Author’s Journey
Lila’s story is my story…
and yours
Why would a semi-retired, 83-year-old, white marketing executive write and produce a book about a brown girl’s adventures on the way to a new school?
It came from some very extraordinary influences in my life as a young child and as an adult.
And I love to tell stories.
As a 10-year-old, I witnessed my gentle, loving grandmother’s eyes freeze with fear when newsreels showed pictures of Adolf Hitler on television.
Hundreds of years of antisemitism were taking a toll on a quest for a life void of prejudice; so, she emigrated to the new world of America.
Brian, an African American man whom I met and befriended while I was a young kid working in my father’s deli, opened my eyes to the vice that prejudice applies to innocent hearts and minds.
He was a conductor for the NYC subway system and owned several two-family brownstone residential buildings in the neighborhood, which was now mostly Spanish and African American.
Brian was an elegant, handsome man with a rich-dark chestnut brown complexion and thick mustache, always neatly dressed and groomed. He spoke with clarity and dignity. In the 50’s he was not accepted in the white world, and because of his success he was considered “uppity” by his black neighbors. He treated me like an adult and through our conversations, although he never complained, I felt his pain.
The author, Michael Rosen, at bottom right
My Brother and I shared a bed, while my parents slept in the living room in the one-bedroom apartment we rented in a tenement, in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn, NY.
At that time, my parents’ best friends moved to Lake Hiawatha, a rural area in NJ and became affluent in the real estate business. They loaned my father $1,000, convincing him to purchase a one-bedroom log cabin house on a dead-end street facing the woods, with a creek running through it. Mortgage and upkeep were paid for by renting it out part of the year.
My father loved it there so much he purchased a larger two-bedroom cabin near the lake, and we moved there all year round. During the summer and holidays, we were the gathering place for our Brooklyn family.
Now this short, fat kid with a thick Brooklyn accent must start his freshmen year in Parsippany high school. It was built on a farm. The school was 98% Christian with a lot of hard-working, hay-bailing kids.
Now I needed to fit into a new world.
Let’s jump to fatherhood. As a young child, our daughter Lisa was happy and well-adjusted until she started public school. Then Lisa became very moody, irritable, and had some difficulty with friendships.
She hid her feelings of inadequacy, not belonging, and not fitting in. We had her tested and found out she had a learning disability; she was dyslexic. We met with the teacher and principal, told them about the testing, and her above-average IQ. Their response: she was just a slow child; this was infuriating.
Turns out the school started receiving state funding to help kids with special needs, and they were diverting these monies to other areas and not using it to hire specially trained teachers. We sued the school district, which paid Lisa’s tuition for Leeway, a private school specializing in these programs.
Good news and bad news. Some of the kids were so severely Dyslexic; Lisa told us she thought the school was for retarded kids (back then, developmentally challenged was not in a young child’s vocabulary). Fortunately, the principal took a special interest in Lisa and helped her cope
Soon afterwards, many other parents followed in our footsteps, prompting our district’s Board of Education to order the closure of Leeway and revoke its accreditation. Because the school was closing mid-semester, the principal spoke to a friend who ran a private school for overachieving kids, where Lisa was tutored and graduated. By this time, our high school system had a program in place to help these kids. They installed new learning tools, called Apple Computers, and allowed them to take oral exams, which Lisa usually aced.
After being told she was not college material, she enrolled in community college. She graduated. Again, she was advised that getting into a four-year BA program and / or graduating were not in the cards for her. And again, she did it. She received a BA in Recreational Therapy from Cortland College, the first school in the country to offer this program.
After graduating, Lisa brought her experience to the disabled population at a state facility (AHRC) for developmentally challenged kids and adults serving as their Recreation Director. After moving to Indiana with her family, she became the assistant manager of a Dude Ranch that specialized in working with developmentally challenged kids. Next, she became an assistant High School teacher working with the same population. Lisa is my hero. She is the Lela in “I Just Want to Be Me”.
Parsippany high school
