Embedded Files
16 June 2015
.... or my time at Ashland Junior High School
In the film "Speak" they wonderfully condense the process of Mr. Freeman connecting with Melinda, the key scene is when he and Ivy are discussing Melinda's art project; the turkey bones and the palm tree. Melinda is seated as they come into the frame from both sides. The camera is static as they discuss the project until just before Mr. Freeman says the word "pain". At that point they cut to a tight reaction shot of Melinda's face as the word registers and her eyes look up at him in surprise.
Jeffrey Ewing
I attended public school in Ashland K thru 10; transferring to Strongsville after my sophomore year. We moved there because my father, a lithographer at Garber Printing, would not cross another union's picket line and was permanently replaced by management. By a particularly perverse coincidence I would unknowingly receive my first college degree from the same Cornell University labor relations program as the architect of Garber's nasty union-busting campaign.
Attending my first (and most likely only - as technically I am not a graduate) AHS class reunion (the 35th) a few years ago I was "stunned" by my anonymity, at least among those classmates I had first met in junior high. I was also disturbed by a core feeling of resentment. I understood the origin of this resentment although I was surprised that it was coming out as resentment and not as one or more other emotions. It was not a suppressed memory in the strict sense as for years it was a rare day that I do not think of it, but rather a compartmentalized memory - one I had coped with by refusing to emotionally react to it. But the reunion was overwhelming this defense. Intensely enough that I bailed out of the reunion banquet just after it started and ended up down at Brookside Park watching the end of a travel ball softball tournament and decompressing, intending to go back but finally abandoning the idea.
I got a definitive handle on my anonymity a few years later during a 2015 visit to the Junior High School building. Knowing that the building had a looming date with the wrecking ball I impulsively entered and wandered around at the conclusion of the school year, taking photos as I navigated the halls in an overwhelmed haze. It is relatively unchanged fifty years later; just as cold, uninviting, and scary as I remembered it. During this visit I was as disconcerted as Alice trying to make logical sense of it all as she navigated her way around Wonderland.
But the Ashland Junior High building is no Wonderland, its off-kilter qualities and seedy appearance are more the product of almost a century of mean-spirited voters than of someone's whimsically twisted imagination. Thanks to the defeat of countless building levies the ancient and dysfunctional building that was inflicted on us over 50 years ago is still the same rabbit-warren of dead-ends, abandoned storerooms, subterranean locker rooms, and cobbled together additions.
As I began to get my bearings and become oriented I found that my main feeling for the place was disgust. That and a sense of personal violation tinged with a vaguely recalled fear. For me as a student the only mental stability havens were the Art Room and Shop Class. But at least the flood of mostly negative memories did shed some light on my anonymity and go a long way toward explaining why I connected so completely when years later I read Laurie Halse Anderson's "Speak" and again when I saw the movie adaptation (coincidentally filmed down the road in Columbus).
Like Melinda, a traumatic predatory event sent my life into retrograde. And while I might be overstating things a bit or at least overstating the causal dynamic, it is a reasonable indulgence after decades of reluctance to "speak" about it and a concerted effort to under-react to the memories. Occurring at the school in the middle of 7th grade (as one of the smallest and least mature people in the school I must have been inviting prey), it fractured a fragile identity already in considerable turmoil, causing me to largely withdraw into myself and disengage for the next two and a half years. While the absence of outside distractions improved my grades, it also meant that by design I flew far below everyone's radar, a largely invisible presence unremembered by my classmates. I didn't grasp how successful this withdrawal had been until this visit to the school.
It is in retrospect a surreal thing which might have been somewhat mitigated had I not (like Melinda) been silent.
"Speak even if your voice shakes."
I was far too ashamed to have told my parents but did have two cousins just a few months older to whom I came close to sharing the details of this incident, seeking help shortly after it occurred. But at the only family gathering where this was likely they not only failed to recognize my personality change but aggressively excluded me from their self-involved activities; the timing of this rejection almost too cliche. I am only now realizing, 50 plus years later, that I harbor infinitely more resentment toward my cousins for not being there for me than toward the two classmates who actually traumatized me for their pleasure. Taken together the four of them constitute yet another example of what Hannah Arendt once described as "the banality of evil", people totally self-absorbed for so long that they no longer had the ability to think from the standpoint of somebody else.
Adding to the stew of dysfunction that made me feel different from other people, was the onset of a relatively severe auto-inflammatory disorder that would last for several years, with obvious symptoms and extensive treatments but no diagnosis; medical science at that time having conceptually discounted the possibility of such immune system responses. All that was actually needed was a occasional cortisone shot but with the wrong diagnosis that treatment was never considered. I suspect that the auto-inflammatory thing was caused or at least exacerbated by the crushing emotional upheaval that was taking place as these allergic flare-ups were rare after leaving Ashland. The idea of such a connection did not occur to me at the time.
The invasive medical horror show brought its own moments of terror and violation into this period of my life, but that is its own story and only tangential to this one.
Throw in a badly timed puberty for good measure. So the fact that I maintained some semblance of sanity during this age 12 to 14 period is in and of itself rather amazing. My life was falling so short of my expectations and the world proving such a disappointment that it was impossible for me in my moments of clarity to take it seriously. Which is actually a pretty good coping mechanism. Call it "instinctive existentialism" as I had no acquired knowledge of that philosophy at the time and simply seized it as a way to rise above the absurdity of the conditions then confronting me.
So at the dawn of puberty, she'd learned no one would defend her, she could not defend herself,
and the only way to survive was to pretend to be dead.
To digress a moment, I get that the diminishing of expectations is a fundamental part of the whole coming-of-age thing. And I can even look back and find a bit of perverse amusement in my attempts to comprehend and cope with my dramatically changed circumstances; although if I had watched it happening to someone else I could find nothing amusing, perverse or otherwise.
Unable to verbalize what happened, Melinda nearly stops speaking altogether, expressing her voice through the art she produces for Mr. Freeman's class. This expression slowly helps Melinda acknowledge what happened, face her problems, and recreate her identity. Melinda's recovery comes as a result of her own efforts, without professional help.
The dynamic is an interesting one. We hide our pain and constrict our lives by withdrawing from friends and family, but at the same time we are angry with them for not being tuned in enough to recognize that something is wrong. We are especially angry with our friends for moving on and leaving us alone to cope, even if we have pushed them away. On the plus side, if we are lucky we are unexpectedly befriended by relative strangers who somehow sense our pain, leaving us with a life-long appreciation of their protective efforts and a regret that this went largely unacknowledged.
In retrospect I find it incredible that I exhibited a mild but obvious personality disorder from age 12 to 14 without anyone even suggesting that something might be wrong or that counseling might be useful.
Perhaps that is why I have come to embrace even ineffectual gestures like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khEUKTs---Y&t=8s
You against the world at age 12 is not a good thing. Tentative children who survive these years with their integrity and personal identity intact must have large amounts of physical courage, humility, wisdom about people, and the ability to eat pain without resenting oneself. As this is quite a tall order for a 12 year-old the early loss of my personal identity may have been inevitable. 8th grade saw me still in search of an identity and focused outward only toward academics. 9th grade was a time of considerable retrograde although anger (running up against that "ability to eat pain without resenting oneself" constraint) was beginning to replace shame.
Tom Booker: It was like his mind, his spirit, whatever you want to call it, just disappeared. The only thing left was anger.
As if the boy I once knew just went somewhere else.
Grace: I know where he goes.
Tom Booker: I know you do. Don't you disappear. You do whatever you have to do to hold on.
I began to emerge from my isolation and move forward when I entered 10th grade and moved to the high school building, the movement forward probably started during an especially good summer at Camp Mowana in 1965.
Ironically our move from Ashland occurred one year too late, as the progress I made that last year left me forever nostalgic about Ashland and prejudiced about Strongsville. Had the move occurred after 7th, 8th, or 9th grade I likely would have never looked back and to at least some degree would have embraced Strongsville. And I think a part of the reason I returned to Ashland in 2015 was to rediscover the reality of my life there and re-examine the idyllic notions I had managed to construct over the subsequent years.
Songwriter David Fenton explained, "Turning Japanese" is all the clichés about angst and youth and turning into something you didn't expect to.
I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,
because I'm not myself, you see.
In retrospect my dynamic (like Melinda's) was a loss of identity and its slow reconstitution. Metaphysically, not gender identity or questioning of my heterosexual orientation. When your identity shatters this severely you are diminished, shrinking back into your core and forever losing much of what had been built onto that core up to that point. It isn't that pieces of what you are get vaporized, but rather that they lose the links or connections that made them an integrated part of your identity. The rebuild is not so much a newborn process as a salvaging operation, supplemented by substitutions in order to grow a new-found identity. How long it takes to cobble together a new identity is mostly a function of the degree of stubbornness in accepting substitutions, and in this I was even more stubborn than Melinda.
You emerge from something like this emotionally underdeveloped and you will never get that back. The trade-off is that this sort of developmental interruption creates someone with multiple perspectives, capable of parallax views of life that won't lock you into a standard narrow identity.
"When Melinda draws a tree using principles of cubism, Mr. Freeman says she's finally on the right track."
Why do you look so familiar?
I could swear that I have seen your face before
I think I like that you seem sincere
I think I'd like to get to know you a little bit more
Find yourself, 'cause I can't find you
Be yourself, who are you?
In fairness to everyone around me, I did not understand my situation enough at the time to have articulated much about it, even if someone had been tuned in enough to try to draw it out of me. Plus I think that denial or minimization of impact becomes a coping mechanism for dealing with something like this. You avoid confronting it because you are ashamed to be so weak that through this act someone has acquired a continuing influence over your state-of-mind. Acknowledging their power over you is conceding that you are not strong enough to simply push your way back to normalcy.
If you recover from something like this and the recovery is largely as a result of your own efforts (which neither Melinda nor I would recommend), it will make you absurdly self-reliant. In part from the confidence gained about yourself by the experience and in part from a continuing (if not always entirely rational) contempt of those who failed to discern your distress during the crisis. You crawl out of the pit with the new found knowledge that it is not bottomless - that you can only fall so far.
For me it has been intoxicating to finally make these connections and be liberated from a "portion" of the responsibility for wasting those years. And it is tempting to embrace my victimization and even obsess over this development. But this rush is addictive and there is danger in being simplistic about the cause . The pivotal incident was only a tiny moment in my life and its impact way out of proportion to its innate power, which was amplified by the perfect storm of circumstances that were in play when it occurred. More significant going forward is having a better understanding of this period of my life.
Fiona Apple had the best retrospective take on this sort of thing when she stated that she did not write songs about this trauma:
"It doesn't get into the writing. It's a boring pain. It's such a fuckin' old pain that, you know, there's nothing poetic about it."
Getting back to the two girls who set all this in motion, there was at least one positive result although that came decades later. The trauma altered almost everything about me and in the "Uncle Vanya" moments of my senior years I can use it to scorn my regrets - using it as a scapegoat where otherwise I might feel guilty about things I did or did not do. In that sense they did me a favor, I only wish that I had discovered this capacity earlier in my life.
Both of them have since come to bad ends. When I learned of this a few years ago I took a little too much joy in the news but I think that was less about what happened to them than it was the possibility that there could actually be an independent mechanism for cosmic payback. At first I thought it was OK to superficially believe that as long as it was not your deep down belief. But now I think the opposite is true, it is OK to not superficially believe it but it is a useful peace of mind tool to have it as a deep down belief.
Of course if you want to go off into the realm of the unknown, and who doesn't; examine the possibility that after its shattering my identity was never adequately reconstituted.
And that identity is not an essential need but an obstacle, that without an identity we are driven by forces other than power and profit.
From this might come an existential self-awareness to one degree or another, or maybe now I'm just in Bitburg and my brain is hanging upside down.
http://www.psychologycampus.com/psychology-counseling/existential-therapy.html
In any case identity is at best half a lie and if you are prone to moments of clarity you realize that a lot of it is total invention. Which might account for my difficulty in cobbling together a replacement identity that was acceptable to me yet did not require my engaging in a huge amount of self-knowing whimsy - which requires far too much energy to maintain.
Shame and shyness are traits with a huge potential to corrupt. They probably fall under the sin of pride which some regard as the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. Yet they are not as serious as pride because for most people they offer automatic atonement by torturing whoever possesses them. One upside is that the challenges they make to your character could be considered opportunities to exercise and grow your nobility of spirit. The trick is to incorporate them into a positive identify and use the perspective they give you as your bridge into the world of the hypersane.
And so if you have found all the above rather tedious, I can summarize my personal takeaway sixty years later with this brief hypersane exchange from a recent Showtime movie:
Cian Fitzgerald: So you believe me then?
Freddy Lane: A child and a baby are left alone in the bath and the baby drowns. Whose fault is that, the child's or the adult who left them both alone?
Cian Fitzgerald: I didn't do anything wrong Lily!
Freddy Lane: What if the adult comes back to find the child holding the baby's head under the water? You know the answer don't you? It really doesn't matter, because of what I've recently come to realize; there's only one thing that should concern any of us. Do you know what it is? Make sure you're not the baby!
Cian Fitzgerald: No!
When ordinary folk look at a problem or an issue, it's like trying to shave in a steam-clouded mirror. For the hypersane, at least in the area(s) of their hypersanity, there's no steam on the glass. They see things the rest of us can't see, and they see them clearly.
the-hypersane-are-among-us-if-only-we-are-prepared-to-look
“I don’t think the people of the slave states will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to other than moral persuasion.”
John Brown 1859
Moving on to more neutral matters:
My 7th grade math teacher was Mrs. Frank (I think that was her name and am slightly amazed that it popped into my head) who was about 80 years old and as interesting as watching paint dry. I completely underachieved in that class for several reasons, and they used your grade that year to determine who would go into advanced math in 8th grade (I am recalling all this stuff as I write). So Pam Leonard and I got put in an 8th grade math class for fuck-ups, taught by Bob McFarland who was a strict disciplinarian, friends with my mother, and a teacher I knew from Osborn - so goofing off was not an option. McFarland would post class ranks on the bulletin board each week, which got Pam and I got into this unspoken competition to be #1 and we traded spots all year in the rankings; and both got solid A's each grading period. But we were already pigeon-holed by the system and were kept in that classification the next year.
There was some pre-SAT given early in 9th grade and one morning a couple months later I was called out of English class by the front office. When I got there I was given a certificate for having scored highest in the school on the math portion, apparently better than anybody in the advanced math class. Most likely due to being in McFarland's class that year - maybe they knew what they were doing when they put me in there!
They just don't make urinals this interesting anymore. Note the cool terrazzo floor. I am pretty sure this has been closed since well before I was a student although it may have been in use as a male teacher rest room.
"My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down"
You need that existential self-awareness I mentioned earlier to truly appreciate the absurdity that was the Girls' Gym. Those windows on the mezzanine walking track are just at street level, you could walk by on the outside sidewalk and look down at the underground gym floor. Or the girls could look up at the undercarriages of the cars and trucks rolling by on the street overhead. The door in the lower right corner opens to a staircase about 12 feet below the concrete surface of the courtyard. The walking track is the basement level - the gym floor is the sub-basement.
The gym looked used to look rather pretty with its wooden floor and the brick walls, but until my recent visit I had only viewed it from the outside street level windows. In any case it was an incredibly expensive and illogical way to construct what amounted to a very tiny gymnasium, a design fraught with unnecessary drainage and maintenance challenges.
Nothing says "Ashland Junior High School" better than this 2015 eye-level photo of the courtyard. When I rode my bicycle to school in the early 1960's I would park it in this courtyard chained to one of those railings. It looks exactly the same except for needing a coat of paint and except for the middle school initials on the painted windows to the girls' locker room. Center and right is the original 1915 high school, on the left is the new gym and the auditorium which were added on in 1926. The gym was actually built on top of the basement and heating plant of the first Ashland High School which served as the Junior High from 1915 to 1925. Then as now the courtyard is one of my favorite features of the school, perhaps because there is no attempt whatsoever at pretense.
So, you are two floors below street level, your gym period is about over, and you need to head to the locker room. If you are taking 9th grade Latin you can use the adjective "labyrinthine" (from Latin labyrinthus, from Greek labyrinthos - Miss Rickel would be amazed to see such a reference coming from her worst ever Latin student) to describe your path to the gym lockers and showers. You eventually end up inside this silver roofed structure in the courtyard, which is slightly above the walking track that rings the gym - the idea that they needed a locker room appears to have been an afterthought when the original gym was completed in 1914. There is a back entrance to the girls' locker room, a locked basement area known to past students as "the tunnel". I was able to look down it once when the steel entrance door was opened under the stairs at the south end of the school.
The bottom windows on the left (in the concrete wells) were supposed to let a little light into the basement area under the main gym which was constructed on the old foundation of the 1879 high school, about ten years after the Cottage Street section of the school was built.
Man’s task in life is the paradoxical one of realizing his individuality and at the same time transcending it to arrive at the experience of universality. Only the fully developed self can drop the ego.
—Erich Fromm
The biggest question about Ethel Rosenberg for me relates to her sons. After our initial interview, I end up speaking to them, together and separately, several times over the course of a month, mainly because I have so many questions, but also because they are so delightful to talk to: wildly intelligent, always interesting, completely admirable. How on earth did they triumph over such a traumatic childhood? Elizabeth Phillips, the child therapist Ethel used to consult, said in an interview:
‘One, they have an extraordinarily high level of intelligence. Second, they had amazing adoptive parents. But we now know how important those early years of life are, and Ethel must have given those two boys so much in those years that it lasted all their lives. Ethel must have been an extremely good mother.’”
A somewhat less "labyrinthine" feature in the boys' gym is the small door between the south basket and the fire escape exit.
Although in plain sight, the door is so unobtrusive that you are unlikely to even notice its existence. It leads down to the little used visitors' locker room under the south floor of the gym.
Contrary to the widely held "you can't get there from here" assertion, there is a "labyrinthine" passage that snakes around under the gym floor and eventually opens up into the much larger and far nastier "home" locker room (see below). This was used by the boys' gym classes and has a more formal entrance under the north basket. Everything was painted white 50 years ago in an effort to make up for the lack of natural light. Strangely, it is not much more cringe-worthy than it was back then. I suspect that the rooms down here are so innately repellent that nobody wanted to stay long enough to vandalize the place, perhaps that was the intention of those who designed it back in the mid-1920's.
As already noted, this is a confused epic horror show of a building. In the tradition of the Winchester Mystery House, indeed Sarah Winchester would have fit quite nicely on most of Ashland's School Boards. The building was originally constructed in 1914; with additions in 1924, 1926 (McDowell Auditorium), 1938, and 1943. There are things that distinguish one section from another, the best clues are in the basements which unlike the upper levels rarely tried to tie into each other. Only on the bottom level it is impossible to go from the 1914 building into the newer sections.
Emerging from the bowels of the 1924 gym you find the school's most bizarre feature. A basketball court that doubles as a stage, and an auditorium & orchestra pit that doubles as spectator stands. Over the past ninety years it has served as an excellent example of why this arrangement is a bad idea.
Note the white panels at the top left and right of the gym wall which plug openings in the west wall of the gym, the three orange banners hide similar openings. Behind them are large windows looking out all of six feet to the back windows of the Cottage Street section of the school. My guess is that this was once the front wall of the 1870's high school.
The auditorium itself evokes my most pleasant memories of the building, and the only feature that I will miss. I found it dazzling as a child and it imparted a lifelong fascination with musicals and concerts. Any play or concert I attend never fails to evoke memories of it.
Overture, curtains, lights
This is it, you'll hit the heights
And oh what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it
McDowell Auditorium "itself" is a magnificent structure. Had cheapness not caused the designers to give it this schizo multi-functionality and a shared wall with the south wing addition, it would be well worth preserving as a stand alone theatrical venue. Preservation and re-purposing would have been quite practical and it could serve the community for at least another century. The attention to detail, totally missing in today's schools makes it worthy of its own page, just click on this link:
The Alice In Wonderland Door
"When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead"
On the third floor of the south wing is what I used to call "The Alice In Wonderland" door. Always locked I expected to one day see the White Rabbit come along with a key, open it, and let me follow him to Wonderland (all this occurring several years before the Dormouse advised: "Feed Your Head"). I include the song lyrics because they are such a good fit with the building, the bewildering things inflicted on me during my three years of residence, and the reality that it was within these walls that I went through the often strange and sometimes wonderful process of puberty.
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And call Alice, when she was just small
When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll know
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head
Click to Watch - WhiteRabbit
"The Alice In Wonderland Door" during demolition. Of course I had no idea when walking by the door in 1965 that I would be standing outside the school taking a photo of that hallway 50 years later. As it was my favorite feature of the school, I wish I could say that it had been my protective space counterpart to Melinda's janitorial closet, but it was always locked and the demo was the first time I was able to see inside; no wonderland - just an empty attic over the auditorium.
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