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sons (anD Mostly DauGHters) of tHe Blue anD WHite
his work in quantum electro-dynamics [he was also the author of QED] and, more important, a great lecturer and a great and loveable character [see Surely You Must be Joking, Mr. Feynman], took his place.)
• When, in 1959, Fidel Castro’s revolution ousted Batista, the fascist president of Cuba, Castro was a hero to students. My social studies teacher, Mrs. Emil, cautioned that Castro was a communist and not just the Robin Hood who he appeared to be. We were outraged. The United States soon concluded that Mrs. Emil was right and that Castro’s government should be overthrown. Thus, in April 1960, the new Kennedy administration sponsored the Bay of Pigs invasion, which failed miserably. Students at Midwood, I among them, donated money to Tractors for Freedom, a committee that was set up to facilitate an exchange for the prisoners that the Castro govern- ment had taken during the aborted invasion.
• I didn’t particularly care for Mr. Shlakman, who taught my honors English class. We studied Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and were asked to write an essay about the tragedy. I did and took the position that, inasmuch as Sophocles’s audience was very familiar with the trag- edy, the real art in the play lay in Sophocles’s language and approach, not in the story itself. My composition came back with a very low grade, as Mr. Shlakman did not like my thesis. In my yearbook, in which he insisted upon writing (I certainly didn’t need his auto- graph), he wrote, “Great power, too often dissipated,” which, as you can see, still sticks with me and which I thought was a pretty horri- ble thing to do. When I went to college, I discussed my essay with my humanities professor, who was a bona fide classicist, and I was delighted to come away vindicated.
• My biology teacher was Mr. Zahalsky, who, when he first introduced himself to us, emulated the swordsmanship of Zorro by saying his name and simultaneously slashing a Z in the air. So obsessed was he with having a name that started with a Z that he sat me in front of
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