I have the memory, but the pipe involved disappeared many years ago. My first day at (I hesitate to mention the name) Horace Mann School, a high school, in the 1950s, is the place. We had to wear suits and ties to school and call the teachers sir. The principal had to be called "headmaster", with a Boston "A" in master. There were no female students or teachers. Sounds bizarre already, right? I had a Stanwell in the breast pocket of my suit ready for lunchtime. The stem was peeking out a fraction of an inch. Everything went well until Spanish class, where a busy body of a teacher spotted the pipe. He walked over to me, removed it from my pocket and said "you are not allowed to smoke in school." I answered "I do not intend to smoke in school, but what I do off campus is my business." Well, you would have thought that this disheveled individual with a sloppy low class Spanish accent were the moral authority of the universe. Even my parents didn't try to take the high ground with me. He walked back to his desk with the Stanwell. "I want my pipe back, sir." No answer. The pipe was returned after class. I had earned my self the position of class dunce from this little event. It didn't matter that I did well with the language, and had a very good accent in pronouncing it, I never got better than a C in that class. In recent years Horace Mann has come under justifiable attack as a place where numerous schoolmasters had sex with the boys. True, nobody attempted it with me, but to think that this pseudo scholarly creep, a MR. Garcia, played the moral superior with me, in the midst of Sodom & Gomorrah is both annoying and amusing. I think that the next time someone asks where I went to school, I will say "Sodom & Gomorrah." They will probably ask "where is that, New Jersey?" "No, Riverdale."
