Page 116 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
wisdom, but more likely upon what was perceived by ten- and eleven- year-olds as my wit, I had more than once been president of my thirty-or-so-student class at 193, a job that entailed doing absolute nothing that I can recall but did involve a bit more prestige than being eraser or window-pole monitor.) I accepted.
My father then suggested that I have posters featuring a picture of an ice cream sundae surmounted by a cherry and the slogan “At the Top of the Heap is Yavy for Veep,” and I made many. I don’t know what the connotations of the word heap do for your image (or how it reflects on your classmates), but I suppose that a picture of a few scoops of ice cream could overcome the suggestion of a mound of garbage. Anyway, I was very pleased that he helped me and more pleased that he let me employ his own childhood nickname in the slogan. I soon found myself making a campaign speech in front of an auditorium full of seventh- graders, the largest audience that I had faced to that point. (I had yet to be bar mitzvahed.) I don’t remember being nervous, but I do remember getting some laughs, one of which might have had to do with the fact that the building that housed Hudde was (truly) built in the shape of an H. Joe won and I won, and neither of us did anything in the execution of his office that I can recall. So, as noted, I had been well prepared by my executive experience at P.S. 193.
Joe’s influence on my intellectual life was far subtler. As I men- tioned, his father was editor-in-chief of the Sunday magazine section of the New York Herald Tribune when we were at 193. He was also to become editor-in-chief of Pageant magazine and Redbook magazine, two very popular publications at the time. Redbook, a magazine that focuses on women, is still published. Sey Chassler was, as you might have guessed, a literary man and probably the first certifiably intellectual adult whom I had experienced. He and his wife had lots of books cramming the shelves of Joe’s house on East 19th Street. He even smoked a pipe! Undoubtedly due to Sey Chassler’s influence and that of Joe’s mother, both of whom were very nice to me, Joe was a skilled writer and, more important, something that nobody else around me was: an avid reader of good books. I can still picture my skinny friend seated at a table with his
• 98 •