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When
I was about fifteen years old, I transferred from public school to a
private High School in the city. I lived far enough away from the school
to make a daily commute too burdensome. So, I signed up for a room in
the High School Dormitory. I took the railroad to the city each week,
rode the subway uptown to the stop just a few blocks from the school,
and walked to my dormitory. The school was part of a university with
a few campuses each made up of a few buildings. So, it was not uncommon
for me to be walking to or from the subway station in the company of
some college guys who also lived in the suburbs but who still chose
to stay in the dorms during the week.
I had only been
making this weekly round trip to home and back for few weeks when I
spotted a college upperclassman and asked if I could walk back to the
school with him. He said, "Sure", and proceeded to tell me
some of the history of guy who had walked those streets over the years.
As we passed one of the main buildings on our campus, he pointed out
a large bell or gong mounted on an outside wall. It looked like it had
been there for a long time. I did not remember having ever heard it
ring. But, then I had only been on campus for just a short while.
I was familiar enough
with the High School routine to know that we did not change classes
at the sound of a bell. The teachers and the students all knew the time
and classes ended and began just as they did in the college building
down the street. As a matter of fact, there was a large study hall across
the corridor from some class rooms on the main floor of the Old Building,
the building in which the High School was housed, that were dedicated
to one of the university's graduate schools. A bell system would have
been too disruptive to the men of learning who frequented those rooms
and that study hall.
But the bell I had
noticed was right outside one of the huge windows of the Study Hall.
I can remember how briskly the college senior walked, and how he spoke
with an almost fierceness as he explained the bell to me. He told me
that when the Old Building was new it, in 1929, was the school's only
building, and there was very little else in the way of buildings or
neighborhood around it. As the school grew, so did the area around it.
There were very nice apartments overlooking the river to the east, with
scenic parks that featured a series of pathways and stairways that gave
residents access to a riverside walk down below.
As the suburbs became
more popular following World War II and with the advent of affordable
cars, people abandoned the city for larger stand-alone homes with a
yard of their own. The nice apartments fell on bad times. Yet the school
was there as an island of solid positive growth. And where the rapidly
decaying neighborhood came in contact with the school was in the street.
The frustration
felt by the now largely immigrant non-English speaking minorities who
lived in the area when "rich college kids" walked along their
streets often erupted into torments, harassments and violence. It was
in the aftermath of such an encounter that the bell outside the Study
Hall came into being. One of the boys from the gradate school, who studied
at the left hand of one of the great scholars we had on our faculty,
had been brutally beaten by group of boys from the neighborhood. He
had either been killed or beaten so terribly that the school took preventative
measures.
The bell outside
the Study Hall was installed. It could be triggered by any one of several
carefully hidden switches the locations of which the entire academic
community was made aware. It was understood that when the bell would
sound, the Study Hall, filled with perhaps fifty to a hundred young
men at any one time, would clear out on to the street to deal with the
situation and save those being attacked.
I will tell you,
I am downright prejudiced against death; also against being beaten up
by thugs of any stripe. I am an equal opportunity defender of those
being attacked by no-good-nicks. No matter how frustrated a person might
be, if they act out against others, in my opinion, they must be stopped.
I definitely discriminate against those who act as though they are above
the law. Whether such bad guys are sick or malcontents, they can not
be allowed to act out on their own prejudices at the expense of the
health and safety of others. |
