I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree . . .
—Joyce Kilmer, “Trees”
There were no trees in evidence as our school bus lumbered through a tall chain-link gate, topped with a coil of razor wire, and onto a long strip of asphalt flanking a line of drab army barracks. This was to be my school for the 1966–1967 academic year: four long, U-shaped, cinder-block buildings converted into twenty-one classrooms on a two-plus-acre portion of Camp Kilmer, a former US Army installation located in Piscataway Township, New Jersey. Although my home lay within easy walking distance of two established elementary schools, the school board had elected—as large swaths of the township’s farmland were developed into tract-home subdivisions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with an attendant surge in school-age boomers—to bus several classes of children from around the township many miles away to a makeshift temporary campus they named the Ethel Road School, after the road along which this stretch of Camp Kilmer lay.
My sister and I, about to enter the fourth grade and fifth grade, respectively, had been excited about the prospect of taking a bus to school for the first time. We had dressed nervously that morning, in new plaid dresses our mother had made, and set off for the corner of Rivercrest Drive and Perrine Avenue with our lunchboxes and small bouquets of marigolds for our teachers. We joined a gathering of some other fourth, fifth, and sixth graders from our neighborhood already milling about. When the large bus approached and groaned to an idle, my sister and I climbed up and found a seat to share. I squeezed her hand and gazed out the window. What would the day hold?
What followed was a circuitous, nearly hour-long ride through parts of Piscataway we had never seen before. Wending our way through a warren of cul-de-sacs and freshly paved, grid-like streets lined with newly built ranches and split-levels like our own, we stopped in the parking lots of various garden apartment complexes before rumbling down rural roads, past fields with dilapidated farms and a seemingly misplaced, red-roofed bar called The Carousel Lounge. Its parking lot was empty at eight o’clock in the morning, but older bus-mates would later whisper that “go-go girls” danced there in the afternoons and evenings. What “go-go girls” were, I could only guess.
As we rolled along, we picked up children waiting at the ends of driveways that led to some of the township’s many historical homes. (Piscataway Township had been founded in 1666, one hundred years before the founding of the United States). One long stretch of road, School Street, took us past a motley assortment of small houses, outbuildings, and uniquely cobbled-together structures set among thickets of scrub and glinting streams that looked like a page out of a Mother Goose storybook. Years later, I learned that the street had been named after a progressive school built along the road by one of two Utopian communities founded in the area in the early twentieth century. Folks in the commune built their own houses, often without experience or plans, which might explain some of the eccentric architecture.
As the miles rolled by on that hot September morning, the bus filled with the smell of lunchboxes: bologna, bananas, peanut butter. The pong of exhaust mingled with the sharp, cinnamon odor of our marigold bouquets, which—held tightly in our fists, stems bound in wet napkins and Saran Wrap—had begun to wilt. After passing through the prison-like gates and getting our first look at the shabby row of buildings and the macadam parking lot that doubled as the “playground,” all bordered by a ditch of waste shrubs and more chain-link fencing, my sister and I exchanged uneasy glances. This was a far cry from the clean, modern elementary school we had walked to in the past. Our spirits sank.
From Soldiers to Students
In 1942, the US government appropriated a large tract of Piscataway Township and parts of bordering Edison Township in order to establish the country’s main pre-embarkation site for troops heading to the European theater in World War II. The camp was named for nearby New Brunswick’s native son and notable poet Joyce Kilmer, who had died in World War I and is probably best remembered for his poem “Trees.” Travelers on the New Jersey Turnpike may recall seeing his name on the service plaza that sits just south of the Exit 9 turnoff for New Brunswick.
In its heyday, the bustling camp processed some 2.5 million soldiers on their way to the nearby New York City Port of Embarkation. After the war, the camp was used to reprocess troops returning from Europe. Later, in 1956, when a more confident America still harbored refugees, it housed some thirty thousand Hungarians fleeing the failed uprising against the Soviet-backed Communist regime, many of whom eventually settled in and around Piscataway, especially in New Brunswick.
In 1958, to accommodate Piscataway’s burgeoning population of school-age children, the board of education sought funds to convert three buildings at Camp Kilmer into overflow classrooms. Voters approved, and, in the summer of 1958, The Central New Jersey Home News reported that “the buildings, located in the ‘so called’ permanent section of the camp, will be called the Ethel Road School and will be considered an annexation of [the then-extant] Fellowship Farm School.”11x“Board to Map School Plans,” Central New Jersey Home News (Somerville, NJ), August 4, 1958; https://www.newspapers.com/image/315429471/. Intended to be a temporary fix, it was closed shortly after new elementary schools were opened in 1960, one of which I attended for kindergarten, in 1961. By 1965, however, as the school-age population continued to surge, the board voted to reopen twenty-one classrooms in the Ethel Road annex, and older elementary-age children from several schools around the township, including my sister and me in 1966, were bused there.
During the nearly sixty years that have passed since I attended Ethel Road School, I have discovered that many contemporaries growing up during the postwar birthrate boom had similar experiences in “alternative” classroom spaces, including Quonset huts and doublewide trailers. But especially in recent days, with a presidential administration threatening to cut funding for programs serving our most vulnerable children, I find myself thinking a lot about my year spent in former army barracks, in a seemingly less-than-ideal setting for childhood education. (The eventually abandoned site of Camp Kilmer was so gloomy, in fact, that concentration-camp scenes for the 1964 movie The Pawnbroker were filmed in a section of the camp once used to hold transiting prisoners of war.)
Using anything resembling the former Camp Kilmer as a site for elementary public education would likely set off more than a few alarm bells today. Weeds wound through the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence separated by a ditch from the asphalt yard where the buses pulled in and out in the mornings and afternoons, and where we played at recess after eating lunch at our desks. A cafeteria of sorts operated in one of the barracks, serving food prepared at another school, but my sister and I always ate the lunches our mother packed each morning. We did buy milk in the cafeteria because it was only two cents a carton, even though it had usually gone sour because of inadequate refrigeration. On sunny days, recess and gym class consisted of games played on the paved strip—hopscotch, jump rope, tag. More than one concussion resulted from children hitting the ground in games like red rover. One boy broke an arm falling into the adjoining ditch. Another broke ribs.
On rainy and especially cold or snowy days, “phys ed” took place in a long, gutted barracks with a concrete floor and floor-to-ceiling metal poles that we dodged along with hurled kickballs. According to newspaper reports, a small library was located in one of the buildings, but if I ever entered it, alone or with my class, I cannot recall doing so—and because I loved and continue to love libraries, I doubt that I would have forgotten such a detail. In each building, there were separate washbasins standing in the open at opposite ends of a long central cinder-block hallway, next to our respective bathrooms—boys at one end, and girls at the other. In ours, a wall-hung dispenser of “Sanitary Products” with a coin slot, perhaps a vestige of the years the camp housed Hungarian refugees, amused us nine- and ten-year-olds.
The classrooms themselves were not much better, jerry-rigged as they were out of spaces designed to bunk soldiers. The classroom walls were plywood; the windows were high and small. Antiquated heating pipes ran along the outside walls. If you were fortunate enough to sit in a row next to the pipes, you could keep fairly warm in the winter, although you quickly learned they would burn you if you touched one. Anyone sitting a row away, however, would freeze, and we usually kept our coats on in the cold months.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, parents of children being bused to Ethel Road were worried less about infrastructure and more about other things, primarily the proximity of the school to the adjacent Kilmer Job Corps Training Center, where, it was rumored, the shiftless teenage jobless trainees might pose a danger to young children. As a result of parental concerns, the township guaranteed that two uniformed guards would be onsite at the Ethel Road School during all school hours. I never saw those guards, though I am sure they were there. Worried parents had also insisted on the eight-foot fence and barbed-wire enclosure. Despite the suboptimal physical conditions and purported Job Corps–trainee threats, my fifth-grade year at Ethel Road—for many reasons, some of which I would come to appreciate only over time—was one of the most creative and formative of my childhood education, offering experiences and impressions that I continue to ponder.
The main reason that year felt enchanted was my teacher, Elizabeth “Betty” Ames. A New Englander and a young, first-time teacher, she brought to the classroom a mix of old-school rigor and playful, innovative creativity. We regularly memorized and recited poetry (including Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”), wrote responses to art prints, acted out scenes from Shakespeare and other plays, and learned rudimentary French vocabulary and songs. We took a field trip to Philadelphia to visit the places we learned about in history lessons. We conducted simple but exciting science experiments with baking soda and borax crystals. We drew from still-life arrangements. And we did a lot of bonding—the relatively small class size being one benefit of a cramped schoolroom. At a time when a typical elementary class might consist of twenty-five students, a photograph of my class taken in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall shows eighteen of us, goofily happy, flocked around Miss Ames. For part of that year, Miss Ames recruited me to help a Japanese student, the daughter of a visiting scientist at Rutgers, learn English. Hiroko and I both loved to draw, and our friendship developed while we sketched everyday objects and then traded the words for them in English and Japanese. Before the end of the school year, when Hiroko moved to New York City with her family, she was nearly fluent in English, and I had learned a few Japanese words and phrases as well.
Miss Ames Objects
After my fifth-grade year at Ethel Road, I entered the sixth grade at Holmes Marshall School, within walking distance of my home. Miss Ames moved to New York City to be with her future husband, John, and both of them began studying to become licensed practical nurses, believing such work to be of most service to humanity. A classmate and I visited Miss Ames in the city during our sixth-grade year, taking the bus from New Brunswick to the New York Port Authority and meeting her and her roommate, who wore purple leopard-print stockings and had a boyfriend who played for the rock group The Animals. How grown-up we felt, walking with the two women through the East Village and then visiting the United Nations. On that trip, we learned that John was a conscientious objector; not long after that, he and Betty Ames moved to Canada.
Such things made an impression, partly because my family was not a particularly political or progressive one. Talk at the supper table was less about the Vietnam War, race, or feminism than whether my father should mow the lawn on the weekend or set out his eggplant seedlings in the garden for hardening off; or, alternatively, whether my mother should go bargain hunting at the flea market in Englishtown or stay home and paint the hallway. Still, we children took things in, even if we did not yet understand them. And while it would be years before I fully appreciated Miss Ames and John’s decision to leave the United States rather than fight in a war they deemed immoral, their choice planted a seed of awareness in me. One possessed a conscience, I realized, and one could use that conscience to accept, to object, to choose. And there were other things I had begun to apprehend during my year at Ethel Road School—including questions about race that arose on that long bus ride to and from the school each day.
Nominally Integrated
Our schools were integrated by 1965, albeit with far fewer black children than white ones. (In that Independence Hall photograph of my Ethel Road class, five out of the eighteen students are black, just a little over a quarter of our class). Piscataway made no concerted effort to correct “racial imbalances” in its schools until the 1970s and 1980s, efforts that sometimes led to controversy, as in the case of Piscataway Township Board of Education v. Burke or Piscataway Township Board of Education v. Taxman.22xPiscataway Township Board of Education v. Burke, 1978; https://law.justia.com/cases/new-jersey/appellate-division-published/1978/158-n-j-super-436-0.html and Taxman v. Board of Education of the Township of Piscataway, 1996; https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/91/1547/476277/.But in 1965, from what I can tell from contemporary news articles, the rhetoric surrounding the Ethel Road busing decision was driven less by the desire to further integrate schools than by a determination to avoid overcrowding and forcing younger children into double sessions in the schools. According to a table of “School Statistics 1844–1976” in Walter C. Meuly’s History of Piscataway Township, 1666–1976, the total number of pupils enrolled in Piscataway schools nearly doubled from 1955 to 1960, from 2,214 to 4,370, and then swelled to 6,620 pupils by 1965.33xWalter C. Meuly, History of Piscataway Township, 1666–1976 (Bicentennial Commission by the Authority of the Piscataway Township Council, 1976). There were simply too many of us to fit into the schools that existed.
While our schools at the time may have been nominally integrated, racial segregation was far from finished in our township. On the ride to Ethel Road School, I noticed that few black children got on the bus until we got to School Street, which seemed to be populated almost entirely by black families. That had me thinking about my own relatively new neighborhood, which was almost exclusively white. Across a swath of former farmland behind our development and then past several other new streets ran Park Avenue, an older street where most of the residents were black, most living in small, neat homes, some with outhouse privies behind them and possibly a staked donkey and a scattering of chickens. We knew that the family of two of our classmates lived for a while in their car on Park Avenue. Children from Park Avenue attended Knollwood Elementary, where I spent kindergarten through fourth grade, and we would sometimes meet up and walk together. I was aware of the oddness of this separation, but it wasn’t until I rode the bus through School Street that I realized geographical segregation by race was hardly unique to our part of the township but part of a larger, systemic phenomenon that was behind an emerging civil rights movement of whose existence I was still unaware.
What accounted for these distinct African American neighborhoods in Piscataway? In his History of Piscataway Township, Meuly describes the growth of various residential neighborhoods in the early twentieth century. Much of the township was still farmland at that time. He writes about an area then known as New Brunswick Highlands, located off River Road:
near Holmes Marshall School along Park Avenue. It was an early residential development, begun in 1918 by the N.T. Hegeman Company of New York City. The settlers were black people from the southern states as well as from Pennsylvania. They had been sharecroppers, and some were children of former slaves. Among them a group of southern Baptists founded the Zion Hill Baptist Church. The early dwellings were small frame houses or lean-to’s [sic] with a distinct southern appearance. Some were set on brick pillars because, as an old resident said: “We never saw a cellar until we came north.”44xIbid., 142–143.
Later, in an attempt to learn more about School Street, I read about the two Utopian communities that emerged in the area in the early 1900s, at about the same time Park Avenue was being developed. I became especially interested in the community known as the Fellowship Farm Cooperative, or Stelton, so-called after the Stelle family, early Piscataway Township settlers. The Fellowship Farm commune was started by followers of the Spanish anarchist martyr Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, who, after Ferrer was killed in 1909, founded in Manhattan the Francisco Ferrer Association based on the libertarian principles of Ferrer’s Escuela Moderna (Modern School). Members were not just anarchists but also socialists, vegetarians, single taxers, and other left-leaning progressives. For various reasons—primarily a desire to escape the city and live cooperatively and intentionally—a handful of Ferrer Association members decided to buy up a tract of relatively cheap land in nearby New Jersey. Those interested in joining this intentional community could purchase small parcels from the Stelton site founders, on which plots they built various rough-hewn, often ramshackle structures while making a living by farming and raising chickens. According to Meuly, “the socialist and liberal thinking of the [Stelton colony’s] founders finds expression in the street names chosen: International Avenue, Brotherhood Street, Justice Street, Voltaire Street, Karl Marx Place, now changed to Arlington Place.”55xIbid., 145.
Perdita Buchan, in her book Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden, describes a house built in 1915 by a Russian-born artist, musician, and anarchist named Sam Goldman: “[It was] a strange building, cement, with bas reliefs of swans and cranes and fairy-tale cottage windows, as though a dacha had been lifted from the forests of Russia and dropped on the flat plain of central New Jersey.”66xPerdita Buchan, Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rivergate Books/Rutgers University Press, 2007), 5. I must have seen the Goldman dacha every time our bus made its journey to the Ethel Road School. Also still standing along School Street in 1966 was the Kropotkin Library, the Stelton colony’s library named for the famed Russian anarchist. No wonder School Street felt to me like such a fantastical place.
The Modern School established at Stelton in 1915 was, according to Perdita Buchan, “the heart of the colony,” where sons and daughters of Stelton denizens (and students sent to board at the school from the city) engaged in a self-directed, hands-on education, following progressive, child-centered ways of learning, many of which are now, as Buchan points out, standard educational practices.77xIbid., 70. Not all of the Modern School’s practices were ideal. For many years, the children’s dormitory and schoolroom were unheated; ideas about diet could be quirky. Under one regime of adult volunteers, according to Buchan, “the children ate only nuts and raisins; under another, all vegetables were eaten without peeling and with dirt still on for nutrition.”
Nonetheless, most students at the Modern School appeared to thrive: writing and printing their own literary magazine, making crafts, woodworking, weaving, engaging in dancing, pottery, metalworking, basket making, theater, sports, and music. At the time of the publication of Buchan’s book, in 2007, loyal Modern School alumni continued to gather annually at Rutgers University for reunions. According to one alumna, “Living and learning in Stelton included not only the school and the hours we spent there but the colony and the people in it.”88xIbid., 84. One notable alumna was Joan Baez’s mother, Joan Bridge. Of her mother’s time at the Modern School, Baez writes, “There was one school she was sent to which she loved. They left her alone there, and she could sit by a brook and not go to class.”99xIbid., 72.
We didn’t have to eat unwashed vegetables at Ethel Road School. And we did have to attend classes. But I can’t help drawing certain parallels between these two transient schools established, at different times, just miles from each other. Challenging or unusual learning conditions, it seems, don’t necessarily preclude the growth of mind and spirit. According to Buchan, when it came time for graduates of the Modern School to enter mainstream education, their grounding in a challenging climate that encouraged freedom and hands-on, child-directed learning made it possible for those colony children not only to catch up but also to move “easily ahead” of peers who had come up in more conventional school settings.1010xIbid., 81. Buchan describes the demise of that unusual community:
Ironically, the colony at Stelton was destroyed by another intentional community, an army base [Camp Kilmer].… An army barracks is a community of rules, the antithesis of an anarchist community, and yet it was the lawlessness of the soldiers that helped to destroy Stelton. The soldiers heard about the “free love” community and came looking for action. There were stories of vandalism, robbery, and even rape. For the first time, colonists had to lock their doors, a problem because most doors wouldn’t lock. The soldiers frequented a bar called the Nine O’Clock [also known as the aforementioned Carousel Lounge], and to reach it they had to walk through Stelton, often returning drunk. Suddenly, the dearly bought rural peace was shattered, and the colony was under siege. People began to move away. Children were taken out of the school. By the end of the war, the colony was much diminished. Many houses had been bought by black soldiers, since Steltonites were the only people near Camp Kilmer willing to rent or sell to blacks.1111xIbid., 83.
This explains, I think, why so many of the black children who boarded our bus to Ethel Road lived along School Street.
The Gift of a Good Education
The year I spent learning in a repurposed army barracks (in physical conditions that even the superintendent of schools admitted were “substandard”), taking the long weekday bus ride to and from it, widened my ten-year-old view of the world. The significance of certain facts, large and small, dawned on me with the force of revelation—for example, at Ethel Road School, my sister had the first black schoolteacher that either of us had ever seen. Or that while most of my classmates in Piscataway were Jewish or Catholic (of whose ritual feasts, bar and bat mitzvahs, saints cards and medals, I, a Presbyterian, was envious) and that while school cafeterias served fish sticks on Fridays and we had every Jewish holiday off from school, my first-grade teacher Mrs. Abraham, who was Jewish, was required to lead us not only in the Pledge of Allegiance but also in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer each morning. Like most US communities in 1966, Piscataway Township was thoroughly entangled in the myriad paradoxes of the American experiment.
I think back to the teachers at Ethel Road, offering the best education they could without a lot of supportive bells and whistles. “We function as a school, although we do not look like one,” said Ethel Road School Principal Nicholas J. Navarino in a Courier-News article dated January 27, 1966, about the class that preceded my time at Ethel Road. “We’ve had a good year.” I’m still learning from kernels sown during my “good year.” Perhaps that is the great gift of a good education: the inspiration to keep on trying to learn.
Rarely a day goes by that I don’t repeat to myself the lines from the Robert Frost poem that I memorized and recited aloud in 1966, standing beside my desk in Miss Ames’s class. Like the little horse belonging to the narrator of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” who “must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near,” my sister and I were mystified that morning as our bus edged through a barbed-wire gate, and we stared in disbelief at the squat, seemingly soulless buildings that resembled no school we had ever seen before. There were no woods, no trees, no “frozen lake,” but, in a manner of speaking, we gave our “harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake.”
Now, almost six decades later, like the speaker in Frost’s poem, I continue to wonder at all that I didn’t know then, all that I learned, all that I’ve yet to learn. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is considered by many to be a children’s poem, but I think Betty Ames knew that it was a poem meant to accompany her pupils throughout life—its meaning, by turns, deepening, darkening, sustaining—despite adversity, however manifest and always with us.