Pedro Amaral:
CLASS OF 1964
Piscataway High SchoolClass of 1964
Piscataway, NJ
Pedro's Story
Reminiscence ... elementary school for my cohort (class of '64) began in 1951. It was the start of kindergarten at Holmes Marshall school in Piscataway. My sister, Chinta, and I moved into a house in the middle of a field at the top of a small hill on the newly paved 'Overbrook road'. Overbrook intersected a country road called 'River Road'. Overbrook got its name came from its proximity to McEddy's brook, and a river, the biologically dead (at the time), Raritan River. We were transplants from a place called 'University Heights' -- the old Camp Kilmer WWII embarkation camp that Rutgers used as 'premium' faculty housing.
Holmes Marshall was our neighborhood school. East on River road, lived the Campbells (the twins, Richard and Jane, Jimmy and the older son, Malcolm) and Turennes (Eddie, Jeannie and an older sister) and, further on, the Radcliffs. In the other direction, west, was Dembeck's farm, the Truskiewicz' nursery (Eddie and Frankie) and the Farris family (Gordon, Richard, Franny, Zet, Adrian and Freddie). Up the street from us lived the Brush's (Johnathon, Timothy and Pamela) and two dozen more that I could mention. Holmes Marshall was just past the Farris's, west on Park Avenue.
Our kindergarten teacher was Wilmott, first grade escapes me but I remember being afraid to get Howell who had a reputation for beating kids. Munley comes to mind as the next teacher in memory, then Richardson (who we treated terribly, I think) but I remember Farris and Nizborsky, sort of. And of course, (Elmer) Trotman was the archetypical janitor, Schor the principal.
Remember our desks? The desks had inkwells that had to be manually filled with ink. The school did not have "quill" pens s...Expand for more
o they devised another form of torture for our learning pleasure, sharpened steel calligraphy nibs that cut through paper like razors. Actually, we didn't really have paper, it was more like old fashioned newsprint that dissolved on contact with ink.
Odd memories recur from those days: daily (losing) fights with Buster (Samuels), the principle announcing that we should not listen to 'Rock Around the Clock' (presumably because it inspired wrongdoing). Ollie Walker (who would slap me in face for failing to behave) and Hattie Crawford (his sister, who was, for me, large), Bobby Bulzac's fight with Bobby Brandt (who tended to bully), Henry's (Davis) courageous comeback from polio (which we all feared) and walking to the Farris's house every day.
At some point, our entire cohort moved to the 'Firehouse' and from there to a middle school -- New Market, perhaps. Finally, it was the early years at freshly minted Piscataway High. Most members of the class of '64 remember their years at Piscataway far better. As a terrible misfit who was ultimately expelled, my precarious academic survival depended on the largesse of members of my perennial cohort like Cathy Duffy and Kathy Haskins who were kind enough to share notes. Courageous teachers like George Segal, our art teacher, probably found us remarkably untalented but never showed anything but patience. There were teachers with a missionary zeal like Schnure (math), Heukelekian (English), Fischer (History and track(?)), and Coppage (trying to teach the tone deaf to sing), Galloway, Stauber and Birdsall (who we would buy eggs from), Trozzolillo (Latin). Would that a few among my thousands of student teachers went on to exhibit such dedication.
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