Page 152 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
I had chosen convenience over comfort and had elected to attend Mid- wood’s far more intimidating main building.
Ultimately, choosing to endure the overwhelming main building as a very young sophomore was a choice that would positively change my life and lead to great things. I have therefore always given a lot of credit to Sputnik, which had provided me with the ability to choose.
I suppose that that requires a bit of an explanation, maybe more than a bit: Starting in the mid-1950s, there were so many teenagers in the local population that Midwood’s building, located at the intersec- tion of Bedford Avenue and Glenwood Road, could not possibly hold all of the ninth-graders who would be graduating from the local “K-to- eight” schools and the tenth-graders who would be graduating from the local junior high schools. Thus, an unused elementary school was found to house them. All tenth-graders graduating from junior high schools were compelled to go to Midwood’s newly created annex building in the Kensington neighborhood; K-to-eight graduates would go to Kensington as freshmen; and tenth-graders who had already “served” one year at the Kensington Annex as freshmen would go to the main building. Because I attended Hudde, a junior high school, I would have been compelled to attend the Kensington Annex—but for Sputnik.
In the 1950s, the United States was locked in the Cold War with the former U.S.S.R., and the launching by the Soviets of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, gripped America with the fear that it was falling behind technologically. Midwood responded by devel- oping a new curriculum that was aimed at accelerating education in mathematics and science. Qualifying sophomores-to-be would be eli- gible to add chemistry to the “academic” students’ normal regimen of biology, geometry, English, social studies, and a foreign language. Then they would be able to take physics as juniors and, presumably, college- level math and science then and thereafter. Taking the program was, not surprisingly, referred to as “taking Six Majors.” I qualified. Because the Kensington Annex was not equipped with chemistry labs and, perhaps for other reasons, if you were to take Six Majors, you would go to the
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