A dynasty of 64 years has come and gone into cyber space. Dorothy Salwen Rabinoff perpetuated her legacy, through a aHigh School named Midwood: born and bred in 1940 on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, across the Avenue from Brooklyn College.
With her paraprofessional role in Special Education, she and her husband Sam, discovered their destiny. A fated love affair with the ‘Hornet’s Nest’, a blessed account of the High School’s inoculation of the school’s larger than life maestros teachers staff and lacrosse football baseball volleyball basketballwrestling track and field , cricket, tennis jocks at Midwood Field , originally Wingate.
A grandee simpatico and a dynamic leadership, headed up by Dr. Tubby Ross. Dr Schwartz, Julie Raskin, Chairman of the P.E. Department, Henry Fuchs, Senior English teacher ,facultyadvisor to the school’s paper, the Argus… All Padow, Physicsand Chemistry pro….co-owner of a drug store on Avenue J,between East 13th and 14th Street, two blocks from the local BMT Avenue J subway.
II
Whence a young but not frail student, who lived around the block as they say, Dorothy literally got out of bed and crawled into her classes and the acclaimed inscription in the school’stiled lobby.
’All who enter here and depart…To their love of country, theirfellow man, and God’. (Harvard Yard, William James)
III
A dynasty? Indeed!.
‘The Hornet’s Nest’, her signature essay about the faculty and her cronies... Her glowing accounts of the musical heritage she identified with. Auditorium Spring Sings.
Chairman Ben Chncy and his alter egos. The strutting students,their voices: the choruses and the glories they were motivated to“Stout hearted men..” . Miss Friedman, a substitute, charging up these “Pennies from Heaven” Sopranos, altos: theirs puppy lovevoices changing with their hormones and braces on their teeth..
A citadel of musings. “Take notice of our passing lives in the midst of bullying on the planet.(Hitler, 9/11) The Westinghousehonored scenarios.. But she and Sam, a Junior High Principal, persisted, perpetuating the ’Hornet’s Nest’……”the fire in their bellies”.
Could Golda Meir have done as well, in her un- freckleddomain… Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?
IV
To rise from the ashes seems cliché like . 64 years of yearningambitions and scaled back aspirations along the way, in a grownup universe, the halls filled with arm to arm “aspirations” and energy, the elevator operator, reading his in print newspaper..
The walls outside the cubby time clock space. Dorothy and her inner circle, including Seymour Konigsberg aka Woody Allan.Student Matilda Cuomo, Gladys Bernstein, girl’s vice principal..Leonard Harrison, playing out his role as a principal.. before Alzheimer’s’ struck his neurons and state of mind.
Whence her recording of memorial marriages ,birthdays, awards, raising a family, dreaded deaths, reunions, growingpangs of a teen aging colossal . Adolescent yearnings to grasp aHuckleberry Finn , Tom Sawyer ego trip playing out, onMidwood’s merry go round campus, a bridge across Bedford Avenue to the digital 21st century library...
A hundred and eighty five years of a mantra.”. MurrayEisenstadt (Civics, Althea Gibson into a tennis clinic) Social Studies, tennis coach) at 95, his “Kappie” 90. A gala celebrationunder the four bridges..
Likewise a celebration of Dorothy and Sam Rabinoff’s 64 year old dynasty…May ‘the Hornet’s Nest’ live forever in her soul,Dorothy working her poems and crossword puzzles, while waiting at the Pearly Gates….
” Heaven is on the way to it”
May 27, 2014 The City that never sleeps.
