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anDries HuDDe, We salute tHee
students in class 7-16, of which I was fortunate to have known and liked a fair number from 193.
It was a big deal that in junior high, education was “departmental” for the first time. Each subject had a separate teacher. But students did not have individual schedules, as they could in high school. The class traveled as a unit—some would say as an “unruly mob”—from math teacher to English teacher to social studies teacher, etc., and thus became quite cohesive. Friendships blossomed and strengthened, and in the ninth grade, what had been class 7-16 remained intact as class 9-18. (I have no idea why 16 became 18.)
I’d like to say that I have significant memories of the academic life at Hudde. I can’t. The only really formal lesson that I do recall was one in counting points in order to make headlines fit, a real art form: Remember, M and W are each counted as 11⁄2 points, and I is only 1⁄2 point. (I am pleased to announce that my spellcheck and bad-grammar indicator did not reject the phrase “I is”; perhaps it had committed to memory the fact that this story was set in Brooklyn.) I also learned that headlines are written in the present tense to signify that something occurred in the past, that tombstones (headlines that are in adjacent columns, right next to each other) are, like real tombstones, to be avoided, and that a circus layout for the front page is pretty cool, hard for me to define (I know it when I see it), and seldom used by The New York Times, which in those days had eight columns to “lay out” rather than its present six.
As you might have concluded, all of the foregoing was taught in journalism class, which prepared 7-16 to put out the school newspaper, the Hudde Penguin. Just as it was natural for the school to be named after a slave-trading and rumrunning coward, I assume that it made sense to somebody that its monthly paper be named after an animal whose clos- est relationship to Flatbush is that it could be found in the Prospect Park Zoo. I do not believe that there was any evidence that Andries Hudde was a penguin-runner.
Anyway, I was disappointed that I was not an editor of the Penguin. My friend Joe Chassler, whose dad, it will be recalled, was employed as
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