Monday Mezze: My Bakersville School, Manchester NH - 1956 / 2026 - Affirming All Are Created Equal ++ Gaza Children BIS Graduation

Welcome Family, Friends, Colleagues,

I remember being moved, a very long time ago, when I read in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story the line Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

I’ve never forgotten that line and lately, in my life, that long distance revealed itself a troubled path once again. Between Lebanon, Palestine, Iran - and the life I’ve lived being part of, and embraced, by those peoples and lands for over a half-century I get overwhelmed and shut down for a while.

NB I will always return.

Today I am being reaffirmed not only by my link to a moment that happened 70 years ago but by your unwavering support.

Do not ignore, by the way, the life-affirming video from Gaza I’ve attached.
It tells us everything.

On the day I wore a suit and tie for the first time I was 13-years-old.

I looked really sharp in an unseasonable-wool-suit my mother had spent weeks working on, resizing and cutting a man’s suit down to my teen-age body. I had never worn a suit before. My brother Albert tied a necktie for me around my neck - I think it had ducks or birds on it - and I was ready to go.

Looking totally sharp and put-together, I was ready to graduate from Bakersville Grammar School in Manchester NH.

It was June, 1956.

I had been at Bakersville for eight years. Manchester schools had no kindergarten in those days - no library, no school lunches - and I knew most of my classmates well.

It was a blue-collar school serving one of the most blue-collar neighborhoods in Manchester. We came from homes of immigrants and refugees, mill and shoe-shop workers, people laboring in construction and in a nearby leather rendering factory.

Across the street was a farm owned by a Lebanese truck-farmer. On days when the weather was really bad after school I would cross over to them and wait until someone had transportation to take me home.

Recently I came across an old autograph book from 1956.

Arthur, Danny, Dolores, Marie (on whom I had a huge crush), Adeline, Tim (who bullied and punched me for years while Don watched - or was it the other way around?), John, so many others written in variations of Palmer Method cursive; so many to remind me of a life we once shared.

Teachers, too: Miss Burbank, Miss Cox, Mr. Hickey - even Mr. John who taught shop.

Many of us, like John (who would never let us know exactly where he lived), Joyce, Ruthie, Alan, and Janice, walked together every day to and from school - each season, each year.

Some parents had cars. Many didn’t.

Then in 1956 we stopped walking together. We graduated.

Alongside the autograph album (priced @ 59 cents on its endpaper) I found a few photos and as I was examining all these treasures last month I realized I had come across them nearly 70 years to the day when I graduated.

On June 14, 1956 I graduated from Bakersville.

As a professional photographer for over half-a-century who has taken tens of thousands of photos around the world these few images have become among my most precious ... I think that they are the first photos I ever took and I am so thankful I still have them.

I have photographed kings, prime ministers, presidents and terrorists yet I find, other than family pics, that one of my most precious images is of my best friend Arthur - whose parents were Greek immigrants - who was the first person to ever give me a book for a present - Trixie Belden and The Red Trailer Mystery.

On June 14, 1956 I graduated from Bakersville.

Last month, seventy years later, in June of 2026, inspired by this ephemera - and struggling with other matters that were consuming far too much time - I googled Bakersville and rediscovered myself.

I recognized - in the place where so many young lives are today being nurtured - the place where so much started - including a passion for mystery novels.

Worlds where, as Anaïs Nin wrote, we can “.. travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls ... [where] ... You can shake the sand from your shoes, but it will never leave your soul.

Education is a hunger for worlds beyond Homer’s Odyssey and Ibn Battuta’s Rihla, for worlds beyond the boundaries of nativist power and prejudice.

On June 10, 2026 I returned to Bakersville for the first time in 70 years to reintroduce myself.

On the 16th, I got to photograph a ceremony honoring students who had completed the fourth grade and moving on to middle school (Bakersville is now PK through 4).

I was overwhelmed by what I saw and heard, overwhelmed by the love and opportunity being offered to these children and families.... and by extension to the rest of America and all of humanity.

Astonishingly it has within its 69% minority representation a linguistic diversity of over 60 different languages.

I love it.

When I visited in June I used my English, French, and Arabic to talk with some students and parents - with Muslims I shared religious greetings. Perhaps Miss Cox, who gave up trying to teach me grammar and how to diagram sentences in the sixth grade, would have approved.

Today Bakersville - as it embraces and educates approximately 330 students, many the children of immigrant and refugee families - hosts the Manchester district’s first Spanish and English dual-language immersion program.

Lift up our lamps beside the golden door, we are urged, so that all may live free.

This is a video of a graduation ceremony in Gaza for young children who attend the British International School. It was posted by the father of one of the graduates (!)

All our children deserve our love and support … all deserve to be free.