Picture a skinny, badly frightened boy, aged six, being pushed by his mother toward several shrouded figures beckoning him from a dingy doorway. In one of the boy’s hands, a small, brown paper bag holding a single sandwich, a salt-and-pepper-seasoned scrambled egg between two slices of Wonder Bread. The lad clings with his free hand to his mother’s dress crying hysterically. I was that little boy on a crisp autumn morning in 1938, shrinking from my first day of schooling. The shrouded figures were black-habited Catholic nuns. Behind the doorway other children were wondering what might befall them within the walls of the small, squat wooden firetrap to which they’d found themselves delivered.
An excerpt from Acanemia: A Memoir of Life in the Halls of Higher Learning,by Lawrence E Hussman
Available as a paperback or a Kindle edition from Amazon.com
