Howard Kessler:
CLASS OF 1968
Passaic High SchoolClass of 1968
Passaic, NJ
Howard's Story
As if at Our 50th Reunion: Passaic High School Class of 1968
It seems as if we all left ‘our home town’ in a similar way the Erie Lackawanna Railway left Passaic’s Central Shopping District. The rails laid in that space on Main Avenue defined the city’s activity and character as our youth was defined by our neighborhood street and parks of lavish trellising trees. Not too many years following the departure of the train-line, we graduated and departed as well. Then the sheltering canopy of Dutch elms that cooled the streets where we once lived, were killed by the Ophiostoma novo-ulmi fungus, spread by the elm bark beetles. (AKA: Dutch Elm Disease) The thick green filter from the direct sun simply withered and died. The decomposing skeletons of bleached wood were removed and shredded. Nothing is left of that Passaic, ‘the once luxuriant pictorial,’ our small city with the same name as the county and the meandering river, that made up the backdrop of our idyllic youths. We might have hoped today to have seen in our deaccessioned childhood homes and old neighborhoods as something to approximate our memories from our vernal days. Sadly, they have not held up well to the many sublimations any more than we have held onto our youth. According to Wikipedia, (from the 2000 Census) “Passaic is the tenth most densely populated municipality in the entire United States with 22,000+ people per square mile.”
The faded photographic images, hidden in the attics of our minds, are now akin to dusty, cracked reflections in neglected defoiling glass mirrors. Passaic only comes up for us as information for a passport or the answer to a password security question. Do we value those countless rotations of the clock hands in our Paulison Avenue classrooms? Do the memories of our final years of home town education add up to such little significance? How few of us seem to wish to recall this time! How few of our graduating class members are presently attempting to communicate after fifty years! How few are curious enough to know our classmates stories! ...Expand for more
Is that really because of the ‘value of our-time’ or is it a lack of ‘value of ourselves?’
Look at the pictures from our Yearbook, The Echo; the forced flash cube snapshots our parents took before we anxiously left for the proms, a party, or a school assembly. Look at a yearly school picture-day portrait. For us, at least, this was ‘where thousands of years of society had progressed to keep it’s responsibility to society to develop it’s citizenry at the cost to that society.’ Did this time exist or was it part of some parallel universe? Like the Erie Lackawanna, our rails have been pulled up and relaid where we thought they belonged. After half a century they must belong where they are currently, whether we want our tracks tied in that new location or not. And so, today I am looking back from where those tracks took me… Where the view is far greater in the before-time then that which is still to come.
But I too must be guilty. I should have remembered – where all those missing things and people were. The faces I recall from my high school days, are no longer the faces that exist now. Even the face recognition software on my iPad could not identify our ‘thens’ from our ‘nows.’ Worse, I thought I could at least remember the names of all my classmates. Too many seem unfamiliar. Were they from a different graduating class? How could they be from mine and am I so unaware?
We were young then, and our experiences were so few. Therefore each detail should have been important. Now, the passage of half a century makes each of us almost classified ‘antiques...’ In these years we have had many experiences, so many in fact that we can’t possibly recall everything. Have I willingly forgotten more than I should? Am I indeed from a parallel universe forever riding on the toy train of my childhood going round in circles on the floor of an imaginary playroom that never existed? Were any of you there as well?
Howard Kessler
PHS Class of 1968
(AKA: Herman to a few of you. Most friends and family have been calling me ‘How’ since grad school)
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