Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  No, whispered Jane to her schoolmates, they couldn’t make a promise like that? Don’t do it. And pretty soon, “they were putting up their hands and pulling them down,” not at all as they were supposed to do.

  Back in class, their teacher was mortified. What did they think they were doing? Someone pointed the finger at Jane and soon the teacher wormed the story out of her, going on to demand that she and the other miscreants now take the teeth-brushing-forever oath. Jane refused, urging her classmates not to do so, either; when she reenacted the scene years later, you could see her springy youthful energy restored, as she mimed begging her classmates not to comply: They couldn’t possibly keep a promise like that. It was wrong to say they would. “Well,” the teacher said, turning to Jane, trying to defuse the revolt. “I’ll deal with you next.”

  The two met privately. “All she got from me was an argument. So, at her wits’ end, she expelled me.”

  Expelled?! “I’d known of people suspended, but never knew anyone expelled.” This was different. This was serious. “This was awful. It was like the end of everything.” Her parents would be called in. “It came to me good and strong and fast that I was an outlaw”—a sense that would reach across the years into her old age, never entirely dissipating.

  Her misbehavior seemed to feed on itself, and may not have been as discouraged at home as fully as school authorities might have wished. One time, Jane went off popping paper bags in the lunch room and was sent straight to the principal. The principal called her father. Dr. Butzner, according to family lore, replied, “I’m a busy man. You’re a busy educator. I’ll take care of my problems. You take care of yours.”

  “When we were kids,” wrote a Scranton newspaperman who’d known Jane back then, “she was a free spirit, clever, hilariously funny and fearless.” She’d spit on the stairway rail and slide down, which made for grand entertainment for the kindergarten children below. She’d run up the down escalator at Scranton Dry Goods, a major department store on Lackawanna Avenue. It was as if she sought trouble for the sheer delight of it.

  In fourth or fifth grade, as one of Jane’s children recounts the story, her teacher dispensed the wisdom that wearing rubber boots would make your eyes sore. Nonsense, Jane was sure. Nonsense, Dr. Butzner affirmed. Soon she was wearing rubber boots into school every day, parading them around. See my eyes? she’d taunt the teacher and anyone else who’d listen. Look at ’em—they’re just fine.

  Another time, a teacher kept her after school; she was to copy out two pages of the history book. “Which two pages?” Jane asked. Didn’t matter, said the teacher. Jane selected the frontispiece, which had only an illustration caption: “Columbus Landing at San Salvador.” No, said the teacher, that won’t do, and gave her two more pages. Jane refused; she’d done precisely as asked. “So there I sat after school and there the teacher sat at her desk doing something, and we sat and sat.” Finally, Jane just got up, gathered her coat, and left.

  It was bad. The saga of Jane and her teachers mocks the more familiar script—of youthful bristling at classroom constraints, minor behavior problems, parents called into school, corrective action taken, surrender to adult authority, schoolhouse harmony restored. And certainly the story doesn’t end with Jane emerging from her school years grateful for a routinized order she’s finally learned to accept; she never accepted that. Rather, it was mistrust and rancor ranging across the years, a war interrupted by only temporary truces. “She was always afraid of teachers and teachers were always afraid of her,” was the truth one of her children extracted from a lifetime of his mother’s stories of school.

  Years later, in the middle of a two-day university conference in 1987 devoted not to the childhood of Jane Jacobs but to her ideas, Jane would offer her own theory of those troubled years. In grade school, “the little girls who do best are the ones who take the teacher as a model,” imagining themselves as teachers someday; in school, they’re little apprentices, sopping up the tenets and values of their teachers. That, of course, wasn’t her, not one bit. But other little girls “couldn’t care less about being teachers,” and didn’t get “as meaningful an education either—[because] they’re resisting it.” That, she said was her. “I was that kind of little girl.”

  In early 1962, giving a public talk in New York City soon after publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs was telling how her book grew out of the discrepancy between how big housing projects were supposed to be and how they turned out. When she asked architects and planners why projects so often proved less lively and successful than promised, they’d all but call the people living in them stupid—unable or unwilling to do “what they’re supposed to do.” And then, as if the phrase itself caught on some raw tangle of neurons in her brain, leading her into a rhetorical riff, she said, “I didn’t know why people weren’t doing what they were supposed to do, but I did know this much”—here she slowed, laid on the weight of it, thickly—“that if people weren’t behaving the way they were supposed to behave, then something was at fault with the theories about how they were supposed to behave.” And knowing her adult waywardness, her lifelong resistance to authority, it was hard not to think of young Jane in school, squirming at all the ways she was supposed to behave but wouldn’t or couldn’t.

  Her son Jim intimates that strategies Jane would later use against unthinking planners and city officials derived in part from those years of wrangling with her teachers. Certainly she came away stronger for them, as she did that day in third grade when she was expelled. Leaving school, she felt bereft, didn’t know what to do, wandered off alone. Soon she found herself near the train tracks, which sat low, in a depression, verboten to everyone, certainly nine-year-old girls. On impulse, leaving her books and jacket on the heights above the tracks, she scuffled down the rock face that dropped to the tracks, then climbed back up. Up and down, repeatedly, she climbed, coal trains clattering by all the while, spewing smoke. Only when she heard kids going home for lunch did she clamber back up to the street one final time, gather her things, and trek home to Monroe Avenue for her own lunch, not knowing what would befall her.

  Nothing befell her.

  At home, with her mother, she tried to “rev myself up to tell her.” But she never did, just ate her lunch.

  “Better hurry up, Jane, you’ll be late for school,” said Mrs. Butzner finally.

  So she walked back to school, hung her jacket in the cloakroom, and sat at her desk. The teacher never said a word. Jane theorized later that she may even have been relieved to see her. She “may have been terrified at what she had done,” Jane’s quiet reappearance averting any confrontation.

  The incident left her with a feeling of independence. “I was an outlaw and I was accepting the fact that I was an outlaw…It really changed me. It was an important event in my life.” She’d learned that “you can be afraid of something and the only way to overcome being afraid of it, or to lessen the fear, is to live through it.”

  In February 1929, Jane, finished at George Washington School, enrolled as a freshman at Central High School, downtown. While her grade school was just a few minutes’ walk from home, Central High was a block’s walk over to the trolley on Electric Street, then a two-mile ride on a clattering, brightly painted little vehicle with wood-slatted seats—south onto Adams Avenue, a little jog to the west, then almost a straight shot on Washington Avenue down to Vine Street. There, at the corner, was the great Gothic pile of stone that was Central High. Across the street was the central library. After eighth grade, she’d tell an interviewer, “we went downtown to school. Our life enlarged and we had a city life—going to plays, lectures and the larger libraries.” Suddenly, all of Scranton lay within her reach, and with it resonances of a wider world.

  SO FAR AS DISCONTENT IS EXPRESSED IN

  CONSTRUCTIVE MOVEMENTS FOR HUMAN BETTERMENT,

  IT IS NECESSARY AND TO BE ENCOURAGED.

  These words of John Mitchell, the legendary mine union leader,
were engraved on one flank of a monument to his memory erected in Courthouse Square, Scranton’s municipal complex, in 1924. Standing before it, you needed no deep inborn appreciation for the rights of labor to feel something for the men who toiled underground at their dark, dangerous work. A granite tableau, like a niche in a church, sheltered and surrounded the figure of Mitchell himself. It showed men in miners’ caps and high-laced boots emerging from a diagonally striated coal seam. One of them wields a pickax. Another holds a horse’s bridle as the animal strains against a wheeled cart overflowing with black diamonds of coal. The scene is cramped and, somehow, even in the light of day, dark—a stirring monument to human labor. One day a year, Jane knew, miners’ children from a neighborhood near hers got the day off to march in the John Mitchell Day parade. But who was this John Mitchell? she once asked a classmate, the daughter of a miner. Oh, Jane recalled her simple reply, he was “the greatest man in the world.” And she would remember that right alongside all the boosterish talk she’d also imbibed about Scranton’s glory as anthracite capital of the world.

  Black coal, hard coal, stone coal. Black diamond. Those were some of the names given to anthracite, the gleaming-hard, clean-burning coal that all through the nineteenth century heated millions of America’s homes. (“Bituminous” is the other kind—softer, smellier, more sulfurous.) Most of it came from underground deposits found in an elongated region of just a few hundred square miles in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania around Scranton. “Coal is the theme song of this city in the hills,” a Federal Writers’ Project book would say of the city in 1940. “Coal brought prosperity and also despair. Coal built its mansions, stores, banks, hotels, and hovels; it blackened the beautiful Lackawanna, scarred the mountain sides, made artificial hills of unsightly coal refuse.” Anthracite built Scranton. It furnished jobs; a hundred thousand or more miners worked those underground seams. It built fortunes.

  Anthracite, and the industries that grew up around it, made for a city that in the 1920s was home to almost 150,000 people. It was the third-largest city in the state after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, studded with civic monuments erected over the past thirty or so years near Courthouse Square or along its downtown shopping district along Lackawanna Avenue, alive with stores, thick with shoppers, brightly lit at night, plied by trolleys. The city’s electric trolleys were said to be the first in the nation; “Scranton push, Scranton brains, and Scranton money” had done it, an early-twentieth-century booster crowed. (Some trolleys were routed to avoid miners coming home from work, lest a wealthy woman wearing a light-colored dress soil it on a seat just vacated by one of them.) The city had a zoo, a museum of natural history, a fine public reference library right across the street from Central High—all these, Jane would recall, “meant much to me as a child”—along with imposing hospitals and, as she remembered, “several stuffy but imposing clubs.” The city had begun its long downward slide, owing to clean-burning anthracite no longer being required by law in New York City, ongoing labor troubles, and finally the Great Depression itself. But just now, Scranton was still vibrant, to Jane so interesting and exciting that, she’d say, she liked going to the dentist because it brought her into town. Now, in high school, she was there every day, and began to see the city close up, following her own nose, under her own power.

  She was a bit younger than most of her classmates, enrolling at Central when she was not yet thirteen. Much of what comes down to us about her four years there suggests an adolescent girl, in time a young woman, a little lost in the clouds. This from a Central High student publication in December 1931:

  There was some mixup or day-dreaming in Physics class last quarter. This example was used: If the current of water in a river makes beautiful scenery, what does the current in an electric wire do? A poetic student popped up and asked: “Does it make beautiful scenery?” I think the poetic student was Jane Butzner.

  She was forever late for class. Her homeroom teacher her first year there, Henrietta Lettieri, kept scrupulous attendance records, most students recording untarnished streams of zeroes in the lateness column. Jane was absent rarely, but late seven times that first semester, nine the next. One time, Jane was on her way to being late again and begged her mother to write her a note. Mrs. Butzner obliged, explaining that “Jane sat too long at the edge of the bed with one shoe in her hand.” Growing up, Jane’s son Jim would recall her sitting like that many times: Jane was thinking, or, as he puts it, “figuring something out.”

  Maybe figuring out a poem, like “To Rupert Brooke,” which laments trying “to write / The strange disturbing melodies I hear,” but failing, and vowing not to try again.

  And then I read your poems; they give birth

  To glorious exultation, boundless dreams;

  I hope and strive again; you give me food.

  For man, they say, has conquered air and earth,

  But by a poet stars have been subdued.

  Jane was still writing poems; this one got a modest prize. Like other alienated students for whom high school meant football or Saturday-night dances more than Latin or English literature, Jane found refuge outside class, in the school literary magazine. Impressions was presided over by an English teacher, Adelaide Hunt, who one of Jane’s classmates would remember as “a merry person, with a melodious laugh that started somewhere near her solar plexus and gurgled its way upward, irrepressible, infectious.” Jane became the journal’s poetry editor. During at least her last two years at Central, few issues lacked a Jane Butzner byline, or just a J. B. attached to an essay or poem.

  At age ten, her parents had given her a typewriter and a book on touch typing. In her teens, she was already a writer. Several of her poems were chosen for published anthologies, with names like Saplings and Younger Poets, devoted to student work. One of them earned an honorable mention—one of only ten, in a nationwide poetry contest judged by Joyce Kilmer and other poet notables, that attracted thousands of submissions. When it first appeared in Impressions in May 1932 it was simply “Sonnet.” In its prize-submitted form, Jane called it “Of a Friend, Dead.” It much suggests the preoccupation with life and health at war with death and decline that would run through Jane’s adult work. “Fool!” she addresses an unknown figure too ready to accept a friend’s death. Dead? When “he holds the concentrated red and golds of autumn afternoons, the flow of sun-warmed brooks in spring”? No, you

  never knew the groping beauty of his thoughts

  Like wing-beats of the night-birds in the dark.

  To say that he is cold is blasphemy,

  When you have seen him fling his arms in bliss

  And laugh, and kick his brown heels to the sky.

  And felt his ineradicable kiss.

  In the December 1932 issue of Impressions, just before graduation, Jane brought Percival G. Tookey Jr. into the world, or at least, as a kind of fictional school mascot, into the collective mind of Central High. In Jane’s story, Percy laments his name to his father, who assures him that someday he’ll have a son and name him Percival G. Tookey III. Thank you, no, replies Percy. But abruptly, now hopeful, he imagines a way out of his name problem. What of that middle initial, father, that G? Might it stand for, say, a nice, familiar, equable, George? No, Dad says, it stands for Geschwindt. This trifle might have been the end of it, except that the following year, Jane’s brother John would bring Percy back to life in the same school journal: Percy’s son gets into a scrap with a neighbor, which leads to a legal contretemps worthy of Jane’s imagination and John’s legal future.

  Through Impressions Jane brushed up against the larger literary world. When Cyrano de Bergerac played in Scranton, a prominent drama critic, Clayton Hamilton, lectured about it at the Century Club. Jane Butzner, girl columnist, was there to ask him whether literary giants like those of old had a place in the modern world. Certainly, he assured her, as they had all through time. “And as he said it,” Jane wrote, “I could fairly hear and visualize the centuries sweeping by.”

/>   A little later, Joseph Auslander, soon to be named the nation’s first poet laureate, swept through town. Jane interviewed him, though not from any respectful journalistic distance: meeting Mr. Auslander, who could speak so beautifully, was like meeting Orpheus himself, Jane wrote, and to actually “exchange ideas” with him was “like speaking with Apollo.” Plus, Auslander adored Rupert Brooke! At one point, the two of them commiserated about the world’s dreamers. “It is those out of tune with the world who are called the dreamers,” she had him adding, and they were society’s only sure refuge. “Our hope is in the poets. It is the poets who see beauty in the machine age, and it is the poets who grant rescue from the machines.”

  If Jane was a little geeky, it didn’t mean she stayed home all the time reading. Here she was, interviewing literary celebrities. She was on the swim team, too. She was getting something out of high school, just not in class. Accounts don’t come down to us of any high school crushes, but she did make friends. One was Jeanne Madden, who enjoyed a brief career in Hollywood before returning home to manage her father’s hotel in Scranton. Another was Gershon Legman, a butcher’s son, who would go on to study origami, collect bawdy humor, and embark on the serious study of the dirty joke as a genre; Jane would marvel at how he’d made a career out of collecting dirty limericks. Then there was Carl Marzani, born in Rome, who immigrated to the United States in 1924. His family settling in Scranton, he’d entered Central High the year before Jane, speaking English with what he would admit was a “ludicrous” accent. But he took to America, Scranton, and Central High so readily that he graduated third in his class. Then he went to Williams College, fought in the Spanish Civil War, joined the British Communist Party, endured three years of prison for his trouble, and spent the rest of his life as a social activist, radical, and author. Jane would remember him as “a pleasant boy.” He would remember her as “on the tall side, a bit gawky and socially shy, but very assertive in class”—and “a living witness to the quality of Scranton’s public school system.”