Fresh Kills _ School - Day 18

School - Day 18

In the day to day living, I have say that my mother was a very dutiful mother. I, we, never wanted for the basics, food, shelter, hand me down clothes.  Shoes were about the only new thing I ever remember getting in the clothing department.  I do remember picking out a set of trousers at the discount Robert Hall men’s clothing store on the Avenue for my entry into first grade.

That we did not go to kindergarten I have often wondered about. In the age of the post-World War Two housewife, there were few if any daycare centers. They started with Lyndon Johnson and his government handouts to the poor.  Though in a way they were really a masked way of getting women out of the home and into the workforce of the mighty Military Industrial Complex of post WWII.

Kindergarten was a public school thing.  And my father had one of those holier than the Pope kind of attitudes against the whole public school education thing.

But then again it was Philly where the parochial Catholic school system was built after the so-called Catholic riots of 1844 and the Know Nothings and their swastika like pure white American political party getting all paranoid and angry about all the Paddy and German immigrants breeding like rabbits and taking over all the older real estate and slums in Philadelphia county. And taking the crumby manual day labor jobs away from the natives.

The immigrant Bishop, a Sudetenland German, went to the W.A.S.P. establishment and their wasp bankers and made them lend him the money to build that separate but not equal (superior) Catholic school system.  Perhaps that is what my father was concerned about, the quality thing more than the wasp ethnic thing. Whatever. Check mark.  Reconciled.  Won’t go there anymore. Well, not quite.

In a way those riots were a building of consensus among diverse parties to agree to separate and agree to disagree and to build the new infrastructure of Philadelphia City out of the rural Philadelphia County that soon followed.

In fact, looking back up at the Schlichter tower of that rope mill, I have seen a photo of it in some historic archive when it was built in 1858. It is like two blocks long and reminds me of those pictures of the Detroit assembly plants geared up during WWII.  One has to wonder if it was coincidence that this factory got built, if it was out of investment, speculation of a growing industrial future or this monster of a rope factory was a buildup to an intended war not unlike the German buildup before WWII.  And there was all that cheap immigrant labor to man acre after acre after acre of factories and mills all over this local patch of land.

The mind does wander.

Anyway back to dad.  For about a dozen Saturdays before I entered the first grade, he made up a series of learning cards on cut up index cards.  And for a very painful two hours each Saturday, I had to put up with his Prussian style of teaching as I learned the alphabet, a few cat and dog words and painfully, very painfully, learned my signature in cursive.  First sixth months of first grade I glided through.  I had already done the Cliff Notes via dad.

I don’t want to dwell on this.  But dad and the public school thing, his sticking his nose up in the air attitude, the first day, my first day, in Catholic first grade had 104 students.  Hey.  It was post WWII baby boom time in first grade. After a few weeks, the herd had been culled down to 99.  I could count by then up to 100.  The sister would mark the daily attendance on a corner of the black broad for the attendance monitor in the eighth grade to come in and record the number.  Ninety-nine in first grade.  Down to sixty-six by eighth grade.  I hear about this crowded thirty children public school classrooms crap these days and wonder what that scam is all about. The unions? The construction contractors? The bribes in city hall?

As it turns out, Saint Bishop Johannes Neumann thought he put one over on the wasp bankers when he made them finance his private school system.  As it turned out, the bankers not only got satisfactory return on their equity, they got cheaper taxes from not having to build so many public schools to accommodate wave after wave of cheap immigrant labor and their children’s physical needs.  But then again the Catholic school thing was always about the soul thing. Right?  Win, win for the bankers.  Win, win for the church.  Win, win, win-lose for the pacified literate labor force?

Getting back to mom.  Looking back at the housework she did, which I witnessed as a young child, was pure drudgery. And then she would be there at lunchtime to dole out a meager Franco-American canned spaghetti and grilled cheese sandwich meal to four kids. Well, we did not know we were poor.

That whole housewife is home, housewife can make lunch for kids, sort of fed into a very cheap parochial school system that depended on the slave labor of women married to God, no Jesus, doing the teaching and not being part of any Protestant public school system and their cafeteria lunch programs. I think the feed the students at lunch in the cafeteria thing got started with the suburbs where they had to bus, drive long distances to school.  No cafeterias even in the inner city public grade school system or so I understood it back then.  I can remember a Prot cousin, near my age, talking about school lunch in a cafeteria and I was like bewildered. Really? What else do you do in public school? In the burbs?

Mine is a narrow perspective perhaps of the whole picture.

Mom got a factory job after my younger sister graduated from eighth grade. High school was a stay at lunch situation, cafeteria and all.

Irony is that the factory mom got her job in was a modern factory built during WWII and on the site of the old Shlichter family mansion. I always from first grade onward as I walked the long walk to school wondered why the modern one story white brick clear glass factory was surrounded by a nasty old dirty granite stone two foot high wall that had once supported an iron fence surrounded the building. Later I would research it.  If you are born in Philly, the history city, and surrounded by history, eventually it becomes a hobby for some.

Part of this afterlife experience puts me in mind of being tired and exhausted in real life.  But here, the focus is always awake.  In a way, I have learned to turn down the volume on the thought process thing.  There is such a thing in reality and in abstract realness of too much thinking.  Time to rest.