The lesson she never forgot: What happened to them?

MEMBER COLUMN

by Lynne Burt-Jenkins

LW contributor

After my grandfather, Pop, died suddenly in 1947, my grandmother came to live with us. Mom and Dad decided to buy a house for the whole family. They purchased a semi-detached house on 29th Street that had three bedrooms, an enclosed front porch and a basement with a second bathroom.

There are many strong memories attached to this house, most of them very happy.

I was 7 then and played with the other kids on our block. In the spring, the maple trees that lined our street had seed pods we called polly noses. You could take the sticky part at the stem, separate the pod into two pieces and stick them on your nose to resemble a parrot beak. In the winter, these huge trees had beautiful leaves that grew at a very fast rate, going from pale, shimmery chartreuse to dark green in about a month. In the winter, a heavy snow would make the trees bend over the street, creating a kind of tunnel one might expect in the country, but unexpected in the city. It was beautiful, almost magical, and the heavy snow softened the noises around us.

In the summer, we’d gather to catch lightning bugs. We’d play stoop ball, using the front steps as bases, or sewers (baseball, using sewer tops as “bases”), jump rope, draw with chalk on the street, play jacks and marbles.

I went to a grammar school, PS 89, a few blocks from our street, from kindergarten to eighth grade. Our school had an indoor pool called a natatorium, the only school in Brooklyn with a pool. It reeked of chlorine. Our school playground was covered with pebbles on the ground. I carried pockmarks on my knees for decades from falling on those pebbles. In school, we had music lessons, art and shop (for boys only.)

We had great teachers and many lessons I still remember. One, especially, in the seventh grade: “Consider the source. When someone is trying to convince you of something, find out how they benefit from convincing you. Consider the source.”

Another lesson in social studies came from an example taught in my last year in PS 89. Since this was about 10 years after the end of World War II, and school textbooks took almost 30 years to create, print and distribute, our teacher taught this lesson by example: He asked us to raise our hands if we had relatives who had fought or died, soldier, sailor or civilian, during the war. I raised my hand, as both of my Mom’s brothers had fought, one in the U.S. Army and one in the British Army. I also had an uncle who served in a submarine in the Pacific. In our class almost all hands were raised. Then, the teacher told us to keep our hands raised, and then said to put our hands down if our relatives had died only while fighting in a battalion, in a plane or on a naval vessel.

Almost every Jewish kid’s hand stayed up. A lesson I have never forgotten.