A Leg Up, Two Legs Down
June 12, 2022
I was born with leg problems. Especially knee problems. When I was about five years old, my parents took me to a doctor who had a gym. I had been waking up with pains in my knees. He diagnosed me with Osgood-Schlatter Disease, also known as Osteochondrosis, a repetitive use injury that manifests as a painful bulge under the kneecap. It affects growing children who play sports in which they must constantly jump and run and who are at higher risk. The disease usually goes away without the need for treatment once a child’s bones stop growing. But back in the early 1940s, I doubt that doctors knew that. He made me do exercises like picking up marbles with my toes. I don’t remember much else about my regimen.
During my early years in Fellowship Farms School, a K-5 two-room schoolhouse where the two teachers had small K-2 and 3-5 classes. I only spent a few months in kindergarten. My classmates were learning the alphabet, learning to print, coloring, and being accompanied to the boys’ room by the spinster teacher, Miss Grace Fleming. It was determined that I lacked the social maturity to attend and was dismissed until the following year. However, I was referred to a Rutgers University child psychologist, Dr. Anna Starr, who tested me. Stanford Benet found I had an IQ of 165. Dr. Starr also learned that I already knew the alphabet in English and Yiddish, was learning French with my sister who was in 9th grade, could add and subtract, and basically was bored in class. I was a misfit.
The following year I was placed in 2nd grade. I wore glasses and was teased with “four eyes” as a nickname. I excelled in every subject except physical education, I lacked the coordination that my now older-than-me classmates possessed and penmanship. I had poor hand-eye coordination that never improved as long as that subject was taught. Years later, I determined that when Miss Fleming kept putting my fat pencil in my right hand, she was messing up my natural left-handedness.
It was during my transition to the 3rd, 4th, and 5th-grade classroom that the importance of my legs began. I was the youngest and smallest in my classroom. The new teacher, Mrs. Blanche P. Bieler, arch anti-Semite and racist, changed my whole attitude toward school. She would teach the 3rd graders a lesson and we’d work on our workbooks. Meanwhile, she’d go on with the other two grades before coming back to us for our next subject. When she’d ask the older kids a question and nobody’s hand would go up, I’d raise mine. If she called on me, I’d answer it with perhaps more information than she expected. This angered the bigger boys. They started calling me names and chased me home after school. I would run as fast as I could until I got to my house.
But it was not only the boys. Joan May Mehl was a classmate who lived almost across the street from our house. She’d invite me to walk with her along the creek that passed behind her house. She’d be friendly until she’d decide to push me into the creek giving my shoes a “soaker”. I’d catch heck from my mother. Joan would say she was sorry, and I’d believe her. She was two years older than me. Those years were a greater gap between boys and girls than twenty-four social months. She could run faster than me. She also was always picked to paint the classroom windows for the holidays. I’m sure Mrs. Bieler considered her artistically talented Christian girl more appropriate for the task than one of her Jew boys.
I was glad to graduate from Fellowship Farms School and ride the school bus to New Market School for a new start in 6th grade. Wrong! She had passed along the word that I was a troublemaker. I had been suspended for two weeks once in 4th grade and three or four times in the 5th grade. Her anti-Semitism came to the fore when she insisted on speaking to my non-Jewish father and basically ignored my Yiddishe mama.
Now I had to face a new bunch of anti-Semitic boys once I didn’t show up on the Jewish holidays. I’m sure when the teacher, Miss Shepherd called the role and I was absent, she’d mention why. When I returned after the holiday, I’d be called the vilest names and threatened with beatings. They even tried to force a friend from Stelton, Bill Schaefer of German descent, to beat me up. He refused and suffered his own insults. He soon transferred to a Catholic school. I still had to be wary for my three years in New Market. I hated school more than ever. But I loved running.
As kids, we played baseball or softball as soon as the snow melted and the ground dried up sufficiently. In the fall, the football fans took over the playground and I played that barbaric game to keep active. If I had been playing with the Bagen twins who lived at the other end of School Street, I’d run the mile home on time for supper. As we got older, we’d bike farther than the confines of Stelton. I was not conscious of how my legs were getting stronger. I think only the Hankerson boys, Alfred and Donald, could run faster than me. I thought I was cool until one night at a Boy Scout meeting, I was challenged to a race by my father, then in his late 40s. He whipped me good.
When I got to New Brunswick High School, I tried out for the Cross-Country team. Marty Greenberg and I would bike to the Johnson Park horse racetrack and practice. But at team practices, I just didn’t have the stamina to keep up with the guys who already had made the team and who were obviously in better shape and had a stronger desire than I did. But Stelton had some fine runners who represented our community well. Walter Smith, Rudy Bush, and Hans Pokorny.
My lifestyle changed radically at twenty-one when suddenly I took a wife. I became a full-time working man and that became a rotating shift schedule. Playing softball in a city industrial league was my only physical outlet. When I needed to work several jobs at once to buy a house for a growing family, we moved to Milltown. By then, my waistline and weight had grown to disgusting proportions. I found jogging up Riva Avenue in increasing increments, shoveling snow, and gardening satisfying solutions. Running was my release and my salvation.
I moved to California at the age of 42. I found running was a common practice for health-oriented folks. There were 5 and 10-kilometer runs every weekend somewhere nearby. I was soon hooked. In time, I felt bold enough to run longer distances including two marathon runs (26.2 miles). I kept running and playing softball into my 50s.
At 72, I moved to El Salvador. By then it was obvious that my sore knees were keeping me from comfortably climbing mountain paths to visit friends. I sometimes needed a hand to make it over a steep rocky trail. But I persevered. I jogged at least five miles every morning until May of 2012 when I couldn’t do it anymore. That’s when I started riding my bicycle.
By 2013, I was riding over 300 miles a month. Except for the times I had surgeries and the Covid-19 pandemic, I biked and worked out in the local gym. By the time of the pandemic, my mileage had dropped considerably. My knees were hurting too much to walk on our pot-holed streets and multi-level sidewalks. Sometimes riding short distances kept my knees loose and less painful. Other times, I just couldn’t handle the pain. Nothing helped. My doctor said I now had osteoarthritis. Now, I rarely ride my bike or walk anywhere I don’t have to. The osteoarthritis is now felt in all my joints to varying degrees and at different times. There is no cure. At any moment, a finger might cramp up and freeze in a grotesque position. I have to use my other hand to get it back to normal. I’ve gotten used to not being able to trust my knees when stepping off a curb to cross the street. Likewise, I look for a pole or a hand to pull myself up onto a curb or mount the stairs on a bus. I use ramps where available rather than stairs. I do my best to keep my weight down because the more I weigh the more my knees pay. It’s embarrassing to go shopping with Margarita and she has to carry a couple of heavy shopping bags while I carry a loaf of bread to the bus stop. If people thought I was her father before, they must be positive when they see us. Maybe machismo is so taken for granted here that nobody notices.
Does anybody want to buy a thirteen-year-old bike with good tires, an odometer/speedometer, and fenders?
Kountry King's Kastle 