Winter Babies Learn In and Out of the Classroom: Step 91

Being born in the winter during my years of school in Milwaukee meant you started kindergarten and graduated from the twelfth grade in January. As I recall there was no disadvantage to enrolling in kindergarten when there was snow on the ground, but for some reason entering college at such a time was not as easily done as it was in the fall. Although there was an imbalance between numbers of students in each year’s January class compared to its June class, the discrepancy was never as clear to me as when I arrived at Marshall High.

As previously noted students coming from Samuel Morse and Wilbur Wright junior highs were put together with students coming from the junior high wing of John Marshall. Our combined numbers filled four homerooms, which was a quarter of the sixteen homerooms the June classes ahead and behind us occupied. With plenty of precedent a number of us winter babies were looking to acquire the necessary credits to graduate early.

While we were not an exclusive group our mutual drive and determination probably brought us closer together even before we were pulled from our original homerooms and combined into a single homeroom in the fall before graduation. Among my driven cohorts were my lifelong friend M and the two Jeffs. Although the three went to the same elementary school, M lived north of the busy Capitol Drive while Jeff M lived just one block south and Jeff P lived still further south almost to Keefe Avenue Parkway.

Jeff P and I shared a common birthday and Jeff M was a day older. When I would call Jeff M his mother would answer the phone, lower her voice and in a gravely tone say hello. Then turning to Jeff she’d tell him loud enough for me to hear that some froggy voiced person was on the phone for him. It made me laugh both because of the way she did it and because it meant my voice would no longer be confused for that of a small child or woman.

Unlike my father both Jeffs had fathers who owned their own businesses and for whom they worked a couple nights and weekends. Jeff P. had to go all the way east to someplace north of downtown to help his dad with some kind of wholesale supply business. Just exactly where the operation was and what he did there was not clear to me.

On the other hand Jeff M’s father owned a well-recognized retail establishment on 76^th Street north of Silver Spring Drive. Jeff was unable to wait on customers purchasing liquor, but he could stock shelves and haul bags of ice from the freezer out to the customer’s car. He could hardly wait to get his driver’s license to make deliveries in the store truck. The same delivery truck I helped him remove the spray paint from when vandals struck one night.

Although I always thought of Milwaukee as a friendly and safe town in which to grow up, as with most places there were, and probably still are, a few antagonistic individuals. As his dad removed the paint from the store windows and we from the truck, we all were amused by the incompetence of the perpetrators. Not only had the bigots turned their swastikas backwards but also their lack of literacy was apparent by their atrocious anti-Semitic curse painted on the side of the vehicle, “Dam Jue.”

I had been exposed to bigotry before and would be again, but this was one of the most blatant examples of misguided animosity. Fortunately, it was easier to take simply because we could literally see how like all prejudice it grew out of ignorance.