In a public school, heroin is sold on the premises. (It also was sold on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital where juvenile drug addicts are detained to cure them of their drug addiction.) In two other schools, police officers circulate on the grounds and in the corridors to prevent violence. A mathematics teacher in still another school who had to give an examination needed a policeman present in the classroom to guard her. In several schools, pupils threatened younger ones with beating and maiming them, collecting money from them either once or regularly and taking their watches and fountain pens. Often the young victims do not dare to tell the names of their tormentors. In one such school when two victims were asked by the teacher they refused to answer, saying, "We don't want our eyes cut out!" In this particular school, one boy was beaten with a broken bottle from behind and cut so severely that seven stitches had to be taken around his eyes.
In still another school, a fourteen-year-old girl pupil was actually raped during the lunch recess in one of the corridors on the sixth floor. In a girl's school, a woman teacher was attacked and beaten by six girls aged twelve to fourteen. Police and radio cars had to speed to another school where two thirteen-year-old pupils attacked a teacher, one with a long stick and another with a picture taken down from the wall.
A regular race riot occurred in a metropolitan school. One teacher was punched in the eye, a police officer was struck and scratched. A police detail had to be sent to keep order in the building and the neighborhood. There are schools where one out of every five boys has been in Children's Court. To several high schools, detectives have been sent disguised as porters or pupils to check drug addiction and/or violence. Wire-tapping equipment has been installed by police in school buildings.
In a letter to TIME Magazine (1953), James A. Michener, the well-known author, draws attention to a school where women teachers always try to stay near the door. Otherwise, as one of them put it, "the big boys might trap her in a corner and beat hell out of her." In a junior high school known to me, women teachers do not dare to go on the staircase alone for fear of being attacked or robbed by pupils. A policeman is permanently assigned on duty in this school. When questioned about his easy assignment, he answered, "Sometimes it gets real rough!"
In one school a pupil always functions as a monitor and is stationed next to a toilet. A teacher questioned about this routine answered that she did not know whether the monitor is supposed to suppress violence, sex acts, vandalism or drug addiction. The type of vandalism that occurs is exemplified by the high school where children ripped out a toilet and threw it out of the window.
A thirteen-year-old boy stabbed an attractive young woman teacher eight times in the back and again in the face when she had fallen to the floor. Authorities were bewildered by the behavior of this boy, who came from a good home background.
I could continue this list almost indefinitely. There is nothing in these "juvenile delinquencies" that is not described or told about in comic books. These are comic-book plots. In comic books, usually these crimes remain unpunished until the criminal has committed many more of them. Children are not so lucky. They face severe punishments whenever they are caught. Educated on comic books, they go on to a long postgraduate course in jails (with the same reading-matter). To every one of these acts correspond dozens of lesser ones, hundreds of minor ones and thousands of fantasies.
Fred’s Book Club
When suggesting to Claude Shannon a name for his new uncertainty function, von Neumann said:
You should call it entropy, for two reasons.
In the first place, your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name.
In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.
Fred’s Video Collection
Hank Ballard joined The Royals in 1953, teaming up with Henry Booth, Charles Sutton, Sonny Woods and Alonzo Tucker. They released "Get It" in 1953, an R&B song with possibly sexually oriented lyrics, which some radio stations refused to play (although it still made it to number 6 on the Billboard R&B chart).
The group then changed its name to The Midnighters to avoid confusion with The "5" Royales.
In 1954, Ballard wrote a song called "Work with Me, Annie" that was drawn from "Get It". It became the group's first major R&B hit, spending seven weeks at number one on the R&B charts and also selling well in mainstream markets, along with the answer songs "Annie Had a Baby" and "Annie's Aunt Fannie". All were banned by the FCC from radio air play.
Their third major hit was "Sexy Ways", a song that cemented the band's reputation as one of the most risqué (and under-rated) groups of the time.