The Reunion
by Jack Ridl

I saw them we were young.
Ginny was a cheerleader. Ben was getting
A's in trig. Tonight we glance at nametags.
Around the cheese tray, we say, "Of course

I remember you." "Yes, four years ago.
Things are better now." "No, she never
graduated, moved. I don't know where."

We look good. The food is just fine. The music
brings it all back, and we dance the latest steps
across our brain's prom floor. It's all the same.

And nothing is. We're still dumb kids, just gray
and tame. If we had it to do again, we'd get it
right. Some are sure they got it right the first

time. They ask for another Manhattan, dry
martini, scotch on the rocks. They glisten
in their tans. They watch the rest of us,

the ones with comb-overs, two divorces,
the ones who look for lower gas prices,
a good night's sleep, group tours.

"The Reunion" from Practicing to Walk Like a Heron by Jack Ridl. Copyright © 2013 Wayne State University Press, with the permission of Wayne State University Press. (buy now)

It's the birthday of Maria Montessori (books by this author), born on this day in Chiaravalle, Italy (1870). She was a bright student, studied engineering when she was 13, and — against her father's wishes — she entered a technical school, where all her classmates were boys. After a few years, she decided to pursue medicine, and she became the first woman in Italy to earn a medical degree. It was so unheard of for a woman to go to medical school that she had to get the approval of the pope in order to study there.

As a doctor, she worked with children with special needs, and through her work with them she became increasingly interested in education. She believed that children were not blank slates, but that they each had inherent, individual gifts. It was a teacher's job to help children find these gifts, rather than dictating what a child should know. She emphasized independence, self-directed learning, and learning from peers. Children were encouraged to make decisions. She was the first educator to use child-sized tables and chairs in the classroom.

During World War II, Montessori was opposed to Mussolini's fascism and his desire to make her a figurehead for the Italian government. She lived and worked in India for many years, and then in Holland. She died in 1952 at the age of 81.

She wrote many books about her philosophy of education, including The Montessori Method (1912), and is considered a major innovator in education theory and practice.

It was on this day in 1422 that Henry VI became king of England at the age of nine months.

He was King Henry V's only child. In 1423, the year after he ascended to the throne, English nobles from around the land swore loyalty to their toddler king. They also set up a regency council to make government decisions until he was old enough to do so.

It was about a century and a half later that William Shakespeare wrote a historical trilogy of plays about Henry VI. To get information about King Henry's life and times, Shakespeare used a reference book called The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, written by Edward Hall and published in 1548. The three Henry VI plays were among Shakespeare's earliest plays, and they were huge box office successes, helping to establish him as a major living playwright. These days they're hardly ever performed anywhere.

Today is the birthday of William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, born William Chon in Chicago (1907-1992). He started working for The New Yorker as a reporter for the "Talk of the Town" section in 1933, and was paid $2 per column inch. He took on some editorial duties after a few years as a writer, and became managing editor in 1939. He convinced the magazine's founder, Harold Ross, to devote an entire issue to John Hersey's in-depth coverage of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It was radically different than the magazine's usual fare, but it was a huge success. When Ross's health began to go downhill in the early 1950s, he bequeathed the magazine to Shawn. Some people were skeptical that Shawn could pull it off; after all, he was a Midwestern boy, raised in Chicago and educated in Michigan, and his first real journalism job had been reporting for a small paper in Las Vegas, New Mexico. He didn't like a fast-paced lifestyle, crowds, elevators, or power lunches. He was a small, shy, extremely courteous man whose feet didn't reach the floor under his desk. Ross died of cancer late in 1951, and Shawn succeeded him a couple of months later; he held the position until 1987, when the sale of the magazine forced him into retirement.

Under Ross's leadership, The New Yorker had been a forum for sparkling wit and snarky gossip; its stable of writers included E.B. White, James Thurber, and many members of the Algonquin Round Table. When Shawn took over the helm, the magazine took a more serious turn. It featured more stories of national interest and toned down its New York focus. Tom Wolfe said, in 1965, that Shawn had turned The New Yorker into "the most successful suburban women's magazine in the country." Former New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker complained that most of the writing was "about somebody's childhood in Pakistan," and even Shawn himself sometimes regretted the decline in the amount of humor in the magazine's pages under his watch.

But he had the support of the magazine's owners, and throughout his career, he earned the admiration and affection of the writers he worked with: among them J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Jamaica Kincaid, Elizabeth Bishop, and Philip Roth. He published Truman Capote's In Cold Blood as a series of articles. His magazine began to shape public opinion rather than just remark upon it. It was in the pages of Shawn's magazine that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring first educated Americans about the environment, and James Baldwin published essays on racism that would eventually become his book The Fire Next Time (1963).

When the magazine was sold and Shawn was forced to retire in 1987, he wrote a last letter to his colleagues, saying, "We have built something quite wonderful together." After his death in 1992, former colleague Gardner Botsford wrote in The New Yorker: "He sharpened our thinking, brought us sternly back from our vacant musings, oiled our transitions, and turned us into professionals of a greater competence than we would ever have achieved on our own." Another New Yorker staffer said, anonymously, "No editor ever ruled a large and complex magazine as absolutely as he ruled this one; yet no editor, perhaps, ever imparted to so many writers and artists as powerful a sense of freedom and possibility."

Shawn himself once said, "Falling short of perfection is a process that just never stops."

On this day in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous “American Scholar” address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. He told the students to think for themselves rather than absorb thought, to create rather than repeat, and not to look to Europe for cultural models.

The first radio news program was aired on Detroit’s 8MK on this date in 1920.

In 1920, radio was still a medium for hobbyists, and no one really used it for the widespread distribution of up-to-the-minute information. The Scripps newspaper family, which owned The Detroit News, provided the first push in that direction. They were worried that radio would put the newspapers out of business, but they were also worried that they would look bad if their radio news experiment failed to take off. They hired a teenager named Michael DeLisle Lyons to start up a radio station as a kind of trial. They told him to set it up in his own name, so that if it bombed, the Scripps name would not be associated with it. Lyons got government approval on August 20, and he played nonstop music for 10 days while he worked out the bugs. August 31 was the date of the primary elections, and The Detroit News reported that returns would be announced that evening over the radio.

The next morning, the newspaper reported: “The sending of the election returns by The Detroit News’ radiophone Tuesday night was fraught with romance and must go down in the history of man’s conquest of the elements as a gigantic step in his progress. In the four hours that the apparatus [...] was hissing and whirring its message into space, few realized that a dream and a prediction had come true. The news of the world was being given forth through this invisible trumpet to the waiting crowds in the unseen market place.”

The radio station that began as 8MK is still in business, operating under the call letters WWJ, and it is still an all-news station. The Detroit News would later launch Michigan’s first television station.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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