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Chapter Twelve
Sons (and Mostly Daughters)
of the Blue and White
SEPTEMBER 1958 – JUNE 1961
In which a satellite and some songs appear to change the author’s life—for the better.
Hume in Error?
Having dutifully (and easily) held my enthusiasm in check as I saluted Andries Hudde in song for the last time in June 1958, I packed for my second summer in Starlight, focused not just on camp but also on what might lie ahead in September. I had made a choice, and I was very scared.
Thanks to the launching of the satellite named Sputnik, I could have entered high school as a not-yet-fourteen-year-old sophomore by attending Midwood High School in either (a) its main building, which would house twenty-eight hundred students, 80 percent of whom would be juniors and seniors ranging in age from sixteen to eighteen, or (b) its far cozier annex (known both as “the Annex” and as “Kensington”), which would be attended only by freshmen and sophomores, fewer than a thousand.
Midwood was within walking distance; the Annex, on 18th Avenue near Ocean Parkway, was two bus rides away. I was very scared because
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