MORE MEMORIES

Fritz Poebel is just enough younger than I am so that his childhood memories are of the Cold War while mine are of World War II. As part of our contribution to the war effort when I was in elementary school we were called on to collect the tinfoil from the inside of cigarette packs and make it into big balls which we brought in to donate to the boys in uniform. I never found out exactly what you could make in the way of war material out of those balls of tinfoil but I did my duty and brought them in.

 

The most dramatic impact of the war on my elementary school was the system of crossing guards and other chores that the older kids did for the little ones. In my school, we had an elaborate system of boy’s ranks and girl’s ranks. There was a boy four-star general who wore a little armband with four stars on it, a girl four-star general (my big sister, Barbara, her year naturally) all the way down to noncommissioned officers. Paul Pavlides was the four-star boy general my last year before moving up to high school.  He was a very high status kid because his father was a waiter at the Stork Club and he was the best handball player in addition. None of us had ever been anywhere near a nightclub, needless to say, but one day he brought in a great big glossy menu from the Stork Club – it must have been 3 feet tall – and we were all enormously impressed.  Rafael Villalba was the boy three-star general and I was the boy two-star general -- not bad, of course, but not as good as my big sister, which was the story of my life in those days.