Elizabeth Bradley Elementary School, 1946-52

In the middle of my first school year at Bradley, the educational powers decided to “promote” me from kindergarten to first grade, so that I got only a half-year of each. With the consequence that I was among the youngest and least socially-able members of each of my school classes, all the way through high school. Although not, interestingly enough, in college. The same sort of thing seems to have happened to a lot of the kids who ended up at MIT… Mammy said many times that she regretted yielding to the insistence of the school folks on this score. And that she turned them down flat when they tried to pull the same stunt again later. For which I’m grateful: that would have been a disaster.

They asked us, one day, what instrument we’d like to play. I had only the vaguest of notions what instruments there were: music, especially performance, hadn’t played a big rôle in our home life. I said saxophone, working from a crude mental image of a long, black thing with silver keys. Somebody caught on, and I was soon ingesting the rudiments of the clarinet. Wish I could claim the initiative, but I was pretty passive in this transaction. Mrs Clark seems to have thought I did something creditable, but I remember only a very elementary version of Marche Slave and maybe, vaguely, one performance.

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