Stephen Wagner

Posted on: Jun 28, 2020 at 2:02 PM

Dear Connie,

Happy birthday! Lots of good memories of you. I'll try to send you a private message later today.

"Laissez les Bontemps roulez" indeed! My wife's father and her mother's parents were Acadians, but from the francophone north shore of New Brunswick instead of southern Louisiana.

Posted on: Jun 19, 2020 at 9:35 AM

A very happy birthday to you, Linda! I'll add a private message.

Happy Birthday, Herb! I just tried to add a comment but it didn't "take". If you would like to swap e-mails, please send me your current e-mail address. Your profile makes it looks like you're now in Florida full time. Is that right? I think It's been a year since we were in touch. My e-mail address More…

Happy Birthday, Herb! It looks like we haven't been in touch for a year. This time last I was busy with office moves for two professors and myself at Harvard Law School. This time the last five weeks of the Spring semster at HLS had to be conducted remotedly, with all of us away from HLS and classes taught using Zoom. Especially considering that one prof I work for still hasn't learned how to use a computer, that was challenging. If you'd like to swap e-mails, please send me your current one. (Are you now in Florida full time?) Mine is still swagner@law.harvard.edu All the best, Steve

Posted on: May 26, 2020 at 9:15 AM

Nancy, Happy Birthday!

I remember a funny incident quite early in our ninth grade Latin class in junior high when you were called on by a teacher substituting for Mr. Chandler, who was out sick. The sub was a Mrs. or Miss Mabon or Maybon -- that's how her surname was pronounced -- and she was very definitely from the Deep South. You didn't do anything wrong, but, like the rest of us, you had trouble understanding her accent. (At Oakmont we'd had a fifth grade teacher for most subjects who was from the Boston area, and when we had spelling contests with another class they were given a handicap!) If you're interested, I can provide details. Pardon me if I've told you this story already.

Posted on: Oct 14, 2018 at 8:42 AM

Dear John -- and this is obviously not a "Dear John" letter -- Happy Birthday! I hope you and yours have come through the recent horrible hurricane okay.

Sooner or later I'll send you a private message replying to your latest. For now two things that others might also enjoy:

While doing coursework for my MAT at Harvard in 1968-1969 I heard Alex Haley give a talk. This was after the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X but long before Roots was published, let alone became a TV miniseries. Before telling us about the research that led to Roots, he told us how he had become a writer. While in the Coast Guard in the Pacific during World War II, he wrote love letters for some of his fellow servicemen. One, at least, had received a "Dear John" letter from his girlfriend, i.e., one in which she broke up with him. The reply Haley wrote for his comrade was so effective that she changed her mind!

A few minutes ago I heard "Finlandia" on the one remaining classical music radio station in the Boston area. Do you remember playing that with the HHS orchestra in a brick-walled gym or auditorium in a small state school (Lebanon Valley?); the reverb in that room was amazing. The same trip included a tour of the Hershey Chocolate factory and a visit to the state house in Harrisburg. Roy Stevens led a bunch of us on a walk on that building's roof; a cop or guard yelled at us to come down. When we did the Gershwins' Girl Crazy shortly after JFK's assassination, Roy, after hypnotizing the baddie and getting him on all fours like a dog, yelled out, "25! Get 'em!". The girls and parents in the audience may have been mystified, but every male senior roared with laughter, recognizing Sid Young's standard punishment for supposed misbehavior in Senior Health class. I remember one time when the whole class had to do it, in shifts!

Herb, a slightly belated Happy Birthday! I meant to send it yesterday evening after watching two British mysteries on TV with my wife. She went to bed before the second was half over, and I fell asleep watching it. I woke up just in time for the ending and figured I'd better get to bed myself. I'll send you a longer e-mail a bit later!

Just now sent a birthday message to my younger son, born June 14, 1980. He missed Friday the 13th and Father's Day by one day each, arriving on Flag Day. Hmm, was June 13, 1946 a Friday? If so, was Walt Kelly already writing "Pogo", where one of the characters -- Aloysius Alligator, I think -- would have been stressed about it?

[Answering my own questions: June 13, 1946 was a Thursday. Walt Kelly created the characters, Pogo and Albert -- not Aloysius -- Alligator in 1941 and first drew the Pogo comic strip in 1948; it went into national syndication in 1949. The only instance of graffiti on my model railroad is "I Go Pogo", which I added to a kit I built while an HHS student. SW]

Al l the best! Steve

May 10, 10:32 p.m., EDT

Joanne, Happy Birthday, rather late in the day! I'd have liked to written earlier today, but have been very busy working for three professors at Harvard Law School and then at home, except for watching two British "whodunit" shows.

If you'd like, as a present I could send you a couple of true stories connected with playing the cello in high school. Were you in the orchestra for our senior play, "Girl Crazy" by the Gershwins? There were a couple of funny stories and some sad ones connected with that.

I'll recommend two things I used to love to read to my students at Wayland High. One, which I read in psychology, is a short story by an Irish writer who used the pen name Frank O'Connor, entitled "My Oedipus Complex", related by a young boy who grew very close to his mother while his father was a soldier in World War I; the boy and his dad had some difficulties afterwards. At one point the father snarls to the mother, "He wants his bottom smacked!" and the boy yells back, "Smack your own!" When I reached that point one year, a colleague opened the door to the classroom to see what was going on!

The other, which I read to students in the one-quarter-long "Immigration and Americanization" U.S. history course I developed, is an autobiographical essay by Mario Puzo, famed for writing The Godfather. It's "Choosing a Dream: Italians in Hell's Kitchen"; I think he wrote it for a volume edited by a man with the surname Wheeler called something like The Immigrant Experience. But it was reprinted in a collection of pieces by Puzo called The Godfather Papers. Though I found The Godfather so enthralling that I read it in one night, I agree with Puzo that his best book was The Fortunate Pilgrim, largely based on his family's experiences.

One of my much older colleagues at Wayland (born in 1910), at whose home I roomed and boarded for two years and was like a second mother to me, used to spend her summers in Estes Park. (I've never been to Colorado or any of the Rocky Mountain states myself, though in the summer after our graduation from HHS my family camped in all but one of the national parks in the Canadian Rockies en route to the Pacific.) I could relate hilarious stories about her trips West incident and an almost miraculous one about one of her cats somehow surviving for a month on his own in the wilds of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Nancy, Happy Birthday! I have happy memories of you from classes and Latin Club.

Posted on: Dec 11, 2016 at 12:56 AM

Mark, Happy Birthday a day late! And congratulations on what must have been a very useful career, happy retirement and three daughters!

I'm still working full time, starting my 27th year as essentially a secretary to professors at Harvard Law School after twenty years of teaching classes in history and social sciences (and, for a few years, German as well) at Wayland High School -- and, I hope, teaching a good deal of English and a little elementary math to students in those classes.

And I have two sons and no daughters. My father was the youngest of three brothers, with no sisters. I have three younger brother, Rick (HHS class of 1965) has no children. Fred (class of '70 or '71) has three sons and no daughters. Hans, class of '78 or thereabouts, has two daughters and no sons. My mother lived long enough to know that she had a granddaughter and, I think, to meet her. (I'm unsure of my younger brothers' graduating classes at HHS because they accompanied our parents for a year in Europe while Fred was still, I think, a high school student, and I was thirteen or fourteen when Hans was born in March of 1960 or 1961. (I took plenty of teasing from HHS classmates while pushing him in a baby carriage or a stroller. It was good I got experience helping raise him; my wife was the youngest of just two siblings and never baby sat or otherwise cared for infants until we had our own.)

I wonder if you've spent more time in Ohio than any of our classmates. I followed Mr. Hughes's example and earned my undergraduate degree at Oberlin (as two of my brothers also did), but I came to Massachusetts to earn a Master of Arts in Teaching at Harvard in 1968 and have been here since. I earned a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard while teaching at Wayland High (part time for my two years of coursework, full time while writing my dissertation, a political history of U.S. immigration policy, nominally from 1952 to 1965 or 1968 but in practice going back to the 1920's. But I've never taught at the college level. While I was at Oberlin the only students allowed to have cars were those who needed them for work, e.g. organ majors at the Conservatory who had jobs in churches beyond reasonable bicycling distance, and the bus service was very minimal. So I only got into Cleveland two or three times a year; aside from political activities including a civil rights march, campaigning for Carl Stokes, who became the city's first black mayor, and protests against the war in Vietnam, I went to one play on Euclid Avenue, visits to the art museum, and ate at the only Hungarian restaurant I could find. Other political activities (a chartered bus to Toledo to see Hubert Humphrey in 1964, and campaigning for Democrats on Saturday afternoons (after morning classes) took me off campus as far as Ashland, Mansfield, Akron and almost to Youngstown. I also remember listening to Senator Ernest Gruening and (I think) Norman Thomas speaking against LBJ's war policies in Columbus and Cincinnati.

I have a vague memory of making a parody poster, along with Vonnie Benglian, for a theatrical production called Perlmutter Rex. I think the basic idea was his, but I'm almost sure I did lettering and chose the supposed venue: "the Felton-Troc Entertainment Center", a choice between Philadelphia's only burlesque house, which I never went into but passed on Arch Street, also the home of the YMCA where I had Youth Orchestra of Greater Philadelphia rehearsals every Saturday morning, convenient to Nicholas Smith's model train shop (which later moved to Broomall), Reading Terminal with its farmers' market and wonderful arched train shed upstairs. I considered those to be within walking distance for someone carrying a cello (though in a light corduroy case, not a heavier hard case like those some other students had). That also applied Gimbel's with its stamp department, Leary's bookstore, Independence Hall and the square behind it, Woolworth's and a great deli on Chestnut Street, Wanamaker's, another model railroad store on 16th, Rittenhouse Square, Logan Square with the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Free Library, plus the Rodin Square, which I think was father out on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and the Museum of Art, which certainly was. I sometimes walked out to 30th Street stations to look at locomotives from the parking lot just north of it, but when I went to the University Museum at Penn I usually caught an underground trolley at 19th Street. I once walked from the Y (near City Hall) all the way past the Parkway at least as far as the Strawberry Mansion bridge. I probably cut through Fairmount Park and the Wynnefield section (already turning from mostly Jewish to mostly black) to get to City Avenue (Route 1, which became City Line Avenue and Township Line Road. I did catch a P&W car from Township Line to Beechwood-Brookline or Wynnewood Road station before continuing the last mile or so home on foot. That may have been an even longer walk than the one I took (also with cello) from my cello teacher's house a mile or so from a bus stop south of Swarthmore, following Route 320 (Sproul Road) past Route 1 and the Media bypass, and past the shopping center a good distance north of that, then up and over a big hill past the then new St. Pius X church to West Chester Pike, Lynnewood Home and home to South Ardmore (a few blocks from the junior high).

Either of those hikes was far longer than anything I did in my short time in the Boy Scouts. (Since my Dad taught at Temple University, our family spent whole summers camping in tents on a state owned island in Lake George in northeastern New York, until 1960, when he finally bought a car and learned to drive. After that we made a short trip to New England and longer ones through much of Ontario, some of Quebec, much of New York, Michigan and Minnesota. In 1963 we crossed into Canada at the Soo and followed the Trans-Canada Highway north of Lake Superior the first year it was open. In 1964 we crossed at International Falls and camped from there to Vancouver, staying as far north as we could en route while still heading west, using hundreds of miles of gravel roads. We then camped on the Olympic Peninsula, visited a friend of my mother in a small lumber town north of Mt. Hood, and camped along the Oregon and northern California coasts. We stayed in a motel at San Francisco, then camped at Yosemite and headed east. But we had serious car trouble in the Nevada desert and our car burned up. None of us was hurt. We stayed a couple of days in Tonopah before Dad decided to fly home. We rode several hours in a Greyhound to Las Vegas; the bus was so crowded that I stood the whole way. We then had our first airplane rides, via Chicago. I recognized the Juniata River from the air -- thank you, Mr. Stauffer, in junior high Pennsylvania history! -- and followed our progress from there. My wife gave me a pedometer two or three years ago; I try to average at least five miles of walking a day and do almost every week, unless we have too much snow.

Wow, have i gotten off the subject and rambled!

The Felton, on Rising Sun Avenue in the Feltonville section of North Philly, was the only theater in the city that showed German language movies. I took Connie Bickett (my date at our junior and senior proms) to see the operetta or musical "White Horse Inn" after dinner at the house of the Hungarian woman who, though not my father's mother, was effectively my second or third grandmother. (It's complicated.) Since I didn't drive -- I didn't learn until after Oberlin -- we took a bus or trolley to 69th Street, and then rode nearly the entire length of the Market-Frankford Subway Elevated. I'd done that routinely two or three times a month from 1953 to 1960 to visit relatives in the Northeast. When we got off at the very gritty Margaret-Orthodox station to catch a 75 trolley bus, she said, in a rather alarmed tone, "Steve! Where are we?!"

I don't know whether Vonnie and I ever gave you the poster (drawn on a plain sheet of paper. In any case, it was meant in good fun.

I've continued to try to write humorous stuff since high school, including dozens of songs honoring fellow teachers when they retired. Also a farcical musical "Origins of the Trojan War" in three short acts performed by members of Wayland High School's Latin Club, featuring three polkas, farcical German-language versions of Snow White (with music mostly from the Disney movie) and Hansel and Gretel (with music mostly from the opera by the original Engelbert Humperdinck). etc. etc.

All the best.

Steve Wagner