A remark at the casual Friday evening session of our recent 50th reunion found its way to my ears, and by the time it did, it was too late to determine from whom it came. It happened during the time when photographs were being taken of groups of us from each of the elementary schools that sent its contribution to our Fairview High.
The essence of the remark made by the male voice was that the girls from Cornell Heights were the prettiest. I didn’t take it to be particularly judgmental and I dismissed it as just part of the background chatter, while still nonetheless filing it away on my hard drive.
And then the following evening, while one of the main-event speakers was addressing us, a corollary bit of dialog from an adjacent table also registered on a secondary level of consciousness. It was words, spoken by an X-chromosome, to the effect that, you know, Fairview Elementary boys were all so very smart. Again, I didn’t bother to try to see from whom the remark came. And why would it matter, really?
But that’s when it all came rushing back to me ... those rumors of federally funded, albeit clandestine, studies back in the ‘50s. Oh, you remember when it came out that a certain minority group had been exposed to this or that unsavory additive in their kibble. And then there was that whole flap about how those fluoroscopes in the shoe stores, like the one over in Miracle Lane, put way too many roentgens into the bones of all those pre-adolescent feet, while purporting to help ensure a better fit for your Poll Parrots. I mean, we’re not talking about mandatory sterilizations on some remote caribbean atoll, here, but rather markedly less sinister things like who was in the plain-sugar-cube control group and who got the real polio vaccine. Just another brick in the wall about what was going on here.
Can you say “guinea people?”
Now I remember those stories, too, but it wasn’t until I was in the military, in the very late ‘60s, that I had any reason to give them pause. For example, while vacationing on the DMZ in Korea, my infantry company had a tiny attachment of military intelligence types, aka “spooks.” They told us stories that would curl your hair about some of the “dirty tricks” they had up their sleeves for their North Korean friends. Certainly not your normal Welcome Wagon stuff. I mean, these people had way too many check marks on the left sides of their report cards.
And then, too, that sense that the world was really not all sweetness and light was only reinforced when I got back stateside and transferred to the Chemical Corps. I mean how else would they want to use someone with a degree in linguistics? At Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, I was assigned to the unit in charge of transporting, storing and disposing of this country’s entire collection of chemical, biological and radiological munitions. I’ll leave it at there being nasties on a level you wouldn’t even want to imagine imagining.
Oooooo.
Now my security and loyalty oaths still do not allow me to tell you that we spent our time filling surplus WWII liberty ships with tons and tons of obsolete nerve gas canisters, blood agent artillery shells, mustard gas munitions and all manner of other party favors ... and then taking them out into the Pacific Ocean and scuttling them as the most cost-effective way to get them off the books and into the realm of being compliant with the latest Nixon-Brezhnev treaty banning such silliness. You didn’t hear it from me.
Sorry, Charlie ... but the solution to pollution is dilution.
Do enough of that sort of sport and it makes a cynic out of a saint. So when, in the ‘90s, it came out that there had been some “social engineering” experiments back in the ‘50s, conducted in southwest Ohio elementary schools, who was I to say it couldn’t have happened? I mean when an old wives’ tale marries an urban legend, this might have been one of their kids.
What am I talking about here? The federal government, even today, will say precious little ... waffling between official denial of anything untoward and no comment, citing national security concerns. Now understand that back in those days, I had enough high-level security clearance that I could listen to the NSA talk to the CIA if I cared to, and I was only hearing about this now? But I’m here to tell you the scary fact of the matter remains that there is fire where there’s smoke. While Fairview High had a good half dozen “feeder” elementary schools, the majority came from Cornell Heights and Fairview Elementary. After all, such studies have to have sufficient populations to be statistically valid.
Enough, already!
Fine, I’ll put you out of my misery. What I’ve come to understand is that the playing field of our childhood was tilted so that Fairview “yutes” were fostered to become ever so slightly smarter than their peers, while Cornell Heights’ wee- ones were incubated to be a bit more socially-gifted than the average bears. I must caution here that we’re just talking about small, incremental differences being somehow effected in the groups. It wasn’t like all the FES kids were made to walk around wearing mortar boards and slide rules, while their CH counterparts all belonged to some social equivalent of Mensa.
But sure enough, take a look at the very tip-top of the ’65 honor roll and there a few more FES’s than CH’s, just as in the yearbook activities photos, you’re a bit more likely to see CH faces smiling back at you. It wasn’t like we both didn’t have to take the same math and science classes, as well as suffering through dancing lessons at Botts and then endure Cotillion. I’m just sayin’.
Think about it. I’m not a big fan of coincidence
When I asked my source – let’s just call him/her/it, Shallow Throat – all I came away with was that it was part of a study, still on-going, to follow these people through their lives to see if their end game was different as a result of these manipulations. Was one group somehow more successful? Well, even I know that would depend on how you describe success. Is achievement quantifiable with a dollar sign? Is it about some mystical assessment of contribution to global this, that or the other thing? Might it simply be a matter of how one’s happiness quotient has ebbed and flowed with the tide of a lifetime?
They probably did not bother seeing whether Group B had fewer cavities.
Now you know what I know. Well, who are we, mere spawn of the last truly great generation, to question how our foremothers and fathers chose to spend their balanced-budget tax monies?
Well, the Dan Wolfe that I’ve come to know and love, or at least bite my lip and tolerate, isn’t one to take anything at face value. I need to know how they introduced their changes into the two educational systems to achieve their desired ends. I am driven to understand. I Ask To Know. Hell, if you want, translate that into Latin and put it atop the new library.
Harkening back to some Monday morning Basic Concepts assembly at Fairview High, we were all told about the “scientific method” — an approach to problem-solving in general to figure out life’s quandaries, great and small. The gist of this Ouija-boarding was to, first, define the question, then do research about it ... mind you, no Cliff’s Notes here, develop and then evaluate all possible scenarios and finally make a decision based on all the above. Note: neither did I “say stir well until done,” nor “do the hokey-pokey and turn yourself about.” It was Problem-Solving 101.
And then again in the Army, I remember my CO telling me, “Captain Wolfe, my door is always open. Feel free to talk to it.” What I hope he meant, however, was to consider possible answers and alternatives before you ask a question. Use the brain your deity-of-choice, if any, gave you, in other words.
So, if you accept the premise that this really happened, what do we know? Back in the medieval years following the war after the war to end all wars, our parents told the school administrators they expected their schools to challenge their kids as a mechanism for doing well ... first in school and then in life. But that would have been the same at FES as well as CH. We know that there was a significant Jewish contingent in Dayton View who added a certain impetus to this expectation, but that wasn’t confined to any unique bit of zip-code, either. Nothing I knew of changed just because you crossed south of Otterbein. It wasn’t age of parents, where you were in the order of birthing of siblings, air quality index or whether you got the fluoridated water or not. Sun spots, nope. Proximity to overhead high voltage lines, tempting, but no.
And again, there were not quantum leap differences here. We’re talking about a handful of standardized test points here and maybe an extra dance or two or five during the awkward mid-puberty years there. It wasn’t like one group was too smart to be social and the other group was too social to be smart. No air-quotes here.
Perhaps I left out the step in the puzzle-solving methodology that speaks to how an inch or so of Baileys Irish Cream can add a certain bit of facilitation to the process, greasing the neural skids, as it were. It came to me, not in a eureka moment, but as a slow awakening, while I was going through my collection of grade school photographs the day after the reunion. Was it my imagination or were pretty much all my teachers old? That’s not the sort of thing you take notice of as a third grader, where every adult is old. It was black and white then. You’re young and your parents, teachers and all the assorted stalactites and stalagmites are old.
Even now as I write this, I note that the kindergarten teachers had to be borderline geriatric. I know, I know, the only way to tell for sure would have been to cut them in half and count the rings. And even in those grades where there was a token 20-or-30-something, they were titrated out of significance by a preponderance of antiques from the other end of the spectrum. If, on balance, the average age wasn’t 60-ish, then I’ll give up my certification to work the carnivals in the guess-your-weight-guess-your-age booth.
And every bit as telling, my very limited access to comparable CH photos tells me that was not the case there. Youngsters, by comparison. Oooooo, again.
Was there an answer to our riddle here for taking? Just maybe.
As I see it, FES was born in 1925 and many of her staff of teachers, almost all ladies, started soon after, and, having found a home, stayed there. These matrons of our academic prowess, as they aged, came to see wisdom as the more significant key to future success. CH came on-line in the early postwar years, 1951 according to the cornerstone, and her cadre of teachers hired on then. Such a goodly number of teachers there were more on a par with our parents, age-wise, as opposed to our grandparents. And the self-evident truth here is that these relatively young ladies at CH, by sheer force of youth, realized the importance of mastery of the social skills.
Now, I’m not seeing some grand nature-versus-nurture debate here. I’m just saying that an ability to hack through the firewalls and security protocols at DoD and HHS could come in handy.
But know that the official proof in the pudding won’t come about until the study is over, when the last of us has moved on. Then one fine day, our great-great-grandchildren will read, no doubt telemetrically via the chip implanted in the base of their necks, about how there was once a study long ago in a galaxy far, far away and now the results are in.
If my crystal ball is to be believed, I’ll guess it will tell them that both groups, in the long run, came away about the same, as each exchanged its strengths and weaknesses with the other. Our Fairview High was a melting pot that served to pasteurize and homogenize us, in a good way ... and in a stroke of evolutionary or intelligently designed wonderment, allowed us, over time, to absorb and benefit from what good we measured in others.
So, we turned out OK, in spite of Secretary Mengele’s efforts, huh!
But then, I can’t be sure without a DeLorean.
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