SCARSDALE AND ITS HIGH SCHOOL

(Remembered in 2008; revised, 2023)

Especially if we moved in critically sophisticated societies, most of us alumni of Scarsdale (NY) High School learned the Scarsdale Shuffle, as I call it. For most of the sixty-five years since I graduated, when asked about where I went to high school, I replied “in Westchester” or “in the suburbs” before being forced to admit more exactly where. We feared that others would make assumptions about us, not only about wealth, that we thought wrong. I can’t remember when I came to answer “Scarsdale” without shuffling; perhaps it was two decades ago. A slightly younger friend who went thirteen years through Bronxville public schools told me of being even more embarrassed about mentioning where he grew up. “Some people could go on about it for a half hour. Others would never let up.”

    One reason for the shuffle is that Scarsdale has often been described as the epitome of NYC suburbs. A friend from my Manhattan elementary school recalled “girls in their penny loafers, plaid skirts, and rich, starchy white blouses.” True though his memory might be, Scarsdale was (and perhaps still is) more peculiar thatthan outsiders guess. First of all, because of severe zoning restrictions, it had in our time no common social venues apart from the high school. The municipal swimming pool hadn’t yet been built. There was no hangout near the high school except perhaps the public library, which wasn’t hospitable to hanging out. A friend who went to a Brooklyn high school once asked me, “Where did you go when you played hookey?” Nowhere. Weren’t most other suburban high schools (and towns) different in this respect? For one, the Mamaroneck high school sits on the Boston Post Road.

   As the movie theaters were in remote corners of the town, they were hard for us to patronize until we obtained our drivers’ licenses (for daytimes at sixteen; nighttimes at eighteen, unless we passed the high school’s drivers ed course and then could drive ourselves at seventeen). When friends talk about films they saw as teenagers in the 1950s, I’m reminded how culturally disadvantaged we were. The playwright Richard Foreman, who has lived across a SoHo street from me for some thirty-six years, tells me that as a teenager he went to see Broadway matinees because his family, unlike mine, lived close enough to the Hartsdale train station for him to walk there on his own.

   Another difference between Scarsdale and other southern Westchester suburbs is the general absence of sidewalks. One joke at the time, perhaps true, held that a local policeman seeing anyone over eighteen or under seventy walking on the street would stop and ask what they were doing. In contrast to those empowered to drive a car, we teenagers felt under-privileged, as indeed we were. Unlike urban teenagers who could take public transportation, we felt imprisoned, as indeed we sort of were.

 Jonathan Marder, a Manhattan culture publicist a generation younger than myself, told me that since his parents were divorced, he was fortunate enough to spend his weekends in the city. Though I don’t generally envy the children of divorced parents, forced to shuffle from one place to another on a legally enforced schedule, I now realize that Jonathan grew up with cultural advantages I lacked.

   The oddest thing about extracurricular social life in Scarsdale in the 1950s was that it was controlled by the churches and synagogues, which offered weekend venues unavailable elsewhere. Dating a classmate outside your faith/church I recall as socially inconvenient. My father used to crack that if adults didn’t belong to a church or synagogue in Scarsdale, they wouldn’t make any friends there. I don’t think he realized that what was true for him was also true for us. Never again and nowhere else would my (and his) social life be so limited.

   When a friend who grew up in neighboring Edgemont told me about a certain German-Jewish country club physically unmarked on his side of the MTA railroad tracks, I replied that I didn’t know about it, probably because most of my friends descended from Jews who had, like my own father, come to America more recently from eEastern Europe. Asking my dad about them perhaps a decade ago, he replied curtly, “I didn’t play golf.”

   My Bronxville friend recalls only two Jews in his classes, both the children of Bronxville teachers, several of whom were Jewish, he adds. None of them, however, resided within its square mile.

    Because Scarsdale High School and, indeed, Scarsdale itself lacked an indoor swimming pool in 1957, I earned my senior life-saving certificate in Ardsley, two towns away! Decades later, and now somewhat wiser about the ways of the world, I wonder if this lack of common facilities venues was planned? If so, by whom? When? I heard that nothing undermined the anti-Semitism (remember?) of the Scarsdale Golf Club as much as the advent of the community pool in the late 1960s. Once the golf club kids preferred to patronize the larger pool, their parents felt less need to subsidize an institution that, I’m told, had become predominantly Asian soon afterwards.

    When my father died a few years ago, I inherited his copy of Harry Hansen’s book about Scarsdale (Harper & Bros, 1954), which was copyrighted by “The Town Club Scarsdale, N.Y.” that must have commissioned and subsidized it. Reading the book recently I noticed how few Jews are mentioned, even in the lists of supposedly prominent names that fill the book’s long appendix. (Didn’t the Town Club exclude Jews as well?) As the local synagogues then were all in White Plains, they are mentioned only in the last paragraph in the discussion of churches. Nothing else Jewish is mentioned in the book.

   What made this blanket omission surprising to me is that my grandfather’s youngest brother moved to Fox Meadow in the late 1920s. My father’s first cousins graduated from SHS in the 1930s. In 1951, three years before Hansen’s book appeared, we came to live on the other side of the same block. In subtitling his book “From Colonial Manor to Modern Community” did Hansen expect that Jews wouldn’t count in Scarsdale? I recall that even though publications like the New York Times and, say, The New Yorker were long reluctant to expose anti-Semitism among putatively sophisticated people, several articles in the Times, two even featured on its front page during the late 1970s, told truths about Scarsdale that could be ignored but not disputed.

   Though SHS claimed a reputation among the best college-preparatory schools in the country, that estimate was true only for those who passed through the highly selective honors courses. I recall that when I got to Brown University in 1958, I could hold my own in history, in which I took an honors course promising advanced standing in college, but in everything else I had to work overtime to catch up with the guys who went to Exeter, Andover, Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, and Boston Latin, among other stronger preparatory programs. Dr. John F. Cone was my favorite high school English teacher and Walter Ehret must have been a great choir director, because five decades later I still love not only to read and write but also to sing.