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P.S. 111. Our parents paid a $2 a month tuition fee and sent us out each morning dressed in the mandatory uniform of maroon pants for boys and skirts for girls, white shirts, and clip-on red ties.
    The school was rife with problems, lack of supplies being the least of them. Most of us were products of violent homes, and therefore prone to violence ourselves, making playground fights daily occurrences. The fights were often in response to a perceived slight or a violation of an unwritten code of conduct. All students were divided into cliques, most based on ethnic backgrounds, which only added tension to an already tight situation.
    In addition to the volatile ethnic groupings, teachers were faced with the barriers of language and the difficulties of overcrowded classrooms. After third grade, students were divided by sex, with the nuns teaching the girls and priests and brothers working with the boys. Each teacher faced an average class size of thirty-twostudents, more than half of whom spoke no English at home. To help support their families, many of the children worked jobs after school, reducing the hours they were free to concentrate on homework.
    Few of the teachers cared enough to work beyond the three o’clock bell. There were a handful, however, as there are in all schools, who did care and who took the time to tutor a student, to feed an interest, to set a goal beyond neighborhood boundaries.
    Brother Nick Kappas spent hours after school patiently helping me learn the basic English I had not been taught at home, where both my parents spoke Italian. Another, Father Jerry Martin, a black priest from the Deep South, opened my eyes to the hate and prejudice that existed beyond Hell’s Kitchen. Still another, Father Andrew Nealon, an elderly priest with a thick Boston accent, fueled my interest in American history. Then there was Father Robert Carillo, my cohort in the clacker escapade, and the only member of the clergy who had been born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen.
    Father Bobby, as the neighborhood kids called him, was in his mid-thirties, tall and muscular, with thick, dark, curly hair, an unlined face, and an athlete’s body. He played the organ at Sunday mass, was in charge of the altar boys, taught fifth grade, and played basketball for two hours every day in the school playground. Most priests liked to preach from a pulpit; Father Bobby liked to talk during the bump and shove of a game of one-on-one. He was the only priest in the neighborhood who challenged us to do better, and who was always ready to help when a problem arose.
    Father Bobby introduced me and my friends to such authors as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, and Stephen Crane, further instilling in us a passion for written words. He chose stories and novels by authors he felt we could identify with, and who could, for a brief time, help us escape the wars waged nightly inside our apartments.
    It was through him that we learned of such books as
Les Misérables, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
, and
A Bell for Adano
and how they could provide a night-light to keep away the family terror. It was easy for him to do so, because he had been raised in the same manner, under the same circumstances. He knew what it meant to find sleep under the cover of fear.
    Other clergy were not as caring. Many took their cue from parents, using violence to enforce their classroom rules. In the Catholic school system of the 1960s, corporal punishment was acceptable. The clergy were, for the most part, given parental approval to deal with us however they saw fit. The majority of priests and brothers kept thick leather straps in a top drawer of their desk. Nuns preferred rulers and paddles. A closed fist or a hard slap was not out of the question.
    No one used that show of force more than Brother Gregory Reynolds, a bald, middle-aged man with a jowly face and a round beer belly. He always held the leather belt in his hand, walking up and down the classroom aisles, swinging it