Tag Archives: #keesevilleny

College Dreams by Frances Cohen

As high schools and college students celebrate their graduations, I reflect back on my parents’ insistence that their children, unlike themselves, graduate from college.

My husband Bill and I always regretted that we did not have a college degree, but times were different in the 1930s during The Great Depression.

When I graduated high school in 1935, there was no way that I could afford to go to college. Immediately after I finished school, I got a job as a bookkeeper. Most of my salary went to pay the rent of my parents’ apartment.

Bill’s grandmother promised him that she would pay Bill’s tuition at the University of Vermont in Burlington. Those plans were crushed when his grandmother died after attending his high school graduation, and she left no provisions to pay for his education. Since he did not have the advantage of a college degree, he went into the retail business and spent many years associated with Pearls Department Store a family owned business in Keeseville, New York, that sold lower end merchandise. Things changed in the late 1960s when the Northway and the big box department stores in Plattsburgh opened. We found it difficult to compete. Fortunately, we had the opportunity to open the Village Bazaar, a very nice ladies’ store that catered to career women. It was successful, and we decided to close Pearl’s and concentrate on the Bazaar.

While our children were growing up, we kept telling them, “You are going to college! You are going to college!” Beginning in 1964, our dreams of making sure our four children had college degrees became a reality. Our daughter Laura graduated from State University of New York at Geneseo with a degree in special education, a field in education that had just recently been created. Soon, our other children followed our oldest daughter’s footsteps. Our son Jay graduated Union College in 1968, Marilyn graduated from the University of Albany in 1972, and our youngest Bobbie graduated from State University of New York at Plattsburgh in 1977. Two of the children completed masters degrees. Six of our of our eight grandchildren have also received their undergraduate degrees and even completed advanced degrees. [Update: The seventh grandchild completed an undergraduate degree in 2015 (and is enrolled in a graduate program), and the eighth is currently attending undergraduate college full-time.]

At times, however, their education almost backfired on us. When Laura came home for Thanksgiving her first year, she began swearing up a storm, using four letter words that had never come into my home before. I decided to turn the tables on her and started using them myself. When Laura expressed surprise that I was swearing, I responded, “I’m paying $2000 a year to send you to college so that you can come home and swear like a sailor. I figured I could do it for free!” Laura never cursed in my presence again.

Jay also got a lesson in humility after his freshman year. He came home for the summer after he took, along with his other courses, a three-credit business class. He began criticizing the way Bill and I ran our businesses. He peppered us with questions. “Do you really know how to run a store? Do you understand what it takes to determine what to buy? What styles to order? How to deal with the bank?” I answered, ‘Sonny-Boy, your father and I have been running a business since before you were even born. We hired a buying office from New York City to inform us of the latest fashions. We learned that in Keeseville we sell more size 14 and 16’s. We learned that we needed to buy three pair of pants and five blouses to every blazer. We learned how to best deal with our customers. We learned this by the seat of our pants, which is better than any business course they teach at your fancy school.”

There is an old saying that states: I was amazed at how little my parents knew when I was 17 and how much they learned by the time I was 21.” Our son Jay learned that lesson that day.

Bill and I take pride in our children and grandchildren’s education, but we also take pride in the fact that we were self-taught, sometimes the best kind of education a person can have!

A version of this article originally appeared in the August 18, 2016, Jewish World News, a bi-weekly subscription-based newspaper in upstate New York.

Four children, four college graduates, seven degrees.

Schooling in the Olden Days

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While in Frisco, Colorado, in August 2015 to welcome our new granddaughter, Larry and I visited the nearby Dillion schoolhouse, a two-room museum that was built in 1883 and served as the town’s main educational facility until 1910. Walking into that old building with its wooden floors, dusty chalkboards, and old-fashioned seats transported me back in time to my own experience in a two-room school house in the 1950’s.

When our family moved to Keeseville, all classes from kindergarten to twelfth grade were held in a big brick structure on top of Main Street that was built in 1936, when improved methods of transportation allowed for consolidation of the the area’s small one-and two room school houses.By the mid-fifties, however, a growing population fueled by the near-by Plattsburgh Air Force base necessitated the construction of a new elementary school. In the meantime, students were shipped off to other locations. My brother Jay spent fourth grade in the town’s old shirt factory. Two years later, I was part of the the group of students who were bussed the four miles to the two-room school house in Port Kent.

I am not sure how the teachers felt about being transported back in time one hundred years, but we students loved it. The building itself was comprised of two huge rooms that were linked by a connecting door. Two wooden stoves provided the heat, the old oak floors were scuffed and the bathrooms were far from modern. However, it was fun for us in Mrs. Smith’s second grade class to be next door to the third grade class. The school was set on a hill in a large grassy lot that overlooked Lake Champlain. Lessons were punctuated with the sounds of train whistles from the Port Kent railroad station and horns from the ferries that transported cars to and from Burlington, Vermont.

Each day, we would be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. The school would transport lunches, and we would eat at our desks. We loved our teacher, Mrs. Smith, who was sweet and kind and looked a great deal like Loretta Young. My friend Julie Thompson Berman had special memories of Mrs. Smith: A left hander, her second grade teacher tried to “convert her” until Julie’s father set the teacher straight; having Mrs. Smith was a relief.

Most of the students walked up to the high school and took buses to Port Kent, but some of the students lived in Port Kent. Steven Bullis and Barbara Klages lived within walking distance of the school. Barbara lived in a huge house right next to the railroad tracks. The trains went roaring past her front porch several times a day, and I thought she was the luckiest person in the world. No matter where we lived, the intimacy of the small school resulted in friendships that have lasted a lifetime. Along with Barbara and Steve, I met Julie, Betsy, Linda, Betsy, and Mike in Port Kent, and most of us remained classmates and friends throughout our graduation in 1968. It was also while in Port Kent I had my first heartbreak: I was in love with Jay Sussdorf, who moved away at the end of second grade.

One of my clearest memories was our performing in Hansel and Gretel. As I had been a witch that past Halloween, I got to play the villain to Julie’s starring role as Gretel; she pushed me into the “oven,” a table covered in black construction paper with a drawing of the fireplace.

The next September, we started the school year in Port Kent. The elementary school was finished over the winter vacation, and we started going to classes there in January, 1958. The new school was shiny and modern and beautiful. However, looking back, I have fonder memories my year and a half in that little red schoolhouse than I do about the new building.

Ironically, many years later, Adam and Julie had the opportunity to attend school in a similar building. Both children went to the Clifton Park Nursery school in the little red school house on the corner of Moe and Grooms Road. As a cooperative preschool, Larry and I participated as a helping parent in Adam and Julie’s classrooms on a rotating basis. One of Julie’s earliest memories is Larry coming in on Halloween as a clown with a big red honking nose. She thought she was the luckiest child in the world to have such a funny, talented father. Both children loved going to nursery school in that old building with its wooden floors, huge old windows, and parent-made shelves lining the walls filled with toys and books and arts and craft material.

My Mountain Girl’s elementary school in Frisco, a modern building with a huge playground, is only a few blocks from her home. I doubt if she will follow in the footsteps of her grandmother and mother. However, she is learning about the history of her small Rocky Mountain town: the Ute Indians who originally lived along its rivers, the mountain men who trapped beaver in this territory in the first half of the nineteenth century, the miners and their families who settled the town in the 1870’s. She enjoys picnics and concerts in the town’s historic park, where she plays in original buildings that once served as homes, a jail, a chapel, a saloon and brothel! And she can explore the the Schoolhouse Museum, with its wooden floors, dusty chalkboards, and wooden seats. And on one of our visits, I will share the stories of my own adventures in a two-room schoolhouse on top of a hill overlooking Lake Champlain.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Jewish World News, a bi-weekly subscription-based newspaper in upstate New York, on August 6, 2015.

Larry’s classic clown outfit in 1985. Adam and Julie were delighted!

There Goes My Heart

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The first week of September in Upstate New York is a time for new clothes, sharpened pencils, and bright yellow buses that reappear on neighborhood streets like clockwork two days after Labor Day. School opening is an important time for the children. It is also a bittersweet moment for the adults who are saying good-bye to them.

My first vivid memory was my first day of school. My mother walked me up the hill to the big brick building that housed all the grades for Keeseville Central. I quietly sat at a table stringing colored beads in Mrs. Ford’s kindergarten classroom. My mother wordlessly slipped out the door. I didn’t cry.

I was supposed to be the last of my parents’ three children going off to school, but that plan failed. My sister was born three months before I entered kindergarten. Bobbie was a shining example of the little “surprise” many pre-birth-control women in their mid to late thirties experienced just when they thought diapers and formula were behind them. I am not sure if my mother pushed Bobbie in the carriage into the classroom that morning. I am sure dropping me off only to return to a house still equipped with a crib, a high chair, and a playpen was an ironic moment in my mother’s life.

When it came time to send my son Adam off to kindergarten, I had mixed feelings. I was happy for him to be starting on his next adventure, but my mind was filled with concerns. Would his teacher, who had a reputation for being strict, be kind to my son? Would he overcome his shyness, make new friends? My fears were certainly not alleviated when within the first week he didn’t come up our driveway after the school bus pulled away. My phone call to the school triggered an alert to the driver, who found Adam fast asleep in the back the bus. Somehow, he did survive his first year. Life before school became a distant memory as Julie followed Adam up the school bus steps three years later.

What was so much more difficult for me was sending Adam off to college. The summer before, I shopped for comforters and dorm sized sheets and enough shampoo and soap to last him four years. The thought of his leaving the house and our no longer having four at the dinner table caused me to tear up all summer. A week before he was to leave, I was cutting up several pounds of chicken breast when I burst into tears. “I will never have to make this much chicken again!” I sobbed out loud to an empty kitchen.

The night before we drove him to the University of Rochester, most of the purchases were still in bags with the tags still on them. Unlike me who needed to be packed and ready days in advance, Adam was happy to just stuff things into suitcases and plastic bins at the last minute.

The four of us lugged his life in Rubbermaid containers up the five flights of stairs—why did my children always get the top floors of their dorms?—and Adam quickly settled in. My last memory of my son that day was his leaning back on his chair in front of his desk, proclaiming “I am going to like it here!”

Once Larry, Julie, and I got back into the car for our trip home, I felt such deep pain that I thought someone had wrenched my heart out of my body. I cried from Rochester to Syracuse. I finally stopped when Julie commented sarcastically from her perch in the back seat, “You have another child, you know!”

Sending Julie off to Williams College three years later was a little easier—maybe because she was the second child; maybe because she was only forty-five minutes away. We dropped her off in Williamstown and got her situated in her fourth floor—of course!-dorm room. By the time we pulled into our driveway, we were giddy with excitement over our new-found freedom. We knew that both children were happy in their college environment. That knowledge, coupled with the realization that we longer had to worry about the daily angst of their high school lives—homework, car pools, dates for a dance—made the transition into our now empty nest smoother.

Still, each time our children came home, I found their inevitable departure difficult. After sending Julie off to college for her final year, I asked my mother if she ever got used to saying goodbye. “Oh, Marilyn,” she said. “It never gets easier! Every time any one of you gets into the car and drives away, I think to myself, ‘There goes my heart!’”

So, each year on the first day of school, when I see the school bus filled with children with their new clothes, their sharpened pencils their bright back packs, I will be thinking of my first day, my children’s first days, and my aching heart.

The story that started it all! Published in The Jewish World on August 15, 2013 on Page 12. After moving to Florida, I compiled a number of my stories and published this on my birthday in 2016.