Mendel Letters 106 — A Lane Student Remembers
NOTE: This letter from a student of Mendel’s son was found attached to the pile of letters. It included three handwritten notes. “Thanks Charlie, Mendel showed me your letter.” “I selected the AP text to introduce different views to the class and because I like playing off the text.” “The principal Charlie remembers left before I arrived.”
December 3, 2022
Dear Mendel,
I was a student at Lane High School between 1980 and 1984 and had the privilege of being taught by your son in 1984, my senior year. He was relatively new to the school but we were impressed by this earnest young teacher with a PhD from Rutgers and his desire to fill our brains with more liberal ideas than were typically taught. Although the teaching staff at Lane was probably mostly comprised of folks who had never voted for a Republican their entire lives, your son was still further to their left. These were union members and many of them went into teaching to avoid the Vietnam War, because if they were in a university getting a masters degree in teaching, they could defer their draft status until graduation.
Your son spoke to us about his dislike of the war, few folks in 1984 had a favorable view of that foreign entanglement, and how he would have handled the situation if drafted. He told us he would have served, versus fleeing to Canada. He said he would have been as outspoken as possible within his unit that the war was inhuman, unjust and simply bad foreign policy. A few years later I would take a class at Cornell with George Kahin, a Southeast Asian expert, whose book, Intervention, thoroughly outlines all the mistakes the United States made in the years before and during the war. One unpredictable outcome for the Lane High School faculty in 1984 was that a large number of these highly qualified teachers would have likely chosen another profession if the French had not lost at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
As a bright eyed 14-year old entering Lane, it was a most unique place. The building was immense and in fact, everything about the school seemed large. The gym had an enormous balcony for spectators (the only time in four years this was used was for a professional wresting event including Jimmy “Super Fly” Snuka), the auditorium seemed like it could fit at least a thousand people and it was about 1/4 mile round one floor. The school drew from quite a large number of communities including Ridgewood, Glendale and Woodhaven. These were mostly white, middle class neighborhoods. The enrollment zone also included Cypress Hills and East New York, neighborhoods whose residents were people of color and generally low income. My father had grown up in East New York and attended Thomas Jefferson in the late 30’s and early 40’s before serving in World War II. While there was tension between the mostly Italian and Jewish kids in his neighborhood off of Pitkin Avenue, he and his friends had fond memories of their childhoods. That said, his friends all moved out of the neighborhood and moved to places like the Long Island suburbs. We only made it as far as Woodhaven.
Since I was a very good student at P.S. 210, a 2,000 student two-year middle school in Ozone Park, I was placed into almost all honors classes at Lane. These classes were generally well taught by very good teachers, who appeared to care deeply about their students. My fellow honor class students were generally from the more affluent neighborhoods, but there were students also from less advantaged parts of the school zone. For instance, the valedictorian from my senior class was a Spanish girl (we didn’t have Latinx yet in 1984) who lived near the Crescent Street J subway line and ended up attending Columbia. She was smart, vivacious and hard working. She did not participate in many after school activities because she worked at least 20 hours per week after school at a cashier at a local grocery store. Her lack of involvement was a source of consternation among my friends because we wanted her in our school plays, on the yearbook staff and in our student government. At the time, we didn’t fully appreciate her family’s likely reliance on some of her wages.
My freshman class started with 1,500 students and by the time of graduation, virtually half had dropped out. The school at this time was probably 1/3 Hispanic, 1/3 Black and 1/3 white and while there was the expected tension between the groups, the kids generally got along well enough. A bigger concern was the Rock versus Disco controversy, which was generally along racial lines but were all blurred after Eddie Van Halen played a guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s Beat It single. Along the way, we had a school shooting over a botched robbery, but unlike today’s common mass shootings, nobody died and things were back to normal pretty quickly. Even prior to the shooting, students did have to move through metal detectors upon their arrival to school in the morning and were told to leave their guns, knives and babies at home.
The economic differences, while not completely apparent at time, clearly had a large impact on the education received by the students. 100 of the 1,000 of so kids in each class were in the honors classes and the rest were in general education. The general education classes ranged from good to awful. When I would take general ed classes like music or art, they could be very chaotic, with very little teaching and learning occurring. The teachers who taught English, science and math to the large student body, did a better job. These were tough situations because the students in many cases came from very low-income families, many were single parent households and few provided the support system that my own two boys get in our upper class family. I drive my 8th and 9th grade kids to their private school, they both get in- home music lessons, have all the quiet space in our home to get their homework complete, have two parents to help guide their lives and get to enjoy nice vacations during the summer. Most of the students at Lane came from working class families or worse and likely had suffered from some form of child traumatic stress.
It was against this background that your son was likely pushing the administration at Lane High School to do more for these students. Given the challenges of the student body, I am not sure how much the Principal could have done to allocate resources differently at Lane. If they moved resources away from the 10% of the honors students, you likely would have lost many of these kids to private schools, mostly catholic. In fact, the catholic school strike in the fall of 1980, did results in a large number of kids from Glendale and Ridgewood deciding to stay at Lane. Many of these students were actively involved in after school activities and clubs. The after-school activities afforded to me and my peers at Lane were far better than what my kids are getting at their very exclusive and expensive private school. Furthermore, the advisors who worked on all these after-school programs were remarkably devoted and gave countless hours to their students.
Even your son showed up an hour early to school two days per week my senior year to help a group of us study for the advanced placement history exam.
In general, I think during the time that your son was at Lane, the school was providing above average outcomes for their students given all the issues faced by the institution. It wasn’t just the kids from East New York that were in need of extra help. One science teacher was writing the parents of a child from Howard Beach that their son was not doing his homework and two guys met him after school and told him no more letters — or else. The student received straight A’s moving forward. I heard this story directly from the teacher. This was before that scene in Goodfellas when they told the postman to stop delivering bad letters from the school to the family of an aspiring gangster or else he would be put into a pizza oven. Please note, John Gotti attended Lane for a few years before dropping out.
During this time, your son was carefully teaching us about the plight of coal miners in West Virginia, singing us songs about the hard work on the Erie Canal and forcing us to think about all things American. He loved America, but saw the potential to cure injustice and create more opportunities for all its citizens. These were valuable lessons because many of the students in my classes came from conservative middle class families, similar to those portrayed in the sitcom — All in the Family. The house pictured in the opening credits of Archie Bunker’s residence was only 2.5 miles away from Lane, just off Woodhaven Boulevard.
The head of the social studies department, was a great teacher and taught my class economics in 10th grade. He wanted to make sure your son was not unduly influencing the students so he picked a American studies textbook that provided a more conservative view of U.S. history, to counterbalance the threat of leftist views. The school teaching staff was such a variety of incredibly gifted folks and simply average instructors. As a impressionable teenager, the school seems full of excellent teachers who really did care about their students. I think if you had taken these teachers and placed them into a private school of smart and wealthy parents, the school would have been terrific. In fact, the principal at Lane when I arrived was a fierce disciplinarian who stalked the hallways with a clipboard and strong determination to keep the school safe and clean. While there were people who did not agree with his authoritarian style, his law and order approach did provide for a strong structure and quite efficient operation. He later left Lane and became principal of Stuyvesant High School. I understand from friends that attended Stuyvesant he was a beloved principal. I am sure it was not due to a law and order type persona among the very smartest and most gifted students in New York City. Had my parents known about the benefits of test prep, I would have gotten into Stuyvesant since I missed the cut off by only a few points on the test but then I would have lost out on the entire Lane experience. But if I didn’t attend Lane, the experience for my other classmates would not have been as good either. I don’t say that out of conceit but the experience of learning in school is based upon your peers and just as my experience would not have been as good at Lane without guys like my friends Frank or Alex, there are folks who I would like to think I enhanced as well — at least I would like to think that is true.
So Mendel, you gifted and talented son got bounced around a public school system that should have embraced him and never let him leave. He ends up fighting hard to work in high schools that are struggling with the exact issues that have filled his conscience since he was a young man. Those struggles include inequity, racism, fairness, political awareness and truly understanding the history of our country.
For example, American businesses wanted the Irish and the Germans in 1840 but many of the people already living in the country wanted nothing to do with these beer loving, sausage and corned beef eating folks who were different from their Pilgrim forefathers. Few Americans wanted the Jews or Italians of Europe in 1900. The country, once again led by the business community’s drive for cheap labor, pushed for open immigration at the turn of the 20th Century. We seem to be fighting the same immigration fight today with the plight of Central American peasants hoping to come to this country for a better life.
Your son has been thinking and teaching about these issues for the past 40 years. He has been working his entire life to make the promise of this country live up to its true potential. It doesn’t mean he is always right, but his intentions are always true. If he is wrong occasionally, it is not because he was given money by a lobbyist or paid by a corporation to take those views. His vision for this country is to make it a more perfect union for all those who live here and call it home. His vision is not of America, love it or leave it. It is of a country that has great promise, but needs to work harder each day to make the United States a land of opportunity and promise for all, not just the top 1% or other special interests.
Franklin K. Lane High School was a land of great contradictions in 1982. It was located in a working class section of New York. If had a combination of some excellent students and many other students who would struggle just to get a high school degree. These issues were not created by the school administration and while they could have some influence on outcomes, many of these students were fighting against strong odds for success. Lane was on the front line for many of the issues in our society. In the year since, the school has fallen in quality from that mid 1980’s period, the school’s performance has suffered and has struggled mightily to perform at even the most minimal standards. Your son’sfight continues and the country continues to struggle with many of the issues confronted by Lane during his employment. The school was a better place because he challenged students to question their beliefs.
Thanks,
Charlie
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
