AN UPDATE    On the last posting, 2025/3, do a Ctrl-F for "One Wall Street" and you'll come to where the French department store Printemps ("Spring") has opened its first US branch at that address, on the corner of Lower Broadway, formerly a bank,. What a location! It's not only on one world-famous street, but on two!
I have no interest in touring the whole store, but doing recent errands, I did stop in to see the spectacular Red Room, formerly the bank's lobby located directly at the head of Wall Street. A photo of the original lobby is on the previous posing. It's now a spectacular display area of women's shoes (!). This next photo does not do justice to how well the vertical white forms on the tables complement the verticality of the windows and wall patterns. I sat down on one of those very red couches (click) to view the room.

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I was wondering about the pronunciation New Yorkers would give to the French name of the store. On one YouTube video, the woman narrating totally anglicized the name to "prin-temps", rhyming with "print [D]emps[ey]". On another, a man did attempt to make it sound French and used nasal vowels. But French has several nasal vowels, while the refuge for English speakers is just one, the nasal vowel that appears twice in enfant. Thus he valiantly pronounced the name as tho it were "pran-tan". Good for him, I say, but the first vowel is actually as in vin. In any case, Bienvenue au Printemps!.

Postings Backlog    There was a time when I could keep up with my postings. At times, I was even able to write about a trip en route while it was still going on, which was how this website started. But nowadays I keep falling further and further behind, despite the fact that I have voluminous online notes for each topic below.

This is the current lineup of the backlog of upcoming postings, that may or may not ever get completed and published. There are three groupings, starting with the LAST of the three priorities:

3) GENERAL TOPICS

Airships: Goodyear Blimps, Graf Zeppelin, Hindenburg
La Cage aux Folles / The Birdcage
Georgia & the Caucasus

2) RECENT TRAVELS In 2024/8, under "Catching Up", followed by the heading "2021 to 2024", we summarized past trips not yet reported on. But happily after that, we did catch up a bit, covering the two Hudson Circuits (one of which bubbled over to the subject of Hamilton). Yet that still leaves:

2021 (Sept): the very short, fun "Spite Trip" to Dearborn MI (Ford Museum & Greenfield Village).
2023 (Sept): the sudden, rather inexpensive cruise back to Bermuda (after two earlier visits).
2022 (July) & 2024 (July): the Great Lakes Rail 'n' Sail, over two years, pandemic-postponed from 2020.

But that list has kept growing:

2024 (Oct) short trip to Gettysburg-Rockville Bridge-Harrisburg.
2025 (Sept) Montréal to New York cruise.

1) THEATER, ACADEMIA, LITERATURE This is what we're working on now. In the Epilog to 2025/3, having completed the Hamilton narrative, I said I wasn't pleased with Hamilton the Musical, but said I wanted to discuss theater in general first, and only then comment on Hamilton, and add to it in comparison, The Lion King.
I started doing that, but then became more involved in the narrative becoming autobiographical. In 2025/1, to explain how I gradually worked my way into Lower Manhattan, under "My Schooling", I presented a limited overview of my academic background, whose schedule worked out into my having two jobs in Lower Manhattan, where I now live.
I have been contemplating that move, and now feel that what I wrote in 2025/1 was sorely incomplete and inadequate. In this current posting, I want to blend several topics, like I did originally on this website (which explains the heading "Series", referring to several topics covered together). I want to now, with your indulgence, blend in a more complete Academic Autobiography, one that explains more how I moved ahead step by step in school as a language major, then on to travel. But do realize that this bio does end on a theatrical note, leading back to the topic of theater.
Finally, in telling about the complexities of being a language major, I want to also explain a surprising dichotomy: how an overlay of literature on language was at the same time a plague for me, and yet still the basis for some wonderful literature-related travel. That explains the triple nature of this category, which will appear as three different threads we'll handle at the same time, Theater, Academia, Literature. This will clearly overflow this posting. We'll start with Theater.

Oral Tradition    It's all about language. But when most people think about what language is, they think of the written version of the language we speak—that's what we're using right here and now. Put that aside, and remember that we talk about SPEAKING a language, so we're going to disregard the later development of writing and investigate the fundamental issue of speaking, where it all started.
This presentation is all hypothetical, but I feel it makes sense. To set the scene, think back to at least the period of the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, if not earlier. They were created by early modern humans, Cro-Magnons, during the Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age) 15,000 to 17,000 years ago. It's felt that human speech started perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, so by the Stone Age, perhaps people were jabbering along reasonably well.
We just want to form a primitive image, and to help us, we have two Russian paintings by Viktor Vasnetsov from the early 1880s. They both show primitive Stone Age people around a campfire, one with them celebrating, and the other, more somber, showing the fire to be right outside the cave they might live in. All the above is non-specific and might be anywhere; it's just to set a mental scene of early socialization.

Campfire Origin of Theater    Surely early socialization was amplified around a campfire. Project that to today, and it could still be a campfire, toasting marshmallows, but is more likely people around a dinner table, where conversation prevails.
Back to the cave. People tell what happened to them, but like in all human endeavors, a specialist evolves. Anyone can hammer a nail, but only some become carpenters. Anyone can tend a paper cut, but only some become physicians. Anyone can tell a story, but only some become storytellers, narrators of the past. When Alex Haley presented "Roots" to the world, he popularized the West African concept of griots. A griot (GRI.o) is an oral historian, someone that is not only good at telling stories, but is a specialist who retains the oral history of the tribe.
But many people love to embellish a story. Just as that fish caught last year becomes larger every time the story is told, heroes and villains of the past become braver or more evil, to the point that some might even become legendary. Did Robin Hood or El Cid do all the things attributed to them? Did they really exist? (The former, no. The latter, yes.) Once storytellers had great success telling about history, real or embellished, the next step would have been to purposely invent heroes and villains. And fiction was born.
Back to today. Most history and fiction today is written down, but where does oral storytelling persist? Around campfires, for one thing. Picture telling ghost stories and urban legends with those marshmallows being toasted. Anyone telling a joke narrates a story orally, and this is formalized by stand-up comedians who'll do a whole show telling (comedic) stories. And very fundamentally, a parent telling a bedtime story to a child might do it orally. (Lots of bedtime stories are read, but anyone can narrate the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears without a book.)
For the next (huge) step in this development we'll use the modern image to reflect back on its ancient origins to suggest the origin of audience participation. The kid already knows the story and can tell it himself, so the parent becomes playful. He narrates that the Papa Bear comes up to the table and says . . . then leaves a pregnant pause. The kid then enthusiastically fills in the blank: "Who's been eating my porridge?" And an actor is born. If this was done around that ancient campfire, perhaps the narrator prompted several people to interact with known dialog and we suddenly have a narrator interacting with several actors filling in the dialog.

So far, we've discussed just having a sole narrator by himself. In modern times, I think of Hal Holbrook portraying Mark Twain in his one-man show "Mark Twain Tonight!", where the character embodies the narrator, who becomes an actor himself.
We've now reached the point where a sole narrator becomes a narrator with actors. To see how this develops, we look to the Greek chorus, which acts with the actors to fill in thoughts, emotions, scene shifts. What pops into my mind is in Turandot, where Calaf sings Nessun Dorma to the princess and the palace. At one point a chorus of women breaks in to the aria with commentary.
As the role of the narrator subsides, we see his responsibilities moving to the actor directly in the form of an aside to the audience or a soliloquy. Asides are frequent and obvious by the title character in the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. On Broadway, they are also used by various characters in Hamilton. Soliloquies appear in Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie.
Finally, we come full circle; the tail wags the dog entirely, in those very common presentations where there is no narrator at all. Thus, the modern theater has inherited all the stages of development from having only a narrator to having only actors, plus everything in between.

Brecht's Verfremdung    While I always was interested primarily in the linguistics side of language study, far more literature than I planned was included in what came across my plate. I was wondering why I knew a bit more about Bert(olt) Brecht, the German dramatist and director, and I checked my files to find that, during that year in Middlebury's MA program at the Universität Mainz we took a course called Bert Brechts episches [epic] Theater. I also knew that during the six-week summer session of Middlebury's German School in Vermont I was slightly involved in a Brecht play (more later), which did illustrate his philosophy of theater, so that does make sense. Here goes.
The word fremd is "foreign, strange, alien", so that a Fremdsprache is a foreign language, a Fremder is a stranger, and so on. To further his concept of theater, Brecht used the word Verfremdung, literally "strange-ing", making something purposely strange. It's usually translated as "alienation". In the theater, he promoted the type of effect called a Verfremdungseffekt, or "alienation effect". Its purpose was to distance the audience from a play's emotional involvement. Brecht's goal was to encourage audiences to think intellectually about the drama, rather than empathizing with the characters.
Brecht's alienation effect techniques include:
Explanatory captions, perhaps projected on a screen to remind the audience that the performance is artificial.
Actors stepping out of character, to lecture, summarize, or sing songs.
Stage designs that expose the lights and ropes to keep the audience aware of being in a theater.
Breaking the fourth wall by exposing the theater's technology to the audience.
I will fully confirm later that that's just how we put on the play in Middlebury in 1961, the summer before Mainz. Two aspects stand out. At the side of the stage was an easel, like vaudeville theaters used to use, and someone would step out at the beginning of each scene with a large card that gave the date and location. Also, our friend Rita played a gender-bending role as a pageboy in full period costume. Before each scene started, she summarized to the audience what had happened in between scenes, and perhaps the characters' thoughts.
Obviously, Rita's pageboy role brought back into play the original role of narrator side-by-side with the actors, so the concept was far from new. Also, anyone who's watched any of the Law and Order TV series will recall the white-on-black messages repeatedly shown at the start of a scene, stating the exact date, time, and location, down to the street address.
Now I shall be so bold as to not fully agree with Brecht here. Tho otherwise the audience might empathize with the character, there is always a consciousness of theatricality. The theater does involve suspension of reality (that's not really Napoleon on the stage!), but that's relative. Audiences understand (tho perhaps subconsciously) theatrical affects such as these: actors in a discussion never face each other; either they stand shoulder-to-shoulder facing the audience so they can be seen and heard, or at best, stand at a 90° angle to each other. And actors at a table in the theater or on TV, just sit around three sides of the table (or if it's round, in a semicircle) so the audience can see and hear them.
And how about this: when Peter Pan suddenly flies up into the air, the audience has a dual reaction. (1) Oh look, Peter Pan is flying! (2) I think I can see the cable! The audience always has an awareness of theatricality. What Brecht espouses is valid, but is just an extreme version of the normal, always-present disassociation in the mind of the audience between the character and the theatrical experience.

Now let's move temporarily from the Theater thread to a thread about my experiences in Academia to explain how I got professionally to where I am in both language and travel. It will lead back to the theater in the end.

Academia    This is neither a memoir nor a full autobiography. It's an Academic Autobiography, and is an improvement on the posting in 2025/1. Its purpose is to show how I developed interest in language and travel. Most of it is from memory, but I was wise enough to go into my paper files in an upstairs back closet, not only to discover additional details, but to correct some memories that had gone awry. Old report cards were particularly fun and helpful! The academic portion will break down to:

a) Early Schooling in East New York
b) Brooklyn Technical High School
c) Queens College of the City University of New York
d) Middlebury College (Vermont)
e) Twelve Later Study Programs

FAMILY BACKGROUND I remember people telling me that my two ethnic heritages got me started with language. I always disputed that, but now reconsider that just a bit.
Both my parents were born in the US, but their parents were immigrants from Europe who were both uneducated and illiterate. My father spoke what I considered Italian with his mother (Grandpa died when I was three). But he knew he was speaking Neapolitan, which most linguists now consider a very close, yet separate language from Italian, as are Sicilian and others. He once made a reference to what he called "l'alt'italiano" (High Italian), indicating that was not what he spoke, so I knew he knew there was a difference.

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A very early memory was as a young teen, I saw on TV an ad for Medaglia d'Oro (Gold Medal) coffee. I thought the name was particularly mellifluous, and repeated it a few times. My father heard me and commented to my mother how good my pronunciation was. That phrase is my only "family" connection to Italian.

It was different with my mother. Her parents had immigrated as of 1905 "from Minsk". Since that was then in the Russian Empire, they told their five daughters they were Russian, and they had no reason not to believe their uneducated parents. It was only when I started traveling to Eastern Europe and learned more geography that I discovered two truths. First, how could they be from the large urban city of Minsk? It turns out they were farmers from rural Minsk province. Second, I realized that Minsk was the capital of Belarus, at the time a separate "Republic" within the Soviet Union, and later an independent country, like Ukraine and others. When I broke the news to my mother she said "you mean I'm not Russian!!!!!?" I had to explain that Belarusian was "like Russian". My family to this day makes a symbolic 3-4 Easter eggs by boiling them in water filled with dried onion skins, which results in eggs in a bronze color. This custom I found online is purely Belarusian.
My father's mother was always "Grandma". My mother's mother was "Baba", a word that's the same in Russian and Belarusian. But we called my mother's father what we all pronounced as "Jetka". I later found out that it's really дзедка / dzyedka, and it's a word exclusive to Belarusian. Thus, I was the one who eventually determined just what my maternal heritage was—an early exercise in ethnic research.
While my mother learned to make Sunday "spaghetti dinners" in the Italian-American tradition, she otherwise often showcased Belarusian cuisine. Thus, tho our home was totally English-speaking, we did pick up food words. My sisters and I all know that "kapusta" is cabbage, and I usually use "khren" to describe horseradish. And to this day, if I drop something on the floor, in frustration, I'll most likely say "kholyera" (khol.YE.ra) out loud as an expletive. (The word is literally "cholera".) And if something it hard to believe, I'll do a verbal "bozhe moi" rather than "[oh] my God".
So ethnicity was inherent from early on. Anyway, just living in an urban area by itself exposes one to much more ethnicity than growing up on a farm in Iowa. I remember being under five years old (my sisters weren't born yet) and regularly being taken out by my parents to Chinese restaurants. That's unlikely for someone growing up on a ranch in Montana.
One more image. Not far down the street from where we lived was a small synagog, and once or twice, on a Saturday morning, when my father was walking down to get his car on the way to work, passing the synagog, he was asked if he could turn on the lights, since such "work" was forbidden on the Sabbath (Shabbat). Where else but in an ethnic urban area would my Italian-American father help out as a shabbos goy?

EAST NEW YORK In the last posting, 2025/3 under "Brooklyn Boy", I discussed East New York (ENY) back to Dutch days. But I want more here. In reflection now, today I say I'm a New Yorker, specifically a Manhattanite. But I grew up as a Brooklyn Boy, and most precisely, as a resident of ENY, which I now see as my early "home town". But that thought needs expanding, since everything up to high school took place there.

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To be most accurate, I started out in the neighborhood abutting ENY to the west, Brownsville (see map). I now find that the land was acquired in 1866 by one Charles S Brown, who subdivided it and named it after himself. (Actually, at least in my time in ENY, the local pronunciation sounded more like "Bronze-ville".) Only two places here remain of significance to me.
Click at the top to find Eastern Parkway, a major east–west boulevard designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux of Central Park and Prospect Park fame. The road was built between 1870 and 1874 and has been credited as the world's first parkway. At the time of its construction, Eastern Parkway extended to the eastern edge of the then-independent city of Brooklyn. This fact further indicates that ENY was in the beginning at most a suburb of Brooklyn, a last bit of Kings County before Queens that had not yet been swallowed up by Brooklyn—until it was.
First, I was born in 1939 on the edge of Brownsville at the Brooklyn Women's Hospital, which existed from 1930 to 1966. It was on Eastern Parkway at Ralph Avenue at the northeast corner of Brownsville. For my first two of years or so, we lived in an apartment building in southeast Brownsville on Christopher Avenue south of Livonia Avenue. Exactly three blocks east of Christopher are the railroad tracks that divide Brownsville from ENY, so we were very close. That was my full time in Brownsville before ENY.
In 2025/3, I first gave the history of East New York, which I'll repeat here: The Dutch had called the area Ostwout (East Woods). In 1670 they founded the town of New Lots when the area seceded from Flatbush (the "old lots"). In 1835, Connecticut merchant John Pitkin (cf Pitkin Avenue) purchased the land of the Town of New Lots north of New Lots Avenue, and named the area "East New York" to signify it as the eastern end of the influence of New York City/Manhattan (there is still a sub-neighborhood called New Lots). The City of Brooklyn annexed ENY in 1886, and then Brooklyn became part of the City of New York in 1898. All those years later, Pitkin would have been astounded that his area so far East of New York actually became part of it. So, while ENY is now a neighborhood, like so many others it once was an independent village, so considering it my home town does seem equitable.

To start with, let's just repeat this neighborhood map of ENY for orientation (Map by Zietz). Everything in gray to the west, including Brownsville, is in Brooklyn, while everything else in gray to the to the west and north is in Queens.

I also have to add that my world was in central ENY. Anything south of Linden Boulevard (click) was terra incognita to me in those days.
Over time, we lived in three places within ENY: on the west side, then right in the center, then in the north in the sub-neighborhood of Cypress Hills. North of Cypress Hills is Highland Park, which is "high" because a glacial moraine from the Ice Age runs along it. ENY is located south of the moraine, just to the left of the word "Harbor". Back on the first map, the parkway you see runs along the top of the glacial ridge.

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We'll now use this more detailed street map as we continue (click) for more precision as to life in ENY. To the west, find Pennsylvania Avenue at Liberty, SW corner. We lived here in an apartment house until I was five, which I can date because of FDR. When Roosevelt was running for his fourth term for the election on 7 November 1944, it must have been sometime in October that he was campaigning in Brooklyn (I'd turned five that September). I remember my father hoisting me on his shoulders to see FDR ride south down Pennsylvania Avenue. This picture of FDR in his car was taken in Honolulu on 19 July 1944, just weeks before I saw him in Brooklyn. Decades later, I saw FDR's same car in the Ford Museum in Dearborn MI.
Despite my being only five, there are two other locations on Pennsylvania Avenue of significance to me. Literally one block north of us, on Penn and Atlantic, SE corner, was a local icon (now gone), the East New York Savings Bank. I'll have a lot more to say about this in a moment. Literally one block south of us, on the SE corner of Penn and Glenmore, is a petite, but spectacular building that remains there to this day, the Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church.

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More precisely, it's the Храм Святой Троицы / Khram Svyatói Tróitsy (Church of the Holy Trinity). It's where I was baptized, as were both my sisters and family cousins. Let me rush to add that we were never churchgoers in our family, and I'm a staunch secularist. But if I have to be a baptized secularist, best that it took place in the charmingly ethnic atmosphere of a Russian Orthodox church like this.
I've just learned so much more about it. It was founded in 1909 by immigrants, mainly farmers, from Belarus, including Minsk province, and they commissioned this magnificent structure a few decades later, with construction completed in 1935 (I'd had not idea that the building was just four years older than me). The church was designed in the traditional Russian Orthodox style by a notable Russian-born architect who had worked as an architect for several of the Imperial palaces in St. Petersburg, and was appointed court architect in 1903. Like the Statue of Liberty, the church's copper onion domes long ago oxidized to a green patina, and are neighborhood icons. But as the old immigrant generation died off, the congregation diminished. However, membership has increased in recent years due to an influx of Russian immigrants to Brighton Beach (Little Odessa), in southern Brooklyn, part of Coney Island.
Learning about the Belarusian immigrants who founded the church is a confirmation of what I'd figured out about my maternal ethnicity. These immigrants had emigrated from the Russian Empire and their religion was Russian Orthodox. This is what gave these simple Belarusian farmers the idea that they were Russian. That the two languages are so similar added to that misconception.

I have one more church to mention. My parents were married on New Year's Eve (!!), 1937, in the Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Manhattan, the Свято-Николаевский собор / Svyato-Nikolayévskii sobór, on 97th between 5th & Madison. My guess for why they eloped to a point so far from ENY is because of the ethnic disparity. The cathedral was started with seed money from Tsar Nicholas and completed in 1902. It's the administrative center of the Russian Orthodox Church in North America and is an official NYC landmark. I have visited it.
I mention both of these churches, since, like with other people with a dual ethnic heritage, outsiders can fail to recognize one of the heritages. They see my Italian last name, and don't realize just how Slavic my background is.
When my twin sisters were born a few months after the FDR parade, we moved nearby more centrally, to the downstairs of a two-family house on Jerome south of Sutter.

EARLY SCHOOLING My mother had worked closely with me and had me reading before I started school. I started 1st grade in the fall of 1945, 3+ blocks away, at nearby PS 158 on Ashford at Belmont. Google Maps reminds me the walk took a mere 6 min. For 2/3 of every year, my birthday corresponds to the last digit, so for most of 1945, I was 5. But since my birthday coincides with the start of the academic year, in 1st grade I had just turned 6. I stayed in that school for 2nd and 3rd grade.
At the end of 3rd grade, in June of 1948, I came home with a letter from school saying I've been included in a special Advanced Reading series of classes in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades in PS 108. The letter said that if my parents and I would visit that school the following week we could learn about the advantages of the program. Of course we did, and this was a major early academic turning point. I want to emphasize that outside forces determined this change. My family didn't apply for the program, since we didn't know it existed. And I was recently totally shocked to find that very same letter still in my paper files!
PS 108 is in the Cypress Hills subsection on the north side of ENY. Not all streets are named on our map, so find Fulton Street, along which the Jamaica Line elevated runs (I used it later to go to Junior High and later still, Brooklyn Tech). Above that is Jamaica Avenue, at the time to me just another main street, but now I know it had been a Native American trail, bringing trade from the Ohio River and the Great Lakes to the Hempstead Plains, now the location of Jamaica, in Queens. Then it became the Brooklyn Ferry road (to Manhattan). In the mid-19C it became the Jamaica Plank road, with toll booths.

Back to our street map. The unnamed street between Fulton Street and Jamaica Avenue is leafy, pleasantly residential Arlington Avenue. I just found out that it was originally known as Division Avenue, possibly because it separated Fulton and Jamaica Avenues. It was renamed after Arlington National Cemetery in 1887.
Find Arlington and Linwood, the location of my new PS 108. Going there would involve walking north some 23 minutes (per Google), four times my previous walk. By chance, somewhere in the middle of my three years in 108, we moved to our third location at Arlington and Hendrix (much closer to historic Jamaica Pass/Broadway Junction), again renting the downstairs of a two-family house, significantly shortening my walk to school, to about 9 minutes.

Of the three early public schools I attended before high school, PS 158, PS 108, and PS 171 (my junior high), it's 108 that remains strongest in my memory. And of AR-4, AR-5, and AR-6 that I took there, it's the latter sixth grade class taught by Mrs Rhoda Lindner that is the most memorable. We all remember many of our teachers, but as I now review the past, it's Mrs Lindner who stands out as the most significant teacher I had from the beginning thru 9th grade in junior high. For this reason, I want to tell more about the school and her class.
I took the three AR classes in 108 starting in the fall of 1948, 1949, and 1950, putting me in AR-6 with Mrs Lindner for the academic year starting in 1950. I would have just turned from 10 to 11 with the new school year. Looking back over the decades, I now find out a lot more about the building.

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Public School 108 is a historic school building in Cypress Hills, built in 1895 of sandstone in the Romanesque Revival style. The above period view (first link) is in 1908. Arlington Avenue, the major of the two streets, is in the foreground, crossing the more minor Linwood street, where the arched main entrance can be seen. I learned that both streets were originally cobblestoned, tho that can barely be perceived here. The building is three stories tall, plus an attic fourth floor with dormer windows. You see several chimneys. (NB: The East New York Project is a grass-roots effort to document ENY history to help keep it alive. I got a lot of information from their website.)
The second link shows the same view today. Those gorgeous dormer windows are still there, but the chimneys are gone now. I can't remember if they existed during my time or not. The school was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

There is no denying that, starting in the 1960s, East New York began a long decline from middle class to a lower income Hispanic and black neighborhood. An indication of the current state of ENY, including Cypress Hills, is shown by the reinforced windows on the ground floor of the school in the second view. However, there seem to be signs of pre-gentrification. Real estate companies are actively buying properties and raising prices. Houses are being flipped. Still, East New York hasn't experienced the same level of gentrification as other Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Williamsburg and Bushwick. But we shall see.
PS 108 has its own Wikipedia page, and I can link directly to two Wikipedia photos. This view looks south on Linwood towards the entrance. You can see that the main façade on Linwood consists of a seven- bay central section, plus two adjacent recessed sections, connecting it to end pavilions that are three bays wide. I always thought the building was attractive, but as a kid, never really appreciated the architecture.
This is the main entrance in the central section, clearly showing the seven bays (Both Photos by Smallbones). But this view now leads to a dramatic story I never knew about until now.
During the declining era of the1960s, the city decided to close PS 108 and tear it down. Sal Abbracciamento was apparently an alumnus who led a successful campaign to save the school. For that reason, the school was renamed PS 108 Sal Abbracciamento School in his honor. It continues to house an elementary school, but now covers grades K-5. It no longer goes to grade 6 because of the reshuffling of schools and the development of the Middle School concept—more later.

THE POSTCARD ADVENTURE This next issue is of an academic type, except that it didn't have anything to do with a school. It was totally self-generated. We've earlier referred to languages; this is a reference to an early urge for Far-Away Places.
My first domestic long-distance trip was a family drive to Chattanooga, Tennessee to visit family in March/April 1953, when I was 13. My first international trip was to Europe in 1957 at 17, between high school and college. The Postcard Adventure took place before either, and would seem to illustrate my very early interest in far-away places.
Some kid in school told me about how to do this, so presumably he'd done it as well. This was pre-Alaska/Hawaii, so there were 48 states. I took 48 cents of my allowance and got 48 penny postcards. On the front, I wrote "Chamber of Commerce", then a capital and state, such as "Sacramento, California". I knew nothing of street addresses, or the then prevalent zone numbers. This was before zip codes, the Zone Improvement Plan, so the addresses I used had no numbers at all.

On the back of each of the 48 postcards, I wrote, quite naïvely, "Please send me information on your state. Thank you." And then I wrote my name and address.
It's quite amazing that any of these address worked, but in the next weeks, pamphlets, leaflets, and brochures rolled in. I wouldn't look twice at most of this tourist junk today, but it was like pure gold that would appear in our mailbox, a total thrill from both near and far places. I would estimate I eventually heard from maybe 2/3 of the 48 states. This was a precursor to years later, when Beverly and I visited all 50.

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I would love to know when this happened, but have minimal clues. Above is the postcard I used on this project, the green Jefferson one-cent postcard, Scott UX27 (Beverly and I once collected stamps), which was first issued in 1914. It was no longer issued as of 1 January 1952, meaning it was used thru 1951, just about when I entered Junior High. I know I used the Jerome Street address, so that would tend to limit it to when I went to PS 158 thru the third grade. But that was really young. I also walked from Jerome to PS 108 for the first half of my time there. That would have been in 1948, when I'd just turned 9 in the 4th grade, and I'm going to go with that. I suppose I was pretty precocious.

MRS LINDNER'S AR-6 So I've now decided that PS 108 was the centerpiece of the three schools up to Junior High, and with due respect to the other teachers, that Mrs Rhoda Lindner's AR-6 class was the most memorable. You'll see why as we proceed.

Mixed Grades There was a very unusual quirk about that class. We just accepted it, but as an adult now, I'd love to know how it had come about. For some reason, AR-5 was miniscule that year and had only 4 (!!) sign-ups in it, and since AR-6 had room, they became part of our now mixed class, sitting on the left in the row next to the window, with Mrs Lindner teaching the two groups separately. The class picture of that year that I still have has a head count of 29 kids, meaning the AR-6 group must have had 25. One hears of mixed-grades being taught in one-room rural schoolhouses, but this is the only mixed grade class I was ever a part of. But all went smoothly.

Curiosity Table On the right side of the room was a large table. It had no name, but I'm now calling it the Curiosity Table. It had "stuff" on it, magazines, workbooks, pamphlets, some science stuff. Things one might keep in a box or in old drawer—or in an upstairs closet. But it was our gold mine. Any one of us could check it out whenever we'd finished our work. I remember two items to this day.
Apparently Mrs Lindner had attended the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair and had collected some postcards and pamphlets from the pavilions of independent Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which she had on the table. Of course the Soviet Union had taken over those countries in WWII, and by 1950, we were aware they were occupied. It deeply impressed me to see these artifacts from three no-longer independent countries. Years later, when I visited the three, and also in 1990-1991, when they became independent again, my thoughts went right back to the Curiosity Table.
I once picked up a science magazine from the table, and on the back cover was a great thrill for me. It told about continental drift, with a striking illustration showing how the bulge of Brazil in South America had pulled away from a corresponding hollow in West Africa. How amazing! It seemed to me then that continents seemingly drifted about like lily pads on a pond! (Not quite.)
Years later when I was writing about Iceland's volcanoes and the mid-Atlantic ridge, my thoughts went back to the table. It happened again when I wrote about what I called the "Three Sisters", about how three land masses broke away from southeast Africa, with one going south to become Antarctica and freeze over, one going east to become Australia, and one going north at a rapid pace to crash into Asia and become the Indian subcontinent, with the impact causing the Himalayas to rise. Heady stuff.

Norway Checking online about old TV shows, I see it was in 1949, the year before I was in AR-6, that the TV show "Mama" with Peggy Wood began, running until 1957. It was based on a 1943 novel that was also adapted for a play (1944) and film (1948). It told the story of the Hansens, a Norwegian-American family living in San Francisco in the 1910s, as seen thru the eyes of the elder daughter. I was thoroughly enamored of this program.

https://i.pinimg.com/474x/87/8e/e1/878ee13445803e384d24d3128912e03b.jpg

Reflecting back, I see the reason for that. Mainly, it was because it was thoroughly ethnic. In addition, the story evolved in a "faraway place" on the other side of the United States. I now learn that in actuality, the show was broadcast from CBS Studio 41 above the 42nd Street waiting room in Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal. (!!!) And it was done live (!!), as was very common in those early years of TV.
I suppose I was already filled with the Latin culture of southern Europe from my father's side of the family, and with the Slavic culture of eastern Europe from my mother's. Perhaps it was just because it was a European culture from the northern, Germanic side. It's entirely possible—tho conjecture—that it was a precursor to my later interest in German, but I watched that program every Friday evening, being carried away in time and place, to say nothing of culture.

I bring this up because of the next activity we were doing in AR-6, research reports. Mrs Lindner announced that each student would do a report on a country to be presented to the entire class, to share information. Now it's possible that I just lucked out and was assigned Norway, I do not remember. But I now think it's more likely I must have spoken up and asked for it, I just don't know.
I remember her writing an outline on the board for us to copy down about things we should cover, like cities, geography, history, and so on. But one phrase that was included was "Transportation & Communication". Why is that the only phrase on the outline that still sticks in my mind? Is it a evidence of the travel urge?
I got eagerly to work doing my research. I'm now going to say that this was a precursor to the website research I now do constantly online. But then it was different. Tho I may have checked out the Arlington library that I passed going to and from school, I know that my two main sources were the two sets of encyclopedias we had at home. I do not know their names, as I'm sure they were el cheapo items possibly sold door-to-door, but I never learned of their origin. They were just the red set and the blue set. But I delved in eagerly, handwriting my report on scrap paper to begin with.
Then a peculiar thing happened. Earlier than expected, Mrs Lindner found she had some free class time to start the reports, and asked if anyone was ready to present. I said I was pretty much finished, but mine needed to be copied over for turning in. She said I could do that later, so I stood up with a fistful of scrap paper pages and reported to the class on Norway.
I don't remember most of the report, but I'm sure it covered cities, fjords, the North Cape, and just what you'd expect. However, my interest was so deep, that I had gone further. I had found that Norway has two possessions, and I eagerly included them in my report. One is Jan Mayen, a Norwegian volcanic island in the Arctic Ocean with no permanent population, 55 km (34 mi) long. It was fun to point out, but I've never heard of it since. The other is Spitsbergen to the north, the major island of what is now known as the Svalbard Archipelago. Take a look at this map of the Arctic Region. The red border is the line of the 10°C (50°F) mean isotherm in July which defines the border of the Arctic. Spitsbergen/Svalbard in blue stands out, but you'll have to click to find Jan Mayen, near Greenland and Iceland. Decades later, when I sailed twice along the Norwegian coast and to the North Cape, I thought of my AR-6 report. But the time I was sailing on the Deutschland and it went further to Spitsbergen, stopping at Moffen Island, at 80°N the furthest north I've ever been on the Earth's surface (I've flown over the Arctic), it was my old report that deeply interested me in going there.
More current research shows that Jan Mayen was discovered by the Dutch. Although administered separately, Jan Mayen and Svalbard are collectively designated as "Svalbard and Jan Mayen", with the two-letter country code "SJ". It was also given the web domain of .sj. However, it's is not in use and Norway's .no is used in its place.
I've now learned something on my report card from Mrs Lindner that I'd never really paid attention to before. In elementary school, the only grades given were S for Satisfactory (otherwise U for Unsatisfactory, N for Needs Improvement, I for Improvement Shown). The 19 preprinted categories on her report card were supplemented by 3 she added by hand, and I now note that Mrs Lindner seems to have improved on the simple S, so that 14 have several plus signs added. She gave me an S+ in Completes Work. She gave me an S++ in Leadership, a category she wrote in; this surprises me now—I was no leader. She added the category Responsibilities and gave me an S++++. But the one that startles me now, if not then, is where she wrote in the category Research Reports for an S+++. I now see this as a reflection on Spitsbergen and Jan Mayen.
There's one more quirk to how reports were given. One of the purposes of having kids stand in front of a group to read their report is to get them used to public speaking. But Mrs Lindner apparently also wanted us to get some broadcasting experience working with a microphone. To do this, in the front of the room was a floor microphone, which was probably inoperable, but in any case, was not plugged into anything, and we gave our reports in front of it. Now forget modern hand-held mics or even those tiny ones located in an actor's hairline.

https://mh-2-stockagency.panthermedia.net/media/media_detail/0031000000/31721000/~vintage-microphone-with-stand-isolated-on_31721587_detail.jpg

Microphones in the 1950s were big, boxy affairs, as above. I remember going to Radio City Music Hall again and again and, every time someone was supposed to sing, watching a floor microphone as above rise up out of the stage. But I'm misleading you. Mrs Lindner had an antique, and every one of us recognized it as such. Picture the below as a floor model.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9a/40/d9/9a40d9d00dc60b538fdadf873ba0cdf5.jpg

This was the unconnected antique that we spoke into, and we recognized it as ancient. I now know that they're called spring-mount microphones and go back to the 1920s. Another memory.

Music Appreciation In each of grades 4-5-6 we had fun sessions of what was called Music Appreciation. It wasn't only the AR classes—all of the three upper grades in the school did it, and it's my understanding that it was some sort of a city-wide mandate and everybody did it. It was meant to introduce kids to light classical music, all short selections--I got into symphonies and concertos on my own later. We enjoyed it and it was easy, tho in retrospect it should have been called Music Recognition, since the teacher usually just played a snippet at each beginning that covered the identifiable theme. I don't think we ever took the time to hear an entire selection.
I remember the list—I wish I'd kept it—of about a dozen or more required selections for each of the three grades. As I try to eliminate things I learned later, I've come up with the following few from the list. These are the only ones I specifically remember from those three years.
All young kids will remember having learned the finale of the William Tell Overture (Rossini) because of its pop culture connection, but we did also learn about first three sections of it, all four being performed without a pause. You may remember how I used all four parts when reporting, appropriately, on Switzerland, in 2021/9. Do a Ctrl-F for "Tell in the Arts" if you wish to review the sections. Here I'll just give a short précis of the piece.
As we learned it, the parts were Dawn, Storm, Calm, Finale. Dawn is also called the Prélude; the official name of Calm is the Ranz des vaches, a typical Swiss "call to the cows". Consider it a Pastorale. I find it of particular interest that the sections alternate from peaceful to dynamic to peaceful to dynamic.
While we play a recording in that posting, for variety I have a different one here. This is the complete William Tell Overture (12:45). The sections are at the points noted: Dawn (0:07, cello); Storm (2:58, violins, woodwinds); Calm / Ranz des vaches (5:44, woodwinds); Finale (8:25 brass!!!!!!, tympani).
North Americans will associate the Finale with the opening & closing theme (2:01) of the Lone Ranger TV program, which started in 1949, the year before Mrs Lindner's class--thus it was fresh in everyone's mind—and ran until 1957. But I will add that I had eagerly listened to the radio version even before that.
I clearly remember Edward MacDowell's To a Wild Rose. I now learn that it was the first of a suite of ten short solo piano pieces written as part of his Woodland Sketches, all written in 1896 during a stay and his summer retreat in New Hampshire, where each piece was inspired by a different aspect of the surrounding nature and landscape. Here is To a Wild Rose (2:33).
Another memory is of the Gavotte from Mignon. I don't think we realized what Mignon was at the time. It's an 1866 opéra comique in three acts, by Ambroise Thomas (to.MA). Here is the Gavotte from Mignon (2:11). The identifiable melody starts at 0:21.
Now hold on to your hat. One way to get young kids to identify names with music is to make it a sing-along. At the time, we sang, along with the music: Gavotte from Mignon by Thomas / Called a gavotte, an old French dance / Tripped by lords and ladies gay / In the court of Louis, King of France. (Stop laughing.)
But the main thing we'll be discussing here in this regard is Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King from the Peer Gynt Suite (as we knew it, not knowing at the time that there were two suites). One reason I always had a special regard for "Mountain King" involves my mother. She never had the slightest interest in classical music. But when I came home one day and said we'd learned "Mountain King", she immediately recognized it from HER elementary school days a generation earlier and started singing it for me: DA-da-da-da-DA-da-dum, DA-da-dum! I've always held that connection dear to me, tho now that I think of it, there's another connection. This was Grieg based on Ibsen! How much more Norwegian can you get?

Back to Grieg, Peer Gynt, and Norway. I now know a lot more, since I've just researched the entire background for presentation. To tell the story in order, Henrik Ibsen wrote his play Peer Gynt in 1867. He asked Edvard Grieg to write additional incidental music to various scenes, and the play with music finally premiered in 1875.

The original score contains 26 selections over the five acts of the play. Later, in 1888 and 1893, Grieg chose eight of these pieces to arrange into two four-piece suites, Suite No 1 and Suite No 2. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" is the fourth and last selection in the first Suite.
There is irony here. Ibsen's play and Grieg's 26 selections are not overly famous today. But the suites are among Grieg's most famous works, and of those eight selections, "Mountain King" might be the best known. How odd for things to get pared down like that. Actually, for many years, the two suites were the only parts of the music that were available, as the original score was not published until 1908, one year after Grieg's death. As I look thru the selections, I find that the two suites were not taken in order from the play, but willy-nilly. They are totally out of original order and in a way, have a life of their own.

The first Suite includes:
Morning Mood - Morgenstemning (we learned it simply as "Morning")
Åse's Death – Åses død (say OH.ssə)
Anitra's Dance – Anitras dans
In the Hall of the Mountain King – I Dovregubbens hall

The second Suite includes:
The Abduction of the Bride. Ingrid's Lament – Bruderovet. Ingrids klage
Arabian Dance – Arabisk dans
Peer Gynt's Homecoming (Stormy Evening at Sea) - Peer Gynts hjemfart (Stormfull aften på havet)
Solveig's Song - Solveigs sang

My favorites are all from the first suite. This is the beautifully haunting Morning Mood (6:10). Every once in a while I think about it when I get up. And again, we sang along with it: "Morning is dawning and Peer Gynt is yawning, it's Morning from the Peer Gynt Suite by-y-y Grieg." In a NYC accent, "morning" is "mawning", so it fit in well with "dawning" and "yawning".
I've now learned more. The piece depicts the rising sun finding Peer Gynt on his travels, now stranded in the desert in Morocco. This brings out a big difference. Since the suites all take the selections out of their original context in the play, listeners do not tend to picture morning in a Moroccan desert, but rather in Grieg's Scandinavia, quite a shift.

And then there's the enchanting Anitra's Dance (3:30). Anitra is the daughter of a Bedouin chieftain, and she performs a seductive, bewitching dance for Peer Gynt to please him.

But as I said earlier, our main interest here lies in what is possibly the most famous of the selections, In the Hall of the Mountain King (2:28). The theme is heard right from the beginning and then comes to a spectacular, crashing end. It intensifies, in a similar way to Ravel's Bolero. And this conductor really gets into it!
But it's the translation of the title we need to discuss. I want to compare it to another famously translated title. The anti-war novel Erich Maria Remarque wrote in 1929 was Im Westen nichts Neues / In the West, Nothing New. When Arthur Wheen translated it into English, he set up the title to be All Quiet on the Western Front. It's different from the original, but conveys the same ironic meaning, since the day that the protagonist dies near the end of WWI, the situation report from the front line goes out saying that "nothing new" had happened; "all quiet" satisfactorily expresses the same thing. And adding "front" clarifies for outsiders what might have been clear to Germans in the first place.
That was a good translation, but I have an issue with the translation of In the Hall of the Mountain King. It's become standard internationally, but I find it incomplete in what it's supposed to convey. Review above the translations of the eight selections in the two suites. You don't need to know Norwegian to see that most of the translations seem to match quite well. Then you come to I Dovregubbens hall, and this is what we need to discuss. I should add now that this part of the adventure is no longer in Morocco, but back home in Norway.
If we do just a partial translation of the original, we get "In the Dovregubben's Hall", so it comes down to: what's a Dovregubben? In both Swedish (which I've studied) and Norwegian, a gubbe is an old man. Add an -N as the definite article, and gubben is "the old man". We all know about Scandinavian trolls, so as a cultural step further, we find that a trollgubbe is a troll chief. Furthermore, when we discuss a tribe, we usually call its leader a chief, and I really hesitate to use the word "king", which sounds far too royal to me, given the primitive situation, and conjures up the wrong image. So now we just need to see about Dovre.

https://www.strubb.de/images/anderswo/Dovre-Tour/Karten-Dovre/Oslo-Oppdal.jpg

Dovre refers to the Dovrefjell, or Dovre Mountains, lying in the triangle between Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim. I think we can say that Norwegians would be familiar with the area and with the fact that trolls are strongly associated with the Dovrefjell. Folklore and stories often depict trolls residing in or near there. Since that's common knowledge to Norwegians, the title does not use the word "troll". But the translation for non-Norwegians should include it.

https://i.etsystatic.com/20087931/r/il/77149f/4921899027/il_1080xN.4921899027_1wdz.jpg

This is a hand-carved model of a Dovregubben troll for sale on Etsy. Dovregubben are described as being smaller than other trolls and inhabiting caves in the mountains. If the above is too cute, then here's another illustration:

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mythology/images/e/e3/Dovregubben.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20170108200224

I'll add here that hule at the top is "cave", not "hall".
The standard translation doesn't mention the Dovre itself, but replaces it with the word "mountain", which is a logical, positive move. But it doesn't use the word "troll", which is essential to understanding what this adventure of Peer Gynt is all about. In addition, even the original Norwegian use of the word hall forms a misleading image, again picturing a royal hall for a king, not the mountain cave that's seemingly meant.
So the translation out of Norwegian abandons the specific cultural connections of (1) a troll and of (2) a well-known (to Norwegians) mountain range. In my humble opinion, a better translation would be "In the Troll Chief's Mountain Cave".
As you may know, if you look up a title in Wikipedia then flip languages, you can find how the title appears internationally. I at first thought Swedish, being the next-door Scandinavian language, might be different, but it's I bergakungens sal (kung is king, sal is hall [cf FR salle, GE Saal]).
In German it's In der Halle des Bergkönigs; in French, Dans l'antre [cave] du roi de la montagne; in Spanish, En la gruta [grotto] del rey de la montaña. At least the reference here is to a cave, or even better, a grotto.
Russian follows thru with В пещере горного короля / V péshchere górnovo korolyá; (пещера / peshchera = cave; гора / gora = mountain; король / korol' = king).

Moving on: we had great freedom in those days. When we were done with lunch and had some time left, we were able to go back into our classroom. It was kept unlocked, and we were allowed to be unsupervised there. Some would sit around and socialize, others worked at the Curiosity Table, but there was always a bunch of us who played the recordings we'd been learning. It was so easy—as we quizzed each other, most people identified the selections correctly.
There's one more thing about Music Appreciation in Mrs Lindner's class that was great fun, but which I've been avoiding mentioning until now: just how we heard the recordings.

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/old-portable-turntable-isolated-clipping-path-included-31661817.jpg

Phonographs were common to all of us in 1950—above is a portable one. It wasn't yet the hi-fi or stereo era, but we all were acquainted with phonographs that you plug in, put a 78 rpm record on the turntable, flip or twist the switch, then manually set the arm with the needle into the first groove. (Other speeds were brand-new then. 33 1/3 rpm had just come out in 1948 and 45 rpm in 1949.) But what Mrs Lindner used for our music was more magical. And even more portable, since it didn't need electricity!

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e1/c9/13/e1c913c78a2c53d488cb56d7825e0f31.jpg

We heard all our classical music on a gramophone! It was similar to this, tho not the same. We all knew it seemed like an antique—and it really was an antique, a beautiful one. You simply cranked it up—there was nothing to plug in. It sat solidly enough so that you could later crank it a bit more if needed, without jostling it. You put your 78 rpm record on and released the turntable by the little lever next to it (click—the lever is closest to the viewer). Then, as with any phonograph, you just manually rested the arm with the stylus onto the record. The biggest visual difference is that, in place of an electric speaker, a gramophone has that big cornucopia-style horn attached right to the arm that magnified the sound. It worked quite well, and I have fond memories of using it. What a beautiful item.

Actually, I learn now that the gramophone era generally spanned from the late 1880s until the 1950s, at which point the phonograph took over, so perhaps it was less of an antique than I always imagined. Of course, it's what the Grammy Awards are named after, tho they were first awarded later, in 1959. The best recording I could get on a gramophone as an illustration is this one (3:40). However, it's a replica of a vintage gramophone from the 1920s, three decades earlier. Tho the sound is tinny—that's why hi-fi, then stereo developed—it was easy to learn William Tell and Peer Gynt music from.

A Theatrical Many people have been involved as kids with something like holiday pageants or elementary school plays. In Mrs Lindner's 6th grade, we did some weird take-off on Snow White for school use, which added woodland creatures to the story so that everyone in the class could participate. And I was to play—get this—Nutty the Squirrel. I came home one day with a note for my mother asking if she would be so kind as to work on a costume for me. Now in reflection, I find that really expecting a lot, but to her credit, my mother rose to the task. She did have a sewing machine, but was not a seamstress. Still, she found a pattern, dyed an old bed sheet gray, and managed to figure out how to make the huge tail detachable (with snaps top and bottom) as the script required. I only mention this as a tribute to my mother, who stepped up to the plate to work things out. I still have the mimeographed program saying that Class AR 6-1 was being assisted by AR 5-1.

Class Pictures We're all familiar with school photos. Nowadays, they're in color, and to my knowledge, usually just individual pictures of students. When we taught, teachers got complimentary photos, and I have some of me, and of Beverly.
But back in the day, school photos were (1) in black-and-white, and, more importantly I think, (2) of the whole class. I find in my files three class pictures, one from each school: of the 3rd grade in PS 158, of Mrs Lindner's 6th grade class, AR-6, in PS 108, both in class, and of my 9th grade Junior High class in PS 171, taken outdoors in front of the main entrance. Thanks to the ENY Project, a number of these photos are now online, tho not mine. However, I have links below to two photos to give an idea of what they were like. Again, both photos are in PS 108, tho they are NOT MY AR-6 class; so consider them generic:

http://www.tapeshare.com/108/PS108_Class6_1_1958.jpg

http://www.tapeshare.com/108/PS108_Class4_1_1955.jpg

The first link is to a PS 108 regular grade 6 class taken in 1958, eight years after mine. It's taken outdoors, in front of the school entrance, like my Junior High photo is. In addition, it lacks a list of names. Use it to visualize the age group for sixth grade, and also 1950s outfits. All boys wore ties! Unlike in class, boys are in the back, girls up front, some seated.
The second link is to a PS 108 regular grade 4 class taken in 1955, five years after mine, so picture faces two years older. It's the type I'm more used to, taken in class, and like mine, it has names listed below (tho they forgot the three boys in row six!). Again note the 1950s attire, with boys in ties. Most boys again are standing in the back (and in row six), and all girls are seated in front. In my picture, Mrs Lindner is in the back, as here, and I'm two boys to the right (her left). Also, boys and girls are more mixed, as normal in class.
But one thing stands out in the classroom picture, also in mine: the banner between desks saying Honor Thrift Class. And therein lies a tale.

ENY Savings Bank We said that, a block north of where we'd lived on Pennsylvania Avenue was the ENY Savings Bank. I'd always thought it was THE main branch, but now find out there were many, and it was just the local one. It turns out the main branch was on more elegant Eastern Parkway. In any case, this was a community bank that took care of working-class people. It had a program whereby any student could open a savings account, and many if not most, did. For those, each week, small paper coin packets were distributed in class, and we'd put in a quarter or a few dimes for a deposit to our accounts. We were then declared an Honor Thrift Class, and it was the bank who arranged for the class pictures, possibly free of charge, I'm not sure. Years later when I wanted to go to Europe after high school, I used those savings, doubled by my parents, to make that life-changing trip.
I now find that the East New York Savings Bank as a Brooklyn institution existed from 1868 to 1997, growing to become one of Brooklyn's largest savings banks, catering to the working-class population.

http://www.tapeshare.com/Zone5/SEPennAtl1938w.jpg

The four-story Renaissance Revival branch of the East New York Savings Bank at Pennsylvania and Atlantic Avenues (see street map) was built in 1889-1890. The most embellished part of the building, the columned entrance to the bank, is not original, but dates from c1917. The above photo is from 1938, and to me as a five-year-old in 1945, this was the height of elegance. The bank continued to thrive, and eventually had branches in Manhattan and Queens, as well as in Suffolk and Nassau Counties on Long Island. In 1931, it acquired by merger the Brownsville Savings Bank, and in 1991, purchased Gold Dome banks. But with the decline of the ENY neighborhood, the East New York name had rapidly lost the cachet is once had, so the bank went with something that sounded more prosperous, and took the Gold Dome name, but still stayed in East New York. In 1987, the Manufacturers and Traders Bank (M&T) of Buffalo acquired it, along with its 15 branches.

http://www.tapeshare.com/Zone5/SEPennAtl2006w.jpg

This view dates to 2006, looking south down Pennsylvania Avenue. My old apartment building might be visible a block away on the right. This branch was demolished in 2015 to make way for a seven-story medical building. M&T today has branches along the east coast, from Maine to Florida, and west to West Virginia. There are three in Brooklyn, one being a small building on Atlantic Avenue next to where "my" branch was. There are ten in Manhattan, the nearest to me being in Chelsea, so in a sense, ENY Savings has joined me in Manhattan.

School Song Only because the ENY Project unearthed it, do I find PS 108 had a school song. It's nothing I remember singing back in the day.

http://www.tapeshare.com/108/PS108Schoolsong.jpg

It might be from well before my time. We always called the school One-Oh-Eight, never One Hundred Eight. But I love the cozy, small-town way it starts "Where Arlington and Linwood meet". If by any chance, the song dates to the school's founding in 1895, that might explain the second line "In good old Brooklyn town", since the City of Brooklyn was independent until the NYC consolidation in 1898. Or not.

Advanced Reading: Literature We finally come to the reason the three classes were called AR-4, AR-5, and AR-6, for Advanced Reading. In addition to general enrichment, we were distributed, to keep, pocket-size books with literary works. The books in each grade were without cover pictures, but brightly colored, pink, blue, green, and the title page said they were published by the City of New York. I kept mine for many years, but they're gone now, more's the pity. Of all the works covered, I remember specifically two by name, not only because of great interest, but because later in life I used them for travel. When we later get to talking about literature used for travel, we'll have full discussions of how that was done, with additional pictures. For now, we'll just give a short preview of each.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his longest major poem, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in 1798. He wanted to purvey a feeling of antiquity, so even in the title he used an old spelling of "rhyme", and grandly called the old sailor an ancient mariner.
The story goes thus: an old sailor stops a guest going to a wedding to tell his story of an old voyage. A storm set the wooden ship off-course and headed for the Antarctic. An albatross, which has the largest wingspan of any bird, leads them out of an ice jam, but the sailor, inexplicably, shoots the albatross with his crossbow, to his eternal regret.

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The ship does sail north, but is becalmed, and suffers from a drought, and sailors die. That leads to what must be the most famous quote from the poem:
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink. (This last line is often misquoted.)

The crew blames the mariner for the turn of events, and in anger, they force him to wear the dead albatross about his neck. An albatross around one's neck has since become a metaphor for any burden or guilt one must bear, or a past mistake that continues to haunt someone.
Decades later, when I was sailing from South America to Antarctica, the poem came back to me when a naturalist pointed out an albatross flying above. I had a bit of time, and went to the ship's library. While there was no copy of the poem there, there were two reference books with quotes from the poem. I typed up eleven favorite quotes, went to the purser, and asked them to make copies. It was published the next day, on 17 November 2006, and copies put under each cabin door. This was very gratifying as I thought back to the AR classes.
The other work I remember well was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Évangeline, published in 1847. The story takes place during the British ethnic cleaning of French speakers from Acadia (Nova Scotia), when they were shipped en masse to Louisiana, to mix with the French-speaking creoles that had already settled there. These 'Cadians became Cajuns. The story, based on a real event, is specifically about how Évangeline is separated from her fiancé Gabriel in the turmoil. They do not meet again in Louisiana until decades later, when Évangeline, now a nurse, discovers Gabriel in a hospital on his deathbed.

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The first link shows Évangeline and Gabriel in Acadia (Nova Scotia) before deportation. The second shows her discovering him dying in the hospital in Louisiana.
Again, decades later in Nova Scotia, I visited the village of Grand-Pré where the story starts, and later, in Louisiana, the town of Saint Martinville in the Cajun/Creole country, where the story ends.
But something else that happened more recently was a source of great fun for me and harked back to Mrs Lindner's class. Last year, on 14 July 2024, for reasons to be explained when I get to write about that trip, I was in Wisconsin with a local guide. We were driving in a heavily forested county park late that Sunday morning. Almost no one else was about, and the tree branches formed a canopy over the road, so that you could not be more embedded in nature. The guide casually mentioned that most of the trees were hemlocks. Now I wouldn't know a hemlock from a broomstick, but the time and place were inspirational, and I suddenly burst forth with the opening lines from Évangeline:

It was totally irrelevant that that it wasn't twilight, but approaching noon—the atmosphere just carried me away. Of course, I had to explain my sudden outburst to the guide.

In the recent posting I talked about my mentors, and I'll be clarifying that as we move on. But I want to limit that list to professors of German that guided me in my language study. Thus I have to classify Mrs Rhoda Lindner in another category. I'll used the current buzzword influencer, even tho no online presence was involved. She influenced the entire class, and was a strong influence on my early education, more than any other teacher between grades one and nine (Junior High).

In the next posting, we'll move on to my ENY Junior High, where a contrary experience convinced me that I had NO language ability whatsoever.