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Massapequa sits in the southeast corner of Nassau County on Long Island. The next town over, Amityville, had a significant black population, particularly in the working-class area north of the Long Island Rail Road. The man who ran everything in the Massapequa school district was a New York lawyer named Lew Ames who also owned a local real estate company called Big Chief Lewis. The Massapequa High School football team is called the Chiefs, and Lewis had an enormous version of an old cigar store Native American in front of his office. Ames, who was bald and brusque and resembled the actor William Frawley, eventually became president of the school board. My father told me that Ames had kept Massapequa a “lily-white” town by making sure that brokers never showed their listings to black families. To do so would have cost them dearly.
Ames ran the school board, and he handpicked the superintendent of schools. That superintendent was handed a list of Ames’s “enemies” who were to be sidestepped for promotion within their departments and throughout the system. My father was beloved by his students, and this resulted in an almost Billy Budd–like resentment on the part of some higher-ups. He was never offered a position as department chair, vice-principal, or principal. Those teachers who played the game and kissed Ames’s ass moved ahead. Many of them were skilled and respectable educators; others, not so much.
This political bossism came into sharper focus when I walked into my tenth grade French class and noticed that my teacher had a distinctly odd attitude toward me. My father told me that this teacher had been an organizer for Ames’s school board campaigns and had once contacted my father, trying to cajole him into finally coming around to support Ames. My dad told her where to go.
When I was a child of perhaps eleven or twelve, my father asked me a simple question in order to, hopefully, set my moral compass. My dad had attended Boys High in Brooklyn and had played football at a championship level with many black teammates. He deplored racism, which wasn’t necessarily common for a white man of his generation reared in Brooklyn. “What do you think you would do if you were black?’ he asked me. “Would you choose the route of Martin Luther King, the patient, nonviolent route? Or would you emulate Eldridge Cleaver and fight for your rights using violence, if necessary?” I recall saying something like, “I’m not sure how long I could be patient and nonviolent.” My father let out a little laugh and said, “I thought so.”
My father taught in Massapequa for twenty-eight years, spending his entire career in the classroom and with no advancement. As the provider for a large family, and one who sought to make his career in education his sole source of income, he might have played that one hand cautiously, but he was someone who let his stubborn sense of personal integrity overtake his common sense.
My childhood is divided into two parts, the line being the death of my father’s parents. Part one is up until I was ten years old, and during that time, my father seemed happy. He was always present, and we spent a lot of time together as a family. At school, my father took on many tasks. He taught classes in American history and economics. He coached football and riflery. He chaperoned dances, supervised weekend recreation programs, and served as the director of one of the school district’s summer camp programs. For him, it was one-stop shopping, a synergy between his commitment to education and community. Some years he was a Little League coach or Cub Scout master. His energy seemed inexhaustible. Other teachers, however, had second jobs to supplement their modest incomes. Some owned businesses that cleaned carpets or polished floors. Others spent the summer working construction to bring in cash. With six children at home, my mother probably hoped he would join them. However, my father received nearly all his income from a single employer, and as his friend Arnie Herman told me, he needed to be somewhere that people valued him and what he had to offer. Arnie said, “The students in your father’s classes weren’t relying on him to paint the house or pay the bills. In his classes, they simply wanted him to teach them.” Herman was right. My father’s relationship to his students defined him. They rewarded him by making him the first teacher they dedicated the school’s yearbook to while he was alive and active, a distinction normally given to one who was retired or deceased. They dedicated it to him twice.