Memories of North Catholic Philly - circa 1962 and 1933

I am reminded of older stories about North Catholic in Philly from my Dad who was a graduate in 1934. There were many changes to the buildings between the time I arrived there in 1966 or my brother in ’62.

It is remarkable that North no longer exists and St Joan of Arc Church just closed in June.

The one thing the newer North had was the building annex that was built in the early sixties. Cannot nail down a date of its dedication but I remember being there on a Sunday afternoon and standing in the lobby with my father waiting to go into the auditorium to take a seat.

The door opened into the Principal’s waiting room outside his office and there in scarlet was Archbishop Krol standing there talking with Mayor James H. J. Tate.  The door closed and we went to get a seat.

The new building had a great expanse of a new cafeteria on the ground floor. The first, second and third floors above did not sit level with the floors of the older original school building dated to the late 1920s. So connecting stairways between the two buildings was a series of half flights and landings.

There were built in lockers in along the floors in the new building.  There was an overflow of lockers for students in the older building as you would walk by a passageway past the restroom and a room filled with janitors that were actively collecting trash from the daily four periods of lunch in the new cafeteria.

Am not certain but I think there was a furnace in that room with the janitors and they burned the trash but I am not totally certain.

The overflow locker room in the basement of the older building had been the cafeteria in the original school according to my father.  I think he brown bagged it in the Depression but managed to scrape together a nickel for a bowl of navy bean soup and a buttered roll which was his favorite and served on one particular day a week as the daily special.

His main memory was that of being in his homeroom and even in the hot last days of summer in September or the hot days in late May or early June, the windows of the room would remain closed because of the smell and all the flies that were generated by the horse stables across the street at Harbison’s Dairy for the delivery of milk via milk wagons in the 30s.

He related the story of his older cousin, my godfather, having broken down in front of the school in his junker Model T Ford and then spending all day taking the engine apart before being able to get the car going in late afternoon. And that as the car departed, there were a few odd bolts and gaskets in the street and the Model T was still road worthy. Don’t make cars like that anymore.

My Dad was able to keep progress all day on his cousin because in those days, your homeroom was where you sat all day. The teachers actually changed classes and not the students.  The same basic education for everybody since the homeroom was arranged alphabetically in the “M”s in his case and this particular class had most of the Micks “Mc”s in it.

With a last name in alphabetical going M-c-S, he was seated last seat of the last row and next to the window.

Which leads to the story of the last class of the day, and the guy ahead of him in the seat in front of him.  That guy had the cardboard lid of an ice cream cup consumed at lunch. 

Apparently the round disks were objects to throw like a mini Frisbees and quite the fashion to aim such flying lids at cars from the height of the local Elevated station down the street for commuting students.

Well anyway, the story goes something like the guy with the ice cream lid had sent it into flight in a classroom where the next teacher had not arrived yet for class. The lid hit the next teacher just as that teacher turned the corner of the door and hit him squarely in the face.

Teacher said “Who threw that?”. No answer.

The teacher then conducted class, and then as it was the last class of the day the teacher after class went to every desk and holding the cardboard disk and asking each student seat by seat, aisle by aisle, asked every student if he threw the disk. As they denied the act of throwing it, they were allowed to leave.

Last aisle and the guy in front of my Dad looks the priest in the eye and denied throwing the ice cream lid. The guy left. At that and because my Dad was last man on the totem pole and his shock of the bold faced lie of the guy in front of him, my Dad said that he burst into laughter in comic relief of the irony of the situation.  

The priest did not ask him if he threw it. He instead got a week’s detention.

That was North Catholic. 

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On Growing Older – Group School Photo - 1966

The photo above kind of got sprung on me. It appeared on a Facebook friend’s page. Had not purchased the photo from the photographer originally. Had never seen it until about three weeks ago.

My first honest reaction to it was how white it was. That I have since lived most of the past thirty five years since leaving Philly in or around the diverse city of New York. That because of economics that means one of the less expensive outer boroughs other than Manhattan.

Oh I did live in Manhattan decades ago in a studio dormitory room and shared an apartment near campus.

Manhattan in the late seventies was still a largely American city. Now it is an International City with international prices like Hong Kong or London.

That the mind does wander and getting back to Philly and youth and the memory of it all, perhaps could be the subject of a book.

The Neighborhood in which I grew up in is no longer 99 and 44/100 percent white, ethnic western European white. The neighborhood was predominately Irish with a smaller percentage of Italian and Polish.  

The German ethnic label thing had faded into the background with two world wars and it was not thought of as an ethnic thing even though some of the names of my classmates in retrospect were definitely German sounding.

The school is still there as a building. It is no longer a Catholic school but a public charter school in the now 50% black and Hispanic neighborhood as per official government stats.

The front doors in the photo were plate glass. The present ones are steel. The parish complex is chopped up with the school a city owned public school, the convent with its many cell like bedrooms is a half-way house for Catholic pregnant teens and the Church is on life support with two weekend masses and two weekday masses being said by one priest shared with another parish about a mile away, the Italian parish, with that priest in that rectory.

There is or was the grave of the Monsignor who founded the parish in 1919 somewhere in the church yard next to the closed up old rectory.

Lots of stats and not lots of feelings.

The real feelings have to do with growing older and with word of mouth knowing that at least eight of the faces in the photo are no longer with us on this earthy plane.

In fact, my being on Facebook had to do with one friend seeking me out after the death of my neighbor classmate of two doors down from where I grew up. The social network thing is the present day family dinner or town square of virtual reality.

I never really thought much about it. The classes were not co-ed. It was an all-boys class, separate and not equal next to an all-girls class. The boys classes got the better qualified teaching nuns imho. Then all off to an all-boys High School, now also a Public School charter high school. 

The inner city has no appeal to the RC church. The money is in the burbs.

And indeed in another age of segregated by sex schools, a mighty school system was built as separate but superior to the public school system that rejected Irish and German Catholic immigrants in the 1840’s, riots and the determination to build that separate but superior Catholic School System in spite of the Protestants and the Protestant Banks having all the money.

That many a Catholic parish in inner city America got built on pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters of immigrants looking positively to a better life in America. That is something that carpetbagger bishops now cannot understand regarding the history of the place in which they now mismanage or "govern" by modern global Harvard / Brown / Wharton spreadsheet style management.

As I try to reconcile a lot of things, I realize that the factories surrounding that school above are either empty, torn down and turned into parking lots or on a small scale supporting many small businesses in one building or gentrified into living lofts etc.

That the coded talk of my youth, with the adults wanting to escape Philly and get over to Jersey or to Montgomery County was code talk to fantasize a non-racial paradise outside of racially changing, economic changing Philly in the post WWI and post WWII changing world of demographics along with rights for minorities – civil rights that extend to the future, the now, and regarding issues like marriage equality etc.

That I catch an occasional fragmented sentence from old friends, perhaps coded phrase of now living in Jersey or Montgomery County of really meaning having achieved their parents dreams of family harmony in a safe enclave place outside the origins of the family within the old city proper.

The Europeans spent decades rebuilding their inner cities after war and love to live, eat and entertain there.

American spared the destruction of war and with a vastness of land into which to expand, made the loop thing of the American civilization being turned into a grassy fortress suburbia supported by the combustion engine etc.

Someone took the time to label the photo with names. I remember and recognize 90% of the names and faces there.

Cannot quite still figure what happened to a lot of the years from there to here.

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Rest in Peace Mister Mayor - Ed Koch - 1924 / 2013

Ed Koch - Mayor of New York City 1978-1989

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Koch

Old Ed was perhaps to some a few points shy of the Jewish “mashugana” bizarre label. In a town as diverse and crazy as New York can get he was a consolation prize or Kewpie Doll in the crowded 1977 Democratic  primary race for mayor, which he was shortly labeled  as at his beginning in office which an older co-worker called him, repeated from the newspapers, and she got a satisfying chuckle of it every time she used the label "Kewpie Doll".

Shirley MacLaine described him as “gay” in her first book Out On a Limb without directly saying who he was and describing that one particular politician who was predicted to run for mayor by some South American Phychic or such as just another politician hanging around the NYC scene before he was mayor.

I think like in Shirley’s book, nobody really publicly outed people in the old days and I think Ed just couldn’t be bothered with the baggage attached to a “I am a Gay man” standup comedy routine. He was of his generation and its traditions to the bitter end. (Some matters personal and private are best left personal and private.)

He was a natural salesman and talker and put the old burned out post war city back on track to the future as its PR spokesman and symbol.

His running for a fourth term was a mistake. Twelve years of anybody including FDR is enough in any democracy.

My own memories of him.

I remember him rounding a corner around 23rd and Broadway on the way to a street fair I and a girlfriend had just left and he was surrounded by something like six, six foot five feet plus tall police detectives / bodyguards in suits, some them almost running trying to keep up with Koch already ahead of them on his way to dazzle the crowds. Ed was tall. Wow. And no guns showing. Where’s the beef? Right there up in your face, that entourage. LOL

I shook his hand somewhere at one of those Sunday street fairs as a hand reaching out of a crowd surrounding him. He had an iron handshake grip even for a brief shake. He also had a great personal up front in your face presence / charisma.

In his retirement he had an office in my building at Sixth Avenue and 51st Street, Rockefeller Center, but on an entirely different floor, different elevator bank. I said a distant hello to him maybe a half dozen times over the years usually on the street and I think he walked from the Lexington Avenue subway line to his office every morning.

I once did see some very enthusiastic young female tourist in a backpack out front asking him for an autograph etc. But Ed’s all but drooling attention was on the girl’s twenty year old or so boyfriend with her. The boyfriend’s face was beet red in embarrassment.

He was fond of Roman Catholic Ritual and I think might have converted but he decided to keep it Jewish for political harmony sake.

Bought a cemetery plot in Harlem at 155th and Broadway in an Episcopalian graveyard several years ago, one of the last open cemeteries in the city, with a great view of the city further downtown for $20,000.

His only request to the Episcopalians who were glad to have him was for the entrance to the graveyard nearest his grave be labeled “Jews' Gate” after he was put to rest there.

Rest in peace Mr. Mayor.

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The Painted Tin Ceiling of the Sky

The jukebox plays Frank,
and the old bar and grill sags
beneath dust and grimy walls,
lead paint peeling off from above.
-
(Memories sweet and sad
linger of the essence of you.)
-
Momentary reflection
is a mistake. For what
happened happened
both good and good
and with the bad.
-
(we never could quite
reconnect again - but we did try)
-
I miss the old days sometimes.
This old place will be a
coffee haven soon - what romance
can be sparked over latte and
a smoke free environment?
-
Youth it was so simple
and flawed.
-
(And they won't play Frank anymore.
Buy the CD - with your takeout grande.)
-
A mind wanders back
and wonders -
what I woulda, coulda,
shoulda done.
-
Life's journey
can be fickle.
Why test the fates?
Now - so late.
-
You are what you are
and where you should be.
Any other path leads
onto, into, assumptions
and imagined destinies.
-
The good road; the bad road?
Soft ego strokes.
Hard Ego Hits.
-
Soft karma (?)
a shuffle of the cards.
Hard fate - served
on plain white plates.
-
A mind wanders back
and wonders?
Why some judgement calls
did not hit the mark?
-
(Memories sweet and sad
linger of the essence of you.)
-
And saying I'm sorry
now to another long gone
or to one's self
seems far too lazy
and too late - too late.
-
In retrospect.
We had or seemed
to have so little control.
Best to blame the gods.
-
Only two things true
about life -
death and taxes.
(worth repeating -
death and taxes.)
-
Everything else, like love,
is or has been merely
coincidence perhaps.
-
And what is coincidence?
-
(like our meeting)
-
I told you once. Did you listen?
-
Coincidence is
nothing more than
excess energy - bouncing off
the painted tin ceiling
of the sky.

Article Source:  e-book, Painted Tin Ceiling of the Sky

911 - World Trade Center - Memories and Reflections

ghosts of 911 - reflections and memories of September 11, 2001

Reflections and memories of the events leading up to and following 911, by a resident of Staten Island working in mid-town Manhattan. Dealing with the immediate consequences of a city brought to a standstill by an act of war and living in and traveling through the war zone for months to come. This includes memories of the old World Trade Center before its destruction as well as points of views from different communities and their dealing with the tragedy.

There is also a tribute to Father Mychal Judge, Fire Department Chaplain, listed as casualty number one of a long list of victims on that day. There is hope in the building of a Peace Garden in Snug Harbor Gardens in Staten Island, which had the highest percentage of Fire Department deaths of any of the five boroughs of the City of New York
.
There is a poem Opede rededicated to the spirit of rebuilding which the author originally wrote in 1978 and rededicated to the spirit of that building of a New World Trade Center out of the ashes of the old.

All in all, this is a series of short stories and reflections on various real people and unknown heroes of that infamous day in September 2001. I think your reading of this will help in the healing process and contribute to awareness of what some would label the beginnings of a New Global Culture. 


Available on Amazon Kindle: