Vietnam. The closest our administrators came to acknowledging alternative thinking was when they allowed the “folk club” to put on a hootenanny.

When I broached the subject of Martin Luther King Jr. at dinner one night, thinking his ideas of racial equality might make for interesting table conversation, my father muttered, “He’s nothing but a troublemaker.”  The times they were a-changin’. Just more slowly for some than for others.

A friend on the newspaper staff had a more open-minded family. Her dad worked for a TV news agency and during a major black-out took us driving around town . He just wanted to see what it was like, have a little fun. After a while he decided it was too dangerous to be running around without traffic lights and took me home. Still, the experience was liberating. It was something I might have written about.

One day I saw a group of travelers heading on foot down U.S. Rte. 1. From where I stood on the sidewalk outside Mrs. Dodd’s** corner store, I could see that some of the men had ponytails protruding from beneath their hats. Their clothing seemed sturdy and practical. I had no idea where they were going, but I didn’t want them to pass by before I found out. I wanted in on the action.

Rte. 1 is a north-south highway that runs from Maine to Florida and was heavily traveled before by-passes were built, circumventing more populated areas. At one place, the highway divides a neighborhood of mostly 1930s and ’40s era homes at the south end of Lawrence Township, NJ, an area less than half the size of a dime on the map, sandwiched between freeways on the cusp of obliterated industries that once polluted the air but paid a living wage. It was where I grew up.

I’d written newspaper stories about a Polish immigrant kid and how he came to America, and the three or four sets of twins at our school. I’d covered school plays and profiled a boy who was an amateur meteorologist. A lot of my stories made it into the Friday “Teen Times” section of the city paper, for which I was paid a whopping forty-cents per column inch. But I’d never written about anything like this.

Mrs. Dodd’s corner store was a neighborhood landmark. But heaven help the hikers if they stopped to buy anything. The store was really just a room with display windows, a counter and shelves, situated at the front end of a corner duplex. Elizabeth Dodd piled her long grey hair on her head and wore black lace-up shoes with thick heels. Her husband George was a WWI veteran and older than God. Like old-time shop-keepers, they lived in the back and on the upper floors. Mrs. Dodd was known to run to the door and flip over the “open” sign if she didn’t like the looks of someone coming up the walk and carried only enough inventory for her regular customers. “You can’t buy this loaf of bread,” she’d say. “I’m saving it for Mrs. McGrath.”  The travelers would have received similar treatment, no matter how hungry they might have been.

The famed Moratorium against the Vietnam War took place in Washington D.C. on Nov. 15, 1969. The march I witnessed that day happened two years earlier, in 1967. By the time of the Moratorium, I was safely tucked away at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, up to my eyeballs in textbooks. The only hippies I met wore matching fringed jackets and boots that they probably bought at Bloomindales.

Later that spring I watched from my street corner as another event unfolded. A convoy of police cars more than a mile long headed south, away from the suburbs toward the city. Only weeks after the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr., race riots broke out in downtown Trenton. The police cars were reinforcements. More than 200 businesses were ransacked and 300 arrested, mostly young black men, according to Wikipedia. Blazes raged throughout downtown and the mayor enforced a curfew. Even though the events were splashed across the front page of the city paper, we didn’t talk about them at home or at school.

I wondered how many more pilgrims would walk by before the procession ended. Unwilling to miss my chance, I jumped in. I thought I could write about the experience and got up the courage to ask questions. The possibility that Mr. Blaine might reject the story never occurred to me. Our paper was so sanitized that it didn’t even contain advertising. These folks were on their way to Washington because they had something important to say. I wanted to say something important, too.

But four blocks later, where the Trenton Freeway intersects Rte. 1, a green car came around the corner. It was my father. He pulled over and growled through the passenger-side window, “Get in the car!”

He didn’t care that I was attempting to be a journalist and had important questions on my mind. I had embarrassed him. He drove the four blocks back home, teeth clenched and seething. Frankly, I had been shocked to see him in the car that afternoon. He always drove his truck. Our meeting at that intersection put an end to my  experiment in immersion journalism.

That spring, a substitute teacher came in for Mr. Blaine. He wrote our assignment on the board. We were to read a chapter and answer the questions that followed. It wasn’t even the first chapter, where we should have begun. The cognitive dissonance was too much. I fought back tears. The year had been a waste.

I could have read the book on my own, and I did read some of it. But I had wanted our teacher to be interested in writing. I had wanted someone who was excited about things like attributions and nut graphs. Mr. Blaine had been a Fulbright scholar. But he was a terrible teacher.

I don’t remember if I raised my hand or just blurted out, but I finally spoke the truth. The substitute teacher looked stunned. I said what we all knew, but none of us had admitted. I would not do the work, I said, and left the room sobbing. It was my own little protest march.

The next thing I remember I was standing in the front office. It was the last period of the day and I told the secretary I had to go home. And then I spilled everything. I told whoever was in the room that Mr. Blaine wasted our time in class discussing the girls’ boyfriends and hadn’t taught us anything all year. I told them we had never opened a book until the substitute gave us an assignment. The class had been a joke.

When I got home I ran to the bathroom and turned on the shower. I stood in the streaming water and wept. When I emerged to go up to my room, no one asked why I’d been crying. No one broached the subject at school, either, not even Mr. Blaine. And the last grading period of my junior year, I earned my fourth and final A in journalism.

Mr. Blaine left our school the following year. I heard he took a position in another town and I secretly hoped it was because of me. He had married a teacher at our school while I was a student there, but I never got the connection. They made the oddest couple.

There’s more to a story than the facts – what’s happening in a classroom, on a roadside, or at a kitchen table. So today when I write, I  try to capture emotions. By walking out of journalism class, I let people know how I felt. That year I fought my own private war. And I started writing. FFG

* The teacher’s name has been changed.

** The store owner’s name has been changed.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *