The Price of Altruism (8 page)

There could not have been a more opposite school in the city to Birch Wathen. Down on 345 East Fifteenth Street, just a few blocks from Union Square, Stuyvesant had been built on the old
boweriej,
or farm, of its seventeenth-century namesake, Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colonial governor of New Amsterdam. At the laying of the cornerstone on a crisp fall afternoon in late September 1905, William Henry Maxwell, the Irish-born, monocle-wearing, mustached superintendent of schools, declared a new era in the history of education. Millions were to be expended “in order that every boy, no matter how poor his parents may be, may have opportunities equal to those given to the sons of the rich.”
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Stuyvesant would be a school combining technical training with an academic program, servicing the bright boys of the lower classes. Whereas there had been fewer than five hundred thousand immigrants arriving annually in America in the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, the number more than doubled in each of the years in the decade after 1904.
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Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and Manhattan had been consolidated in 1898, and Greater New York was now the largest city in America. At the dedication earlier in the winter, Professor Thomas M. Balliet, dean of the School of Pedagogy at NYU, explained that the classical system of education was outmoded and unfit for industrial society. “Now we are a nation of manufacturers and traders,” he exclaimed. Schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, Maxwell thought, were “the educational hope of democracy.”
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Its reputation grew quickly. By October 1907 the
New York Times
called it “a school that excels anything of a similar nature in the country.”
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The face of the city was changing. In 1890 the Irish and Germans counted for more than a half of New York City’s 1.5 million; by 1920 the population had grown to more than 5.5 million, and its largest groups were now Jews (1.5 million) and Italians (eight hundred thousand).

And so when he arrived in September 1938 at the massive five-story structure topped by a sixty-foot flagstaff, George took his place among a new type of classmate. There were Emanuel Schmerzler, Morton Rosenbluth, Jerry Lachman, and the Bader twins—Mortimer and Richard. There were Remo Bramanti, Rosario Pipolo, and the senior president, Anthony Gandolfo. There were Photiadis the Greek, Boyarsky the Pole, and Gallagher and O’Connor and McDougall. Jews were the majority. It was from schools like Stuyvesant that they emerged in the 1930s “on a ladder from the gutter” to become more than half of the city’s doctors, lawyers, dentists, and public school teachers. Perhaps not quite understanding why—after all, his father’s origins were unknown to him—George felt comfortable in his new environs, and most of his friends were Jewish.
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The boys would commute from Bensonhurst, Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, Canarsie, Flushing, Elmhurst, Washington Heights, and Inwood. The ones from Manhattan, like him, would arrive by train from uptown or walk north from the Lower East Side. At the exit to the subway station on Fourteenth Street there was an Automat where you could buy a couple of slices of bread for a dime, and make a sandwich with free ketchup and mustard. Passing by the girls’ school, Washington Irving, on Fifteenth Street and Second Avenue, “sparks would fly” the Stuyvesant boys may have been nerdy, but they had hormones like everyone else. Private school kids like the ones in Birch Wathen looked positively like “creatures from outer space” to them, but this, most admitted to themselves privately, was undoubtedly a projection.
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They were grinders, geeks. Even though by 1934 the citywide exam had been instituted to stem the influx of numbers, classes still had to divide into two sessions: juniors and seniors between 7:40 and 12:35 and freshmen and sophomores from 12:40 to 5:20—and everyone took studies seriously. Every week at assembly they’d sing the school song—“Our Strong Band Can Ne’er Be Broken”—and end with “America the Beautiful.” And once a week, for a whole period, they were made to take a hot shower. Many of the boys came from cold water flats, and Stuyvesant wanted them clean.
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The school was built on an H-plan, with academic classes on one leg, shops on the other, and labs and lecture rooms on the crossbar. The shops were a proper technical universe: There were pattern making, drafting, wood turning, blacksmithing, forging, and machine work. There was even a 1.5 ton copula installed in the foundry, with a brass melting furnace, a core oven, a melting pot, a molding machine, a dry grinder, and a polish and buffer. In the basement, steel racks for storage of lumber and metals were packed alongside machines for cutting up stock. There were twenty-four-inch surfacers, twelve-inch hand jointers, a double-arbor sawing machine, and a water tool grinder and grindstone. And then there were the labs. Lewis Mumford, the American historian of technology and literary critic, remembered the excitement of it all. His physics teacher had once held up his pencil and said: “If we knew how to unlock the energy in this carbon, a few pencils would be enough to run the subways of New York.”
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After school George would stay around for his electives. There was the Experimental Physics Lab, the Arista Club, the American Rocket Society and, most important, the Chess Team. His year was quite a class—with the highest scholastic record in the school’s history—not an easy one to shine in. There was Joseph File, who would become a Princeton nuclear engineer, and a pioneer of MRI. There were the Bader twins, legendary future professors of medicine. There was Joshua Lederberg, a year behind, who would win a Nobel Prize for his work in bacterial genetics. And there were Nat Militzok, the six-foot-three-inch future New York Knicks forward, and Kai Winding, the composer and bebop jazz trombonist.

George had a squint in his eye, and a strange affect no one could finger, but even among this crowd he was distinctive. In solid geometry class he would sit quietly in the back of the room and just once in a while offer a comment that no one could quite understand (including the bespectacled teacher, Mr. Solomon Greenfield). His voice was high-pitched and squeaky, though somehow also soft. Most thought him strange, mechanical, even perhaps slightly autistic. Richard Bader, the class valedictorian, could sense that he was leagues above everyone. His genius was baffling, even a little unsettling. Awkward, he signaled an almost defiant self-confidence in his intelligence. First Board, he led the Chess Team to the city championship in 1940, and no one, least of all George, was surprised.
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Above a faint cartoon of a Clark Kent type with a fedora, the
Indicator
of the class of June 1940 provided “a picture of the typical senior—the results of a class poll”:

Age: 17

Weight: 155

Height: 5’9”

Ambition: Engineer

Favorite Subject: Mathematics

Hobby: Model Airplanes, Photography

Favorite Magazine: Reader’s Digest

Favorite Comedian: Jack Benny

Favorite Radio Star: Bob Hope

Favorite Actor: Paul Muni, Errol Flynn

Favorite Actress: Hedy Lamarr, Bette Davis

Favorite Orchestra: Glenn Miller, Kay Kyser

Favorite Athlete: Lou Gehrig, Glenn Cunningham

Favorite Author: John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis

Favorite Ball Club: N.Y. Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers

Favorite Columnist: Jimmy Powers, Walter Winchell

Favorite Morning Newspaper: New York Times, Daily News

Favorite Evening Newspaper: N.Y. Post, N.Y. World-Telegram

Favorite Radio Program: Bob Hope Show, Fred Allen Show

Favorite Motion Picture: “Gone With the Wind”

For his part George hoped to be a “research physicist,” and his yearbook photograph agreed. Serious and cocky, his gaze was at once both dreamy and focused, and the paradox fit him perfectly.

Parting from the class, Mr. Bradshaw, the track coach, compared success in life to the storming of a citadel, reminding everyone that the average boy earned $8,500 fifteen years upon graduating and wishing them luck in life’s “battle.”
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The principal, Sinclair J. Wilson, took a more spiritual approach to education. As the graduating class and their families settled into their seats at Carnegie Hall on a warm summer day on June 25, 1940, the Lincolnesque New England headmaster started with a soft but stern tone, pointing his elongated finger at the hushed crowd:

George headed upstate to Walton to the farm he visited in the summers. His home was a tent in a maple grove, and besides cooking carrots with onions and butter and discovering new ways to kill flies, there was really not much to do but sleep and read and go for walks and wander. He had brought twenty books with him, and in particular enjoyed Bertrand Russell’s
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
. To members of his old chess team he sent opening gambits, challenging them to reply: P to K4 ????, N to KB3 ??? It didn’t seem worthwhile to waste a whole postcard on just one game, so he initiated four separate games in each letter. His hands were callused from chopping wood, and his back was “burnt to cinders.” But he had graduated second in a class of 708 and was as free as a lark now in the woods just behind him.
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Meanwhile war was looming on the horizon. Hitler had invaded the Low Countries in May and with the help of Mussolini had now battered France into submission. Radio broadcasts were full of news of freighters on the Atlantic being sunk by U-boats, and crackly transmissions by Edward R. Murrow from a London under siege.

America had not yet entered the war, but everyone felt that it wouldn’t be long now. President Roosevelt had just instituted the first peacetime draft in September, and down at the old Custom House on Battery Park thousands lined up for their physicals.
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Packing up his books and pans and chess set, George left the grove and traveled to Sea Bright, New Jersey, for a week at the beach with Alice. Back in New York, he had nine nontransferable tickets to the World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, and a few more weeks before college.

The New York World’s Fair invited its visitors to take a look at “the world of tomorrow” forty-four million had already visited since opening day in the spring of 1939. Walking among the exhibits, George marveled at a futuristic car-based city by General Motors, at Bell Labs’ first keyboard-operated speech synthesizer—the “Voder”—and at an amazing new invention, television. Passing by the Westinghouse Time Capsule that was not to be opened until
A.D
. 6939, he might have thought about the words of Principal Wilson; about marking his horizon and finding Shangri-La within—“no matter what the cost.” His grades had won him a coveted Freshman Scholarship to Harvard, even if the partly bemused, partly awestruck interviewers thought him “an arresting rara avis” and “a baffling kid” as he described to them his experiments to render glass invisible. “I am interested in following “Knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought,” he cuddled Tennyson in his application, and come September 13, wide-eyed as much as he was determined, set out for Cambridge. “Might go hay-wire but will never be humdrum,” the Harvard interviewers concluded. George was on his way.
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Ronald A. Fisher (1890–1962)

J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964)