Midwood High School

Opened in 1940 Midwood High School was known for the academic competitiveness of its then largely Jewish student body. It was across the street from Brooklyn College on the north end of the neighborhood. Most kids who lived in Midwood went either to Midwood or to James Madison High, a few miles south on Bedford near Kings Highway. The Midwood High crowd hung out on Avenue J, near the Midwood Theater, while the Madison kids frequented King's Highway and saw movies at the Kingsway or Avalon Theaters. Both crowds would meet at Dubrow's Cafeteria on King's Street where some boys would look to beat the system. At Dubrow's, like other cafeterias in the city, you took a ticket when you entered. The counter people would punch in the cost of your purchase and you would pay the total on the way out. The gimmick was to have two tickets running. You would put most of your purchases on a ticket that you pocketed and only a couple of things on the one you turned in.

Midwood students were expected to be well-rounded. In 1946 they were contenders in citywide competitions from swimming and tennis to fashion and academics. The school's orchestra and chorus performed radio concerts. Many students joined athletic teams, which seldom won many games. Having achieved a measure of success from often humble beginnings, Midwood parents wanted their children to attend good colleges. Perhaps they remembered that in their day elite colleges often passed over academically qualified Jewish students on the grounds that they lacked character and had not exhibited leadership skills. A less blatant discrimination continued in the 1940s (and well after) with preferential treatment given to students from private schools, on the grounds that they were academically better prepared, and from public schools outside the New York metropolitan area, on the excuse of the need for geographic diversity, over graduates of city public schools. So if you were a Jew from Brooklyn, it was not enough to get high grades. You had to graduate from a "good school" and participate in extracurricular activities.

There was a social and academic hierarchy to Brooklyn high schools in those years that was familiar to students and their parents, although they argued over the specifics of the unofficial rankings. One former Brooklyn high school student, Joel Berger, is quoted in It Happened in Brooklyn as saying “If a person of certain age tells me he went to Brooklyn Tech, I know he had to have done well scholastically. If he went to Lincoln or Midwood, Madison or Erasmus, Lafayette or New Utrecht, we were similar: middle-class kids with aspirations of upward mobility.......If he went to Boys High or Eastern District, we were different. He was tougher, hustled a buck more, had a special lingo.” Manual High was the athletic powerhouse. Boys High in Bedford Stuyvesant, then a racially mixed neighborhood, was a Romanesque Revival landmark built in 1891, and nearby was Girls High.

The majority of Midwood's students went on to college, although the war interrupted that plan for many of the boys. Among the graduating seniors in 1943 was Mimi Sheraton whose parents argued bitterly whether she would be allowed to go away to school. “Little did my father know that what he most feared might happen away from home took place in his own living room directly under the bedroom in which he was asleep,” Sheraton writes in Eating My Words. In the end in she enrolled at New York University as a commuter student living at home.