Bruce Eder:  

I was born in the Soundview section of the Bronx, New York, and raised after age 5 mostly in Whitestone and Flushing, Queens, New York. In 1964, I enrolled in Sands Point Academy (or, as it was known then, Sands Point Country Day School), on Long Island, in Port Washington, New York. Sands Point, as almost anyone who attended will tell you, was an amazing place -- situated on this huge estate, with a 25-room mansion as the school building, surrounded by playing fields, two Olympic-size swimming pools, a maze of hedges, a sculpture garden, and with an adjoining beach (which, as I didn't know then, bordered on the beach front property owned by Carly Simon's family . . . .-- evidently, a lot of the older kids got glimpses of Carly and her sister Lucy going through adolescence on that beach, the significance of which, such as it was, would never have dawned on anyone until a few years later). It was a wonderful, bewildering place to attend school, but if you had the enthusiasm for learning that they hoped you would bring to the place, one thing they did for you there was, they got out of your way and let you learn. I left Sands Point in May of 1969, after finishing eighth grade, owing to my parents' precarious financial situation and also a dispute at the school over the dismissal of three teachers, Bob Kandel (who I am pleased to count as a friend in the twenty-first century), Anita Flackbert, and Elizabeth Gordon. I attended the Windsor School in Flushing from grades 9-12 and graduated in 1973. Windsor was a nice school but it was no Sands Point, though I did meet some very nice people and one teacher, in particular, Linda Comac, who put me on the path to my subsequent career as a writer. And the people running the school knew enough to get out of the way of kids who were prepared to roar ahead with whatever field of study they wanted to pursue. I was supposed to be pre-med at Queens College but majored in English Literature instead, and I've been a writer for the Village Voice, Newsday, Interview, and Current Biography, among other publications, and a writer/producer/narrator in home video (laserdisc and DVD) for 25 years. School From 1960 to '61, I attended kindergarten at a place called the Beehive School in Flushing, Queens -- what I remember best about it was my teacher, Miss White, and the playground, which had, in addition to swings and slides, an old boat, like a very large rowboat (at least, it seemed large to me at the time), where the kids could play -- it was rotted and not quite whole, and there were lots of potential splinters, and rust on the metal (you'd never let kids play in something like that today), but it was fun. I also remember, there was a bus driver named Mr. Hall, and the school had two grades, nursery school and kindergarten -- the nursery school kids napped a lot more. From 1961 until 1964, grades 1-3, I went to PS 93 (now called the Albert G. Oliver School) on Storey Avenue in the Bronx, where I always felt like a fish out of water. It was in our old neighborhood in the Bronx, around Manor Avenue and Watson Avenue, one long block from Westchester Avenue. I remember there was a toy store called Newman's that burned down around 1959 or so -- all the kids were hoping Newman's would rebuild and re-open, but it never did. The local subway stop was at Elder Avenue, I think. There was a big movie theater on Westchester Avenue, and in those days the Bruckner Expressway was just being built -- we had Bruckner Boulevard, which was like Queens Boulevard in Queens, this huge road, four or six lanes in each direction. The most exciting thing that happened when I was at P.S. 93, apart from the Yankees winning the World Series and the Mantle-Maris home-run duel in 1961, were the Mercury space launches -- Alan Shepard and then John Glenn. Everyone was excited by that, at least in my grade. And I remember when Eleanor Roosevelt passed away; it was like a day of mourning in the Bronx. And after that, I went to two private schools, between 1964 and 1973, Sands Point Academy in Port Washington, New York, and The Windsor School in Flushing, New York. Sands Point was like the real-life version of Professor X's Academy in the X-Men Comics, housed at a mansion on Long Island (it was like going to elementary and junior high school in the setting of The Great Gatsby), with all of these extremely bright and motivated kids from three states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut), all studying way beyond their grade levels. I was also totally under the spell of two teachers, Mrs. Winifrid Yindrich, the Spanish teacher, and Mrs. Elizabeth Gordon, the English teacher; I also learned a lot from Miss Patricia Carter and Mrs. Beatrice Bernstein in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, and Mr. Robert Procter and Mr. Ralph Affoumado, the music teachers; Mr. Procter, I'm sorry to say, died of throat cancer in the 1980's, but as of 2008 Mr. Affoumado is still going strong as the head of the choral music for the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU -- I attended a program that he conducted in 1998; and talk about a small world, in a city of 8 million people, his wife turns out to ha...Expand for more