Page 103 - WhyAsInY

a MissteP, a MisnoMer, anD soMe eleMentary MisaDventures
• The constant repetition of multiplication tables works.
• The constant repetition of multiplication tables sucks.
• Cursive handwriting is incredibly well named.
• Although hand-copying the nineteen stanzas of the Davy Crockett theme song three times and then selling the product at twenty-five cents per (for a total of seventy-five cents—see the first reference to multiplication tables, above) may have seemed like a good idea at the beginning, it was woefully bad economics. As I later learned, it also violated a federal statute.
• The yellow mushroom-shaped cloud produced by the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb on Eniwetok in the Bikini Atoll in November 1952 was actually very impressive. I remember the explosion and what it looked like because Sey Chassler, the father of my best friend, Joseph Chassler (about whom, much more later), was the Editor-in-Chief at the time of the Sunday magazine sec- tion of the New York Herald Tribune, and Joe therefore had a copy of the cover of the magazine to display to the class at show- and-tell. I remember that it was the Bikini Atoll for entirely different reasons.
• You had better have had excellent vision and preferred seating if, on Tuesday, January 20, 1953, you really wanted to see the inaugura- tion of Dwight D. Eisenhower (who trounced my parents’ candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson), when you and the rest of the school were crowded into the auditorium to witness the event on a thirteen-inch television screen, measured, of course, diagonally.
• Josef Stalin was a bad man, and he died. I know this because I had to deliver the news of the day to my class on March 6, 1953. I recall asking my parents why, if he was such a bad man, we hadn’t bombed
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