=shssa05c Notes on Shady Hill School / by Steve Amdur / Oct '05 /Save3 ------------------------------------------------------------------- { TO; Jennifer_Crowley@shs.org , CC: rosshall@comcast.net FROM: Steve Amdur, Campra, CH-6718 Olivone, Switzerland sa73122@yahoo.com RE; Shady Hill Class of 1955 ( x1955, I attended from 5_year_olds through 7th grade) As suggested by Ross Hall (Email 6 Oct '05), I have jotted down a few more reminicences of Shady Hill. This document should supplement the handwritten recollection that I mailed you about a year ago. ( I think I don't have a copy of that, so send me one if you can. ) In this document, I would ask that the two portions enclosed in */starred_slashes\* -- ie, the introduction and postscript (including my lenghty signoff with URL's) -- be retained as written. All the material in the middle -- my reminiscences -- you may excerpt at will. With very best wishes to you all, Steve Amdur } ----------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES ABOUT SHADY HILL SCHOOL -- Stephen Amdur, x1955 /*In a sense, Shady Hill (we never called it Shady Hill School) was for me a paradigm of a harmonious community, to which I have been trying to return ever since. In 1967--1974, while dropping in and out of grad school (philosophy), I was at New Buffalo communue, north of Taos Pueblo, in northern New Mexico. Then I spent summers at the Abode of the Message, situated in a former Shaker community in New Lebanon, New York (it abuts old U.S. Route 20 at the the Massachusetts__New York state line ) and then, after having moved to Israel, at Zenith Camp here in Campra / Olivone Switzerland. The Abode, and Zenith, are associated with the so_called 'Sufi Order in the West', founded by Hazrat Inayat Khan and established by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan (PVK). In Israel I spent some years at Moshav Mevo Modi'in, fouund by R. Shlomo Carlebach -- Rabbi (an expert in Jewish religious 'law') or Rebbe (an hasidic leader) or simply Reb (like PVK, he did not comfortably wear any but the most commonplace title). When Mevo Modi'in was founded in 1976 , it was at the end of a dirt road; now an 8-line highway runs past the front gate, and one can scarcely see the Milky Way. But a fresh breeze still sometimes blows in from the Mediterranean, fresh with moisture from the ancient springs in that rocky scrubland. A few miles to the right one can see the line of reforested trees that mark the former border of the so_called 'West Bank'. So those were in four communities in which I sought to regain the sense of a good, orderly world that I had grown up taking for granted while going to Shady Hill. Well, that's the gist of it. All I can add are a few reminiscences, in case some might be of interest to anyone.*\ ------------------------------------- I started Shady Hill in 5_year_olds -- Kindergarden -- so I always thought of 4_year_olds, the first class, as an oddity. Grown_ups were those in upper grades, eventually that became 8th grade, not to mention the 9th grade. Of course we never thought of ourselves as children. As for real adults, that was rather a remote species, nice enough but of only passing interest. In 5_year_olds we played with blocks. My best friend then, and for many years was M Martin -- Meredith Martin. My mother said, she taught me to tie my shoes. She later did time locked up for so_called mental illness, the analysis and treatment of which remains in the Dark Ages. I visited her once at MacLean's Hospital, oppressive brick buildings fit only for Robert Lowell. She once had the insight that her breakdown was a variant of epilepsy, --------------- Miss Dudley taught First Grade. One day we walked into the classroom and saw, on the chalk_tray of the blackboard -- rally a greenboard -- at the head of classroom, a white cardboard with a red circle, and the word 'RED' written by it. That we how we began to learn to read. --------------- Miss Hale taught 2nd grade. She would read us 'The Hobbit'. One day she asked that anyone who had been having nightmares about it raise their hand. Almost all of us raised our hands. So she said she would not read it to us any more. We could not quite explain to her that we hadn't really been having nightmares, but had just thought that this was something we were supposed to agree to -- a sort of volunteering. I was later told that Miss Hale, like many idealistic, tradtion_minded, romantically patriotic Americans, had been a member of the CP_USA, which at that time was in its United Front phase, en route to becoming terminal stodginess. I suppose she was later shielded at Shady Hill from any possible repercussions during the 'Witchhunt' of the McCarthy demagogery. It was in 2nd grade, as I recall, that we dressed up as "Pilgrims and Puritans" at the end of the school year. Through 2nd grade that we had a Rest Period. We each had brought a blanket to school, and we would unroll the mats on the floor. There was also juice period. Two or three people in the class would go to the kitchen and bring back two pewter pitchers of juice, and I think some cookies. I liked most of the juices we had, but sometimes we had prune juice which I did not like very much. --------------- 3rd grade was taught by Miss Hull. I remember it very warmly. There would be one or two apprentice teachers, from Sergeant College. They were young women, and very nice. I sat in front of Kitten Cushman. She had beautiful red hair, and a very sort of soft, flowing manner. It seems to me now that she exemplified the 'sephira' (as they say in kabala) or 'Divine Attribute' (as they say in the Sufi Order) of 'Binah'. That might be translated, 'intuitive insight' -- a 'feminine' attribute (in contrast to the the 'masculine' sephira of 'chochma', which I think corresponds to Pir Vilayat Khan's notion of 'Pure Intelligence'). In 3rd grade I stood in front of the class and gave a talk on the solar system. With help from my mother, I had drawn the outer orbit, of Pluto, using the washpan from our kitchen sink. I forget how I drew the inner orbits. Maybe my father helped me. For myy birthday party I would invite all my friends, which was almost all the class. One year, maybe third grace, someone, maybe Anstill Hammond, said to me, "I heard about the party. Sniff. " I still regret not having invited her. One year David Wheatland had a birthday party on their farm in Topsfield and invited all of us. There were relling hills, and a big haystack. We had bottles of orange crush to drink, and all the hamburgers and hotdogs we wanted. --------------- 4th grade was taught by Miss Eliot. I wonder now, for the first time, why all the teachers were Miss. Maybe in those days married women didn't work much. My mother once told me that she had wanted to work when we were young, but my father didn't think that was really appropriate. Later she worked for the League of Women Voters in Harvard Square. Sometimes coming back from school I would stop by to see her, park my bike, and get a cupcake at the bakery. It was in 4th grade that one day we were told that we would be taught, if not necessarily learn, 'cursive handwriting' , which at the time I understood -- correctly, I would say in retrospect -- to be 'cursed handwriting'. We were also taught the multiplication tables. I got as far as the middle of the 7's -- 49 has a nice solid biblical ring to it - - but have never had a feel nor seen the nneed for all the rest of it. Eventually I almost memorized 7 times 8, which I think is 56. In 4th grade Central Subject was the Greeks, culminating in our Olympic Games at the end of the year. That was someting we took quite seriously, with high jump, discus, javelin, footrace, and I think broadjump. We made chitons, with block-print borders that we chose and made ourselves. We also each made a shield. Those were big shields, very carefully decorated. We chose the pictures ourselves. Mine was a porpoise leaping, and a seagull flying by. We also learned the closing poem of the Olympic Games: "Of many kinds is the greatness of men, and ample is the glory in store for Olympican winners ... " I retained a certain attatchment to Greece for almost a half_century -- I have sometimes wondered if the coincidence that both I and my brother Nicholas unintentionally bear Greek names echos some distant unknown geneology. I was rather thrilled when, travelling from Israel to Switzerland, I first glimpsed the Acropolis from the window of the Piraeus__Patra train. Even though Athens has been ruined by automobiles -- as Jerusalem, and for that matter Boston, nearly have been. (Manhattan, of course, is long past ruination.) It must have been in 4th grade that our class play was Prometheus Bound. Maisie Kinnicut enacted Promethus. There was something so poignant in the last scene, when she is chained -- crucified, really -- to that rock for eternity -- such defiant fragility in her final speech. As I say, we never thought of ourselves as children. At Shady Hill one looked forward each morning to going to school. I would often ride my bike to school, cutting across Mass. Ave. to Brattle Street -- there was some very nice moss at the base of an old low stone wall by a house on Craigie Street -- and then up the walkway on Memorial Drive. Then you cross the street and cut behind the B&N tennis courts. Starting in 4th grade, we were taught recorder -- called a Halil in Israel. I suppose it is the only instrument I can even pretend to play. I eventually learned to play it by ear, which is a useful skill, analogous to being able to touch_type without thinking of the keys -- a matter of giving immediate and direct expression to whatever one is thinking. Though it's not that simple; the mode of expression partially determines the thought. We also had singing. It was rather a mixed bag of songs I suppose. A few Red Army songs -- "Meadowland, meadowland, all the meadows are in blossom" -- and a large number of Christmas carols. Only a few had good words, like 'The Friendly Beasts'. PVK has remarked that it can be rather important for one to do some singing. I had long assumed that I could not sing, and it is only in the last year so, largely from singing the songs of R. Shlomo Carlebach on solitary Shabats, that I have begun to relax and sing. Sinatra is a touchstone, he takes all the time he pleases to shape a phrase. (As Richard Wilbur says: "But Nijinsky / didn't have zjr art / to make the rules for learning to loiter on air; ( he 'simply' said / 'I simply leap / and pause.'". ) A metronone beat and sometimes even a fixed scale can be somewhat simplistic. --------------- 5th grade was taught by Mr. Smith -- 'Smitty'. He also taught Square Dancing. If anyone ever asked me to call some Square Dances, I could do so at the drop of a hat, just from what I learned at Shady Hill. Maybe they would go for it in Israel. Israelis are second only to Swiss and Duich in a zest for interesting oddities. Eg, one year, baguettes. Central Subject in 5th grade was the Vikings. We read the saga of Leif Ericson, or maybe it was of Eric the Red. In 5th grade we learned Mechanical Drawing. Mr. Smith had the sort of discipline and strictness appropriate to that subject. In Mechanical Drawing you use a compass, protractor, and ruler to create, from a set of instructions, successively more complex, symmetrical designs. Euclidean Geometry in pictures, one might say. "Everyone knows / the crusty old man with a heart of gold. / I never thought to be one." (sa) --------------- 6th grade was taught by Mr. Sheldon. Central Subject was the American Revolution. Our class play was about Benedict Arnold, whom Mr. Sheldon seemed to feel had gotten rather a bad press. In retrospect, I would say this was rather a WASP curriculum, but we thought nothing of it. Children, however intellectual and free_spirited, are in a sense 'invincibly innocent' -- we agree to everything, and everything washes off us. I was told that there were several other Jewish kids in my class - - Peter Finn, and Ellen Zetzel -- a 'zetz'' is the yiddish term for a slap, partiuclarly the slap given to a pupil by an hasidic Rebbe -- rather like being struck by the wand off one's Zen master. There was also Betty Walsh, who was quite quiet, with a somewhat - - haunted, or far_away -- look. My motherr told me that she was survivor of the Holocaust, who had been adopted. None of that was of more than passing interest to me at the time, I had grown up assimilated. A secular humanist, as they say nowadays. I knew I was Jewish, and was proud of it -- to me it meant an obligation to identify with and stand up for all other oppressed peoples -- which later turned out to fit nicely, if a bit more militantly, with my maternal grandmother's association with the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Each year there would be the Christmas Play, which I always found quite moving. The text was from the New Testament, the original King James I'm sure. One Christmas Day decades later I was sitting down for supper in the dining room of the Abode of the Message. There was a moment of silence after the 'Sufi' grace. I almost recited, from memory, the text that I had learned from those Shady Hill plays. I am still sorry , when that memory crosses my mind, that I did not do so. "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in the days of Herod the King, behold, there came wise men from the east ..." "And there were in the same country shepherds, abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their silent flocks by night. And Lo, the angel of the LORD came upon them, and the glory of the LORD shown round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not ..." That was in the Assembly Hall, more than 50 years ago. If things are real, they stay with you. There was one Negro girl in our class, Nancy Riddick, and in later years, also Weldon Woodard, who could run very fast. Each grade was only about 30 kids. That seemed to me quite large enough. We all had jobs, which rotated -- line leader, replacing the towels in teh washroom, sweeping the floor -- we used "green stuff", sawdust soaked in oil, to pick up the dust. I liked sweeping the floor and changeing the towels. Each year concluded with the May Day celebration. It started with the 5_year_olds as rabbits, hopping around the lawn, and ended with the 9th graders doing the Maypole dance, so beutiful with those intertwined multi_color ribbons. As I recall, for Hallowe'een we carved pumpkins. --------------- 7th grade was taught by Miss Caudill -- Evelyn Caudill. Certainly a very intelligent person. I had been rather a sissy the previous year, avoiding sports, but in 7th grade for some reason my attitude reversed and I was enthusiastic about all sports -- except baseball, where all I could do was hope to get a walk, in which case I could easily steal 2nd base, and possibly also 3rd base, though that's much harder. I have had one "lazy eye" since it was first noticed in my early childhood. Once a year Benjamin Sachs, who was a great optomotrist with an office in a nice old brick building in Back Bay, would examine me and conclude by saying, 'No glasses.' Instead, he told me to wear a patch for an hour a day, to strenghten the weaker eye. I got used to explaining to people who stopped me on the street, "This is is weaker than that one, so I wear a patch over that eye to strengthen this one." Because of that 'lazy eye' I have relatively little depth perception. Which does make it a bit hard to hit a baseball , catch a fly, or even field a grounder. I winter we played basketball. I later wrote: "How to Play Basketball: If someone's closer / pass. / If your're closest / shoot." PVK once said, "If they ask you do do something, it doesn't necessarily mean you're qualified, it just means they couldn't find anyone better." In the fall we played tackle football, with all the proper equipment. Shoulder pads and knee pads and so forth. Once I got to carry the ball, and broke through the line for a short gain. That was a very good feeling. But it was the last play of the half, so it didn't matter. Central Subject in 7th grade was the Civil War. We read Stephen Vincent Benet's 'John Brown's Body'. I still feel it as a touchstone in lyric poetry, though sometimes I wonder why. A sort of elegaic tone, long calm lines. "In the dense heart of the thicketed wilderness Stonewall Jackson lies dying for three long days. / They have cut off his arm, and tried such arts as they know. But no arts will save him now." By 7th grade my writing style had gotten about as good as one can expect for an American. I don't think its gotten much better since, nor needs to, though I have been practicing ever since. But nowadays mostly I play games with it. We were taught to write in 2 drafts, rarely more nor less. That helps one write quick and clean. The only literary breakthrough I made was to take a touch_typing class in 11th grade. In the course of a few decades of practice my typing speed reached the analogue of playing by ear. Though I think that I write better poetry in longhand. Of course computers speeded things up, though the biggest gain was in doing 2nd_draft edits.. I type now only in EinsteinWriter (W.EXE , 90K), which runs under DOS and is faster and more efficient than the 3_hands Microsoft dinosaurs. It is also self_explantory; one can learn it in about an hour. In 7th grade we learned French, taught by Mr. Candage. The first half year was entirely spoken French, we never saw a word of written French. The entire class was conducted in French; if one had to speak English, one had first to ask, "Est-ce que je peux parler anglais." I think it's thanks to that teaching method that I can today muddle through in French. In Israel everyone speaks at least some English, so I never did learn much Hebrew. Mr. Martin taught shop -- woodworking that is. There was a lathe, a table saw, and a drill press, though mostly we worked only wit h hand tools. He was a very nice person. They lived in a beautiful "modern house" in the Moon Hill community in Lexington. I think he designed and helped build his house, maybe he did all the work. A nice warm family. Miss Swift ran the library. It was in a sort of turret room. It had a nice feel, with the books with old paper and cloth bindings. Mr. Yeomans had come in as principal. He seemd to me a nice guy. That's all the recollections that come to mind for now. */After 7th grade, we moved from our old house on Sacramento Street in Cambridge, which had a large yard with 4 pear trees and two grape vines, to Belmont. I went to Belmont Junior and Senior High, a well_regarded school_system which was the quintessence of USA banality. Since then I have wanted to fix the world ( 'tikun haOlam', as we say ). But that's another chapter. ================================================================= Steve Amdur, Campra, CH-6718 Olivone, Switzerland sa73122@yahoo.com www.geocities.com/sa73122 www.geocities.com/sa73122a www.geocities.com/sa73122c 17 Oct '05 -- 14 Tishrei -- erev Sukot -- 14 Ramadan cold fog has blown up from the valley ============================================================= ================================================================ *\