Binghamton Central High School Archives - Page 4 of 5

My parents, and my career choices

Did we HAVE scheduled meetings with guidance counselors?

My good friend Carol, who I’ve only known since kindergarten, has some follow-up questions about the Lydster’s career choices, which were really about My career choices.

Two questions based on this… why did you not go into law?

Because I did very poorly in a pre-law course at New Paltz. I loved the subject, but Bill Dunn didn’t love my answers. Or maybe it was because it was an 8 a.m. course and I was late sometimes. This failure threw me into a tizzy, because that was my intended life path, and then I had NO idea what I wanted to pursue.

Do you wish your parents had made more suggestions, not along the lines of pushing as much as of possibilities?

Not really, because it just wasn’t in their skill sets. My mother was not one to push us, because that was not her nature in much of anything. She was a “go along to get along” type.

She was very good with numbers and was a bookkeeper or teller for most of her adult life. But she didn’t really think of it as a skill much as, say, her husband arranging flowers or playing guitar or painting or doing all sorts of things. I dare say that he could be a bit intimidating.

For his part, my father, according to his military record, had only three years of high school. I think that part of the friction that I had with him was that I was not very good at working with my hands, the things he excelled in. But I was book smart – would you accept that analysis, Carol? – and he was not as adept, but figured things out as he went along. He was outwardly gregarious, and that wasn’t me.

We did have some areas in common: watching sports together, especially the minor league baseball Triplets and the NY football Giants; playing cards, particularly pinochle and bid whist; and most especially, thank goodness, music.

So he was not likely to offer me career advice because, and I say this without a lot of remorse, he wasn’t always understanding me very much at that time. He certainly didn’t grok what motivated me, and this became even more acutely true in my early twenties when we didn’t talk, at all, for nearly six months, before I relented. This is odd in some ways because my antiwar, and other, activism was molded in no small part by his civil rights activism.

I said two but here’s a third – do you think as I do that our HS counselors were useless?

I actually have no recollection of ANY HS guidance counseling whatsoever, except one passing conversation with Allan Cave, who was the assistant principal at the time, and that only because I knew him from church. Did we HAVE scheduled meetings with guidance counselors, because if we did, I never received the memo?

Just as an aside you wrote about a few math/science awards Lydia received but there’s no mention of any options related to those. Is she just not interested?

Actually, it has determined what level courses she has in 7th grade, and that could lead to courses she could take in 8th grade that could get her high school credit. So it puts her on a more rigorous academic track in several subjects than she might be otherwise.

Me and the Pledge of Allegiance

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Sometimes, you need to tell a story so you can tell another story. This is one of those times.

Back in the fall of 1968 (I believe), I was a sophomore at Binghamton (NY) Central High School. This was, of course, a period of a good deal of strife across the country. The war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement were prominently on my mind in the months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April. I read a lot of King after his death, most notably his speeches in April 1967 opposing the Vietnam war. Also in 1967, Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title for his refusal to be drafted into the armed service.

Both Ali and King evoked race in stating their positions. King asserted: “The war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home… We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” Ali declared: “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America.”

I don’t recall whether the incident to be described was just before or very shortly after John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics.

For these and many other reasons that led to mass racial violence in America, the notion of “liberty and justice for all” in America rang hollow for me. Still, it was a circumstance that led me to act on it.

There were standardized tests being given throughout the school. As a result, the morning announcements on the intercom, including the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, were suspended for several days. I decided that perhaps if the pledge wasn’t all that vital to them, maybe I need not say it.

One morning, though, my homeroom teacher, Harvey Shriber, decided unilaterally that we ought to do the recitation. “Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance,” he said. Everyone stood except me. He repeated his request, but I remained seated. Harvey got red-faced but said nothing.

The first period was math. The teacher was Joe Marino, who I learned later had the same birthday as I (March 7). He was a young teacher, in his first year, at least at BCHS. I was unsurprised when a burly man I had never seen before sat in the seat a couple of rows behind me.

After class, he asked me to go to his office. I asked where that was; it was the principal’s office. Ah, this was Joseph Kazlauskas, the new principal.

At lunchtime, I met with Dr. K, as he liked to be referred to. I remember that he asked me if I belonged to any religious organization that would prohibit me from participating in the pledge, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He cited the Supreme Court case West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), about which Justice Robert Jackson wrote: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

No, my opposition to reciting the Pledge of Allegiance did not come from a religious point of view, certainly not from my specific faith’s position. In any case, I agreed to stand when the pledge was offered, but I didn’t have to say it.

Present tense story to follow, sooner than later.

Pictoral blast from my past

Photo booths use a direct positive process, imprinting the image directly to the paper — creating a one-of-a-kind artifact.

I used to have this red photo album, where I stored pictures of my childhood. It was lost many years ago, and virtually all the photos I now have prior to turning 18 I scrounged from my parents’ house, duplicates of some, but hardly all of my childhood memories.

Then my high school friend Steve – it was at his Unitarian church’s basement where I first heard the Beatles white album – started digging through boxes that have been in storage for 40 years, and found these.

Here’s a high school prom picture. The front row was Cecily, Michele, Karen, and Lois. The back row was Roger, George, George, and Steve.

We, along with a few others, were the socially liberal, antiwar demonstrating, civil rights marching section of the student body. Most of these folks weren’t dating each other. This would have been the 1970 high school prom of Cecily, Michele, and the Georges; Karen, Lois, and I, who went to kindergarten together, graduated the following year. Steve left to go to the Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, NY, which he described as a “Quaker version of Woodstock.”

These were pictures, undoubtedly taken at a Woolworth’s, not terribly far from Binghamton Central High School, which is now, and since 1982, Binghamton High School. This is Michele, Steve, and I doing what one does in a tiny room, the camera flashing every ten seconds or so. I probably never saw these since they popped out of the side of the booth over 45 years ago.

In the era of the selfie, if you never had a photo booth picture taken at a Woolworth’s or like venue, I should explain this process. There’s a booth, with a curtain, and you would get three or four photos for 25 or 50 cents. For years they were always in black and white, though the latter years had color. It didn’t take very long to process, although the three minutes waiting seemed like an eternity.

And the pictures were unique. “There are no copies, no negatives. Photo booths use a direct positive process, imprinting the image directly to the paper — creating a one-of-a-kind artifact.”

I understand that there are photo booths that are currently for rent at parties.

This is me with Cecily, a few blocks from the high school. What the heck was I carrying? The setting, undoubtedly, was meant to be ironic. This is a picture I once DID own, but was lost for decades.

Finally, a page from my high school newspaper, in which I had a column as Pa Central. There were various people who were Pa Central or Ma Central before me.

I think I wrote four columns, the first three in which I took myself far too seriously, I realized even at the time. The last one, which is shown, was lighter in tone. To that end, I snatched this pic from my mom and asked them to run this instead of what I usually used. It is POSSIBLE that I have a copy of this periodical in my attic, but I would be hard-pressed to find it.

Thanks, Steve.
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WOMEN TAKING PHOTOBOOTH ‘SELFIES’ FROM THE 1900S TO THE 1970S (AND BEYOND)

Music Throwback Saturday: High School

The kids know what the deal is
They’re getting farther out everyday

When my friends and I were at Binghamton (NY) Central High School, probably in the spring of 1970, we made an antiwar video. I no longer recall the plot, as it were, though I remember bringing my Johnny Seven OMA (One-Man Army) toy gun to the proceedings.

We used as the soundtrack a song from the Detroit-based, left-wing political group The MC5. It came from the second LP, Back in the USA.

The album was by produced by future Bruce Springsteen mentor Jon Landau, and predated punk rockers such as The Ramones by several years. It was a commercial dud, and very much unlike either of the group’s other albums or their legendary live shows, where “the group often overshadow[ed] the more famous acts they opened up for. ” But we liked it; in fact, I still own it on vinyl.

The selection used for the video was called High School. Some of the lyrics:
The kids know what the deal is
They’re getting farther out everyday
We’re gonna be takin’ over
You better get out of the way

‘Cause they’re goin’ to
(High school) Rah, rah, rah
(High school) Sis, boom, bah
(High school) Hey, hey, hey
You better get out of the way

One of the members, Fred “Sonic” Smith was married to singer and poet Patti Smith from 1980 until he died in 1994. They had collaborated on her 1988 album Dream of Life.

LISTEN to High School or to the whole Living in the USA album.

Julian Bond in Binghamton

Being against the Vietnam conflict in 1965 was well ahead of the curve.

On October 15, 1969, there was a nationwide moratorium against the war in Vietnam, with hundreds of thousands of protesters across the country, and abroad.

My hometown of Binghamton, NY was one of over 300 locations across the country that hosted a moratorium event. Former mayor William P. Burns one of the speakers. But the featured address, right at City Hall, was given by Julian Bond. How he ended up in my sleepy little town of 70,000, I have no idea, because he, in both the civil rights and antiwar fields, was a rock star.
Bond helped to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, when he was 20, organizing voter registration drives, and leading protests against Jim Crow laws.

From the Wikipedia:

In 1965, Bond was one of eleven African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 had opened voter registration to blacks… On January 10, 1966, Georgia state representatives voted 184–12 not to seat him, because he had publicly endorsed SNCC’s policy regarding opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War…

A three-judge panel on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in a 2–1 decision that the Georgia House had not violated any of Bond’s constitutional rights. In 1966, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 9–0 in the case of Bond v. Floyd (385 U.S. 116) that the Georgia House of Representatives had denied Bond his freedom of speech and was required to seat him.

Being against the Vietnam conflict in 1965 was well ahead of the curve, long before Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his April 1967 antiwar address, or when CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite deemed Vietnam a lost cause in February 1968. I well remember how Binghamton evolved on the war from when I entered high school in February 1968 – hostility towards those opposed to it – compared with a year later, when it was a whole lot easier.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, he was even nominated to be Vice President, though the 28-year-old was too young to serve.

So, Julian Bond, not yet 30, was a hero to a lot of us by the time he came to town. The picture here was taken by my friend Karen for the 1970 Binghamton Central High school yearbook, the Panorama. The gold version was what appeared in the book.

Bond and Morris Dees go on to found the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and later, Bond served as the head of the NAACP. But early on, I was in awe of Julian Bond. I was sad when he passed away this week.

Learn about the life and work of Julian Bond from the One Person, One Vote Project. See an interview with Bond about the FBI called “Their Goal Was to Crush Dissent” on the website Tracked in America. Bond is the author of Vietnam: An Anti-War Comic Book.

(Thanks to Alan David Doane for technical assistance.)