As much as I enjoyed my brief visit to the annual meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society as recounted in my previous posts, the primary reason I’d headed into Manhattan occurred later that day—a mini-reunion of writers and editors from my high-school newspaper. I was part of the first graduating class of Brooklyn’s South Shore High School, which meant that it had no newspaper before we got there, and so it was up to us to invent the paper’s journalistic traditions instead of having any to follow. The writers and editors of that newspaper, which we dubbed Shorelines, were advised by a teacher named Ernie Seligmann who is no longer with us, but whom we all loved. We were a tight bunch then, but as the years went by, time, as usual, tore us apart.
For the last few years, we’ve been trying to arrange a reunion of those staffers, but until Sunday, we were never able to achieve even the smallest critical mass. Finally, four of us were able to be in Manhattan on the same day. We gathered at Marsielle restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen on 9th Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets to finally catch up. Below you can see Barry Chaiken, Donna Grant, me, and Marc Frons.
Though I’d seen Donna within the past year, I hadn’t seen Barry since 1993, and hadn’t seen Marc since 1985.
Donna, as I shared earlier, is a bestselling author. Barry has made it big in pharma and also owns a vineyard in Argentina. Marc is now the Chief Technology Officer for Digital Operations over at the The New York Times. We’d reserved a table for five because we’d hoped that another alumnus, Mark Diamond, was going to join us, but he’s running for state senate in Connecticut and, this close to the election, wisely decided that the race couldn’t spare him. Which was just as well—we’d hate to see him lose by one vote because he took time out of campaigning to be with us!
The restaurant treated us well, leaving us our space for many hours as we filled in the missing decades and swapped stories of our high-school antics. We talked about the time our interview with radio host Malachy McCourt led to censorship of the newspaper, and how that event led to some of us (including Barry and me) then spending a couple of hours on McCourt’s show to discuss high-school journalism. Barry still owns a reel-to-reel tape of that show, and hopes to digitize it. We remembered the time Donna and I went to Bedford Stuyvesant to cover the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy, she as the reporter, me as the very bad photographer. We discussed how our rating of local burger joints got us in hot water with the school. Barry had brought a complete set of the paper, and we paged through it for hours, sometimes wincing, sometimes feeling proud. He also gave us each disks onto which he’d scanned the entire run.
When we finally decided to let the restaurant have its table back, Marc offered to give us a personal tour of the offices of The New York Times, which we took him up on enthusiastically. After about four hours together, we parted promising to do this again soon, only the next time with even more of the staff, which we’re going to get busy wrangling.
