Even Clark came in for some snickering: he had no family of his own, and he had a noticeably closer-than-average relationship to the Bear, another confirmed bachelor. I was warned to avoid Stan Kops, the burly, bearded history teacher known widely as “the Bear,” who had some unusual pedagogical methods. I heard that Mark Wright, an assistant football coach, had recently left the school under mysterious circumstances. I heard about some teachers who supposedly had a habit of groping female students and others who had their eyes on the boys. I gathered with my new teachers and classmates in the auditorium and proudly sang Horace Mann’s alma mater: “Great is the truth and it prevails mighty the youth the morrow hails./Lives come and go stars cease to glow but great is the truth and it prevails.” I was an outsider, but I was one of Inky’s boys and, as I quickly learned, that counted for a lot. All around me, the natives swarmed past - to the classrooms, to the science labs, to the brilliant futures they had been born to assume. So in September 1979, I stood in the glassed-in breezeway through which students entered campus, wearing the pink Lacoste shirt my brother had somewhat optimistically insisted would help me fit in. My parents saw the bigger picture: the opportunities that a Horace Mann education could bring, the ways it could change a kid’s life. Touched, as was everyone who met him, by his tremendous personal charisma, I took it as a thrilling compliment. He started calling me “the Mouse,” as my friends at 141 did, and he suggested I might find a home at Horace Mann. And he used his passion for baseball, the sport he coached, as a Trojan horse to bring promising students from rough schools to a campus otherwise reserved for the city’s most privileged children.Ĭlark could work a room like a politician, zeroing in on whomever he was speaking to, making him feel like he was the most interesting person in the world. He brought that same crusading spirit to Horace Mann, where he welcomed girls to what had long been a proudly all-boys school. He drove a bright orange Cadillac convertible, its rear bumper covered with Yankees stickers. In his loud pink cardigans and madras pants, he always looked as if he came straight off the Kennedy compound or the bow of a yacht. He was a big guy with a powerful handshake, bright blue eyes and a booming voice. Inky Clark, a tireless scout of baseball talent, started showing up at my games, and he was not someone you could easily miss. Inslee Clark Jr., then headmaster of Horace Mann, a private school so elite that most students at 141 had never even heard of it.
That’s what brought me to the attention of R. By 14, I had a sweet swing, with the arm, hands and game smarts to match.
My future would have tracked swiftly in the same direction but for one factor: baseball. At 141, my friends’ résumés read like a crime blotter: Jimmy stole a pizza truck and dropped out after ninth grade Eggy was done with 141 after he smashed the principal’s glasses with a right hook Ish liked to pelt the Mister Softee truck with rocks Bend-Over Bob OD’d and lived Frankie was not so lucky. It was this field that drew me to Horace Mann 33 years ago, pulling me out of Junior High School 141 in the Bronx, with its gray-green walls and metal-caged windows. From the stone wall that runs along Tibbett Avenue, you can see practically the whole school: Pforzheimer Hall, Mullady Hall, the auditorium, the gymnasium and, right in the center, the manicured green expanse of the baseball field, home of the Lions, pride of the school. Head up the steep hill, turn left, then walk a bit farther, past the headmaster’s house. Leaving the cluttered din of Broadway, you enter the leafy splendor of Fieldston, an enclave of mansions and flowering trees that feels more like a wealthy Westchester suburb than the Bronx. The walk from the station is short, but it traverses worlds. 1 train’s last stop at 242nd Street, you can just about see the lush 18-acre campus of the Horace Mann School.