The class of 1967 did not produce the most famous graduates of Isidore Newman. That honor belongs to the outstanding football quarterbacks, Eli and Peyton Manning. And we haven’t written the most books. 1970 graduate Walter Isaacson has written numerous acclaimed biographies, and Michael Lewis, 1978 graduate and author of Moneyball, continues to write and publish on contemporary topics.
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So what is different about the class? Our class “President-for-Life” Larry Rabin wrote at the 50th reunion that the class of 1967 “was always known and is still recognized as being different and special. . . .” More of us attend reunions, and over the years the ties to each other have grown stronger. When I spoke with Larry recently, he said that he thought we had removed the boundaries of the cliques that existed in high school and we can now appreciate and enjoy each other. Larry’s enthusiasm, persistence, and energy have helped to keep us together and to continue building relationships.
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The creative accomplishments of the class are impressive. We have five painters, two sculptors, two architects, three writers, a film producer, a television director, an interior decorator, a furniture maker, and two photographers. In this project I’ll explore with my classmates to what extent the traditions of Newman, including manual training and learning by doing, influenced the development of so many classmates who excel in visual-spatial fields. Interestingly, classmate Charles “Pinky” Rohm, III, who has built custom furniture both as a hobby and commercially for many years, wrote that he still has his mechanical drawing set from seventh grade at Newman.
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The Newman class of 1967 was a bright group and a privileged group. Among the 66 graduates were ten National Merit Finalists and two National Merit Scholars. Nine graduates went to Ivy League or Seven Sisters schools, including one to Harvard, one to Wellesley, two to Brown, one to Yale, two to Princeton, one to Smith, and one to Sarah Lawrence with a transfer to Barnard. A number of students went to the elite colleges of the South, including Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt, Millsaps, Georgia Tech, and Rollins.
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Some went to private universities around the country, such as George Washington University, Washington and Lee, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Washington University. A number of students went to state universities away from home, including the U of Texas, U of Oklahoma, U of Florida, and the U of Colorado. Quite a few preferred to stay close to home, attending Louisiana State University, the University of New Orleans, or Tulane. Twelve male students, about one-third of the male students in the class, went to Tulane, and two women students went to Newcomb College, at that time the women’s college of Tulane University. Newman has a longstanding relationship with Tulane and Newcomb, as Newman graduates were accepted as early as 1908.
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About half the members of the class did graduate work after completing college. In addition to the artists described above, nine of the 66 graduates became attorneys, one of them a judge. Six went into the medical professions (five physicians and one nurse). Seventeen, mostly males, became business leaders and/or developers in scientific and technological fields. Ten, mostly women, became psychotherapists and/or educators. And we also have a retired English professor, a geologist, a paleontologist, and a labor leader and social activist.
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Five members of the graduating class entered Newman, as I had, at the beginning of senior year. Two of these, Chuck Lamberth and myself, developed a strong attachment to Newman, and the remaining three did not. Fourteen students left Newman around the ninth or tenth grades, either because their families moved or their parents wanted them to attend military schools or elite boarding schools, sometimes against their wishes. A few were asked to leave because of behavior or poor grades. Despite not having graduated with their classmates, most of these fourteen have a strong attachment to Newman, attend reunions, and remain friends with their former classmates.
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Unfortunately, twelve classmates have died: Jann Terral Ferris, Jerry Gatto, Patsy Friedler Kanter, Joel Levy, Martha Bick Lewis, Mark Malcove, Debbie Matthews, Michael W. Newell, Philip Singerman, Bill Strain, David Weisler, and Dennis Winkler. At our last gathering, a celebration of the class turning 70, Larry Rabin had the idea to honor and celebrate the lives of the classmates we had lost. There was an outpouring of feeling and the chance to talk and share stories about our missing classmates, sometimes for the very first time.
Coming of Age in the 1960s:
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Our class also came of age during the tumultuous times of the sixties. It was a time of turmoil, and expectations and roles were changing rapidly. On the one hand, the rapid changes taking place in the late 60s and early 70s brought about more personal freedom. Some classmates had the opportunity to take detours from traditional educational pathways. Diane Cohen lived on a kibbutz for a year, and it was her experience here that gave her an “Aha” moment and led her to choose language acquisition in children as her career. John Menszer worked for eight months harvesting bananas on Kibbutz Ein Gev. Richie and Vivian Cahn backpacked for a year through Latin America.
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On the other hand, some classmates’ life paths were disrupted by the Vietnam War and the draft, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and continual political protests on campuses. The Vietnam War and the draft had an impact on life decisions for male students. Chuck Lamberth had taken his pre-draft physical and was ready to go to Vietnam when the draft lottery system was instituted and his draft number was 326.
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Classmate Robert Greenberg, who attended Antioch College, wrote that while he majored in Communications, he actually “majored in the late 1960s.” He wrote that “the campus was disrupted, grades were eliminated, and psychedelics were everywhere.” I recall my college life being disrupted three times, in the spring of 1968 with the Columbia Strike, in the spring of 1970 with the closing of campus due to anti-War protests, and in the spring of 1972 with the campus closing again. Richie Cahn remembers being at Northwestern University in 1968, with riots in Chicago and school shutdowns.
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Opportunities and roles for women were also changing dramatically. All the women in the class went to college. Eleven earned graduate degrees, and three earned doctoral degrees. Most of the women were employed or self-employed, making it more likely that childbearing would be delayed. Some of my women classmates found a second career after raising a family. The availability of the birth control pill in 1960s allowed young women to make decisions about having children for the first time. My classmates tended to have smaller families than the generation before. The modal number of children in the class was two (about 25 people had two children). Eight classmates had one child, and seven had no children. Nine classmates had three children.
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I’ll turn now to the history of Isidore Newman School and its educational traditions.
The Creation of Isidore Newman School
Discimus Agere Agendo
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We learn to do by doing.
Now a prestigious college preparatory school in New Orleans, Isidore Newman School actually emerged from the trauma sustained by the Jewish community there during the 1800s. Founded in 1902, the school developed out of the many losses resulting from a century of recurring annual yellow fever epidemics and the subsequent healing response of the Jewish community. Isidore Newman, a New Orleans Jewish businessman who had emigrated from Germany in 1853, founded the school in 1902 to meet the educational needs of the residents of the Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans.
The idea for the school had come from Rabbi Isaac L. Leucht, who began advocating for a school for the residents of the Jewish Orphans’ Home in 1889, and the concept was discussed at board meetings at the Home during the 1890s. The school was originally called the Isidore Newman School for Manual Training. Isidore Newman insisted that the school would be open to people of all creeds who lived outside the Home, thus establishing a spirit of inclusion from the very beginning. Much later, in 1968, Newman would become the first non-parochial, private school in New Orleans to integrate.
Most of the orphans were actually “half-orphans,” as they were referred to for a time, meaning that one parent had died and the remaining parent, unable to work and take care of the children at the same time, placed them in the Jewish Home. The trauma that led to so many Jewish children losing their parents was the yearly recurrence of yellow fever epidemics during the nineteenth century in New Orleans.
Between 1817, the first year of reliable record keeping, and 1905, the year of the last epidemic, 41,000 people died. The worst epidemics were in the years of 1833, 1853, and 1878, and the epidemics occurred every summer from July through October. In 1853, the peak year of yellow fever in New Orleans, approximately 7,800 people died, and one-third of the population left the city. New Orleans had 150,000 residents at the time. There were so many deaths between 1851 and 1855 that the deceased were buried in mass graves in the city, and the Jewish community erected a plaque to honor those who were buried in those graves.
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Yellow fever is a hemorrhagic illness caused by a virus and transmitted by mosquitoes. New Orleans, with its humid climate, water everywhere, crowding, poor sanitation, and below-sea level location, was an ideal breeding place for mosquitoes. The virus caused fever, internal bleeding, and liver damage, with liver damage leading to yellow skin and giving the disease its name. The virus was not isolated until 1927, and during the 1800s people thought that the yellow fever was caused by the miasma, meaning vapors or atmosphere, and cannons were fired into the miasma to fight this terrible disease. The 1938 film Jezebel starring Bette Davis shows the cannons firing in the city to combat the virus.
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By 1844 the New Orleans Jewish community had chartered a Hebrew Benevolent Society to establish a cemetery and to take care of the sick and indigent. According to Joseph Magner, who wrote a history of the Home in 1914, the Hebrew Benevolent Society held a “mass meeting of the Jews of New Orleans” in 1854 in order to create a separate organization to support widows and orphans. That meeting led to the creation of the Association for the Relief of Jewish Widows and Orphans in 1855, resulting in the first Jewish orphans’ home in North America. The Home took only Jewish children, as established by matrilineal descent. In 1924 the name was changed from the Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans to the Jewish Children’s Home of New Orleans.
The Jewish Children’s Home of New Orleans existed from its founding in 1855 to its closing in 1946. During those 90 years it fostered and educated 1800 Jewish children. It was affiliated with B’nai B’rith, which provided funds, and the Home took in Jewish children from seven southern states. Jewish orphanages throughout the South originally provided education within the institutions, and during the 1800s the residents of the Home also had in-house education. By 1890 many orphanages in New Orleans sent their residents out to public schools.
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The New Orleans Jewish community was unusual in creating a private, off-site school for educating the residents of the Jewish Children’s Home. The school opened on October 3, 1904, and 102 residents of the Jewish Home enrolled. Jewish and gentile children from outside the Home soon outnumbered the Home students, who by 1907 were less than one third of the total number of students, and the school expanded to accommodate the growing enrollment. At first the Home children wore uniforms to go to school, but the uniforms were abolished in 1907.
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After the Home closed in 1946, the agency called the Jewish Children's Regional Service (JCRS) began serving Jewish children in need. The agency's services include case management, scholarship aids for camps, assistance for college, special needs subsidies, support groups, disaster relief, and Jewish outreach. The JCRS is the continuation of The Association for the Relief of Windows and Orphans that began in 1855.
Originally called the Isidore Newman Manual Training School, manual training at Newman has often been described as vocational training. Actually, manual training was a philosophy of education; it was described in 1904 by Newman’s first principal, James Addicott, as follows:
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The Manual training school does not attempt to teach any particular art or trade. What it does attempt is to educate the hand as an invaluable and necessary aid in the development of the brain. The great object is to teach the pupil to work as well as to think; to enable him to do something with his hands as well as to answer questions, and this instruction in the use of the hand demands and develops not manual dexterity alone, but attention, observation, judgment and reasoning.
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The history of Newman School is described and documented by Anne Rochell Konigsmark in Newman’s centennial story, Isidore Newman School: One Hundred Years.