The Home Front

...Children play in the mud, in the swamp, run barefoot over the red-clay earth...

...By the time a boy was along in his teens, he knew enough about dealing with wood so that nowadays he could pass for a carpenter...

...And this teacher had no principal or any sort of hierarchy above her...

...Big people learned to be gentle and thoughtful...

...H is shadow frightens...

...And the little town of Venice on the shore of the Gulf, a settlement formed by retired members of the Locomotive Brotherhood in 1924, where today 727 people live the year round, and where for $200 one can still buy a plot of coastal land...

...Her pupils ranged from 6 years old to 20...

...Cooks and waiters complain of the gypsy-like quality of their livelihood, the fact that hotels and restaurants open and close overnight...

...The America we have today is probably more due to that modest institution than anyone has ever imagined...

...When the sun leaves the beaches, women change from their bathing suits to evening dresses and men don stiff white shirtfronts, jackets and shining shoes...

...Eastern Airlines announced an all-time record for February and expected even more in March...

...She was "one of the neighbor girls...

...But one precious quality we developed??a deep-going independence...

...A major segment of the native population lives off the few months of the winter season...

...Try to walk into the lobby of a hotel after 7 P.M...

...Scenes on a Drive Through Florida By Joseph R. Fiszman ATLANTA THE HIGHWAYS leading from the depths of Georgia to Florida are empty for long stretches...

...Every girl learned to cook and sew and run a house and take care of a baby...

...And each day new hotels are going up, new restaurants and tourist homes...

...it is right under the window, and you lie in bed listening to the sound of the surf and imagine yourself rocking on the waves...

...They now make a big fuss about teaching those things...

...Maybe the teachers in our fine, big schools can put that sort of thing into their programs...

...We learned many things from experience...

...We had no gymnasium or manual-training department, but we got plenty of exercise...

...But I have always had a suspicion that, in creating these big, glassy, shiny buildings in the middle of towns, we have left behind a lot of good things which the children enjoyed in the little red schoolhouse...

...Petersburg more old retired folk gather at the Municipal Pier—men and women, couples still young though many are long past their golden jubilee, Irish and Italians, Jews and Poles, Scots and many others...

...And on the steps of the little stores selling Coca-Cola, pecans and King Edward cigars sit the old folks, chewing tobacco and blinking with nearsighted eyes at the traffic moving by, at the traffic going toward Florida, toward Miami where there is the sea, the sun, and money...

...I often think of that now when I see big boys teasing or abusing littles ones on the city streets...

...They work under the supervision of armed guards, they are shirtless, bronzed and muscled, silent and hard...

...The sleek automobiles wind through a land of red clay pitted with ditches...

...Their own amateur orchestra renders the music, one of the crowd sings the lyrics...

...But in one respect our equipment excelled that of any educational institution I have seen since...

...They had experience in taking care of cattle...

...She was familiar with the conditions in every home...

...This whole woodland world was at our disposal as much as if it had been a part of the school...

...My one complaint is that he has not done justice to the educational advantages of the old one-room school...

...without a tie, just try...

...Old, wrinkled faces, white hair and young eyes...

...The seagulls come flying down from Tampa Bay, white spots in the falling dusk, and old hands throw crumbs of bread to them...

...Deep down in a gully in this wood was a spring, around which grew the pawpaws and the wild grapes...

...And at night in St...

...On Collins Avenue the cars crawl bumper to bumper, women and hairy-chested men stroll about in bathing suits, stop at the stands to buy the latest racing form...

...A pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room roasted a few pupils on cold days while the more distant ones froze...

...Every parent was a teacher in those days??the mothers, too...

...During the long lunch hour, many was the expedition on which the big boys led the little boys down through this deep and tangled wilderness...

...Across the border in Florida, the prison road gangs work even on Sunday, even on holidays...

...From there, he goes on to suggest how we can build and organize so that we can keep much of what was good in the old way of doing things...

...We never learned to fit into a machine...

...From the start, we had built-in antidotes to Fascism and Communism...

...Lew Clark, our school committeeman, was far from giving orders...

...and as the cars slow down to pass them by, they rest for a moment and stare with a dull curiosity into the windows of the automobiles...

...Only at the sight of a pretty girl in one of the cars do the prisoner faces melt into a smile: " Hi, ma'am...

...They sit at the card tables, over chess or checkers...

...But young lads, bookies' runners with oiled hair and sleek suits, walk through the lobbies, hands in their pockets and wads of gum between their teeth, and on their full smooth cheeks lies a world of satiety and self-assurance...

...In those days, this sort of pedagogy was taken for granted...

...The smallest child felt at home with her...

...There was no one above the kindly, gentle little teacher...

...With much pomp, a new motel was just opened where the charge is $50 a night...

...Who of the tourists who come to ogle at their villages gives a second thought to the Seminoles living in straw huts in the murky waters along the Tamiami Trail ? In Miami, the world seems to begin and end, to concentrate, among the shiny mirrors and gleaming marble of the luxurious hotels...

...It helps me arrange and codify a bizarre lot of recollections and notions...

...Behind the school was a wood belonging to old Lew Clark, who for many years was our school committeeman...

...True, its equipment was minimum: We had a dictionary, an atlas, a globe, some wall-maps and blackboards...

...These are the faces of people of hard work, good solid people...

...Negro girls in tight red sweaters walk slowly along the narrow sidewalks, laughing into the faces of the boys whose arms encircle their hips...

...For the time being, they were the teachers of nature-lore...

...We never had put over on us the notion that someone away up above knew better than we did or our parents and would tell us all about it...

...When you awaken in the morning, no effort is needed to go to the ocean...

...They were for us whenever they were ripe...

...She knew the opinions of the parents without the aid of any PTA...

...Georgia Thorpe, who was our teacher, had passed only the most elementary sort of examination...

...Behind this golden facade, however, there is something human, something simple—the fear of insecurity, of the unavoidable return to the months of beans and grits...

...And from ropes dangle multi-colored shirts and patched underwear, drying lazily under the sun, giving a bit of color to a depressing scene...

...They were carefully taught how to build...

...As if there had never been a Korea, as if youths their age have never fought, have never suffered, never fallen...

...From the start, I have favored the modern, consolidated school...

...The rail lines and highways leading to Miami are jammed...

...The boys learned about plowing and planting and caring for the land...

...Many others we picked up from our parents or from the little teacher in the little school...

...And along the several mile- long street of hotels moves a procession of open cars with scantily- dressed girls whose bronze smooth shoulders gleam in the neon lights...

...Nor is this all...

...His speeches made the teacher blush for his grammar, but authority was something he never assumed...

...I hope a lot of people will pay attention to what he says...

...tall, grayish trees laden with hanging moss lend an eeriness to the scene...

...Farmers of the Midwest mix with models from New York, bookies mill about in crowds of respectable matrons, and prostitutes rub shoulders with well-behaved girls from sheltered homes...

...Over them all hangs the shadow of the bum who freezes in the midst of all the heat, unshaven and diseased, with a permanent hangover, the bum who stands in front of the honky-tonks of Flagler Boulevard and begs a dime for coffee...

...Its buildings, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, have the color of the orange, and through the multicolored glass bricks drift the rays of the sun, and through the ceilings of the halls one can see straight into the face of the innocent blue sky...

...Old Negroes sit on the steps along the margin of a life speeding past them, as if in the midst of the swamps and moss and mud and hopelessness they wait for death, wait to be picked up by the black birds flying menacingly above...

...Also the roustabouts of the circus grounds at Sarasota— lost souls from all parts of the world loitering about the tents, wagons, stables and cages—hard-drinking men who don't know what the next morning will hold for them...

...Here is the America of the small commercial fishing towns, of the large air bases, the great citrus orchards, the huge packing- houses and yards...

...That sort of thing never happened out there in the country...

...Once the traveler moves away from Miami, once he moves further south or into the hinterland, there is yet a different America to see—an America of hard work which makes one feel tender...

...In a single night this season, a Miami auto-rental company had 1,013 of its cars on the streets, as compared with 589 on the same date last year...

...In Lakeland, the pretty town of thirteen lakes, exists a unique institution, Florida Southern College...

...Who thinks of Korea, who thinks of swamps and blood and hunger and labor camps in Russia...

...During this process, both sides learned something important which is not on any school program...

...Miami is living now in a state of intoxication...

...All these together are part of America...

...Big, awkward fellows 18 or 20 years old were proud to help little chaps of 6 or 7. They would teach them to play games, fix up their clothes, comfort them when they were in trouble...

...Well do I recall what happened when we went "cross-lots" home through fields and woods...

...We all knew her...

...And this in addition to the money spent at Tropical Park and at the dog races...

...The seagulls are grateful...

...Hialeah racetrack broke all records this year: in the first thirty days of its forty-day season, 623,625 people bet $50,437,782 at its windows...

...Here no one hears the words recession or depression, words which seem to hold the rest of America in suspense...

...They iron out the roads, filling in holes so the tourists from the North and Midwest may have a smoother ride...

...The best part of it all was that big folks and little folks lived together...

...She probably had never heard of Columbia...

...Professor Woodring lines the whole subject up and shows precisely what has been gained and what has been lost...

...Large black birds swoop down from the high branches, flutter their wings over the highways and circle over the swamps...

...I am not pretending that the old days were better than these...

...The teacher who had not been to Columbia had two great advantages over her metropolitan counterpart...

...The towns and settlements skimming by, with exotic names like Alapaha and Willacoochee, are cut into two parts by the railroad tracks: on one side the white living quarters dipped in green and afternoon sleep, and on the other the yards, the warehouses, the Negro slums and stores —houses devoured by age, termites and dampness...

...In the swamps, supported by poles, stand squalid shacks with collapsing roofs and decaying walls...

...some dance—lively dances although the movements are often awkward...

...Waitresses and chambermaids eagerly count the tips: What they don't catch now, they won't have later...

...We lacked many things...

...The guards seem weary and bored and eye with envy the traffic moving toward the sea and the golden sands, toward the sun, toward Miami...

...Would they laugh so gaily if they knew that, only a short distance away, in the Georgia swamps, an overburdened mother killed her child because it cried all night...

...Our fathers were first-class teachers of all sorts of useful work...

...Miami bathes in sun and money...

...Little ones learned to trust the strong...

...We had a well-planted yard, wide enough to include a baseball diamond or any other sort of playing field...

...How carefully the big fellows would carry the little ones over brooks and swamps...

...If there was a stormy day or an especially fine one, she would throw the whole program out of the window and do something special...