September 3rd, 1975 was my first day of school at Saint Stanislaus. I can’t say that I remember a whole lot of what occurred in those first days of school. I do know that it must have been quite unusual to suddenly be around a whole bunch of new kids and not just my class, but the 1st and 2nd grade classes were together in the same room. Sr. Fidelia taught both classes. She did have all of the 1st graders sit together on one side of the room and the 2nd graders on the other side. I did make friends relatively quickly, especially with the boys and girls who lived in a housing co-op a block from my building called Village View. I had starting hanging out with some of them, before starting school. There was Peter Jarema, Allan Heck and Paul Kim. Also, there was Roman Strawa and Johnny Miller., who were in 2nd grade as I was starting 1st grade. There were also a few others who my brothers had already known. Like Joey Opalka and Lynn LiCausi and Diane Krawiec. Attending class every day helped make the other students become very familiar over time. I got to know Helene Bracero, Helen Bala, Susie Gregorczyk Jose Guzman and Jose Marrero very well over those years.
Sr. Fidelia left a negative impression in my mind. She was frightening with her meanness, at times. Two incidents, involving me, stick out in my mind. She was a brutal disciplinarian, and she loved to punish late-comers to class by grabbing a ruler and slapping the students on the hands with them. I usually wasn’t late, because my mother would walk me and my brother Rocco to school. I think there was one day, where Rocco was a little slow getting ready for school and we ended up being a few minutes late. She did her usual punishment and whacked me with her ruler. I cried and later complained to my mother, that I was whacked on the hands for something that wasn’t my fault. The next day, my mother came into school and demanded to see the principal and complained that the discipline was excessive. I think the principal agreed, because it didn’t really happen anymore. The other incident was something where I truly deserved my punishment. In an attempt to try and fit in with the more mischievous students, because I was usually very well-behaved, I listened to my classmate Allan, who advised me to get friendlier with Lynn, a female classmate, by lifting up her skirt. She screamed, both classes laughed at me and Sr. Fidelia grabbed me by my hair and yanked me down the hall to the principal’s office and made me write 100 times: I must behave in class. I also had to say I’m sorry to Lynn in front of both classes. Being a very shy young boy, that was way more difficult than all the writing I had to do. I was also intimidated by the issue she had with her fingers. Two of them were severed, apparently by an incident involving a meat slicer, where her hand slipped. She had tape over her fingers and that issue caused me to want to keep my distance from her.
Despite these moments of behavior issues and this unusual nun, I did very well in school, right from the start. My report card was full of A’s and B’s and it was always an A in Math. I wanted to be the smartest student in the class and I felt that my competition for that honor was Lynn and another girl named Bretta Robertson. They were both very smart and pretty girls. As a little boy, I was really excited about learning and some classmates really respected me and others probably learned to dislike me a bit. At the end of 1st grade, Sr. Fidelia thought I was smart enough to skip 2nd grade and go straight into 3rd, but the principal didn’t want the school to lose a year’s tuition and offered to allow the skip, if my parents paid the year’s tuition. My parents refused to do that, even though I was excited with the chance to move ahead to 3rd grade. I went into 2nd grade and the school decided to keep our two classes together which were now 2nd and 3rd grade and the 3rd grade teacher, Ms. Martel became the 1st grade teacher. I was happy because it gave me another year to really get to know the 3rd graders, like Johnny M., Johnny Zadubara., Cheryl Grogan, Denise Hart, Donna Spatafora and several others. A sad thing happened right after Christmas/New Year’s vacation. The day after New Year’s, January 2, 1977, my grandfather, Guiseppe(Joseph), passed away from a heart attack, basically a block from his building on St. Mark’s Place. My family really mourned his loss and also many people in the neighborhood, he was there basically since he came to this country from Ellis Island. I missed a whole week of school, which I was not happy about, but I continued to do very well, grade wise. I also started going to an after-school program at a place called the Cardinal Spellman Center, located on 2nd Street. Some of my St. Stan’s classmates went there and also many students from another school, Most Holy Redeemer, which was located on 3rd Street. I started getting to know many of them. One that became a very good friend for a long time was Nick Marzulla. He was a funny, sarcastic, smart guy that was really into sports. We hit it off pretty well and spent a lot of time in our youth hanging out together. His parents were always very nice to me and I spent a good amount of time at their apartment on Orchard St.
I also spent an increasing amount of time hanging around the buildings of Village View. I had already known several of the kids who were friends with my brothers. I liked to tag along quite a bit with those people, because it seemed that they were having more fun than those who were my age, plus some of the younger friends liked to make fun or pick on me a bit. I didn’t really enjoy that and it started to snowball into a steady problem that made a shy boy go deeper into a shell. It was something I had to deal with throughout my young life.
3rd grade was interesting to me, because it was the first time we didn’t have to share a classroom with anybody. Also, for the fact that our teacher, Ms. Patricia Naughton was a lot nicer than Sr. Fidelia. She was tough when she had to be, but the class, on the whole, behaved well. There were several new students in the class, including Dave Ropiak, who was a brilliant child that was skipped ahead from 1st to 3rd Grade. I’ll assume that his parents paid a full year’s tuition for him to be skipped ahead. The year as a whole, wasn’t very eventful, but I do have to say that I started to think about some of the girls in the class, in terms of who I liked. I was undecided who I liked the most. Sometimes it was Lynn, sometimes Bretta, sometimes Diane, but it didn’t totally occupy my mind. I was only 8 years old. I was more focused on Reggie Jackson and the Yankees winning the World Series and on Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gee’s. Also, that I was glad that the Son of Sam was caught.
4th grade started off on a bit of a downer when I found out that Bretta was moving to New Jersey. As I mentioned, she was a favorite of mine and I was disappointed. It was time to have another nun as a teacher, Sr. Mary Vincent. I enjoyed her teaching a lot more than the last two. She made it fun to learn in her class, and I really excelled. I had straight A’s on the last two report cards. I also joined the choir that year and enjoyed singing at church, even though I was picked on at times, for doing that. I was told that I was a sissy for joining, but I didn’t care. The music teacher, Mr. Perry, was skilled at teaching music, and I enjoyed it. I was also excited that my brother, Rocco was graduating. I loved him but I felt overshadowed by him, in a way. He was one of the more popular guys in school and I wished that I was as popular. Once he did graduate, I continued to do very well grade-wise, but I never felt that I truly fit in.
5th grade was a fairly eventful year for me and the class. Ms. Aguila was the teacher and she always struck me as being quite unusual. Her teaching style was a little different from other teachers I’ve experienced. Somehow, I was able to do exceptionally well in that class. I had straight A’s on all four report cards. I’ve always been a little proud of that. It was the last year with Paul Kim as a classmate. He moved to Yonkers afterwards. He was one of my favorite classmates and I missed him. There were also several new classmates, including a buddy of mine that grew up around the corner on 6th St., Jimmy Duval. He always was a very funny guy and was so cool to be around and I also knew that he would never make fun of me, like many of the others I hung out with. He became probably my closest friend for the last four years at St. Stan’s and we would always walk home from school together and talk about what went on in class. There were other interesting new classmates, Like Kevin Murray and Kris Williams that were both fun guys that made the class laugh quite a bit.
I had a bit of a health issue that popped up in that school year that was difficult. I started getting a lot of headaches. Some that would make me very nauseous or vomit quite a bit. It caused me to miss a good chunk of days of class. It was a mystery for a while to figure out what was causing them. It seemed to be at least once a week, if not more that it was occurring. My mother took me to the doctor, then another doctor, then a specialist. Since my mother and my aunt Marie had migraines, it was pretty much assumed that’s what they were. The question was what was triggering them. Over the course of time, I realized that nearly every time I had chocolate, I was getting a migraine. Obviously I had to stop eating it, which was a big heartache because I loved it, whether it was a candy bar, a chocolate egg cream or a bottle of Yoo-Hoo. There were also situations where stress was causing them and I did cut back a bit on hanging out with those who were making fun of me all the time.
In 6th grade, Mr. Doyle was the teacher and I found him to be interesting in some ways but a little unusual. He liked to play music a lot in class. Sometimes it would be classical, sometimes the Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel. I personally enjoyed it, being a music fanatic, but I could imagine for those who were more into other types of music, it was pretty boring. He certainly played more Beatles songs after December 8th, 1980 when John Lennon was murdered. I always had an appreciation for the Beatles, but didn’t comprehend how much of a hero John Lennon was to me until after his death. I learned about how he was such a peace activist and stood up against the establishment. I was sad to think of what he could have done, if he wasn’t murdered. It was the first celebrity death that had that kind of effect on me.
I wasn’t really much of an athletic child, though I did play softball and punch ball and a little bit of football and basketball, at the playgrounds and parks. At this point, I did find the sport that I enjoyed the most in my youth, and most of my life, for that matter: bowling. My parents would sometimes take me to bowl, with my brothers just to have a good time. Joe had become a very good bowler by then, with his very nifty hook shot. He was in the leagues and had won some trophies already. He also worked at Bowlmor Lanes, behind the counter, assigning lanes and renting shoes. Rocco wasn’t a bad bowler either, though his shot was more very hard and down the middle of the lane. I used to just roll the ball down the middle with two hands and didn’t do very well, but Joe worked on having me actually put my fingers in the holes and shooting the ball like a normal bowler. Once I did that, my scores improved quite a bit, enough for me to join the junior leagues at Bowlmor Lanes every Saturday morning. That was the end of my cartoon watching on Saturdays. My mother ended up getting hired as a bartender on Saturdays, but was mostly making cheeseburgers and fries for the kids who were bowling. I made a few new friends there, including Jace Rafter and Danny Marks, who I bowled with for a few years and Jeff Katz, who would later become a High School teammate. I was very hooked on the game and would participate in leagues for the next 30 years, but that first year, I only averaged a 97 but would continue to improve through the years. My first bowling ball was a Columbia 300 Red Dot and I had my name put on it. In my youth, it was a prized possession.
At this point in time, I started noticing girls a little bit more. I was 11, and though I didn’t quite reach puberty yet, I was paying attention to the friends who were starting to discuss being involved with girls. The two that stick out in my mind are Allan, who always seemed to be chasing after girls and Peter, who is the person who first told me about the birds and the bees, in graphic detail. Thanks for that, Pete. I also hung out with Roman quite a bit, who started to become pretty active with the girls in the neighborhood. I, of course had no such luck, and wouldn’t for a long time.
7th grade would become my most enjoyable year at St. Stan’s, by far. The teacher, Mr. Broughton, was an incredibly enjoyable and understanding teacher. He certainly taught with his own style, which was something that the principal and nuns of St. Stan’s didn’t really appreciate. After missing 18 days of class in 5th grade, mostly because of headaches and 13 days of class in 6th grade, mostly because of boredom, I only missed one day of class in 7th grade. That’s how much I enjoyed being in that class. He always was real and very honest with us, which was very much appreciated, for sure. He also liked to take us on class trips. We had several, including four in the final week of school. We also put on a wonderful play. We did a take on Grease that was truly remarkable. He was very skilled with teaching all of us dance moves and I feel that it was the most enjoyable play that I was ever involved in.
I was sad that Angelique Rivera was not in our class anymore. Her family had moved to Queens. I had always gotten along pretty well with her. There was a wave of new classmates as well. Richie Vasquez became a buddy of mine and Theresa Cruz was a favorite of mine as well. There was also Michelle Vasquez, Leslie Diaz, Maria Bassini and Patricia Venditti.
One thing that I was proud of that year was that we had a Math contest and I was the winner for the class. I then competed with the top 7th graders in each catholic school in Manhattan and I finished 2nd out of about 25 schools. I remember Monsignor Karpinski met with me at the rectory, congratulated me, and gave me $20. He said “Don’t tell your parents I gave you this or that I’m sitting here with a big bottle of wine”. He had obviously drunk a lot of it.
I also had my first real teenage crush that year. As I stated earlier, I spent a lot of time hanging out by the Village View buildings, near where I grew up and though I knew most of the girls who lived there, I was always very shy when the girls were around and I never really gave them a chance to get to know me. There was one specific girl who caught my eye. Her name was Theresa Dougherty, and I can’t really explain what it was about her, except that she was a very smart girl and she was friendly enough for me to at least have some interesting conversations with her. Nothing ever really came of it and her family moved away in the beginning of the summer of ’82. Her brother Bryan was very cool as well and I would miss them after they moved away.
One thing that sticks out in my mind about 1982 is how good the music was that year. It is my favorite year when you consider that “I Love Rock N Roll” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, “Open Arms” by Journey, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, and “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League were all hits that year and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came out at the end of the year. I was an avid Billboard chart follower and I religiously listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. I would root for certain songs to go up the chart each week and I became a music trivia expert. You could give me the name of a song or an artist and I could tell you the peak position for nearly every song. It was useless information, but it was fun to amaze people with that knowledge.
At the end of the summer, I had a fight with Dave Ropiak and he busted my nose. That is the only bone I have ever broken in my whole life. I still say it was a lucky punch, but anyway, I felt like the Elephant Man with a mask on my nose for a week. Luckily, the doctor removed it the Friday before the start of 8th grade. You could imagine the embarrassment if I had to walk into class with that on my face. I guess I should have taken that as a sign of how 8th grade would be for me. After all the good feelings I had with the experience of Mr. Broughton’s class the year before, I absolutely despised Sr. Magdalen and couldn’t wait to graduate. She was mean to nearly everyone in the class and many mornings I dreaded the thought of being there. One morning she sent me back home because I didn’t do a homework assignment. She also kicked Jose Guzman, one of my closest friends since 1st grade, out of the school for repeated missed homework assignments. She was also a very strict grader. Hardly anyone received any A’s in her class. The one thing that angered me the most was the process of testing to get into high schools. I first took the co-op exam for entrance into Catholic high schools. I made every school, except for Regis and I had picked La Salle Academy as my first choice and made it. I then took the test for the top public high schools, at Stuyvesant and I picked Stuy as my first choice, because it was the best and it was within walking distance, only nine blocks from home. When they came back with the results, they announced that no one from the class had made Stuyvesant, but that was not true. The school secretary, Dorothy Luckashenak(thank goodness for her) called my mother and told her that I had made it, along with my classmates Lynn and Dave and that she should go to Stuy and talk to them about letting me go there, because it was probably past the deadline to commit. That is exactly what my mother did. The story was that I had originally missed making it by one point, but there was an error in the answer key and I had actually scored the exact amount needed to make it. Apparently, Sr. Magdalen knew this and didn’t tell me. When she found out that I was going there anyway, despite her actions, she told me that I was making a mistake and I wouldn’t do well there because I couldn’t compete with these other talented students.
From that point on, I was very unhappy with her and I was counting the days until graduation. It also left a bitter taste for St. Stan’s for several years for me. I only attended one event there over the next six years, until they closed in 1989 due to lack of attendance, which was the graduation for the class of ’85, because I had several friends in that class. The rest of the year was fairly uneventful and June 18th, graduation day was a very happy day, though I would miss my classmates after that day, I was thrilled to know that I would be attending Stuyvesant in the fall.
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