Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Hi Phi. Thanks for correction about AP classes. I was in the accelerated math class, but, if memory serves me - and sadly too often it does not!! - we were together for all classes in 7th and 8th grade, and many classes for 9th and on, so I assumed wrongly that they also were "advanced". Swelled head on my part, I guess.... Probably the confounding factor was that being chosen for the special math class (back at the 5th grade tests to enter WHHS) meant that we were  advanced and ambitious in other fields as well, so we chose those AP classes instead of the "regular" ones.

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

The only assembly that raised my blood pressure was the one given by someone from the VA, and he did not differentiate between socialism, communism, and the bastard Russian version of communism. When I wrote an "open essay" (we chose our our topic) for I think Miss Roth's English class, I got red "correction" marks all over the place, which informed me that the Israeli kibbutzim, which used to practice pure communism and which people joined or left of their own volition, and not because of the will of the "State", began only in 1948. Fact: the first kibbutz was several years older than the Russian Revolution, so this would have been impossible. I still remember the shock that a Walnut Hills teacher could have been mistaken. Well, in many ways, we grew up slowly, not like our own children, or at least my own children....  I want to keep my grandkids in diapers forever!! hmmm, no wonder my kids hate me  ;)

Henry Cohen

Kids do grow up too fast these days and there is no such thing as protecting them from things that they would be better off experiencing later. That said, it is more important to teach them effective coping mechanisms than it is to try to insulate them or censor their experiences. It is interesting that at a certain rather young age kids go from thinking you know everything to thinking you know nothing. Under the best of circumstances they do another hopefully more positive and realistic revision later.

John Osher

Mr. Carpenter was a very nice man and a mathematician when mathematician's only job was to teach. Today mathematicians rule the world writing code for the Internet. Mr. Carpenter had a habit of spitting on the front row of our class

Laura Reid (Pease)

to Larry, Dick Murdock and the rest of the Kilgour alums...at the mention of Chester Heery, some other names came to mind...what about Miss Schleehoff and Miss Southcombe??  Why can I remember my grade school teachers and not all my high school teachers??

Steven Levinson

Hank, the assembly that remains most vivid in my mind was the one during our senior year in which the speaker was a Board-of-Education-approved representative of the John Birtch Society.  That son-of-a bitch railed at the socialist federal government for depriving the people of their most precious personal freedom -- the freedom to fail.  How dare the federal government presume to seek to force decent health care and equal educational opportunity on The People!  In fact, how dare those commies presume to undertake to create a social safety net of any kind!  And, good boys and girls that we were, we just sat there and took it.

Henry Cohen

Steve, certainly our class and many at that time were deficient in knowing how to truly give authority a hard time. Some of our transgressions if repeated today would probably be lauded by teachers as welcome hijinks or at worst  punished with a wink wink as they are so happy they didn't have to deal with armed maniacs and cyber bullies. Of course the younger generation has been railed against since ancient times as elders always see the next generation as disrespectful and ill mannered. So it will always be. Don't know how you all feel but being a middle of the road moderate is a tough position to occupy, you get "shot at" by both wings of the extremists on either side. Are any of you fans of the Capitol Steps? They harpoon the left and the right usually hilariously and mostly accurately.  

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Was just looking at Phil's wonderful pictures! Phil, thank you so much. What a treasure.

Mary Vore (Iwamoto)

Finally just saw the video - thank you so much for those who put this together.  Helped me appreciate what a great group of individuals made up our class.  I was - and still am - in awe of how talented you all were/are.  If any of our favorite teachers are still with us, it is possible to send them a thank you??  Mrs. Levy and Mrs. Hutchinson, for English, were wonderful, as was Pedro Stites.  But my all time favorite had to be the substitute teacher known as 'ski jump'!  I never knew her real name, but I laughed so hard I cried at the stuff the class would pull on her.  I don't think she ever figured out why some students, who were crawling out the back windows in the biology class, would keep walking back in the door, over and over again. 

Paul Simons

FYI - 1 new photo including Euge Katona, Dana Cohen, Stan Hertzman (Class of 1962), and me uploaded to pages of those in the picture.

Henry Cohen

What was the name of those outlier buildings that were classrooms before the annex was built? I think we could have successfully sued CPS for cruel and unusual punishment for having classes there in the winter.

Ira Goldberg

Weren't they just "the temps?"

Philip Spiess

Mary Vore:  "Old Ski-Jumps" was Miss Kincaid, nicknamed for her bodacious frontal projection.  We were really nasty to her most of the time, because she was clueless.  We would have her, for example, as a substitute teacher in Math, and she would begin, in a kind of weak Southern drawl, "Now Math isn't really my subject; my specialty is English, so today we're going to have a Study Hall."  Two weeks later you'd have her subbing in English class, and she'd say, "Now English isn't really my subject; my specialty is History, so today we're going to have a Study Hall."  And so it would go.  Study Halls being as boring as a classroom can be, is it any reason we acted up?

Mr. Fish, our other famous substitute, was another fish entirely:  he was a very brilliant man.  (I believe his son went to WHHS, a year or two ahead of us.)  Aside from looking weird and speaking in a weird way (as odd in its own way as Mr. Knab's manner of speaking), he could really teach if (and when) we'd settle down.  My most glowing memory of him was in German class, where we were learning about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (bust of him in Washington Park, across from Music Hall).  He told us that Goethe's most important work was Faust, and that the most important lines in Faust, which explained the whole play and its philosophy, were:  "Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen:/ Verweile doch!  du bist so schon!" (Part I, Scene IV, lines 1699-1700:  "When to the fleeting moment I say, 'Stay!  Thou are so beautiful!'") -- if Faust ever admits to having such a moment, this is the very moment at which Mephistopheles can claim Faust's soul.  Mr. Fish's teaching me this in high school served me well through college and graduate school German lit classes, as well as a graduate course in "German Romanticism"; professors were always impressed that I knew this point before we studied it (and some professors weren't clear on this point themselves).

But on the whole we treated our substitute teachers badly.

Philip Spiess

The two temporary buildings outside beyond the Gym Wing's swimming pools' south walls were sometimes called "the colonies," "the sheds," and even "the annexes," at least until the more permanent "Annex" was built off of the end of the Auditorium Wing.

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Hank, I had social studies with Mr. Klatt in the colonies in 8th grade. It was so cold.

But, of course you know the "annex" was demolished to build the Science Wing. 

Steven Levinson

Phil is correct -- during the 7th grade, at least, they were universally referred to as "the colonies."

Steven Levinson

Mary,

I agree completely with Phil that we treated Mrs. Kinkaid and Mr. Fish very badly, to say the least.  To say a bit more, we were cruel and heartless and would have been devastated and demolished emotionally had we been treated the same way.  We have classmates who were treated essentially the same way, to the eternal shame of their tormentors.

Philip Spiess

For some reason I have no particular memory of most assemblies, except for Ted Bumiller's travelogue movies (I knew his mother Betty, a "mover-and-shaker" in Clifton).  I remember Barry Bishop of the National Geographic Society (and Cincinnati) speaking about his recent trek up Mt. Everest (where he lost his toes from frostbite).  And I remember Edgar Guest, Jr., reading his father's formerly famous "comic" poetry -- which was 'way out of fashion by our time (we were gagging in the aisles).  However, our silence at the John Birch Society guy's speech may have been the silence of contempt -- we didn't even consider him worthy of a response.

Steven Levinson

Our silence might have been the silence of contempt, but I don't think it was.  I think it was the silence of the polite.  We hadn't yet learned (and the school wasn't about to teach us) that polite silence can betoken approval, which can be a bad thing indeed.

Philip Spiess

Well, yes, you're probably right; I had considered that aspect, too.  But isn't it curious at what times we were polite -- and at what times we were not? (cf., your comments and mine on our reactions to substitute teachers).

Philip Spiess

Ann:  I had 8th Grade Science with Mr. Raffel [?] in "the colonies."  I remember a lecture where he talked about the difference between deodorant and anti-perspirant.  (Of course, we were all going through puberty at the time, so armpits were one of many major bodily concerns.)  (And why is it always "bodily"?  It's not an adverb, for god's sake; it's an adjective!)  Anyway, he explained that "deodorant" deals with odor, whereas "anti-perspirant" merely deals with wetness.  But that was not what stuck with me:  he then went on to explain that if you stick a bar of soap in your armpit and leave it there long enough so that it keeps you from sweating, you will PASS OUT!  Whether this is true or not, I have never personally cared to investigate, despite some of the other idiotic things I have done in my life as a point of philosophical inquiry (such as grinding a lit cigarette out in the palm of my hand my freshman year in college on the belief that, if you do it quickly enough -- such as snuffing out a candle with your thumb and forefinger -- it won't hurt; I still have a white scar to show I was wrong).  [N.B., Dale Gieringer:  Do you remember, in the autumn of our senior year, your deciding to drive your car through a large pile of leaves on a street near (I think) Xavier University?  And that it was not just a very large pile of leaves, but that there was something underneath?] 

Jonathan Marks

Somehow "the sheds" doesn't ring a bell.  Weren't they "the shacks"?

Paul Simons

Philip Spiess

Yes, "shacks" is probably more accurate; at least that was one of the names for the two annexes behind Clifton School.  Today, at least around northern Virginia, the public schools have multiple mobile trailers in the school grounds for additional classrooms (population growth having outdistanced school building expansion).

Henry Cohen

I think they were indeed called the colonies, that rings a bell as it was mentioned in a few postings since I asked. They were probably made by the first two pigs in that famous story and if anyone tried to use them today, they would be cited for child abuse. Kinkaid was shall we say differently abled and the mental horsepower was more golfcart like than auto like. Amazing she passed the stringent screening process to become an authorized sub. Of course at the time the key criteria were probably, can find the school on own and has a body temperature of at least 98.6.