Vol. 143: The trouble with grownups

(which I learned in elementary school)

An old man sits on a park bench, sobbing quietly. A passerby asks him what’s wrong.

“Well, you see,” the old man replies, “I’m 90 years old, and I just got married to a 25-year-old girl. She’s beautiful, she’s brilliant, we adore each other, and we have terrific sex.”

“So why are you crying?” the passerby asks.

“I can’t remember where I live!” the old man explains.

At dinner the other night with a couple of my octogenarian friends— none of whom is married to a 25-year-old girl or boy— the conversation turned, as conversations often do among folks my age, to the many blessings of growing older. You know: arthritis, strokes, dementia, Alzheimer’s, hip and knee replacements, heart disease, kidney failure, diminished hearing, diminished memory, diminished influence, computer cluelessness, inability to read tiny print… things like that.

As an incurable optimist, I couldn’t help asking: Aside from free rides on buses and subways, are there no benefits to old age?

My friends mulled that over for a few minutes. Finally, one of them came up with an answer: “Wisdom,” he said. “Experience.”

But of course! Even if nobody pays attention to us anymore, we’re smarter than everyone else, because we’ve been around longer. We may not know from codes or social media, but we know what “Pearl Harbor” means. We know what the Cold War was. We remember Joe McCarthy. And Watergate.

That made me feel better, except….

My friend’s punishment

I once observed that almost everything I needed to know about journalism, not to mention life, I learned in elementary school. All the rest is commentary.

The notion that grownups aren’t all they’re cracked up to be first occurred to me when I was four years old, at the Ann Reno nursery school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Specifically, during rest hour after lunch.

At that point in the day, our teacher, Mrs. Berger, took a break, leaving her two student teachers— young women from Hunter College— in charge. All the lights were turned off, and we kids were supposed to rest on our cots in silence. But of course some of us couldn’t resist the temptation to talk or make funny sounds in the darkness. One such troublemaker, my best friend Peter Rutkoff, was told that, as punishment for his transgression, he would have to remain on his cot for an additional 20 minutes after rest hour ended— an eternity to a four-year-old.

Peter (who many years later created and ran the highly regarded American studies program at Kenyon College in Ohio) promptly made the best of his situation by falling asleep. When rest hour ended and the lights came on, I was greeted by the sight of my sleeping friend and our two student teachers hovering over him, debating what to do.

“Should we wake him up?” asked the first.

“No,” replied the second. “We told him to stay on his cot for an extra 20 minutes. We didn’t say he couldn't go to sleep.”

“But if he’s sleeping,” argued the first teacher, “how will he know he’s being punished?”

An elite school

Now jump ahead six years. It’s the spring of 1953 and I’m a fifth grader at P.S. 9 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As public schools went, P.S. 9 was an elite place, favored by upwardly mobile Jewish parents, who harbored lofty ambitions for their children. My contemporaries there included the future movie actresses Susan Strasberg and Suzanne Pleshette, the future movie composer Marvin Hamlisch, and the future Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell. Our parents included Lee Strasberg (Susan’s father), director of the Actors Studio, America’s most prestigious drama school; James Wechsler, the editor of the New York Post; and Leonard Lyons, the dean of syndicated Broadway newspaper columnists.

P.S. 9 was generally considered one of Manhattan’s three best public elementary schools, and my immediate classmates constituted an even more exclusive group, having been lumped together by virtue of our high IQ test scores. None of us was rich (as far as I knew), but we were certainly privileged to grow up in upper-middle-class households, sheltered from most material concerns.

Mickey Jelke’s vice trial

That spring of 1953, the big New York news event was the trial of Minot “Mickey” Jelke, the 23-year-old playboy heir to an oleomargarine fortune, who, to kill time while awaiting his inheritance, had enlisted two of his high-society girlfriends into a prostitution ring. His trial was reported breathlessly by New York’s seven daily newspapers— “a Roman Holiday of rare proportions for New York’s tabloids,” as Time magazine put it.

One day during the trial, we fifth graders heard the familiar determined click-clack of high heels advancing down the hall in our direction. Our jut-jawed principal, Gertrude Selkowe, an intimidating but well-meaning force of nature, had come, as always, on a specific mission.

“Boys and girls,” Mrs. Selkowe told us, “I know I can’t stop you from reading about the Jelke trial. But if you must read about it, please read one of the responsible newspapers, like the Times or the Herald Tribune, and not one of the sensational tabloids.”

The principal turns purple

We were, remember, ten years old at the time— and the time itself was an age of innocence (albeit an age when even children got most of their news from newspapers). One of my classmates mustered the courage to ask the question foremost in all our minds: “What exactly is this trial all about?”

Mrs. Selkowe turned several shades of purple, stammered, and finally said: “Well, some men have been paying women to be nice to them.”

This explanation was greeted with raucous laughter, especially among the boys, because what boy would want a girl to be nice to him, much less pay her to be nice to him?

It was a valuable (if inadvertent) lesson that has served me well throughout my journalistic career: Grownups don’t really know what the hell they’re doing.

A new boss at CBS

Let us overlook, for the moment, the most obvious grownup example of all. Overlook Donald Trump’s claim last month that taking Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism. And his claim five years ago that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine is a “promising” cure for Covid. And his notion that the way to grow an economy is to discourage immigration and foreign trade. And his claim last week that Portland “is burning to the ground.” You could even overlook the 77 million grownups who voted for Trump in 2024.

A mere random glance at any newspaper or TV screen on any given day will prove my point: There’s no escaping grownups behaving foolishly.

Only last week, Paramount, which owns CBS News, announced that it was paying $150 million to buy The Free Press, an upstart digital news site founded just four years ago. What’s more, Paramount said it had chosen Bari Weiss, the founder of The Free Press, to be the editor in chief of CBS News. Weiss, who has never run a TV network or even worked at one, and who four years ago quit her job as an op-ed writer for The New York Times because of what she called “constant bullying by my colleagues,” will now oversee hundreds of tough-minded producers, anchors, and reporters around the world.

I think I know what my fellow P.S. 9 fifth graders (not to mention my nursery schoolmates at Ann Reno) would have said about that Paramount deal: They’re grownups. What did you expect?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com