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........

Paul Simons

It does appear that with the on-screen murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop, cellphone video of the murders of other black men and teenagers by white cops and vigilantes, the strong re-emergence of white supremacy as a political force that happened at the "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and the acceptance of white supremacists by the executive branch at that moment, we are at what many are calling "an inflection point".

At WHHS as a 9th grader I had an encounter in which an upperclassman with a Germanic last name, taller and stronger that I was, called me a "dirty Jew" and pushed me part way into a gym locker. Another upperclassman also with a Germanic last name attacked the first fellow, got him off my back, saved the day for me. So I guess we can say, it takes all kinds, you can't generalize.

I do know it's all been going on way too long. In this country slavery lasted over 400 years - 12 generations. Think about the thousands of black writers, athletes, musicians, statesmen, jurists, doctors whose ancestors were deprived for their whole lives of ever being who they really were, who were used as machines to pick cotton or tobacco or to dig railroad tunnels. 12 generations. We did make some progress as a country but lately it's one step up, two steps back. I hope we can start moving forward again. I'm aware that these matters involve political decisions, and contributors to these pages are enjoined to remain apolitical, so I'll leave it at that. We're citizens of a country that depends on participation in fair and free elections by informed voters, that's our responsibility and duty, it's the least we can do. Just vote.

Philip Spiess

Gail, I think we can relate stories of personal experience without making them political; after all, they were  -- and are -- real parts of our personal and collective history.  They occurred; we acknowledge them for what they are; we cannot and should not erase history -- particularly "bad" history -- but face up to it and see how we can change and improve our mutual social existence.  Exploring all this together, acknowledging our feelings, then and now, or what our parents inculcated in us (without our really knowing or understanding it) -- in other words, sharing across racial and religious lines -- can surely not be a bad thing -- if each of us handles it temperately.

There were African-American students at my elementary school, Clifton School, though I can't say that proportionally there were very many, but we all did interact with one another.  (I do recall at some point there was some local controversy over the eastern boundary of the school district that encompassed thiose that attended Clifton School -- it was, I think, Vine Street, but how far east of Vine Street into Avondale it should go was, I believe, the controversy.)

However, near the end of my Walnut Hills High School career, the matter of "block-busting" reared its ugly head and hit Clifton (and other places in Cincinnati).  Simply put, the premise was that "if one black family moved into a house on your street, all of the property values would go down and all of the whites would move away, selling their houses to blacks -- and there goes the neighborhood."  It was predicted that the first street to "go" in Clifton would be McAlpin Avenue -- this happened to be the street on which I lived, and I wondered why folks thought my street would be the first --  but as it turned out, Warren Avenue, several blocks away, was the first street in (northern) Clifton to have an African-American resident.  This family was (if I recall) professorily connected with the University of Cincinnati, so it was "okay"; after all, the University was located in (southern) Clifton, and nothing further occurred (or was mentioned thereafter) concerning "block-busting" -- it had all been a big hysterical prejudicial scare!

Clifton Meadows Swim Club, a "private" swim club built on former farmland located on the downhill side of Clifton between Lafayette Avenue and the old canal (or Winton Place, if you will), was another matter, however. By virtue of its "private" status, it remained "whites-only" for many years, just like Coney Island Amusement Park.  When that policy finally changed at the club (and it did), I don't know.

Jeff Daum

In 1962 I was hired by one of our teachers at WHHS to carve a totem pole for Indian Hills CC.  All went as intended, and I was supposed to be interviewed and featured in an article at the reveal of the pole.

However, after the pole was already erected, someone informed them that I was Jewish (at the time, not welcomed there), and the interview was cancelled.  I was however paid in full for the pole per the contract.  The above picture and write-up is from Popular Mechanics.

Jerry Ochs

Jeff,

I reckon it wasn't you they objected to; it was the galvanized-iron foreskin.

Jeff Daum

touché Jerry!  Didn't think the picture was clear enough to see that.

Philip Spiess

Huh?  Nothing wrong here -- the Carvers came over on the Mayflower and were present at Plymouth.  And what Indian tribe inhabited Indian Hills in the 1960s, anyway (the traditional tribes of the Miami Country, i.e., Hamilton County, were the Shawnees and the Miamis)?  Were they welcome?  (Or only at Thanksgiving?)

Sometime, about the same year you mention, my Boy Scout troop, Troop 3 of Clifton, decided to carve two totem poles that would (perhaps) embellish the grounds of Calvary Episcopal Church (where we met).  My father, being head of the Right-of-Way Division of the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company, had access to poles!  He ordered two or three up to be delivered to the church property in time for our Monday night meeting.  They duly arrived, and we went out to carve.  But whoa!  The Gas Company had delivered brand-new poles, covered with rich creosote, instead of old poles that had been removed from service and were practically bare of anything!  Tarnation!  We did not carve, but we did cut out that event!

Jerry Ochs

Gail wrote: "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."  I would like to find out if WHHS still tolerates fraternities/sororitiies, which I felt walled off people.  I didn't have much interest in them so my memories of them are dim, but did we really have black, white, Jewish, boys', girls'?  Really?