Big web guy and mensch Dave Winer wins my heart by being a Queens kid who never let his love for New York die, despite decades in the Bay Area (the un-New York).
A few days ago he posted about his high school newspaper, Bronx Science’s Daily Planet, and the photo (left) on the cover set off a wave of emotional upheaval more important than mere nostalgia.
Yeah, it’s youth. But that’s not it. It is the archetype of the youth that my friends and I, painfully aware that we were not at New York’s Bronx Science or Stuyvesant but just Flushing’s John Bowne, strove to enact. That cover says, to me, New York, sidewalks, Jews, zaniness, smarts, confidence, fun, girls-as-friends (and what’s cooler than that at 17?). It was the ideal high school life that was being lived by others even as we were living a runner-up version of that same life and knowing that it was the runner-up version.
Anyway.
Another thing it made me think of is how many great high school newspapers there must me, and what a great book there would be in a collection of writing and photos from high schools in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Or maybe the 1930s.
The Magpie was the student newspaper at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and during the Thirties it was so great that the New Deal Network created this website about it. A Seymour Krim book review from 1938 is here. Search here for student work by photographer Richard Avedon, writer James Baldwin, playwright Sidney (Paddy) Chayefsky, and others.
Know of another high school paper that was this great? Do tell.
Comments
I stumbled across your site through your comment on Bruce. There is a top notch mathematician at the U. of Illinois who takes great pride in posting the mathematical discoveries of the Bronx HS of Science math teams.I kvell whenever I read stories of ordinary people who are really extraordinary intellectually.
Hi EJ,
Sorry for my slow reply. Yes, Bronx Science is a brainy mathy group. I say this with some bitter envy, because math was my Waterloo in high school and beyond, and later successes in writing have not fully erased that sense of humiliating ineffectualness in math class. But I was more turned on by the buoyant spirit of play and confidence. It’s only the most attractive thing on earth.