Milt remembers his father having a number of heart attacks. We learned he worked constantly even when confined to an oxygen tent he would still be focused upon solving problems. At one point in their lives the family moved to Cincinnati where working for G.E. his father designed a massive turbine generator. On another occasion when they lived in Troy, Milt asked his father to join the Fire Department. Always ready to please and given his community connections his father became active in the Department. He did whatever Milt asked. He became active in the Boy Scouts of America in further support of Milt’s interest. Whether it was overwork or undue stress, or the state of cardiac medicine at the time, his father’s heart ultimately failed and he died shortly after retiring in his fifties. His parents were living on Park Avenue in Manhattan. It was about then that Milt began teaching in Brentwood. He moved his mother from NYC to be closer to her. She lived in a Brentwood condominium community near East Junior High until she was about 65 years of age when she passed away at a relatively young age much as her husband had before her. Milt didn’t remember how old his grandfather had been when he died, but he did tell us that he had been a sea captain who died of tuberculosis.
  As a youngster, Milt favored individual sports like gymnastics, canoeing, lifeguarding and winter sledding. During World War II he remembered the conservation drives in school to collect tin and aluminum piled in mountains of scrap metal deposited on the suburban lawns of the school. One angry sign in particular stands out in memory; It was addressed to Emperor Hirohito and it read – “Some Junk, You Skunk.” He also recalled Mrs. Smith a teacher he deeply admired, going around the classroom smashing all the Japanese consumer goods she could find after War was declared by Congress in Dec 1941.There were also two other teachers he admired. They were sisters and both were strong women who taught Geometry; definitions, postulates and theorems now long forgotten.
   When he came of age, even though he might have avoided military service due to his certification as a teacher of Biology he chose instead to volunteer for the draft believing it to be his patriotic duty. He was sent to Korea and stationed at the 38th Parallel where he faced North Koreans similarly assigned. He remembered the extreme poverty of the people of both North and South Korea and recalled one instance where his intervention as a military officer had saved a young boys’ life. Tensions on the demilitarized zone expressed themselves in another account originally shared with members of our History department. It involved an attempt at communication between American and North Korean enlisted men intended to demonstrate how our individual freedoms were superior to those of the Korean soldiers. An American soldier had drawn a representation of the American flag in the snow with a stick. He then proceeded to urinate on it. Not a very nice or respectful thing to do but it was done anyway, because our First Amendment allowed it The American soldier then invited any of the North Koreans to do the same thing with their flag. They couldn’t even imagine doing it, and lacking freedom of expression couldn’t even fathom the meaning of the demonstration in relative terms.
   Milt was hired by the district in 1955 when he was interviewed by Eugene Hoyt, District Superintendent. He was given a tour, of what he believed to be Brentwood but was actually Bay Shore. The first person he met when he arrived in the Ross Building for the first time was the Assistant High School Principal, Beryl Knott.
  I asked him how he envisioned his mission upon accepting the position in Brentwood. He said he believed completely in what he was doing by affording each and every student for whom he was responsible, the opportunity to obtain the best public education possible. Brentwood would have been described in the late fifties as a middle class mostly white suburban bedroom community that had changed greatly since it had been known as a summer playground of the rich upper class few who sought to breathe deeply of the healthy pine scented fresh air not easily available to residents of New York City who might have preferred seasonal relief from the oppressive urban heat and discomfort from which the Long Island Railroad might have delivered them to a land of tall white pines, peace and quiet. We knew then as we do now, that in a democracy you need an educated public. It appears that one of the reasons we have a serious problem in society today is because we no longer know what our purpose is. It doesn’t mean that all students will automatically graduate. Some will fail as they should in order to learn what they need to take away from their education. All students must be given and take away enough information to survive in a democracy. Every student needs to learn how to read a prescription, to take care of his or her family and not to kill their children. Milt expressed his disapproval and anger over the manipulation of statistics to make educational systems look good. He was fully aware of how that process had manifested in Brentwood and took on a new meaning for him when he resigned from the Brentwood School District in 1980, took some time off from the classroom to recharge his battery before returning to work for the New York City School System as a teacher of Math and pursued a third Masters Degree from CCNY which he fell just short of attaining. He was promoted from classroom teacher in the 3,500 student Martin Luther King H.S. at Lincoln Center to System Security Coordinator, until a serious disagreement with his black Principal over the manipulation of statistics and a concern for student safety caused him to resign his position believing the entire system was falling apart following his reading of Freakonomics . When the Union got behind him, and the Principal was defeated, Milt became more closely aligned with the Union. Eventually when his concerns were ignored an incident he had predicted, occurred when a student was shot in the hallway of the school. The threat from neighborhood gangs was real and unless the system responded by providing adequate resources with regard to requested numbers of Deans to enforce school policies, a security breakdown would only be a matter of time.

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