A Longer Telling, My Life

     A book called On Cherry Street sits next to me. The cover is plain by today’s standards or really any standards. Two smiling kids in a wagon, a happy dog in between the two. The boy drives the wagon and the girl sits in the back. The name Cherry Street appears as the title printed on the book and on the street sign attached to the lamppost next to the wagon. On the inside cover of On Cherry Street I wrote “Bobby,” with none of the letters sitting on the line I must have drawn; the two center b’s bounce high in the air. And underneath the name, my mother wrote “This Book Belongs To Bobby Mayer.”

     I loved this book. It was our second grade text. I loved it so much I asked my mother to buy me a copy and she did, probably for Hanukkah. In truth, I thought that it was illegal to own the book you were assigned in school, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be able to read those stories over and over. That is a life theme, the first thing I wanted to share. I love books. My house is filled with books and I read constantly. Reading makes my life richer.

Looking back at that cover, staring at those White kids, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ask a question like where are the Black kids? Where do they live? (There’s none on the inside either; black kids don’t live on Cherry Street.) I also guess that I didn’t ask, why isn’t the little girl the one who is in front steering the wagon? I might ask those questions today. In fact I just did. How do you think you would answer those questions?

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Let’s take a step back.

     I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cincinnati is a city along the Ohio River. In fourth or fifth grade all the kids in the Cincinnati public school system studied Cincinnati history. The paperback book we read about the city’s history included a long ago winter picture of the river. The river had frozen. I remember the caption informing us that when the river froze, people walked across the ice to the other side, to Kentucky. I thought that was cool.

The book did not mention that in 1829 White mobs attacked members of the Black community and drove about one thousand of them out of town, many going to Canada. At least when I read about these horrible events two years ago, I had no recall of encountering them before. In fact I don’t remember reading any African American history in school, except for the George Washington Carver and slavery parts. So I’m feeling pretty certain that the book did not mention the ugly assault. If you were a student I was tutoring, I would ask: why do you think the authors left that event out of their Cincinnati history?

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     I grew up in a suburb called Roselawn, a neighborhood with a high concentration of Jewish families. My family was a part of that concentration. The Jewish part of Roselawn left a big imprint on how I thought. I spent a lot of time at the nearby Jewish Community Center (JCC) where I played basketball and swam. I appeared in plays in the JCC auditorium and even helped to write some we performed.

     One other Roselawn memory: Parents of some of my friends had numbered tattoos on their arms because they had been in concentration camps.

     Roselawn was a post-World War II suburb. That means it expanded. The fields behind the elementary school I attended grew houses. Lots of houses. The people who lived through the war were the same people who had made it through the depression, so they wanted a nice normal life and that meant a nice home.

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     And then many years after I had left fifth grade, I became a teacher. As an adult, I moved to the center of Pennsylvania and lived in Lewisburg, again a town by a river, the west branch of the Susquehanna. In Lewisburg, I taught social studies, mainly history and civics. I especially loved teaching history, even when my students would say things to me like, “You’re a nice person Mr. Mayer. You can’t help it if you teach a boring subject.” That hurt, but I still loved my students. I tried harder.

      Although Lewisburg was a town where I could live out my passion for teaching, it served a more significant location in my life-it was where I met my wife Jan and my stepdaughter Katherine.

     Jan owned a restaurant called the Valiant Trencherman. The restaurant name comes from Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. The character Beatrice insults her suitor by saying, “He is a very valiant trencherman. He hath an excellent stomach." People must have been concerned about their “excellent stomachs.” The place went out of business, even though it was a great restaurant.

      Jan and I got married in our backyard. At the time, we lived in a farmhouse in Mifflinburg, just down the road from Lewisburg. It was a big backyard with a wheat field behind it. The rolled up wheat in our backyard looked like cereal, like shredded wheat.

     Right before we left our farmhouse, a baby named Seth bounced into our lives. We took him with us. 

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     We fled Lewisburg and migrated further to the east in Pennsylvania, moving dangerously close to New Jersey (just joking), landing in Bethlehem, an incredibly lovely town. We have lived there for 32 years. Bethlehem is also a town by a river, the Lehigh River. So let’s declare rivers as another theme in my life.

     And not long after the move, Seth, Jan, and I were joined by a new baby, Noah. He has since grown up. (So what happened to Katherine? She moved to Florida to live with her father and then moved to Pittsburgh where she had three wonderful kids.)

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     Moving quickly along, I taught at Moravian College for 29 years. My main job was to help people think about and start to become teachers, though I did other things, like teach a course on the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the people I taught at Moravian are also my Facebook friends. Many of them are teachers. I love that. Teaching! One more theme.

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     Somewhere along the way I wanted to figure out a better way to teach people about history. That desire pushed me to consider becoming a writer. As a college professor, I had actually published a few articles on teaching history in academic journals, but I knew the people I cared most about, kids, would not read those articles. So I started a lonely career of writing for young people. My goal: make readers NOT say that I wrote about a boring subject.

     First I wrote a few articles for Cobblestone Magazine. That was a lot of fun.

     I started to get real interested in the civil rights movement and so I edited one book called The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and wrote another about the marches in Birmingham called, When the Children Marched: The Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.

     That second book in particular was my response to the kids who told me history was a boring subject. In reflecting on why my students felt that way, I realized something. History teachers talk mainly about adults and say little about children. I started to wonder: weren’t there any children around when all this history, these wars and depressions, were taking place? I knew they had to be somewhere, so I started to look for historical events where kids were the primary actors. I knew about and dug deeper into the Birmingham marches. Kids were critical to that event. What I have since discovered is that children played an essential role in the entire civil rights movement that took place in the sixties.

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     Finally, I retired from Moravian College, though I still teach a little at the College and as a tutor at a local middle school, but now I can write and research much of the day.  

As you probably see, I wrote another book, this one about the young freedom fighters in Mississippi. The book has a long title: In the Name of Emmett Till: How the Children of the Mississippi Freedom Struggle Showed Us Tomorrow. Right now I am either going out and talking to people about the book face-to-face or staying home and talking to people about the book virtually. There are links to many of those events right here on my website. Check them out. I even did a TV interview. (I think the last time I was on TV was when I was one of the children on Uncle Al’s show in Cincinnati.)

In the spring, I may travel to Alabama and Mississippi to do a book tour. I am so hoping that happens.

     Also Jan and I travel more, go to all kinds of concerts, and eat lots of meals together.  

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     I suppose biographies are supposed to be Earth shattering. This is the best I could do. This has been my life, and it is my most sincere pleasure to be sharing it with you.