Sam Smith - After graduating from a Philadelphia public elementary school, I joined my older brother and sister at Germantown Friends, about two miles up Schoolhouse Lane. Before I would graduate, microwave ovens, McDonald's, Crest toothpaste, Scrabble, the fax machine, Elvis Presley, James Dean, and the Mickey Mouse Club would all be introduced to America. And Rosa Parks would be jailed.
Germantown Friends was an unpretentious institution that -- unlike a number of Quaker proprietary schools in Philadelphia and elsewhere -- was actually run by a Friends meeting, the Quaker equivalent of a parish. The meeting house, in fact, was right across the parking lot from the classrooms. I never knew exactly who was in charge of the meeting but you could feel them keeping an eye on us.
And they were. It was not merely the weekly Friends meetings that I attended until graduation five years later, but an aura that affected almost every aspect of school life, the most notable exception being the school athletic song that inconsistently promised that
When the
Blue and White goes down the field,
We know the other team will always yield . . .
So it's fight, fight, fight for the Blue and the White, |
We'll win every time.
The more typical values of GFS were well described by a headmaster some 35 years after I graduated. He was, unique to the school, a Roman Catholic, but he had, like people who hang around Friends often do, acquired the Friendish predilection for mild words and phases:
Germantown Friends is a Quaker school under the care of the Germantown Monthly Meeting. Friends, of course, have no exclusive claim to those principles which inform our school, but out of Friends' faith and practice, with its belief that there is that of God in every one, flow simplicity, self-discipline, honesty, community responsibility, non-violent resolution of differences, and unreserved respect for every individual. We must constantly affirm these principles, teach them, and protect them.
The Quaker belief that there was something of God in every one, I discovered to my pleasure, included me and influenced my classmates. To be sure, I would to the day of graduation remain an oddity; my social life, for example, highly restricted due to my parents' refusal to let me drive with anyone not yet in college. But during most of the day I felt normal, and on the weekends I could contrive to slip out of parties unnoticed, with no one but myself knowing the embarrassment of being picked up by one's parents, leaving my peers only the memory of a nonchalant, wise-cracking boy who could, with just his tongue, flip the butt of a lighted cigarette completely inside his mouth without burning himself.
I even gained admittance to a gang. The Society of Cruds was meant to be a secret organization. We had a secret tattoo, blue ball point pen dots on the inside of our wrists, but we blew our cover almost daily by our boisterous behavior and the only possible secret we could have kept was that there was any organization whatsoever behind our anarchistic ways.
The core of the Society of Cruds consisted of some of the worst students in the class. The honor of their acceptance was heightened by the fact that I was one of the best. I enjoyed the perplexity my choice of companions caused my teachers, they little realizing the pleasure I found in no longer having to be a good boy all the time.
We did not torment nor did we vandalize. We were, however, of unmitigated high spirits. The brief era of the SOCs reached its epitome in 8th grade. Last period Friday was a study hall period with a teacher disinterested in taking attendance. Once we discovered this, we simply excused ourselves for the rest of the year and headed for the nearby movie house. There the smallest amongst us would buy a ticket at half price, enter the nearly empty theatre and open an exit door for his companions. Approximately halfway through the movie, with the manager safely off watch, several of us would proceed to the lobby, scoop unguarded popcorn into our baseball hats and return to share the salty trove.
It was not until the last period of the last Friday of the year that the plan failed. Ed Gordon, an English teacher, had taken over the study hall and noted the absent students. For some reason, we had cancelled our normal field trip and were wandering aimlessly through the school when Mr. Gordon found each and every one of us, to our considerable detriment.
The pleasures I enjoyed in eighth grade did not pass unnoticed by other teachers as well. My report card found me "irregular" in science, "disappointingly casual" in Latin (which by April had deteriorated to "a serious state of affairs") and "careless" in math. The card offered space for parental comments and my mother willingly contributed, "We feel that being casual and irregular is his besetting sin and hope we can work together to correct it." Perhaps to avoid any more such discussions, my subsequent report cards improved.
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