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4.2.12
WC: 191694
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Our wives—most of whom had known us as adolescents—agreed that we had been pretty nerdy back then, but they prided themselves on having seen through the external faults that had relegated us to C lists. "You don't need to buy the 50's in a store," one spouse quipped, "you guys are walking memorabilia." Another turned an old phrase: "I was able to take my husband out of the 50's, but I can't take the 50's out of him."

The early 1950s—my high school years from September 1951 to June 1955—were not my finest hours. Yet they were as formative as any other period, though the formative dynamic was mostly reactive. I think about them often. My wife says I am obsessed with nostalgia for my troubled adolescent past.

Perhaps that is because I would like to relive them—both to regain my vigorous youth and to use it in a more productive manner. I’m not sure. But I am sure that my early teens laid a firm foundation for my very successful late teens—my college years at Brooklyn between the ages of 16 and 20. I had something to prove, and I went about proving it with a vengeance. My parents were hoping I would make a B average in college, which was very respectable in those days before grade inflation. They didn’t want me to get A’s because A students became teachers, and they certainly didn’t want me to get C’s, as I had in high school. I could never satisfy them. I went straight from C’s to A’s, almost never getting a B in anything. I really blossomed in college, though I didn’t do anything very different from what I had done in high school. I was a “smart aleck” and a “wise guy,” but these qualities were appreciated and rewarded at Brooklyn College, while at Yeshiva High School they were punished. Whenever I came up with anything original in my high school religious classes, my rabbis would say: “If your idea is so good, then the ancient rabbis, who were so much smarter than you, would have came up with it first. If those rabbis, who were so much smarter than you, didn’t come up with the idea first, then it can’t be any good.” End of discussion. It was all different at college.

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14 Salesmen at the nostalgia shops tell me that men in their 40's and 50's experience the need to "collect" their adolescence more than women do. "When I see a guy with a goofy looking grin dragging a couple of teen-age kids through my door on a weekend, I know my summer vacation will be paid for," one shop owner told me. "But if he's got his wife with him, he'll probably buy just one sensible memento for his office."

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