Individual Crossroads Reflections

It seems appropriate that my earliest Crossroads memory is intertwined with this no longer extant utopian experiment born of 1960s idealism, delineated by acres of homogeneous, flat-roofed, precision-placed two and three story houses and storefronts that I had often admired via car and bus windows. I associated the whole with the martyrdom of John F. Kennedy (my hero) and the ‘Great Society’ vision of LBJ. 

My mother and I had a scheduled appointment to learn about Crossroads and what it might offer this not St. Louisan but suburban St. Louisan kid.  Mom had children older than our hosts. She was in the midst of her second divorce and in failing health.  She had a time-sensitive agenda to secure a new path for my — her last’s — education, one independent of the public schools that had, in her estimation, only recently disappointed my closest siblings.  (I think aspects of her tightly owned desperation were familiar to Arthur and Carol, judging by the narratives of Crossroads friends shared in succeeding years.)

Mom and I were invited in to the Liebers’ house, part of a more sobering 1970s Brutalist addition to the earlier, stacked shoe box-like neighborhood.  I still remember the adjustment from an intense summer sunlight to an almost cave like shade and coolness…I claimed one of a pair of Sigurd Ressell-designed leather and wood Falcon chairs. We had nothing like these at home…MODERN…detached from all I was personally familiar with…(I remember often fighting over these same chairs years later when enjoying movies or gatherings with classmates at “Arthur and Carol’s”)  Of the actual conversation, Carol took charge…she was direct, with a lighted cigarette in hand and looking all the part of an Annie Hall stand-in…she was succinct in explaining the vision of education crafted with Arthur…surprisingly, Carol had questions for me, not my mother…they were about what I saw as my strengths…what subjects I enjoyed (I noted architecture and Presidential history)…the one exchange between my mother and Carol that still comes to mind has to do with when my mom dared to ask if they — Arthur and Carol — planned to have a family…Carol was not phased by such a personal question…Though I cannot remember her exact words, she looked directly at my mother and explained that a biological family would not be happening, as the students of Crossroads were their shared commitment.  That declaration has stayed with me for all these years…as I have grown and gotten older and traversed my own life’s roadmap, that statement of adoptive responsibility and caring for the children of others still resonates…earning my thanks and sincere appreciation daily…At the end of our visit, I was given a kind of questionnaire of existing knowledge (entrance exam?) to take home, fill out, and return upon completion.  I can’t remember any of the questions, per se, but they were in all directions.  They addressed the span of time since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, general dates for various defunct civilizations, and one or two questions about the St. Louis Cardinals. 

I was accepted.

I remember the boldly colored rooms…they were unexpected…spontaneous…from the back door — or parking lot entry — there was an electric blue hallway that occasionally housed sports equipment and more often newspapers and aluminum cans for recycling…a door at right led into what must have been the house’s original kitchen…there, surviving cabinetry intended for plates and platters served as cubby holes that required seasonal purges of mimeographed papers (thousands!), lost paperbacks, forgotten foil- or plastic-wrapped sandwiches, and orphaned tangerines, apples and very black bananas…I remember a communal refrigerator — the cleaning of which took extra special levels of endurance…there was also a soda machine — something that if I recall correctly, had a kind of sacred status after restocking…from the “kitchen” you could move through a swinging door into the original “dining room”, a camel-colored classroom with two collapsible tables running down the center and a myriad of orange, blue, and black plastic stackable chairs placed anywhere and everywhere in the remaining open spaces (one of the blue chairs was given to departing teacher Candie Knight, signed by everyone)…there was a three-window bay on the room’s eastern wall that looked out over a neighboring building and what became a burial pit for Carol’s archaeology courses, where students crafted artifacts for NEW ancient cultures that others would unearth and interpret…lighting came not from some great chandelier but from dropped industrial florescent tube fixtures…the floor was covered with some type of asbestos or asphalt black tile, forgiving of just about every activity. From this room, one could move into the original parlor through a pair of still-active pocket or sliding doors, which sufficed as theatrical curtains for plays and impromptu performances.

Painted the same color as the adjacent one-time dining room, the former parlor had light brown, wall-to-wall carpeting (well-stained) on two-thirds of its floor and a series of cushions and moveable platforms that could be moved around to form smaller, more intimate spaces for conversation.  With the sliding doors open, the two rooms partnered as a kind of auditorium…a venue for all-school meetings and even after-hours mock legislatures where parents and kids came together to resolve the political and social ills of the late 1970s.  One could find himself/herself jumping in surprise as a single or many heads craned around those great doors to identify a speaker or better hear an opposing voice.  At the north end of the room there were two large windows facing Lindell that proved deep enough for sitting with a particularly good book.  I can still see Heather Sultz and Rachel Rosen turning pages of “The Bell Jar” or “Ordinary People” or perhaps a script for Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” in these makeshift niches, morphing into adolescent classical sculptures via torn denim, stretched t-shirts, and a strong midday sun.

The upstairs (second floor) rooms were painted similar bright colors to the rooms downstairs — more of that vibrant blue, and a very intense orange. The “Women’s Room” was to the left as one reached the second floor, just beyond the stairs continuing to the upper story. I don’t recall rooms being exclusively assigned particular subjects, though the one across from the stairs almost always seemed to be reserved for typing classes taught by Karen Techner, who also taught film appreciation and film (video) making. This room was lined with metal shelving of varying forms, proving the repository of any and all materials and tools for crafts and art projects. Under Carol Lieber’s guidance, I remember making linoleum prints for the first time in this room. One was included as part of a calendar project whereby each student produced an image for an assigned month. We assembled the full calendars and sold them, covering our production costs…had we been more diligent, we would have made actual income via finishing the full production and aggressively hawking the finished calendars, as Carol suggested a number of times…a life lesson that still sticks in my mind today…I remember evening programming whereby general life situations were discussed among various groups of students and parents…there was a real sense of community in these evenings, where parents and kids engaged with one another…sharing…laughing…The one final thought that comes to mind regarding the second floor has to do with the near weekly complaints from apartment dwellers across Lindell Boulevard regarding the varied ways in which staff and students tied back the curtain panels of the second floor front rooms…I remember the curtains were made of a VERY 1970s “patchwork” fabric representing stylized portraits of men and women…when tied back in certain ways, the people looked as if they were being strangled (the late-Karen Techner might well have identified a parallel to the cryptic tied lighting cord in “Stalag 17”)

…from the outside, the knotted panels looked like a prison escape was in play…a class could easily be interrupted to allow the most recent recipient of complaints to pop in to correct the “unsightly” window display…

Of course there were other spaces, such as a basement darkroom and an upstairs back classroom with science teacher Eddie’s fragrant rats (or were they mice?)…there was a fire escape that was off-limits, but which was occasionally a true escape for one or more students seeking breathers between classes or just after school.  And, there were vehicles of varying stages of malfunction…a much-dented tan colored van that packed students in for field trips and soccer games…a late-1960s, highly distressed Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser that, if nothing else, reinforced the school’s familial uniqueness…And then there were faculty members’ cars…such as Eddie’s no-sheen red BMW, history teacher Vee Lind’s stylish 1967 Pontiac Firebird convertible, Kem Sawyer’s most-safe Volvo sedan, and of course, the long-awaited new Volkswagen Rabbit of math teacher Jean Ducker that was supposed to be green but turned out to be brown…to ride as the sidekick in one of these personal vehicles — with one of these great people as your confidante for the moment — was an amazingly liberating experience…a bridge to adulthood, though ever so brief…