Posted by Michael N. Marcus
on April 2, 2008, 10:30 pm
Message modified by board administrator April 5, 2008, 6:44 am
On TV's Saturday Night Live, Beldar Conehead feared his family would be harassed if Earthlings knew they were aliens from the planet Remulak. The Coneheads couldn't conceal their strangeness, so they claimed to be from France.
Our high school principal was also strange. He capitalized a letter in the middle of his last name so we'd think he was French like the Coneheads. Little Bobby Levine grew up to be Mister (or maybe Monsieur) Robert T. LeVine. He had a smarmy mustache and reminded me of Sergeant Schultz on Hogan's Heroes.
LeVine was obsessed with IMAGE. Although many of his students aspired no higher than a life of soldiering or hairstyling, LeVine ran Hillhouse High School like a pretentious private prep school.
Young ladies could not wear trousers to school. Young gentlemen could wear denim trousers only if they were not dark blue, and dark blue trousers only if they were not denim.
Each young gentleman had to wear a necktie plus a sweater or sports jacket, to prepare us for college, where we wore inside-out sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off.
Because of cost-cutting dumb designs, classroom temperatures were often above 90 degrees, and the only air conditioner in the building was, of course, in LeVine’s office.
In June, final exam papers were often soaked with perspiration.
Kids rebelled by dressing like bowery bums for “Clash Day,” or wore high-neck sweaters and no ties, or pulled fire alarms to cool off outdoors. LeVine wouldn't let boys leave the apparently burning building until he yanked down sweaters to check for ties.
Coincidentally, Elliot, Arthur and I owned a shirt, a tie and a jacket made of the same “batik” cloth. Periodically, we’d loan apparel to each other so one lucky guy could wear all three matching items and make it appear he was tie-less — just to piss-off math teacher Harry Leviton, who was LeVine’s prime tie inspector.
On our graduation day, about eight hundred blue-gowned seniors marched one-by-one onto the stage of Yale University’s ornate Woolsey Hall to receive diplomas from the less-than-loved principal LeVine.
As he shook the students’ hands, some looked him in the eye and said with sincerity, “F##k you very much, Mr. LeVine.” Some of us even called him “Levine.”
The diplomas had been already issued. The class list had been sent to the newspaper. Colleges had already said “yes.” There was nothing he could do but squirm.
In the '64 yearbook, LeVine wrote “our nation must have intellectual superiority so our kind of society will survive;” but the IMAGE of intellectual superiority was easier to attain than the real thing.
LeVine was suspended for “gross incompetence” in handling school transcripts.
Following complaints from colleges, investigators found some 1,300 grading discrepancies. One student received grades of D+, D-, and D from his biology teacher. The official transcript showed a C for the year.
In 1965, Time magazine said “a lot of kids got a break they did not deserve, and others, perhaps, lost out as a result.”
LeVine was forced to retire early, and the ties went with him.
In the ultimate posthumous irony, if you type “LeVine” using Microsoft Word, the software wants to change our principal’s phony French name back to “Levine.”
Bill Gates knows what’s right.
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