"You can't do that to me!

You can't do that to me! ©Joel Baumwoll

When a kid grows up, there are certain ideas he has about the way things ought to be.

Sometimes these notions get into his head at a very young age. That happened to me a few times, and I have no idea where they came from.

My sense of justice is quite strong, and the outrage I feel when confronted with injustice is equally strong. Funny thing is, I recall feeling this way as far back as second grade.

Now, I am not talking about anger at not getting my way. I was never prone to temper tantrums when refused. More likely, I’d figure out some way to get what I wanted, sooner or later. I was implacable in the face of denial.

But there was a strong anti-authoritarian streak in me from my earliest walking around days. By the time I got to kindergarten, it was already fully formed. I wasn’t completely aware of it, but every so often, it would come over me, and get me into big trouble.

Little kids are not supposed to resist the edicts of adults. Especially teachers. When a teacher tells a kid to do something, they expect the kid to hop to. For some reason, I needed to be convinced that what I was being told to do was justified. 

I didn’t accept the teacher’s authority on face value. That’s not a good thing for a kid to do.

Where this came from, I don’t know. My parents never told me to resist authority. My old man was certainly not very tolerant of my stubborn refusal to do what he wanted. 

On one occasion I decided I didn’t want to eat a bowl of oatmeal. I think I was about five or six. I sat at the table; arms folded, lips pressed together, head shaking from side to side.

“Eat it!” he commanded, “before it gets cold. Your mother just made it. We aren’t made of money you know.”

The idea of wasting food in 1947 was a particular hot button in my house. We had just come out of Wartime food rationing, which required ordinary people to collect coupons to be redeemed for things like eggs, butter, milk and meat. My old man was a milkman, and he considered the food he put on the table to be a very important part of our lives.

There were times when he would eye the portion of steak my mother put on my plate, and I’d hear him say, “Why are you giving him such a big piece?” My mother would say, “Oh Harold, you got just as big a piece, and he’s a growing boy.” He’d grumble and look annoyed.

Over time, I got the idea that he considered me a rival for my mother’s affection, and as a kid, I learned to be careful not to give him reason to believe I was taking unfair advantage of my status as the firstborn male in a Jewish home. That could be dangerous. 

There were times my mother wanted to pull his chain, and actually did give me a bigger piece of steak than his. 

So there I was, sitting in front of a bowl of slowly congealing oatmeal. “There are starving people in Europe,” my mother would say, referring to the populations in the countries recently devastated by the war. “They’d be happy to have that oatmeal.” 

This argument never worked for me. Lima beans, stringy pot roast, oatmeal could all be shipped to Europe as far as I was concerned. 

But my father used a more direct approach.

“LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER AND EAT YOUR OATMEAL,” he’d say in an angry
voice. “Mm Mm,” was my closed-lipped refusal. “YOU BETTER EAT IT OR ELSE,” he said, as the conflict was no longer about oatmeal, but about my right not to eat something I didn’t want, and his authority over his kid (and rival).

On this particular day, the conflict escalated until my father, in a fit of rage, picked up the bowl and turned it upside down on the top of my head. Globs of oatmeal fell on my shoulders, and melted butter mixed with tears as I began to howl. Shocked, my mother ran to my rescue with a towel while I cried loudly, mostly out of horror at the gooey mess that was on top of my head and matted in my hair. My mother muttered her disapproval at my father’s technique of discipline, while she mopped her little injured darling. 

I have a suspicion that I picked up on the conflict, and yelled a bit harder and longer to bring the scales of justice over to my side.


On school days, breakfast was usually conflict free. For one thing, my old man left at 4 AM to load up his milk truck in Orange, New Jersey and start his deliveries. So it was just my mother and I and my kid brother, Gene, who was two or three years old, and an interested observer on the scene. My mother went to great lengths to see that I got plenty of what I wanted to eat before I went to school.

My school was P.S. 73, a brick building across the street from our apartment house. We lived on Anderson Avenue in the Bronx, in a section called Highbridge.
It looked down a broad boulevard called The Grand Concourse, lined with elegant apartment houses, each of which had long canopies and uniformed men standing in front to open car doors and hail cabs for residents.

Ours was a middle class neighborhood, almost all Jewish (or so I thought). Just above us was Woodycrest Avenue, a neighborhood of Irish families and parochial schools. 

Every now and then, a group of kids from Woodycrest (we called them “the woodies”) would descend on our block and start fights with us. 

Our offense, I was to learn, was that we had killed Christ. So they were there to exact retribution. I learned to run and to fight at an early age, and it was important to know when to do which.

Every Tuesday we had assembly, and we were instructed to wear a white shirt. The entire school would gather in a large auditorium and hear a presentation by some official.

In my first year of school, 1945, the war was still on, and often we were shown flickering black and white films with scenes of victorious U.S. troops, bombed out buildings, refugees picking their way through piles of bricks for food, clothing or household goods.

Collections were held and we’d bring some item of clothing for the “European refugees.” Once a month, there was a special assembly with entertainment. Puppet shows, dancers, cartoons. We were told to bring a dime for admission, and the money was deposited in a kind of bank account. We were given little books into which each deposit was entered. 

I suppose this was meant to teach us thrift, and encourage us to save money, not just spend it.

My teacher in third grade was Miss Schechter. I remember her as a humorless women and stern disciplinarian. Unlike Miss Price, my second grade teacher, who was a much loved, warm and fuzzy, gray haired granny type who exuded affection, Miss Schechter had a cold aura about her. We were told to sit bolt upright at our desks, and if we wanted to be called on with an answer to a question, we had to fold our hands in front of us and stretch stiffly to attention in our seats.

An upcoming assembly created a stir because we were going to see a marionette show. I had never seen a live show of any kind, and the idea seeing puppets on strings do a play was exciting. As the kids filed in, they sat in a strictly defined order, with the youngest, and smallest kids in front and the older kids (fifth and sixth graders) towards the rear.

Our class was about six rows from the stage, in a cluster on the left side of the auditorium.

There was the usual jostling and yelling as we pushed and shoved down the aisles and into the wooden seats. That day, there was an unusual amount of horseplay, and I was caught up in it. I had brought a straw with me, and a supply of tissues. So had Marty Manson, my best friend, and Paul Joseph.

We began a clandestine battle of spitballs, wadding the tissues into small wet blobs and blowing them into the necks of unwitting victims. The idea was to get off a shot quickly and then sit quietly looking the other way as the target spun around to discover their attacker. Of course, the commotion caused by the flying balls of wet tissue was soon noticed by Miss Schecter.

After a time, she responded, in the fashion of Captain Renault, when Major Strasser told him that a German courier had been murdered at Casablanca’s airport. “Round up the usual suspects,” he instructed his men. 

So knowing that something was going on, but not sure of what or who, she began to round up the usual suspects. Of course, I was on the top of the list.

“Joel,” she pointed an accusing finger at me, leave the auditorium and go to the principal’s office. I was horror struck. I would miss the show, get sent home with a note, and catch hell from my parents, a triple schneid! What could I do?
“No,” I blurted out. “You can’t tell me to leave. I paid 10¢ to get in, and you can’t make me leave.” Instinctively, in a desperate bid to save my skin, I had constructed a powerful legal argument that pitted Miss Schecter’s authority against my rights as a paying customer. 

Somehow, my fevered brain had figured out that this was like going to the movies, and my admission fee entitled me to rights that she could not deny me. I stood my ground. “She repeated her command, “I said go to the principal’s office.” She could not quite believe that an eight year-old student of hers was refusing to obey a direct order, in front of all the other kids. I repeated my argument, “I paid to get in and you can’t make me leave.” Sensing my willingness to dig in, she considered her options. 
 
I guess she thought she could not carry me bodily out of the place without creating a commotion; she looked at me with hostility and said, “very well, when the assembly is over, I will no longer consider you a part of my class.”
No longer part of her class! What did that mean? How could she not let me in the room?

What was in store for me? My victory of the moment was tempered with the uncertainty of what was going to happen next. I watched the show with a growing fear, as the clock moved toward the end of the assembly hour.

The performance ended and the bell signaled the return to our regular classrooms. We filed out, and I walked stiffly back to room 315 with the rest of our third grade class.

Back in my desk, I waited as Miss Schecter came in and started to ask the kids how they liked the show. She led a discussion about the story, which was a classic Punch and Judy skit, but mostly talked about how the marionettes were made and manipulated.

I sat stiffly waiting for some bolt of retribution, but nothing happened. I was not going to be punished. A wave of relief washed over me. And then we went into our math lesson. Schecter would write some problem on the blackboard and ask who wanted to come up and solve it. I liked to get called on and show how smart I was, so I sat stiffly, arms folded and neck craned, for her to see I knew the answer. She called on Elaine Dix, a cute brunette with a pageboy hairdo and bangs that I had an early crush on. Schecter wrote the next problem on the board, and again I stretched and craned, but she called on Marty Manson, my best friend, who sat next to me. Marty was almost never called on.
Well, this went on for the next ten minutes, and we were done with math.

Reading was next on the agenda, and we took out our books. “Who wants to read the first chapter of the story?” Miss Schecter asked. More craning and stretching. To no avail.

We went through the entire class and I wasn’t called on once. The bell rang and we got up to leave for the day. As we walked out, I could see Schecter looking at me with a squinty-eyed expression of anger.

I went home with mixed feelings. I had won the battle, my parents were none the wiser for my antics, and the worst was over. But I was still a little worried. The next day in class brought a repeat performance. 

I was completely ignored for math, spelling, reading book reports, and when it came time to hand in our workbooks with the homework, Miss Schecter did a strange thing. She refused to take mine. “I told you I would no longer consider you a part of this class,” she reminded me with a self-satisfied smirk, “and so I don’t want your workbook.”

Now I was beginning to get scared.

I was in a no-man’s land for an eight year-old. How could I go through an entire school year and not be part of her class? What did that mean? What would I tell my parents?

I started to cry. “Sniff sniff, wahhh, Miss Schecter, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again Wahhh wahhh.” How humiliating. I was reduced to a tearful bawling kid, in front of the whole class. She let it go one for a interminable time and then said “very well. I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

All these years later, I can tell Miss Schecter that I did learn my lesson.
Perhaps not the lesson she meant to teach me, but one that has served me very well.