My Death as a Public High School Teacher: Part III……Molly Ivins Comes to Town

Some time in 1970 ‘research’ articles began to appear on the front pages of the Minneapolis Tribune, the city’s morning paper.    They were titled:   “THINK YOUNG”.   The name attached to them was a local reporter new-name, Molly Ivins.

She had been given permission by the City’s School Administration to interview students at West Senior High School, a venerated old building in the city’s wealthy Lake of the Isles area called Kenwood…..a rich but dogmatically Liberal area whether Democrat or Republican.   My wife and I lived there as an economic exception.   The Superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools lived there also,  barely a block from our house.   He had bought his home from U.S. Senator Walter Mondale.   (We  afforded the neighborhood  from savings we had collected over the years, and  because we bought  before house values in Kenwood began to sky rocket…..as our luck would have it.   Our first born arrived late 1965.)

Sometime later that year Mr. M who in 1967  was made principal at  Edison High School where I taught,  by now  in my sixth year,  sent out a notice to all teachers of social studies, about ten of us in all.    He notified us that the assistant Superintendent of Schools, Mr. V,   who preceded Mr M as Edison’s principal,  directed Mr.M to make our senior social studies classes open to interviews by (the same)  Molly Ivins of the Minneapolis Tribune for her front page column, “THINK YOUNG”.    The students were to be selected by Ms. Ivins  at random from a list of  names of students assigned to our classses.

I was a regular subscriber to the Tribune in those days.   I had read every one of Ms. Ivins “Think Young” columns on its front pages.    Each and every column  included a statistical ‘result’ of the  17 year olds’  sexual habits based on her interviews held in some dark schoolroom far  away from parental scrutiny but  authorized by the city;’s public school administration.   Leading lefties of the day, especially those   rioting at the University of Minnesota  joined the drugged and vulgars opposing    the Vietnam War business,  all gave raving reviews for Molly Ivins’  ‘innovative’ work.

The Minneapolis Tribune seeking modernity, basked in the newly found  light beaming  from  these Leftwing war protests  and the  venom  spewing  from its  femininazi fanatics.    

In other pages of this same Minneapolis Tribune were full page  articles covering  a noted female of college fame who demanded  the music composed by Ludwig von Beethoven  be banned from the public ear  because its rhythms and beats were a sexual assault upon women.   His music, in this feminazi’s words, was  raping her.   

I also knew the name Molly Ivins from these  antiwar rioters.     She was as ugly and vulgar as ugly and vulgar could be even by the standards of the feminist movement era.   I added that  along with her Tribune  prurience in teenage sex.    If  I wouldn’t have allowed a Church figure  to conduct such interviews during my students’ class time, why would I allow this Ivins  to see them in isolation?      And, they were indeed my students during the hours  students were assigned to me to teach or otherwise be responsible for.

I had learned tenacity as a teacher at Edison by then.    I had been elected by my fellow teachers, ‘Charirman of the Faculty Council’.    Since my arrival at  the school I had nagged my fellow teachers  that they were serfs in the world of education, and didn’t deserve even the thin pay that they were getting.   They were professional cowards, I taunted.   Big on the noise when no administrator was in sight, but melted into childlike obedience  when one approached  nearby.

It was in this same year, 1970 when the Minneapolis teachers broke Minnesota state law and went out on strike.    I became a speaker and writer of letters defending the action.    I was never more proud of my fellow teachers, both male and female.  

During this time I got a call from the city’s evening paper’s prep sports reporter, Joe Kaplan.    The official School Board and Administration Line during and before the strike  was that the Minneapolis Schools were the equal of any and all public schools in the area in facilities and educational offerings.     This was an absolute lie, and Joe Kaplan knew it .    Since I coached the boys’ tennis team, he asked me about our tennis budget and how it compared to the suburban high schools  around  Minneapolis.    I happened to have the figures at hand.  I was at the time vice present of the State High School Tennis Coaches Association.    Our budget at Edison was still at $90 for the entire tennis season.     Nearly all of the schools in the suburbs started at  $2,000 and some went up from there.   Furthermore, they owned their own tennis courts.   City schools had none but could use the public city courts for an hour or two  after school hours.

Joe cited my comments in  his column in the next day’s issue.   He wrote it as I told him accurately and sympathetically.   Later in the evening I got a call at home  from Mr. V, the principal of Edison High School during my first three years, the guy who approved  my tenure.    “Did you read this evening’s Joe Kaplan article?……Did he report what you said to him accurately?”    He may have asked yet another question or two along similar lines….I answered yes to each question and added that  I thought Joe wrote a terrific article….which he did, but I think  I said it to irritate  Mr. V.   It is what he said next that turned out to be important:

“I am going to get you.   Some day I’m going to really  get you and don’t you forget it.!”

I passed it off as management-labor tensions during a very emotional  strike, an illegal one to boot.    It was Easter vacation time plus two weeks or so on the picket lines…..and in the speech halls, if I remember correctely.    Compromise was made and we teachers  went back to school officially without tenure,  but in agreement between  the Teachers’ Union and the Minneapolis School District, everyone’s tenure would be honored…….

Well, everyone’s tenure but for  one teacher…..guess who got the ‘honor’?

I cannot remember if the Molly Ivins issue came before or after the strike, but I am thinking it followed the strike.   One was not connected in any way with the other as far as I knew.   

  I wasn’t angry when I entered Mr. M’s office. to inform him I wasn’t going to release anyone in my class for the Ivins’ interviews.     He said he was expecting me to protest   the previous week and wondered what delayed me.   His question flowed smoothly into  my answer, “Because I have no intention to allow any  students out of my class to visit with Ms. Ivins.

Mr. M paled.   His head dropped onto his hands.   “You can’t do that, Glenn.”

“Oh, yes I can.       I wouldn’t let a clergyman take kids willy-nilly  from my  classroom  for private interviews.     

What do you think you’re going to look like to the parents when they read that  you allowed your   students to be interviewed in your school by this foul mouthed frump  cozying  up to their sons and daughters to get them to describe how and with whom they have sex?    How dare ‘they’ dump this on us! (I was referring to the downtown administration brass.)    Don’t you even think  of asking me to join in.   I am not going to  have my students  participate.”  

“I have no choice.!”  this good man exclaimed…..and this principal was such a good guy.   I  often felt bad being an adversary of his, but not this time.  He wasn’t a real confident Principal  with these, his ’superiors’.     He craved for peace at his school at a time when peace in schools was becoming  impossible.

“How do the other social studies teachers feel about  the  Ivins’  interviews?    

“None of them like it, but they won’t object.   

“How many student  hours altogether are  the interviews  supposed to take?”

“Each interview is to run about a half an hour.   Ivins  wants  eight to ten  students picked at random from each senior social studies class.”    That meant about twenty five hours minimum  of student time   would be taken from my classroom.    And here is what   I advised and did so  forcefully:

“Here is what you say to those people:  ‘I’m getting a little static from some of my social studies teachers on the Ivins’ interviews.   You’re going to have to give me more time to persuade them.”  

And then one of those far too infrequent moments in life when one  actually does come up with a  verbal  ‘coup de grace’ when needed, I said, “Tell the administration  that we teachers will have  to get parental permission first.   Sex is such a delicate, personal topic for an interview with a stranger!”    And I truly meant it as a threat.

It was the avenue out of the issue.   It  made Mr. M’s day as well as my own.  We knew we had a  winner.    By the next day the downtown  ’authorities’  told Mr. M, they would delay the interviews.    About a week later, he received  an incidental notice that the interviews had been cancelled.   No reason was given.   He always gave me the idea he liked  me being around.   I felt I was helping him as a colleague.     Schools would be better places for learning  if teachers weren’t treated  like serfs.  Unlike Mr. V.,  Mr. M never treated me like a serf.

The following is an article written by Dave Mona, once a Tribune colleague of Molly Ivins written in 2007 shortly after her death:

“Molly Ivins Teaches Us New Words                       

     She was totally unlike any new hire in recent memory. When The Minneapolis Tribune hired someone from “outside the market,” it was a good bet they were talking about Fargo, Des Moines or Madison.

     Molly was from Texas and you couldn’t miss her.   

     She was loud. She didn’t sound like anyone else in the newsroom and she was tall. If she were a basketball player, which legend said she was, she would have been a power forward.   

     Molly taught us all how to swear.     

     She was good at it, and she knew words we’d never heard before.   

     It was difficult for Molly to complete a sentence without swearing. Her favorite word was “sumbitch,” which we learned could be either good or bad. For instance: “That dumb sumbitch was so stupid he could dive off the dock and not find water.” Or, “…you had to admire the way that sumbitch could put words together.”           

     For much of her brief tenure with The Tribune, she was assigned to the police beat. They clearly didn’t know what to make of her, but legend had it that they named a pet pig “Molly” in her honor.           

     There was little factual support for stories about Molly. She became a bit of an instant legend.            

     Stu Baird, the genial City Editor, once claimed that he had gotten a complaint from the police that her language was too salty. He never offered any proof, but there was little reason to doubt it.           

     After graduating from Smith College, getting a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University and spending a year in France, she joined the Tribune in the fall of the year, arriving from Texas without an overcoat.           

     A few weeks later she entered the newsroom in a floor-length reddish orange maxi coat which nicely matched her red hair. As she walked slowly through the newsroom, Frank Premack shouted, “My, God, it looks like a bad paint job on the Foshay Tower!”           

     Molly’s response to one of the most senior members of the newsroom staff was that he perform an impossible anatomical feat upon himself.           

     There were a lot of rumors about Molly. She once admitted to shoving Linda Johnson (the President’s daughter) into a lake at summer camp.           

     When Molly left the Tribune she wrote a magazine article called “The Minneapolis Tribune Is a Stone Wall Drag.” It chronicled her three years at the paper and the reasons so many people left. Today, many of us still have copies of that story, and we were saddened in January 2007 to learn of her death at age 62 from an aggressive form of breast cancer.           

     Her columns were carried in more than 400 newspapers, and her numerous obituaries carried a number of her better quotes.           

     She loved to attack Texas politicians and once wrote of one, “If his IQ slips any lower we’ll have to water him twice a day.”           

     While covering emerging politicians in Texas she began to refer to President George W. Bush alternately as “Shrub” or “Dubya.” Upon his election as President she referred to him as President Billy Bob Forehead. 

     To Ivins, Arnold Schwarzenegger was “a condom filled with walnuts.”           

     Writing about Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair, she referred to his character as “weaker than bus station chili.”           

     Molly was one of the great characters to grace this region, and she left us far too soon.” 

My Death as a Public School Teacher, Part II Thomas A. Edison Senior High School

When I signed up to  teach at Minneapolis  Edison Senior High School in 1964, I expected to succeed as a teacher, and if I liked the  community, both within and outside of school, I expected to spend my entire professional life there…..as a teacher.   I admit that I had a degree or two of contempt for school administrators.   Nearly all were ‘yes’ men, pleasant guys, many of them had coached a major sport or taught manual trades.   Becoming a  school assistant principal was a first step to receiving higher school pay for ones work.   Greater prestige in the community went with higher pay.   

However,  teaching is an art form upon which a society’s cultural health  depends.   In the ideal it’s an art for the human soul as inspiringly  powerful as the art of Michelangelo is to the eye and mind.   Teachers shouldn’t  arrive ‘two for a penny’ at the doors of the American public school.    Every professional school administrator or classroom instructor,  directly involved with the school’s upgrade of knowledge should be required to exercise teaching that knowledge in a  classroom every year of their professional teaching lives.   

My first three years at this Nordeast school was  probation time.   My future was in the hands of a Mr. V, a  proud, bright, determined, no nonsense guy who saw things crisply and agreed or disagreed crisply but with  temper and revenge against those with whom he strongly disagreed.    He deeply believed in administrative authority.   He had no time for humor.   This man was  often arrogant, but tried hard  to control his negatives.   He was devoted to people who agreed with him and was certain that his very presence  would do the trick to get everyone on his side.   Women teachers adored him.

Mr. V was elevated to the School Administration’s Central Office my last year on probation.   He soon became an assistant superintendent of schools.    He had visited my classes, endured some rough edges I had caused him which, in my view, damaged him as an administrator despite his strengths, and I told him so.   Most of my complaints, all valid, had to do with my coaching the boys’ tennis team, a responsibility he gave me my very first year at the school.

I took that challenge seriously, too.     Our tennis budget was $90 for the entire  ten week season.    The team  had to buy their own tennis rackets, nets,  balls, pay for their own travel to and from whereever they competed.   From the administrations’ view, I was supposed to (for $100)  be a chaperone for an hour and a half after the school day  during tennis playing sesason.   Edison was a worker’s neighborhood.   No one played tennis at Edison, even though an acquaintance of mine, a future tennis mentor at the University of Minnesota,  a few years before I arrived at the school,  had coached the Edison boys to their first and only city championship in tennis up to that time in school’s fifty years or so of  history.  

Mr. V didn’t know about it or care about it.    He named me to keep tennis out of his hair.  

Since funds for the team were a fraud, the guys at my request  decided to do Saturday clean up work around Nordeast and the team got a job at Sentyrz Food and Liquor Mart on Marshall Street, cleaning up its neighborhood empty lots.    We made enough money on weekends to buy team jackets, a little travel money for gas,  a dozen or two cans of tennis balls, our own team tennis net, and most of all enjoyed being together  working for a common cause.   

Complaints came to Mr. V’s office from the city’s dead-beat  and competitive coaches alike,  asking Mr. V, the principal  where he got the money and how dare his school have  such physcial and  psychological advantages from wearing a uniform jacket to matches and worse, playing with brand new tennis balls in warm ups to games.    Mr. V got complaints from the School District’s Athletic Director as well.    Mr. V called me into his office.  He was a very unhappy and angry man.

He asked where the team got the money to buy the jackets and equipment, seething all the way.  

I asked why he needed to know.  

That blew his mind….He gave me his ‘power read’  that he was the boss  man and could dump me if he wanted to.    I remember I became nervous and angry at the same time and to the same degree.   I told him we didn’t steal it…….hesitated before I confessed,  ”The kids earned it  working a few Saturdays together.”   

Mr. V wouldn’t have dared to ask such questions of  the school’s  thirty-year head football coach of that day, Mr. G.   Mr. G might have hit him after ten or twenty curse words.   Mr. V fully understood Mr. G’s long established  presence at the school.    I hadn’t made my own mark yet and knew how vulnerable I was to his command.    He made me promise I would never ‘pull such a trick” again.   

I have forgotten whether or not I kept the promise, but no matter,   a couple of years later Mr. V was elevated to the School District head office.    He caused trouble for me later in my career, however.

Most of the women on the staff at Edison were mothers and still married.   They, as  I, were driven to teach.  Spanish, English, Chemistry,  General Algebra, Home Making.   They caused no trouble and expected menfolk to control the environment outside of their classrooms.

The men obliged.    On one occasion while I was sitting in the teachers’ lounge reading the morning newspaper, a commotion occurred in the classroom next door, room 114.   It was home grounds to a middle aged bachelor teacher, who was incestuously married to history, particularly the history of ancient Greece.    He was a son of Greek immigrants and carried his intellectual  passion with a loud, thick street-tough accent that added great strength to his solid brick build.    He didn’t really need the vocal adornment.    Even in quietude, Gino walked apishly as a warning to all whom he didn’t know,  to maintain a certain distance as he or they  approached.     Everyone like him, probably even the fifteen year old victim of Ginowrath who  was the source of the tumult next door which startled me.

The door to room 114 was thrown open from the classroom side and this teenage male body flew out like a shot from a cannon slamming onto the student lockers immediately across the hall.   Not a word was spoken…..only a puff of exhale coming from the flying object as it hit the lockers could be heard.   

I have no idea what happened during that class session which caused such a scene.    I did see the boy peel himself off the hallway floor, gather his books which flew wildly with him. The boy rather sheepishly walked away carrying his pride with him.    I didn’t know his name, a rarity in my rules of teaching.   A few days later I gingerly mentioned the scene to Gino whose answer was:  “Oh, he’s a good kid.   He just said something he shouldn’t have.  He’s fine.”

Discipline at Edison  began at home, and, if needed at school,  almost always began and ended in the classroom.    Almost all of the teachers were there for a lifetime.   Their reputations were well known by all and added enormously to the cultural harmony within the school.    I am certain the boy who was the object of the room 114 disruption never said a word to his parents about the event.   He would have angered the father and embarrassed the mother.   And that would not do.   Such things ‘corporal’ at the school were rare then.    Guys  who hung around my classroom from time to time would describe a setting or two when they were ‘approached’ by a male teacher angered by  a miscue or another they or someone other boy had foolishly created.    They laughed loudly as they described the scenes even when they themselves were the so-called ‘victims’.

I didn’t find that they had much  wealth of knowledge, but they seemed to be  a very healthy, winsome  bunch. No one was drugged up, then.  I was so confident of our America’s future despite certain  rumblings in its streets.    I was sure  that they needed to go to college to amass knowledge as I had done……to become ’enlightened’ learning the arts and sciences as I had.   I saw myself in these students, especially the boys with their future responsibilities in society, maintaining order, further examining the unknown,  uplifting the culture, leading the way to a better America, and so, a better world closer to God and an ideal nation.    After all, that is what I truly believed knowledge from school and university did for me.

However, I saw the teachers and administrators at Edison too comfortable, too pleased with, again my view, the mediocrity of the school’s education.   Yet, listening to their constant complaints, the weren’t pleased.    They complained about the school’s soft education constantly.    These teachers, almost every one of them were good human beings who wanted to make a positive difference in students’ lives.   Some were even well educated….especially the guys who taught math.   Nearly all had given up to the routines of everyday schooling.    Yet, the streets in other cities and communities  were starting to make noise….violent noise.   Human animals were being unleashed at universities to do animal things……Predators like John F. Kerry,  had found American flesh tasty.   The protein nurtured  their political ambititions and excited their lower depths of deceit and duplicity.    The American way was under attack, an attack for survival which continues to this day with Obamatime, January 2012 forty plus years later.

My Death as a Public School Teacher: Part I.

For nearly 40 years the American public education school system has been in a state of collapse.   Once it was ruled by well educated males, exceptionally well educated females in a masculine environment of strict discipline maintained by adult human beings.

These adult human beings were overwhelmingly  if not universally morally and intellectually developed by and from a JudeoChristian core of beliefs battle-tested through life’s struggle through ancient Greece and Rome, for better or worse.

I was taught to be one of this crowd.   I have had no reason in my own life to waver from the principles of this past for I have been immensely blessed by living amongst  them and learning from them.   I have learned much.   I have failed often and from  heritage of learning  have carried my failures with a far greater weight than my collection of joys have lifted the burden.

By genetics I was born a happy person.  How could I have been born so lucky?    This  pool came from my bi-polar Mother.  The drive to become a man, that is, to be  a perfect gentleman;  calm, wise and collected, polite, considerate, generous, knowledgeable, wise, quiet while gathering  understandings before judgments,  has had more  mixed results.   I am closing in on 78 years alive.

I had an excellent public school education at a time when the wave over the country required a good education for two essential reasons…..one, to become closer to God, for God was the center of all knowledge, and two, to become more learned for democracy, for democracy demands a well educated population to make  the better decisions when voting  for ones future.    

We were at WAR.   The country was under attack by  authoritarian governments which dictated policy and truth.    I was taught by Church, School and Government that there was the GREATEST of dangers for civilized mankind  from  such nations where  citizens are ordered to do what government  bureaus tell them to do regardless of consequences with no voice from the people  to express their vieiws meaningfully.   This lesson remains a constant in my mind.

It is a good time to be educated in a community where citizenship is meaningfully respected.     It is a good time to be educated in a community where KNOWLEDGE is valued and found essential in uplifting the culture’s  quality of thinking and decision-making.    We were western civilization  people, I was taught……It was a gift given to us by the martyrs of our past.

 I loved learning…..I was born curious.   The WAR made me precociously curious.   I,  to this day have photographically etched in my memory a bold black newspaper  headline  “Battle Wages at Midway”.   I was seven years old that Spring……the same spring  when I read the cutlines to maps in the St. Paul Sunday Pioneer Press,  that the Germans were moving through the Balkans to recover territory lost by the fumbling Italians.   (Yet, I was a slow, crippled reader  reading books at school.)

I became a teacher.    I loved sharing knowledge.   I thought I had a lot of knowledge to share as had my exceptionally well educated  old maid school teachers, grades three through six, and freshman through junior years in high school had shared with me.  

I was to seek truth as best I could recognize it…..challenge my thinking always…..and do my duty to keep American democracy healthy.

I decided to study Russian language and culture while in college…..as a service to my country……a residual thought and emotion from  the WAR and   the early  years of the Cold War.        I learned to love Russians in the general and hate Marxism in the particular.

 After four years  teaching at a University College of Education High School, I entered the Minneapolis public school system where I taught Russian in both junior and senior high schools.   Both student groups behaved well in my classes.   Such behavior  was expected and learned before any student entered my classroom door.   Knowledge cannot be shared easily  in chaos.    

At the University school the student body was mixed racially, with  a large number of students bused in from a modest income nearby suburb, and the daughters and sons of professors at the University of Minnesota and sharpies from any Twin City neighborhood whose parents desired a sharper than average ‘public’ school atmosphere for their children.

I enjoyed the challenge immensely.   I liked the university atmosphere and the devotion so many of the professors at that time had for their children’s education.    Yes, professors were married in those days and actually bore children…..just another neighborhood of normal American life of the early 1960s.   Women’s ‘lib’ hadn’t arrived yet.

I was enrolled as a graduate student in the University’s College of Education> It was a requirement to teach at the high school.    Even then teaching  knowledge had become rather lonely, almost disappearing from  among the goals directing American teacher eduation.    It was thought getting along with others and learning to be  less American was far more important than  knowing our human past or our science present.  

 Getting high on rock, sex and drugs became the song and dance of the day.  White guilt was discovered.  “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today”  and similar noises came from the new uneducated, the loud mouthed drugged up university ‘elite’, encouraged by the songs of Tom Leher to love  and trip on LSD if you want to really ‘live’.    

Democrats in Washington began their metamorphosis toward Marxism and its authoritarianism.    “Title”  this and Law that were passed to force people  to become equally small and narrow.    Government  wanted people  to be cleansed at last, of the old rules of JudeoChristian behavior.   Swearing, screwing, and pooping in the street demonstrated one was free from the rules of civilized life.     Civilized life had developed the A-bomb and  napalm and made Negroes and women inferior, they said.   The culture began its decades of painful  decay.    The Marxists now teaching the nation’s  teachers demanded American children know every sin, every vulgarity, every scar and pimple upon the American face by the time they reach second grade.    They gave birth to the racism and hates of  a new American, one of diversity, pitting each new conversion from traditional values  against the nation itself.

Therse Marxists  taught Americans  to believe  they  had caused the world’s sins, and the censorship of Political Correctness began to infect and then control  every American institution from the Catholic church, the New York Times and its children, almost all of its schools and universities, its entertainment industry, its concepts of family structure,  nearly every Protestant establishment except most  Born Agains, with Big Business and Big Labor,  growing larger  from the power of the ever more centralized government in Washington, following suit.  

Marxism had come to  America.

The most heinous culprits in my view were and still are Americans who for reasons fair and foul hated the nation’s Christianity and America’s business  success in the world.   Big business became bigger more successful buying and selling beyond America’s borders.   American ingenuity, much of it gleaned from Europe at European expense was now being gleaned by countries elsewhere.   The gay underground came unearthed which led to the kookiest, one of the foulest group of huxters in history, the feminist movement.

And, sorrowfully as Dennis Prager so often confesses , in so many of  these hate-America crowds we find among its leaders the Christian-hating  Leftwing Jew. 

These are my prejudices now as nearly all were when I was a public high school teacher then.   I belonged among the educated  liberals of that day whose beliefs  are now  deemed conservative.     We are a dime a dozen if our local Prager discussion group is a typical example.   We still believe in God, Liberty and E Pluribus Unum.

I left University High School to teach Russian and “Modern Problems” classes at  Minneapolis’  Thomas Alva Edison Senior High School in a neighborhood of old and newer ethnic populations of working and service class families in the fall of 1964.   They had the best kids in the world.   They had fun going to school rather remindful of my own school days and those described by my wife with her Minneapolis public school life a dozen years earlier.   Drugs and violence  had as yet, never entered our school door.   Students still respected teachers.   Teachers were still adults.   Learnings were traditional, but out-of-date from the  disorder of the civil rights riots and the escalating Vietnam War both foreign troubles far from our Northland  in those mid 1960s.  

However, busing blacks around to schools had begun in Minneapolis.   The administrations of school and city, state and university and the Courts dictated that in order for a  public school to be a proper school rather than a racist one,  (the anti-black variety of racism, the only variety politically, educationally and judicially recognized at that time)  a public school (building) could not  have an enrollment of  more  than 50% of  a racial minority or the school system would be cited by contempt of court.    Minneapolis Judge,  Earl Larsen, had so decreed to match the recommendations of the School Administration.   

The schools’ central administration could now blame the Court for their troubles if anyone objected.

These bureaucrats selling the city’s version of   modern learning  believed it would be more educationally sound   for children to spend an hour or more exiting from and returning to their neighborhoods bus traveling to other neighborhoods to get a better education than attending their own neighborhood schools…….  AND, YES,  THEY WOULD HAVE, INDEED,  RECEIVED A BETTER EDUCATION in that other school where more whites attended.   No Question about it.   

Teaching valuable knowledge, although on the slide downward, was still the norm in those neighborhoods.    The white communities still had fathers as the center of a healthy family unit, consistent with traditional American values.   Crime was very low.   Delinquency was throwing snowballs at cop cars in winter…….outside and away from  of the urban black centers, that is.

The entire population was programmed by establishment  educators,  press and government,  to believe that anyone who opposed forced busing of blacks into non-black communities was  a perfect bullseye of racism shining  arrogantly on all forheads of these sinners.    The self righteous throughout the wealthier districts in Minneapolis adorned their front window with signs demanding:   WHITE RACISM MUST GO.   (Their children, however,  were already enrolled in private schools.)

The great strength of the area where I taught was the quality of its  middle and lower middle class  solidarity.   They lived, worked and went to school in  ”Nordeast”.      Children of yesteryear’s immigrants, recent  immigrants mostly from eastern Europe, a batch of working Swedes, American Indians….and losts of church people who worked to keep their family together as their  parents before them had done.

No one represented this working group of ‘whites’  anywhere in the city.   The entire school administration lived in its high-priced, highly educated  Minneapolis communities all sanctimoniously  voting the Liberal ticket.  I had been one of them.  They, as I,  had graduated college and had never met a cop except to get a traffic ticket.   My wife and I lived  hardly a block from the Superintendent of Schools, John Davis, a Harvard man from the East, a concerned man, a well meaning man, but an easterner who  knew “a racist when he saw one”  kind.   He never got to know Nordeast Minneapolis….He was certainly a stereotype,  yet, I liked him.

The year 1968 was the first year of organized  ugliness in the streets of  Minneapolis mirroring what was going on elsewhere throughout the country.   Our likeable and articulate Senator in Congress, Eugene McCarthy, was riding his antiwar warhorse toward the White House.    Even though I adored my Nordeaster parents and kids, I was attracted to the Senator’s intelligence and poetry.    He was a guy any  Liberal Arts college graduate would be drawn to.   I was one of them, but I abhorred street protest and violence.   

Blacks in the city were also becoming violent.   The established thought they had good cause to become violent because they were black.  On occasion our students whose bus  I chaperoned would have  stones thrown at us  after  football game played at  black neighborhoods.    Questions would be asked by students in our ‘Nordeast’ schools whose only blacks were on the teaching staff.   

In my seven  years in Nordeast the only violence at the school were the scheduled fights between two guys over a girl friend of one or both, a ritual which occured always around 3:30 in the afternoon at the teacher’s parking lot across from Edison after the teachers had parted in their cars.   Twenty or so would gather as audience  and would rather quietly watch the performers box and wrestle until one was pinned and pressured  to give up.    That is, if  I hadn’t appeared.    My room was on the third floor overlooking that very parking lot.   My car would  still be there parked in the lot but that never seemed   to deter any warriors.

I’d rush down the stairs, part the crowd, make my noise,  giving the combatants   hell for being so stupid to be  fighting and the spectators  for watching…..In all of my seven years at Edison Senior High School or anywhere in the neighborhood did I ever feel threatened……except when I received  mid Spring, 1971 when I had received special delivery notice that I had been  fired from the school system for “improperly filling out a school questionnaire.”   

 The downtown School Administration wanted me out of the system.