I WAS BORN IN A SMALL TOWN
That’s where I got to know my first memorable mayor.
‘Beany’ Pealer was the first mayor I noticed. It was in the early
1960s, in my small hometown, in a rural county somewhere southwest of the
Finger Lakes. I was a young teenager who liked to hang around our
one-block-long Main Street, going in and out of the stores, buying gum or candy,
and baseball cards, or something from the little bakery run by a family of bright-orange-haired
Fitzpatricks, looking at sports magazines and the paperback book racks, and at all
sorts of stuff, giggling with my buddies, sometimes being asked to leave the
stores. I wasn’t old enough then to hang in the pool hall, which is what I
wanted to do. Of course. That’s where the cool older guys hung out. Smoking. Drinking
pop. Playing the juke box. Talking about girls. Swearing in loud inventive ways
at each other. ‘Beany’ Pealer ran the pool hall. There was a shoeshine chair in
the front of the place by the window. The 60-year-old mayor of the town would
shine your shoes for you for a dollar.
Right after college I moved to Cleveland where I’d found a
job teaching English and Reading to 6th graders in an ‘inner-city’
school. I was married with a month-old daughter, and I needed a deferment from
the draft. Teaching school got you out of going to Vietnam. (One of the kids
who used to hang around Main Street with us, didn’t get a deferment, and he was
killed in the war. For years, when I‘d go back to the little town, a small
military flag memorializing his death in the jungle hung in his family’s front
window.)
It was 1969 when I got to Cleveland, and handsome Carl
Stokes was the mayor. He was America’s first black mayor of a major city.
Teaching in the inner-city, having historic Carl Stokes as the mayor, made
Cleveland seem like part of The Movement to me. Some years later Dennis
Kucinich became the mayor of Cleveland. He was little, but that was big. Movement-like,
again. The whole country watched him take on bullying utilities and bankers. I reconnected
with him for a minute in New Hampshire maybe 10 years ago when I happened to be
there visiting a favorite cousin from my old hometown during the primary when Dennis
was running for president. I saw him in a crowd of TV cameras and lights, his
big familiar teeth whiter than they’d been in Cleveland. We hugged hello and chatted
for a few minutes, each professing to the other that seeing each other had made
our day.
So, I don’t know how much a character this new mayor here is
supposed to seem to me. I mean, after ‘Beany’ Pealer and Carl Stokes and little
Dennis.
De Blasio’s not a rambling, inventive, radical talker like
Norman Mailer was when he ran for mayor, but I suppose after Mike Bloomberg
they have to position him as a real progressive, and even as a radical. He doesn’t look like one. To me, he looks too
much like the old basketball coach, Digger Phelps, to be a radical. But we’ll
see. I like that he is letting the newsstand guy stay at Astor Place. I like
that I heard he wants the cars and trucks and buses to slow down. It’s beyond insane
that they barrel through the city streets and through red lights with impunity.
It’s a sin that the city lets it go on.
Like it’s a sin that it allows its schools to keep passing
on students who can’t read well.
Here’s something I read recently and posted on Facebook:
IN A CNN STORY llast week, Willingham said her research of 183
football or basketball players at the University of North Carolina from 2004 to
2012 found 60 percent reading at fourth-to eighth-grade levels and roughly 10
percent below a third-grade level. She said she worked with one men's
basketball player early in her 10-year tenure who couldn't read or write.
The University of North Carolina, in my mind, is one of the
good public universities. Like Wisconsin maybe, or the University of Virginia.
Or just a cut below. Anyway, you’d think that any student there, jock or not,
would read better than that research showed. And I’m not naive. I know a lot of
jocks get a break. I know they have tutors and they all study together and they
have advisors that know easy courses and easy professors. But how, with only
grade school proficiency, can they even read the simplest text books or
handouts or short stories in English class? How can they really function as
college students?
I’d ask the new mayor if he has any plan to make it so no
high school grads from the public schools here read that poorly. He hasn’t made
any statement about reading at all. Neither has his new Chancellor. I’ve read
about cutting back on testing and I’ve read about limiting some things charter
schools do now. I’ve read about taxes to get money for city-wide pre-K. But
really nothing about reading. At all.
A few people who walk by my sign have made comments to me
that maybe now things will improve. They mean, I assume, that de Blasio will
start to implement what my sign suggests; WHY NOT TEACH EVERY SCHOOL KID TO
READ WELL. I don’t respond, other than with a little smile and with my eyes raised
in a way that says I hope so. I try not to look cynical.
Sometimes I’d go in the pool hall with a buddy of mine who
was older. He was Beany’s kid. The guys that hung out in the pool hall were all
characters. They were funny. One guy was known as Publius. He called himself
that. He must have taken a little Latin in school. Another guy was called, of
all things, ‘the mayor’. He was from a tiny little clump of houses outside of
town. His parents ran the gas station-with-a-little-store along the highway. I
guess that’s why he was called the mayor. He was a very good pool player. I can
still see his three fingers rhythmically moving under the front of the cue as
he got ready to softly strike his shot.
These guys were not doing much homework or on the debate team
or on the yearbook staff at the high school. They were thinking about cars. Or
Elvis. Or girls. Or beer. Some had rubbers in their wallets. But they could read.
They read car mags and sports magazines and skin magazines. There were music
magazines then, with lyrics to the latest tunes. They probably read those. Even
though they weren’t going to go on to college, they could read better than
those kids who couldn’t read much at all at the University of North Carolina.
New York City is very different from that part of the state.
It has things those of us on Main Street couldn’t have even imagined;
sophisticated, artful things, and unspeakably impoverished things. It’s a big
place to be the mayor of. One thing the new mayor talks about is narrowing the
gap between the rich and the poor here. I’ve got a sign with a message that
could tell him where to start.
