What’s this? A Member of the Class of ’62 Encroaching on
the Class of ’60!
By Arlene Spark, ‘62
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Well, to be honest, yes I am. But only at the invitation of Werner. And only just this once - unless the
storyteller in me is summoned back by your popular demand - to share what it
feels like to be eternally a freshman to your never-ending relative
upperclassedness. Maybe you didn’t ask, but that’s not going to stop me
from telling you anyway. My
daughter, who sometimes seems to have nothing else to do (another story,
another time) discovered classmates.com and warned me that it could be
addictive to someone with an obsessive-compulsive personality like mine. Why, yes I am easily addicted and often
obsessive (can’t stop eating Whitman’s chocolates until every one in the box
is gone, and don’t stop cooking until there’s enough food for an army). She was right, at least for the first day. I couldn’t stop at the Tottenville High
School class of 1962, I had to start delving ever backwards to 1961, and then
to the mother lode of all high school alumni bonanzas – your THS class of ’60
website. More names were familiar to me on your ’60 website than on the one from ’62 I was supposed to have been rummaging through on classmates.com. Why? Because in |
September of 1958, you were juniors when I was a lowly
freshman. You were being inducted into
Arista. You were wearing shiny purple
lettered basketball jackets. You were
cheerleaders. You were running for GO or
already GO officers. I couldn't figure
out why Dr. Berger was the principal of Tottenville instead of chief of staff
at Richmond Memorial Hospital. And I
was still bogged down looking for the swimming pool and elevator.
I knew every one of your names, who you were going with, who
you sat with at the Hut, what your favorite dances were in the cafeteria, who
took the train home with you or who you sat next to you on the bus, if you
lived in Great Kills or Eltingville (I knew how to use the phone book), and if
you were a favorite of Miss Donohue (she who was loved by all the cheerleaders
and therefore by everyone) or Mr. Robert Katz (how could any one so young be so
bald?), or Mr. Stropoli who knew where every city in the world was located, or
Mr. Zindel who received a Pulitzer Prize for recognizing the value of the kid
in his science class (it could’ve been me) who conducted experiments on man in
the moon marigolds.
Me! The overweight,
shy, awkward 13-year old salutatorian from Eltingville’s PS 42 knew you
all. You, I knew, would never know
me. But I would dream about how
wonderful it was to be you.
No matter that one day I would be a sophomore and then a
junior - and I certainly don’t deign to remember a single freshmen from the
year I was a senior. When I found
Richie Miller and Werner’s names on classmates.com, I wrote to them
immediately, and when Werner wrote back, I’m not ashamed to say I dreamt about
him all night long (aided and abetted by his high school yearbook picture,
conveniently inserted in his classmates.com mailbox). I would have dreamt about YOU if you had written. But Werner it was who wrote, and Werner it
was who made me once again feel like that inconsequential, expendable high
school freshman to his exalted juniordom.
Now, to tell the truth it’s been a very long time since I’ve felt like that. On a daily basis in my current life I’m used to being revered, feared, respected - but never neglected.
So, what’s my reason for telling you all this? Well, I’d like to be an honorary member of
the class of 1960. And it would give me
enormous pleasure to be invited to YOUR next reunion. Hell, it would be like me as a freshman being invited to the
junior prom! Actually, now that I
think about it, Richie Miller did take me to one of your proms.
Arlene Spark
As it says in her classmates.com biography, Arlene is a wife, mother, grandmother and professor. She sleeps in New Jersey, but claims to live in NYC. When Arlene graduated from THS in 1962, she was girl leader of Arista and winner of the Betty Crocker Future Homemaker of America award. Today Dr. Spark is director of food and nutrition sciences and public health nutrition at Hunter College, and to her eternal chagrin still hasn’t lost any of that extra weight she was carrying around as a freshman at Tottenville.