• • •
Volpe promised the kids he wouldn’t open the letter from the organizers of the Nebraska festival without them present. They would find out when he did. Three days before the start of Christmas break, he just has a feeling as he walks to the main office after lunch to check his mailbox. Sure enough, the envelope from the Educational Theatre Association is in his slot, mailed from its Cincinnati headquarters. Volpe texts the cast and crew, including Robby Edmondson, knowing that they are not allowed to check their cell phones during class but they all do. (He just hopes none of them will get caught.) He asks them to meet him at the end of the period.
When the bell rings, they all come running. Volpe’s classroom is filling up with a musical theater section, so they adjourn to a nearby empty classroom. He shows them the envelope, unseals it with a letter opener, and pulls out five typewritten pages. The last four pages are a detailed critique of the performance. The first page is a letter, which he begins to read out loud, but he doesn’t get far. It begins “Dear Louis,” and is followed by a one-word sentence: “Congratulations!”
They scream and shout, hug one another; they throw their arms around Volpe and Krause. Zach, the most openly emotional among them, keeps dabbing at his eyes, but he can’t keep tears from rolling down his cheeks. He thinks of how fearful he was when he first got involved in theater and how quickly he was put at ease. “From the first day, everyone was like, ‘You’re one of us.’” Now he feels he has helped put his mark on Truman Drama.
They text their parents and friends. Texts go out to recent alumni of the theater program, mentors to many in the current cast. Volpe’s current students want his former ones to know that the tradition has been upheld.
“That’s another thing that makes Truman Drama different,” Robby observes. “It’s understood by everyone that it’s not just about us. There’s a standard that the kids the year before set, and the year before that, going all the way back more than forty years. That sounds like what everyone would say, but it’s not just words. You feel it. It’s pressure, but in a good way.”
Volpe knew how deeply they had all wanted to go to Nebraska. But even more than that, he believed, “They are not ready to give up this play. They’re just not. They have such a deep connection to it.”
This time, the critique was fully completed. Aspects of the performance were rated as either superior, excellent, good, or fair—they got mostly superiors—and the grades were supplemented with comments. The adjudicator was Liz Hansen, a veteran high school drama director in Iowa and officer with the theater association. “The director did a brilliant job of crafting the arc of the play,” she wrote. Of the cast, she said, “I did not see any weak links, only six totally committed teammates working together in each and every scene. There was genuine love and trust visible onstage—producing a powerful series of moments.” Even in rare moments when the drama lagged, she stated, “I believe this was a script issue—not an actor issue.”
The adjudicator’s only real pointed criticism was of the set. The Hardys’ living room, staged by Volpe as a modern, minimalist space, consisted of a sofa, a chair, a couple of tables, and, as Volpe said, “those straw-looking things that we put in a vase on the floor.” He also arranged flowers in a vase on one of the tables, and the fruit bowl. The furniture purchase at IKEA came to less than $500. But the living room did not convince Hansen that it belonged to “two accomplished and wealthy doctors,” nor did it reflect the “opulent lifestyle that produced the conflict within this family.”
I didn’t disagree at all. It would have been better if the living room conjured on Truman’s ancient stage were composed of pieces from Stickley or Herman Miller, but where was Volpe going to find those? He certainly had no budget to buy them, and the parent population of Truman had no such furniture to lend.
A STREET IN LEVITTOWN. THE THREE-BEDROOM HOMES ARE THE MODELS THE DEVELOPER CALLED JUBILEES.
NO CHILD REMAINS LOST IN LEVITTOWN
On the eve of Good Boys’ world premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2007, the company’s artistic director, Martha Lavey, commented on the play’s focus on class. “To be born into privilege,” she said, “is to be given the tools to replicate that privilege.”
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, wrote in 2012, “There are amazing stories of people who made it from the bottom to the top. But what happens on average? What is the chance of somebody from the bottom making it to the middle or somebody from the top who doesn’t work going down? In terms of basic statistics, the U.S. has become less a land of opportunity than other advanced industrial countries . . . All markets are shaped by laws and regulations, and unfortunately, our laws and regulations are shaped in order to create more inequality and less opportunity.”
What I found most heartbreaking at Truman was how far removed the students were from the parts of America where success replicates success, how little they seemed to know that, and how much wider the gap had grown in the decades since I was a student at their school. We didn’t just think we were part of the middle class, the great engine of America powering us forward; we were part of it. Fully. In my era at Truman, many graduates did go on to achieve high levels of success—they became doctors, lawyers, college professors, engineers, business owners, high-ranking military officers. It was well within the realm of possibility because the climb was not as high. Our education in the Bristol Township school district was not terrific, but neither was it so far removed from what a student in a wealthier public school district would have received.
Now, though, children in America’s privileged zip codes live at a higher altitude, their own airspace—a life of private lessons, tutoring, expensive SAT prep, summer internships rather than paid work, individual sports coaches to polish skills, college “coaches” to burnish résumés. These perks act as multipliers, a doubling or tripling down on an already overflowing basket of advantages: the parents’ good genes, the family’s wealth and status, the leafy neighborhood within the excellent school district. Children in Levittown did not benefit from these things when I was growing up. The difference is, they didn’t exist in great measure elsewhere, either.
The Harvard professor and cultural historian Niall Ferguson, generally considered a political conservative, has written of a “cognitive elite” in America: “The problem is that this cognitive elite has become self-perpetuating: they marry one another, live in close proximity to one another, and use every means, fair or foul, to ensure that their kids follow in their academic footsteps (even when Junior is innately less smart than Mom and Dad).”
He has also observed that “the financial returns on brainpower have risen steeply”—as distinct from the fruits of factory work and manual labor—and that upper-middle-class parents now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children because “smart people tend to marry other smart people and produce smart children.” This is true to an extent, but if it were entirely so, Junior would rarely be less innately smart than his parents and they would not have to try so avidly to gain advantage for him.
At a scholarship audition, I watch as Bobby Ryan is asked to talk about the breadth of his community service. He looks genuinely bewildered by the concept. He says something at first about helping out in his neighborhood as younger kids went trick-or-treating on Halloween, but senses the answer is not satisfactory. “I’m sorry,” he finally says, “I’m not really sure how to answer. I go to school and I do theater and I have a job.”
In fact, I had seen Bobby step off Truman’s stage mid-rehearsal, pull on his Chick-fil-A uniform, and walk out the auditorium door. And he wasn’t the only one. If you had a shift about to start, you left. No questions asked. If a student paused or uttered an apology, Volpe would say, “Go. You’ve got to get to work.” That is still a bedrock value in Levittown—work—even as teens in higher-end zip codes have moved on to unpaid endeavors to further augment their creden
tials.
• • •
Levittown, Pennsylvania, was one of the great wonders of its day. Before the backhoes and work crews descended in 1952, there were no sewers across its 5,500 acres, no running water, little electric service, and no police or fire departments. The landscape was a tableau of farm fields, barns, horses, cows, chickens, and the occasional house. William Levitt regarded the land he had acquired as frozen in time, belonging to a previous century, and marveled that such a backwater existed in the corridor between New York and Philadelphia. He set out not merely to build houses on this primitive territory, but to plant the seeds of a new civilization. Without a hint of irony or self-consciousness, Levitt marketed his sprawling development as a utopia: “the most perfectly planned community in America.”
A camera crew from the documentary series The March of Time visited Levittown in 1953. In a grandiloquent, newsreel-style voice, the show’s narrator, Westbrook Van Voorhis, began his report: “Today, at the eastern extremity of the state of Pennsylvania, a remarkable construction project is transforming the face of the countryside.”
The transformation occurred with breathtaking speed. The Levitt construction crews needed just one day to put up an entire house. They worked as an assembly line, with each man assigned to specific tasks that he applied to one identical house after another. The houses were built on concrete slabs, so no digging was required. Precut lumber and nails came from a Levitt factory in California. “Another day, another forty houses,” Van Voorhis intoned as one thirty-six-man crew, a fraction of Levitt’s massive army, posed in front of a finished house. “The complete price is $10,500, for two bedrooms, a large living room, kitchen, bath, and dining space, and five closets.”
The show notes other Levitt innovations, inspired by the builder’s own vision of what constituted a childhood of privilege. He built grammar schools into the neighborhoods because he did not believe young children should have to ride buses to school. Five massive swimming pools—longer than fifty-meter Olympic pools, and wider—were dug so the children would have a place to cool off in the summer. On the periphery of each swimming pool were ball fields, also Levitt-built.
The documentary shows happy young couples picking out their home sites. One woman looks into the camera and says that she absolutely must live on Butterfly Lane. A police officer is interviewed after he has just returned a lost child to his mother. “That’s the way it goes in Levittown,” he says. “Lost kids, lost dogs, a few motor vehicle violations, but no crime.” The narrator adds, in his sonorous tone, “No child remains lost in Levittown for very long.”
William Levitt presided over Levitt and Sons with his brother, Alfred, but he was the public face of the partnership. Time magazine put him on its cover and declared that Levittown was “as much an achievement of its cultural moment as Venice or Jerusalem.”
My parents were typical Levittown home buyers in that they came from nothing, had built no financial resources of their own, and in no previous era could have even dreamed of purchasing their own home. My father grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, part of the city’s hardscrabble “river wards” that consisted of blocks and blocks of narrow row houses. His father, who had emigrated at the turn of the century from the city of Odessa in the Ukraine, worked mainly as a trucking clerk, dispatching drivers on their routes. For many years during the Depression, he had no work, and my father and his older brother were sent to live with relatives. (A port city on the Black Sea, Odessa was a notorious underworld haven, so it is not surprising that the uncle who had the money to take my father in was one who had found his way into the gambling business in Philadelphia.) When my father was reunited with his parents, it was in claustrophobic conditions amid a multigenerational clot of extended family, all crammed into just a few bedrooms.
My mother’s parents owned a corner grocery and were somewhat better off, though the store struggled because many customers could not pay or had to buy on credit, with debts recorded in a book kept behind the counter. Her father supplemented the store’s receipts by delivering milk in a horse-drawn buggy.
My father began college in 1943, in an ROTC program, but lasted just one semester before he was called to active duty and shipped to Europe. He was wounded, not badly, in the waning days of the Battle of the Bulge. When he returned home, he resumed college at Temple University and then went through its law school, with every penny of his higher education paid by that great entitlement program called the GI Bill.
He was clerking for a Philadelphia lawyer, making less than $100 a week, when he drove out to Levittown for the first time to represent a home buyer. The freshly built town reminded him of a huge Army camp. Houses sprawled in every direction over bare terrain, with newly strung electrical wires crisscrossing overhead. The baby trees planted by William Levitt’s workers were not yet much taller than the Fords, Chevys, and Studebakers parked in the driveways. He didn’t love it at first, but it looked like a chance to get out of the one-bedroom city apartment he shared with his wife and my older brother and to have, for the first time in his life, an expanse of living space.
In 1955, my parents bought their Levittown home—a two-story, three-bedroom model called a Jubilee—for $12,500. The down payment was $100, which they had to borrow from my mother’s father. There were no closing costs or other fees. The monthly mortgage was $65. The house came with a driveway, a garage, and a washing machine (no more laundromat).
A newspaper account described typical Levittown home buyers as “young persons of moderate financial circumstances who had small children and might expect others.” They not only expected them, but also produced them. In the early years, 30 percent of Levittown’s population was under five years old. I was born in 1956, and my sister, the last addition to our family, came along in 1961. We slept upstairs in small rooms with dormer ceilings. My parents had a bedroom on the first floor, their own bathroom, and a big window that looked into the backyard—probably more personal space than anyone in their families had ever known. It is not hard to imagine that this felt like paradise to them.
If Levittown was the epicenter of postwar suburban optimism, my parents were exemplars and beneficiaries of its spirit. They raised us, built a life, and prospered—not extravagantly, but enough to definitively move up in class. I would say they moved up in both economic and social class, though on that later count, they sort of had a foot in both worlds. They stayed devoted to their Sunday night mixed doubles bowling league and were deeply involved in local politics—which were no less grubby than the politics they left behind in the city. But they also had subscriptions to the Philadelphia Orchestra and its Sunday chamber concert series, as well as season tickets to the Phillies.
The sense of upward mobility was central to the ideal of Levittown. The house plots were modest, typically about six thousand square feet, but they were footholds on the dream. For those who moved on, they were steps on a ladder. The early homeowners had come mainly from one of two places: Philadelphia’s teeming neighborhoods, as my parents did, or from coal country in upstate Pennsylvania. There was a palpable sense of gratitude among many in Levittown, of celebration, for having landed in a better place.
My parents traveled a great deal later in their lives—to Europe numerous times, to Israel and South America. Wherever they found themselves, at some point during their journey—in a café in Paris, in some museum elsewhere in Europe, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York—my mother could always be counted on to turn to my father and say, “Do you think our parents would ever believe where we are right now?”
• • •
U.S. Steel’s massive Fairless Works plant, on the banks of the Delaware River at Levittown’s eastern fringe, employed more than ten thousand men at its peak in the mid-1960s. Thousands more found good-paying work at manufacturing plants with names redolent of an era of sweat and muscle—Vulcanized Rubber and Plastics, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, Rohm and Haas,
General Motors. A defense contractor, Thiokol, occupied a big industrial parcel right between two of Levittown’s residential sections. These were mostly union jobs. Overtime was plentiful, and men jumped at the chance to work holidays, which paid double time. Not all of these men were brilliant, and some distinctly were not. But they showed up on time and worked hard, and the union did the rest.
Even as a kid I would hear stories about how much money they made, which seemed like astronomical hourly rates. I never considered it bragging—I just think a lot of people were amazed to be more flush with cash than they ever imagined they would be. There were years in my childhood that it seemed like every other house had a huge Winnebago or some other kind of RV docked in its driveway.
One of my earliest memories is of sitting atop my father’s shoulders in a gigantic crowd as then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy spoke at a rally in the fall of 1960 at the Levittown Shop-a-Rama. (Levitt built that, too, with six thousand spaces for cars. Public transportation was not a part of his utopian vision.) Somewhere around that same time, my parents had a meeting or perhaps a small fund-raiser at our home in support of Kennedy’s campaign. It was probably called a coffee klatch. I must have been preternaturally politically aware, because I have a dim memory of this, too. Or maybe it was just that I had never before seen so many people congregated in our small living room. The author James Michener, a local Bucks County celebrity and big Kennedy booster, was among them. He left us with a signed copy of the novel he had published the previous year, Hawaii, one of those doorstop opuses (937 pages) that were his specialty. It stayed on our bookshelf forever. I couldn’t have read it even if I wanted to. It was in German.
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