Richard Kostelanetz

REMEMBERING SCARDALE AND HIGH SCHOOL FIFTY YEARS LATER (February 2008)

Especially if we moved into critical societies, most of us alumni of Scarsdale High School learned the Scarsdale Shuffle, as I call it. When asked about where we went to high school. “In Westchester” or “in the suburbs” many of us replied before being forced to admit more exactly where. We feared that others would make assumptions about us, not only about wealth, that we thought wrong. I can’t remember when I came to answer “Scarsdale” without shuffling; perhaps it was only a decade ago.

A slightly younger friend who went thirteen years through Bronxville schools told me of being even more embarrassed about mentioning where he grew up. “Some people could go on about it for a half hour. Others would never let up.”

One reason for the shuffle is that Scarsdale has often been described as the epitome of NYC suburbs. A friend from my Manhattan elementary school recalled “girls in their penny loafers, plaid skirts, and rich, starchy white blouses.” True though his memory might be, we know Scarsdale was (and perhaps still is) more peculiar that outsiders guess. First of all, because of severe zoning restrictions, it had in our time no common social venues apart from the high school; the municipal swimming pool hadn’t yet been built. There was no hangout near the high school except perhaps the public library, which wasn’t hospitable to hanging out. A friend who went to a Brooklyn high school once asked me, “Where did you go when you played hookey?” Nowhere. Weren’t most other suburban high schools (and towns) different in this respect? The Mamaroneck high school sits on the Boston Post Road.

As the movie theaters were in remote corners of the town, they were hard for us to patronize until we obtained our drivers’ licenses. When friends talk about films they saw as teenagers, I’m reminded how culturally disadvantaged we were. The playwright Richard Foreman, who has lived across a SoHo street from me for some 33 years now, tells me that as a teenager he went to see Broadway matinees because his family, unlike mine, lived close enough to the Hartsdale train station for him to walk there on his own.

Another difference between Scarsdale and other southern Westchester suburbs is the general absence of sidewalks where we grew up. One joke, perhaps true, had it that if the local police saw anyone over eighteen or under seventy walking on the street, he or she would be stopped and asked what they were doing. Unlike those empowered to drive, we teenagers felt underprivileged, as indeed we were. Unlike teenagers who could take public transportation, we felt imprisoned imprisoned, as indeed we sort of were.

Jonathan Marder, a Manhattan culture publicist a generation younger than us, told me that since his parents were divorced, he was fortunate enough to spend his weekends in the City. Though I still don’t generally envy the children of divorced parents, forced to shuffle from one place to another on a legally enforced schedule, I now realize that Jonathan grew up with cultural advantages I lacked.

The oddest thing about extracurricular social life in Scarsdale was that it was controlled by the churches and synagogues, which offered weekend venues unavailable elsewhere. Dating a classmate outside your faith/church I recall as socially inconvenient. My father used to crack that if you didn’t belong to a church or synagogue in Scarsdale, an adult wouldn’t make any friends there. I don’t think he realized that what was true for him was also true for us. Never again and nowhere else would my (and his) social life be so limited.

When an Edgemont friend recently told me about the German-Jewish country clubs physically on his side of the railroad tracks, I replied that I didn’t know about them, probably because most of my friends descended from Jews who had, like my own father, come to America more recently from more eastern Europe. Asking my dad about them perhaps a decade ago, he replied curtly, “I didn’t play golf.”

My Bronxville friend recalls only two Jews in his classes, both the children of Bronxville teachers, several of whom were Jewish, he adds. None of them, however, resided within its square mile.

Because SHS and, indeed, Scarsdale itself lacked an indoor swimming pool in 1957, I earned my senior life-saving certificate in Ardsley! Decades later, and now somewhat wiser about the ways of the world, I wonder if this lack of common facilities venues was planned? If so, by whom? When? I heard that nothing undermined the anti-Semitism (remember?) of the Scarsdale Golf Club as the advent of the community pool in the late 1960s. Once the SGC kids preferred to patronize the larger pool, their parents felt less need to subsidize an institution that, I’m told, became predominantly Asian soon afterwards.

When my father died a few years ago, I inherited his copy of Harry Hansen’s book about Scarsdale (Harper & Bros, 1954), which was copyrighted by “The Town Club Scarsdale, N.Y.” that must have commissioned and subsidized it. Reading the book recently I noticed how few Jews are mentioned, even in the lists of supposedly prominent names that fill the book’s long appendix. (Didn’t the Town Club exclude Jews as well? Perhaps someone else remembers.) As the local synagogues were all in White Plains, they are mentioned only in the last paragraph in the discussion of churches. Nothing else Jewish is mentioned in the book. What made this blanket omission surprising to me is that my grandfather’s younger brother moved to Fox Meadow in the late 1920s (as did the gangster Bugsy Siegel, then still in his twenties). My father’s first cousins graduated from SHS in the 1930s. In 1951, three years before Hansen’s book appeared, we came to live on the other side of the same block. In sub-titling his book “From Colonial Manor to Modern Community,” did Hansen expects that Jews wouldn’t count in Scarsdale? I recall that even though publications like the NY Times and, say, The New Yorker are reluctant to expose anti-Semitism among putatively sophisticated people, several articles in the Times (when?), two even featured on its front page, told truths that could be ignored but not disputed.

Though SHS claimed a reputation among the best college preparatory schools in the country, that estimate was true only for those who passed through the highly selective honors courses. I recall that when I got to Brown U. in 1958, I could hold my own in history, in which I took Dorothy Connor’s honors course but had in everything else had to work overtime to catch up with the guys who went to Exeter, Andover, Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, and Boston Latin, among other stronger preparatory programs. John F. Cone and Walter Ehret must have been great teachers because five decades later I still love to read and write and to sing.

If anybody thinks a Scarsdale diploma advantageous in the cultural marketplace, they’re deluded. Aside from Bill Stott’s arranging for me to be a visiting professor for a semester, no one from Scarsdale ever did any professional favor for me. I can recall at least two Scarsdale fathers who didn’t publish me, even after we met. Does this lack of respect that Scarsdale people have for their own kind (and thus themselves) reflect the sentiment behind the Scarsdale Shuffle?

On the other hand, thanks to Amy Taubin, an Edgemont girl whom I first met in Scarsdale summer theater in 1955, I was persuaded in 1974 to participate in a SoHo (lower Manhattan) coop where both of us still reside.

Only two lovers since high school were SHS alums, and neither was not in our class.

When I recently heard that the Carvel Ice Cream company had closed its original store on Central Avenue (in Hartsdale), I recalled how many evenings I’d spent licking cones in a parked car, in part because I wasn’t licking anything else then, mostly because better things to do on weekend nights were so few. Looking back we can understand how in a milieu so devoid of social excitements recreational alcohol and later drugs could seem persuasively seductive.

Were any African-Americans in our graduating class? I swim with a good-looking fair-skinned black a decade younger than us who recalled coming from Queens to his SHS senior prom to escort a black girl who wouldn’t otherwise have a date. When asked recently, he didn’t recall her name or going with her, as was customary, to Jones Beach the following day.

I now suspect my mother advocated our moving to Scarsdale in 1951 to better control her kids. As my father continued to work in New York City, where he had a hotel room for spending weekday nights, he would have less presence at home. And since public transportation was so limited and infrequent in Scarsdale, we kids could travel only as far as our bicycles could take us. To limit my life even more, mother refused to sign the permission/clearance that would enable me to play football, which I enjoyed so much in junior high. Recalling the mobility available to me growing up in Manhattan, I felt imprisoned at home and, by extension, in my ‘hood.

Though pleased to see my name often included among distinguished SHS alumni, I’m disturbed not to see more artists and writers who have had distinguished careers—among them, the writer Maxwell Geismar from an earlier generation and Victoria Redel, a generation younger; Ken Gangemi, from my generation; the visual artists Alison Knowles and Nicole Eisenman. I met Geismar once, around 1973, while Knowles I’ve known for decades, initially as the wife of my closest professional colleague, the late Dick Higgins. For a while recently, the Wikipedia short list for SHS alumni included the late rapper calling himself Dirty Old Bastard, which seemed unlikely to be until SHS vanished from his Wiki entry.

I recall that I enjoyed going to school most of the time simply because SHS represented an escape from the limitations of suburban life. To this day, I resist visiting the NYC suburbs (except, of course, for our class reunions).

I came to the last year of Fox Meadow after a few years at Downtown Community School in what we later called the East Village. A self-consciously “progressive” school, it wanted everything to be agreeable, if not fun, for its students, who were deemed to be natural learners, which they probably are most of the time.

The later problem for me as a student, I now realize, was that I tended to avoid everything that wasn’t fun for me and so never learned foreign languages or went very far in science and didn’t do as well either in high school or college as my subsequent cultural records might suggest. I remember seventh grade as particularly tough. I had to work harder than before simply to keep up.

Within a decade after graduating from SHS, I was back in the East Village, just six short blocks south of my elementary school, and have resided in downtown Manhattan ever since. Just recently I wrote a preface to an anthology about the Lower East Side, characterizing it as long “The Center of the Fringe World,” which indeed it has been.

Never before Scarsdale or afterwards did I feel that so many others around me had a stronger command of their social situation(s) and thus their psyches than I did. I suspect that classmates remembering me then are surprised at what became of me in the fifty years since; rest assured, I surprised myself.

One truth we all learned is that success in school doesn’t necessarily bring success in life, not even in cultural life.

Because Brown streamed the brighter (or more ambitious) kids into honors courses that had its seminars in the afternoon (while everyone else attended lectures in the morning), most of my college classmates’ names are unfamiliar to me. Thus, I’ve never gone to a Brown reunion. By contrast, at our class reunions I remember most of the people there and then mostly fondly. The difference is not just that my class at SHS had half as many people as that at Brown or that at Brown we were together for only four years instead of our six. Rather, life within SHS was structured for us to meet nearly everyone, perhaps because there was nowhere else to go.

Here and elsewhere in my critical writings I’ve tried to go beyond what is normally said and understood, sometimes more persuasively to some than to others.