Individual Crossroads Reflections

I remember our carpool with James Abbott, Charley Pinkney, Catherine Park- University City folks. My mother was recently divorced and driving wearing a bathrobe and curlers. Somebody’s father had a lit cigarette in his mouth the whole ride, never taking a drag, just ashing on his tie for the 30-minute ride with the windows rolled up. Different times. The open layout of the school, the colored bins, the big community room with a stage, later transformed with the students’ mural of a creatures in a tropical jungle- seemed wildly democratic. At my previous school, when an adult entered the room, we stood up from our desks and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Wilson.” At Crossroads we called our teachers by their first names. In fact, most Crossroads teachers were about 12 or 15 years older than us- that magic difference between a parent and an influential aunt or uncle. I have thought of Crossroads’ teachers as the godparents I needed, at exactly the time that I needed them.

One of biggest differences between Crossroads and any other school, for me was the ability to make choices. Which history class do you want to take? Where do you want to go for your Wednesday afternoon field trip? We could wander off campus to buy a sandwich at the roach coach. I felt respected, trusted and valued. I wasn’t a great student – but Crossroads students’ academic performance was not the only metric. It was clear that creativity, teamwork, sense of humor, being a good friend were important too.

Carol Lieber’s American History class combined literature, film, music, cooking. I remember presenting my project in an antebellum hoop dress and serving chess pie, using a southern accent. Carol’s archeology class was ground-breaking, not just as a curriculum, but by exposing students to dynamic ways of learning, we discovered where we shine. Before this class, I didn’t know that I was an experiential learner. She broke the class into two groups of about 5. Each team imagined a geographic location, and created a culture that grew out of that place, that ecosystem, with the resources of that landscape. Then we made artifacts, broke them and buried them. The class took a field trip to Cahokia Mounds to see an archeological site and learn techniques used at a real dig. Later each team uncovered each other’s site, interpreted the finds and displayed them with museum-like labels. We learned about archeology, ancient cultures and also teamwork, collaborative thinking, hands-on approaches to projects, applications in the real world, respect for museums.

Karen Techner’s Media Literacy course was an eye-opener, basically a critical thinking class, building awareness in how mass media manipulates through advertising and politics. In Karen’s Touch-Typing class, we each brought our own typewriter. There were electric and manual machines, maybe a dozen students filling the Lindell building’s dining room, everyone cursing a blue streak. She tolerated all that chaotic
noise, dinging, humming, language and look at us now. All you need is two thumbs. My friend, Christie, and I were in a math class that was just the two of us. We met in the front vestibule, dragging three chairs together and worked our way through an Algebra textbook at our own pace. I remember Kem’s ambitious literature and drama classes. Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet and The Miracle Worker with 6th, 7th and 8th graders! Her unit on Faulkner’s Light in August was a stretch for me. Faulkner’s use of repetition, “I’ve come a fer piece…” drove me up the wall. I convinced some of my girl gang members to tear up the book in class and light it on fire. Poor Kem, very pregnant and emotional, didn’t see it as a protest, but took it personally. We ended up sitting on the front lawn, writing an apology and coming up with a list of alternative reading material. I believe we read Faulkner’s short story, As I Lay Dying, a masterpiece and great experiment in narration, with multiple points of view.

Our class trip in 1977-78 was to Washington DC, via Amtrak. I’m sure we visited the Capitol, but those are not the bright memories of that trip for me. There was a film-worthy pillow fight with actual feathers and stuffing in the train aisle, the morning of our
arrival. I remember sleeping on the floor of a church, staying at the famous Watergate Hotel, visiting Georgetown where we saw street musicians and a guy playing the spoons. Arthur’s advice in my yearbook was to give up “creepy rock groups and take an
occasional interest in politics.” Good advice. Now I’m a news junkie, working with the League of Women Voters and Democrats Abroad. Crossroads hired Sarah Linquist and Bob Fishbone, mural artists to work with students creating public art works. At the Laclede Town location, they led a group brainstorm
session to determine the subject matter for a mural in the community room. Somehow, we arrived at a tropical jungle filled with birds and a dragon. Sarah and Bob showed us a slide show of the murals they had made around St. Louis and other cities — large scale
paintings with custom imagery that reflected the location’s history, meaning and ambitions. They showed us how to project small scale drawings to our wall, the length of a basketball court, a space the school shared with the subsidized housing community
around us. Our second project with Sarah and Bob was a mosaic of the Girl with the Pearl Earring. Sarah cut-up a reproduction of the famous painting into at least a dozen 1”x1” pieces. Students enlarged their tiny squares to an 8”x 8” version using any media.
The final montage was exhibited in the parlor of the school. The last project I did with them was a public sculpture. We started with finding a studio which would accommodate a wood shop and areas to paint. Someone gave us a garage in the Tower Grove neighborhood. Then we worked with the artists to get plywood, 2x4s, paint and cement donations. Who could resist middle schoolers with passion in their eyes and a desire to “improve” the cityscape? We created life sized cows, cut from exterior plywood, grazing on the median strip along highway 40 near the downtown entrance from Eads Bridge. Sarah and Bob were my heroes. I wanted to do this kind of work, making art, engaged with the community.

I was a shy kid and relieved to be in a small community where everyone knew everyone, where the students groups were not exclusive. The school’s policy was to admit 1/3 white students, 1/3 African American students and 1/3 other demographics. We all felt hand-picked for this quirky population. For some students, it was their first integrated classroom as many of St. Louis’ neighborhoods and by extension their public schools were still segregated in the 1970’s. Students I remember: Charley Pinkney, a talented musician in a funkadelic band with his brothers; Al Nerviani, a born comedian who
could somehow throw himself down the stairs in a Charlie Chaplinesque way on a daily basis and still crack everyone up; Paris Jackson, singing pop songs in his pink jump suit, the first out, gay person I had ever met; Marc Bellucci, my fake big brother, the only boy my mother trusted; my closest friends, Suzy, Christy, Kathy, Jill and I were dubbed the Foxy Five — kind of like Charlies Angels but without the guns and make up. 

Our girl gang would usually hang together for Wednesday field trips with Carol to the downtown Public Library, live theater with Kem, baseball games with Arthur, movies with Karen. Libby, our art teacher spent an afternoon making giant soap bubbles with us. She took us to the Washington University Medical School to see the cadavers. We went on a hot air balloon ride, spelunking and canoeing. We learned how to spin wool, play pinochle, cook French, Italian and Spanish recipes using only an electric frying pan. One
of the most exciting Wednesday field trips was a trip through the tunnels under Union Station, stretching to the riverfront warehouses. Even though I was only at Crossroads for two years, the experience shook me from the boredom of traditional learning, waking up my curiosity about the people, ideas and city around me.