harold a. katz memoir volume 1 - University of Illinois Springfield

then, history, or civics. Miss Pitman used to teach civics. And I would learn about govern-
ment and I have always had an interest in government, even during that period of time. The
classes I liked best related to current events. I would bring to class items clipped out of
the newspaper that related to civics. I liked English, and I had an English teacher whom
I liked. I was never very good at math or science. Nor was I great at languages. I studied
French, but my recitations in the class were not very good. In fact, I remember reading
French in class, and the whole class would laugh because I was so clumsy in my pronuncia-
tion. So there were some subjects that I liked, and there were some that I didn't. I managed
to do satisfactorily in school.
Q: Did you feel comfortable in school?
A: Well, I felt mildly comfortable, I would not want to tell you that I was the most popular
kid in school at the level that we are talking about, grade school. I did get along. There
were almost no Jewish kids in the schools where I grew up. I would say it was not idyllic
from my point of view, but there were teachers who did kindle an interest in subjects. The
kids that I played with were largely the kids in my immediate neighborhood. I participated
a lot in football and baseball and running. I was not a great athlete, but I was an all right
athlete. My favorite sport was tennis. My brother and I would play sidewalk tennis in front
of our house hour after hour after hour, and day after day after day.
Q: Did you have any close friendships that developed in grade school?
A: I did not have any great friendships in grade school. I think it was a deficiency in my
early life. I had more friendships with people who were not in the grade school. As I indi-
cated to you earlier, the area where we lived had very few Jews. My parents were anxious
that I have a religious education. And I would go to the Jewish temple where in religious
school I developed most of my friendships. This was due in part, I think, to the social pat-
terns at that time. It depended upon your age. As you grew older and you went to high
school and college you just knew that Gentiles did not welcome dates with Jews. Those were
quite different days. My dating by and large was with the girls in my confirmation class.
The girls and boys in my religious school became my social acquaintances. My horsing-
around acquaintances, my playing-in-the-neighborhood acquaintances were different. They
were the people who lived in the neighborhood. And none of them was Jewish. I had
almost two separate lives; social life and religious life were separated from the fraterniza-
tion, the horsing around, and the sporting life of the neighborhood where I grew up. As
a result, I have totally lost touch with all of the kids that I went to school with in the early
years.
Most other kids didn't experience that bifurcation that existed in my life. They played with
the same kids that they went to religious school with. Although I had few anti-semetic
confrontations, a pattern existed within the Jewish community and the Gentile community
in Nashville. When kids started the kind of socializing which might lead to marriage, the
elders generally didn't believe that one ought to risk the danger that you might fall in love
and end up with - horror of horrors - intermarriage. That's the way things were in Nash-
ville, and, I suspect, in lots of places other than Nashville during that period.
Q: Well, do you think that there may have been a benefit to your later life from having
not been in a kind of segregated Jewish community?
A: Yes. There was a certain benefit. I have tended not to be in the mainstream, and that's
true in the legislature, too. In other words, I was always peripherally looking in. I never
committed myself totally to being part of the group, with the discipline that becomes part
of being in a group. I always maintained my individuality, my apartness, which gave me,
I think, an objectivity, an ability to see the other side that I might not have otherwise
had. Whenever a situation arose, I could always see the other side immediately. It's a