gat

every single day for an entire school year on a hand-cranked phonograph: "You must be vigilant,
you must be diligent, American Patrol!" Her expressionless face and brutally stark manner stifled
any inclination to satire. If we have to have schoolteachers, let some of them be this kind of
teacher.
At Waverly I learned about principle when Miss Hill read from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire. She read of the courageous death of Blandina the slave, a teenage convert to
Christianity who was offered her life to repudiate her faith and a cruel death if she refused. She
refused. I learned that all the management savvy of the most powerful empire in history couldn’t
overwhelm the principles of a teenage slave.
Principles were a daily part of every study at Waverly. In latter days, schools replaced principles
with an advanced form of pragmatism called "situational ethics," where principles were shown to
be variable according to the demands of the moment. During the 1970s, forcing this study on
children became an important part of the school religion. People with flexible principles reserve
the right to betray their covenants. It’s that simple. The misery of modern life can be graphed in
the rising incidence of people who exercise the right to betray each other, whether business
associates, friends, or even family. Pragmatists like to keep their options open. When you live by
principles, whatever semantic ambiguity they involve you in, there are clear boundaries to what
you will allow, even when nobody is watching.
Frances "Bootie" Zimmer
Frances "Bootie" Zimmer was born on Halloween in 1911 at Monongahela General Hospital,
three years before the country had an income tax or a Federal Reserve Bank, in the first flush
moments of scientific pedagogy practically realized. She was five years younger than dad, two
inches taller, born in a country on the gold standard where common citizens carried precious
metal in their pockets as money.
She was three when WWI began, six when the Gary Plan riots struck New York City schools. In
the postwar years, her father, son of a German immigrant from the Palatinate, became prosperous
by working around the clock as a print shop proprietor and sometimes investor in movies,
carnivals, newspapers, and real estate. His grandchildren, Moss and Taylor, my brilliant cousins,
are still in the printing business in Bethel Park, near Pittsburgh, one hundred years later.
Bootie graduated from Monongahela High, where she was a cheerleader, in 1929, a few months
before the market crash. Besides losing money, some other great catastrophe must have happened
to the Zimmers then, but I’ve only been able to unearth a few shards of its nature. Whatever its
full dimension, it included the sudden eviction of Grandmother Moss from her home, the
incarceration of great-grandfather Frederick in an old-age institution far away, the flight of
great-grandmother Isabelle to Detroit at the age of seventy-nine, at a time when Detroit and the
moon were equally distant, and the severing of ties between Granddad and his brothers to the
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