Rant #2,388: Bad

I am a good guy, a nice guy, someone who is a pleasant person and a decent human being.

I think I have always been like this, and it has to do with my upbringing, and when you know people who are like me, it really always has to do with their upbringing, and how their mother and father raised them during their formative years.

That is why I looked back with a smile at a Facebook post from yesterday, even though at the time, the situation I was involved in wasn't funny at all.

The question was this: "When you were in school, were you ever sent to the principal's office?"

I really had to chuckle at this, because I have what I think is a great story about myself and a group of about four or five others, who got sent to the dean of boys office and were punished for something we did not do.

This all goes back to my own formative years growing up in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, certainly one of the most incredible places that a kid ever grew up in.

It was a new development right in the heart of one of the longest-running and most famous black communities in the U.S.A., and this was a mixed race development that really set the tone for any kid who grew up there.

We may disagree on many things, but we can't disagree that this place was not only an astonishing place to grow up, but it still resonates in just about everything we do more than 50 years after the fact.

Anyway, myself and my partners in pulchritude must have been about 12 or 13 years old, so I suspect we were in seventh grade back in 1970, when this incident happened.

Among other calamities impacting our education at I.S. 72--an incredibly complex powder keg of supposed education and lots of other violent and non-violent events that took place during that very volatile period in New York City's history that incredibly, still stands today under a different name--was that we were being randomly stuck with pins, without any provocation, and without any sense or reason.

Everyone knew who was doing it--I still do, but won't mention the person's name--but it had gotten to the point that the pin pricks were starting to rile many of us, and the school, which clearly knew about what was going on, was doing absolutely nothing to stop it, including not suspending the kid who was actually doing the pin pricking.

So one day in the lunch room, the guys that I sat with for lunch were eating away, and in comes the perpetrator--he was not "alleged," he was obviously the one doing it--and he proceeded to pin prick a number of people, including one of the guys I ate lunch with.

This particular pin prick was in clear sight of the teachers manning the lunch room that day, yet they stood still and turned their eyes the other way.

When my friend was attacked--and that was what it was, it was an attack--the female teacher standing about five feet away from us literally turned her head when this went on. We questioned her, and she said that she saw nothing (like Sgt. Schultz from "Hogan's Heroes") and if we wanted to complain, she would write us a pass to complain to the dean of boys.

We were outraged at this point, and about four or five of us took her up on her offer, and we preceded up to the dean of boys' office.

What we didn't know is that also supposedly preceding up to the same dean of boys office was a group of four or five boys who were causing a commotion unrelated to the one we were complaining about in another part of the school.

Well, they never got to their supposed destination, but we did. We went into the dean of boys' office, and while he was not there, his secretary or an assistant or whatever she was was there.

What was odd is that she seemed to be waiting for us, specifically for us.

When we got into the office, we tried to plead our case, but she would have none of it. I was standing by the dean's deak, and I saw a note that I read upside down on the desk, which clearly pointed out "five mulatto boys." This was a note alerting the dean that these boys would be coming to his office for disciplinary reasons, but for some reason, the woman evidently mixed us up with the "five mulatto boys," and thought that we were the ones who needed to be disciplined!

I don't remember the exact racial makeup of the four or five of us who went to the office that day, but a few of us were white, we might have had one Puerto Rican and one black fellow with us--that I don't remember exactly--but we were certainly not "five mulatto boys."

The woman would hear none of it despite our protestations that she had the wrong five boys. I even said to her to read the note on the desk--which was probably called into the office so they knew who was about to come there--but she would not listen.

She herded us in to to or three rooms that were part of the office, none bigger than a small single serve bathroom. The rooms were pitch black, and light could only be controlled from the outside of the room. There was a window high up in the room, probably eight to 10 feet off the ground.

She herded us in there, with no light at all, and not only shut the door, but locked it. We were caged like zoo animals, and even though we banged on the door and yelled that we were the wrong guys, she did not listen.

These were discipline rooms, plain and simple, and they resembled jail cells, but without a toilet and without bars.

I don't exactly know what happened, but after about 20 minutes in these rooms--and cutting into our next supposed period of education after lunch--we were let out of the rooms with no explanation at all. We were given passes, and told to go to our next class.

No explanation, no apology, no nothing.

I was so young then that it made an impression on me, even to this day, to be locked up like that because of a case of mistaken identity and nothing more.

Nothing happened after that, but in today's world, if something like that happened, you can bet that it would be all over social media, the woman would have been suspended, and more to the point, the pin pricker would have been at the very least removed from the school and all of us who were pricked would have been tested for everything including AIDS.

But back then, nothing happened, nothing was done, it was almost seemingly just another day at I.S. 72.

So as you can imagine, when I saw that question on Facebook, my smile may haver masked the fact that I was probably gnashing my teeth at the same time.

That was not a memory I really cherish, but it was just one of a load of unpleasant memories from that school.

If you wanted a definition of what anarchy can do to destroy a perfectly good school, staffed with dedicated teachers and filled with a cadre of kids who wanted to learn and progress with their education, I.S. 72 back then would have been a great place to start to understand what was happening in the city schools during this period.

And that incident, in my mind, was the real beginning of the end, for me at least, in the potential of this school and what it actually delivered to its students, or at least the ones who wanted to learn and be educated.

Nearly 50 years later, I still look at it as a shame, a real shame.