William Saunders:
CLASS OF 1971
Baldwin High SchoolClass of 1971
Baldwin, NY
William's Story
Conrad Knows His Bugs
Okay, I'm a little late to comment on this, but I've been a little busy. Commenting late is appropriate for one of the few people in the Western World who admits to NOT watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show fifty years ago. (While I have no memory of why, it might have been one of those years when a tube went on our TV. Since my father tended to not fix anything within a year, we went through several long stretches of my childhood without TV. The upside was it turned me into a reader, so in the end it worked out well.)
I just hope I've remembered this mostly correctly - the mind does strange things on memories of 50 years ago.
While I missed the most historic event of the Sixties (well, besides the assassination of JFK, MLK, RFK, etc.), I certainly realized what I missed when I went to school the next day. The buzz among the students was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was as if I were alive for VJ day: a national celebration of a shared experience, but one that had nothing to do with war.
When we got to Mr. Ludgate's English class, he was going to have none of it. Like most authority figures, he was clueless to the world-historical event that rendered him inconsequential, something most teachers, as narcissists, do not take lightly. In his most sten...Expand for more
torian voice, he decreed, "The next student who mentions the Beatles will write a paper on beetles, real beetles".
The fact that this is the only thing I vividly remember Mr. Ludgate uttering says volumes about his place in history - he was a really good teacher, a charismatic educator, but in the end he was a mere foil for four lads from Liverpool.
My story zooms forward a number of years, when I was in high school, which would be 1968 - 1971. One day my friend Andy and I were stuck at the high school after the last bus, so to avoid the 3 mile walk to south Baldwin, his mother came to pick us up. On the way, we passed Conrad, a neighbor down the street, hitchhiking, so Andy's mother picked him up.
On the way home there was a stop at Bohack's, the small, grim supermarket on Milburn just above Atlantic. And as we waited in the car, someone commented on the bugs in the supermarket. A bug running across the bagging area was described as a cockroach and Conrad interrupted to say, "No, that isn't a cockroach - they're over 1 inch long and dark brown...."
I found this strange since Conrad was capable of many things but I didn't think that entomology was among them. As I thought about it, I recalled who was the first person that Mr. Ludgate heard mention the Beatles after his decree - it was Conrad.
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