Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Wow, I am greatly relieved that someone else remembers Mrs. Powell other than I.

Jerry Ochs

Does anybody else think that Powell, Sowell, Lounds & Dobbins would make a nice name for a law firm?
 

Philip Spiess

Sounds like the bank named in the song from Disney's Mary Poppins.

Paul Simons

Interesting that the partners in the hypothetical law firm are out of art and science. After WHHS I went to UC - University of Cincinnati - College of Arts and Science. They also had colleges of Engineering, Business Administration, etc. At the time there was just the very beginning of Computer Science. I think one could major in Political Science. Now of course the term itself would be an oxymoron.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

I liked Mrs. Dobbins very much. I think I had her for homeroom as well as art.  When my mother was working at WHHS they became personal friends. 

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

Barbara, I was unaware that your mother worked at WHHS. What years? What did she do?

Jerry Ochs

Phil,

Speaking of Mary Poppins:

Mahatma Gandhi was a peculiar person. He walked barefoot everywhere, to the point that his feet became quite thick and hard. He often went on hunger strikes, and even when he wasn't on a hunger strike, he did not eat much and became quite thin and frail. He also was a very spiritual person. Finally, because he didn't eat much and when he did his diet was peculiar, he developed very bad breath. That is why he became known as a super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

Philip Spiess

Sir, you are a paronomasiac!

Jerry Ochs

Phil,

I forwarded your message to my lawyer.  That is to say, I resent that remark.

Nancy Messer

These photos are from From the Pages page of today's edition of The American Israelite here in Cincinnati.  The one of the entire page can't be read unless magnified but I added it so you can see where the second one came from.  I always read this page and this time, Shari, you just jumped right out at me!

Jeff Daum

Philip, thanks for your continuing erudite posts and ability to teach us new vocabulary.

Nancy, unfortunately I don't think we can open the links.  I believe they are through your email and restricted without password.

Jerry Ochs

It is easy to google The American Israelite but hard to find the From the Pages page.  It is under Columns, but all I saw were old adverts.

Nancy Messer

When I added the stuff everything showed up here as planned and then later switched to what's there now.  I googled the Israelite and From the Pages is under Columns and you have to scroll down to find what you're looking for.  It's about Shari Baum Covitz 50 years ago.  It just provides the items but not as a page of the paper.  Not being very computer literate I don't know how to get everything here as planned and have it stay here.

I took the pics with my iPhone and sent them to my email.  I then copied them from the email to here.  Is there another way to get the photos here?

Jerry Ochs

Here is the page.

https://www.americanisraelite.com/from_the_pages/article_6004310a-afe2-11ea-9608-ef7b72deb0dd.html

Scroll down to 50 Years Ago, then scroll down to just above 25 Years Ago.

Philip Spiess

Jerry:  I assume you forgot to include the hyphen, and therefore meant "I re-sent that remark" -- presumably meaning it was re-sent to your lawyer.  Unless your lawyer has a really good dictionary (my favorite is the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1969, 1973, because it adds "Usage" explanations in many cases -- the word in question appears on page 954 -- though I also use the OED), I suspect he may not find the word, which an English professor at Drew University in New Jersey accused me of (when I was pursuing my Ph. D. degree there in "19th-Century Studies," 1988-1990) as I was indulging my habit for punning in his class (it took me awhile to find the meaning of the word, but I got him back later, a story which I'll tell another time).

As to the American Heritage Dictionary, I was fortunate to have one in my classroom when I was teaching private Middle School, and, as we were always encouraged to get students to use a dictionary, I would (tongue in cheek) tell my students (correctly so) that this was the first dictionary in the United States to be published with definitions of all of the well-known "four-letter words."  The 5th and 6th grade boys would immediately fly to the shelves where the dictionaries were stored, pull out the one in question, thumb through the pages -- and then look up at me and say, "You're wrong, Mr. Spiess; it isn't in here!"  I'd saunter over to the desk where they were, look at the page, and say caustically, "You don't know how to spell it, do you?"

My teaching methods may have been unorthodox (so thought some parents), but they usually seemed to get the lesson across -- which is what learning is surely all about?

Jerry Ochs

Phil,

I wrote the past participle of "resend" in my pun.

To all,

Phil and Gail stated that Mr. Sowell was their first black teacher.  I attended Pleasant Ridge Elementary School and I don't recall any black students there.  David B may be able to confirm this.  For me, WHHS was a real eye opener.

Philip Spiess

Okay, Jerry, so here's my story from graduate school (I may have told this story elsewhere before, but never mind):  I was taking a graduate seminar at Drew University in New Jersey in 1988 (working on my doctorate) on "Shelley and His Circle," and apparently I was punning too much in my class comments (this will come as no surprsise to my WHHS intimates), so the professor (whom I enjoyed) suddenly said, "Sir, you are a paronomasiac!"  I was stunned; I had no idea what the word meant.  I finally found out that it meant "punning" (which, in my case, was true enough), but I thought, "I'll get back at him!"

And I did:  The next semester I was taking his course in "English Romantic Poetry," and one day we were discussing Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," and I said (malice aforethought), "Sir, would you explain Wordsworth's influence on the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe?"  Looking at me blankly, he said, "Huh?  I mean, I don't think . . ."  i responded, "You know, sir, the Tintern Abbey-lation of the bells, bells, bells!"  "He looked at me in disbelief and said, "I can't stand it! . . ."  (But I got an honors status grade from him.)

Nancy Messer

Thanks Jerry for the link info here so Shari (and everyone else) can see what I was talking about.

Phil - all your puns astound me.  They are so good and you make it seem so easy to think of.

David Buchholz

Jerry, I don't remember black students at Pleasant Ridge.  I don't remember Asian students, either.  I remember diving under desks, though, seeking protection from an imminent nuclear attack.

As long as we're dealing with fifty years, my wife Jadyne and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary on June 13th.  Here we are then...and now.

And one to celebrate Juneteenth, the holiday discovered just yesterday by the man in the White House.

Jerry Ochs

I've been shrinking as I age but David and Jadyne appear to have grown taller.  Can somebody put it into perspective for me?

David M. Schneider

Malcolm Caldwell or John something (there were two hearing impaired students, one was black, and the other was caucasian) and Margaret Hunt were two black students in my class at Pleasant Ridge Elementary.

David M. Schneider

Actually my memory having been stimulated, I think his name was Joe Caldwell and the white guy was Malcolm Perkins.

Paul Simons

Beautiful photos Dave. About Juneteenth - that was June 19, 1865 when liberation implemented by the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached and freed the enslaved black people in Galveston Texas - about three years after it was issued. You’d think that in the intervening 168 years the white people in the country would have learned of and made peace with the change as well, but evidently a supremacist mindset based on minor items like skin color or hair texture persists when intentionally passed from generation to generation by faulty governmental, religious, and educational institutions. This is one area where WHHS was a better place than many because it was and probably still is an inherently diverse place. At WHHS that didn’t have to be mandated by law - it came naturally. Not perfectly but better than in many other places.

Stephen Collett

Good work, Davey, calling up. I went to Hyde Park elementary school and we had NO diversity. The first people with color and Jews I met at WHHS. It was a great revelation for me. I loved them all immediately as something other than those I knew. 

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

I grew up in Kentucky where most of my parents' families lived and where my father was an attorney and Speaker of the House of the Commenwealth of Kentucky. My elementary school days were spent with all caucasian students and teachers. If anything, I was the diverse student. I was the only Jew. When religion was taught a half day each week, I did not attend the classes and, instead, assisted the principal with whatever tasks she assigned me. I felt different. Very different.

In seventh grade, I left Kentucky education behind and started WHHS. As my father said, "Thank God for Arkansas." because AR was 48th in education and Kentucky was 47th. I commuted across the river and felt like I had entered another universe. Not only were there students of several races and religions, but also classmates who were academically motivated and involved in a broad range of activities and pursuits. I felt challenged and accepted--something that I had not felt in my grade school years at Grandview Elementary School. I wasn't disliked by classmates there, but they knew that I was different. At an early age, I often thought what it must feel like to not be white. I was white, able to blend in, and, yet, I was different. This awareness was the start of my socio-political consciousness. 

To this day, I value the many levels of education that I received at Walnut Hills. Although not always perfect, we were fortunate to have experienced each other and to take advantage of what was offered to us. Sursum ad Summum.

I would love to start a website conversation on the racial perceptions and feelings that we experienced while at WHHS and how that might have shaped who we are today. Yes, I know that race and religion are subjects perhaps to be avoided, but........