The nurse told us that kindergarten was downstairs. The elevator was an ancient screechy box with a brass scissor-gate that threatened to cut off your fingers. We clanked our way to the basement, where it sounded like a parade was in full swing at the end of the hall. The noise led us straight to the roomful of children with whom I would spend the next nine years of my life.
The Kindergarten Annex was long and wide, lined with glass-fronted cupboards full of books and art supplies. There was a teeter-totter, a laddery climbing frame, and shelves of toys. Tables were laid out with construction paper and poster paints. In the center of the room was an enchanting fireplace, an Art Nouveau spectacular tiled with medallions of dragons and unicorns in carved white porcelain.*1
But all of this sank in a whole lot later. In the moment, I stared openmouthed at a scene of magnificent chaos.
The room was swirling with kids in wheelchairs and crutches, but unlike the ones in the hospital, these kids weren’t sick. They were as energetic as any other bunch of junior demons. Boys and girls zipped all over the room in a wheelchair demolition derby, while others crutched at remarkable speed considering the wingspan of five-year-old arms. It was a giant pinball game, as played by rhesus monkeys.
Mom led me over to the lady waving her arms in the middle of the floor. “Riva, say hello to your teacher.” Miss Woodbridge was Peter Pan’s sister, delicate and fey, with the most singularly upturned nose I’d ever seen. I privately dubbed her Miss Nosebridge.
I let the grown-ups talk while I spun around, trying to look everywhere at once. Two pairs of blue eyes were regarding me with equal curiosity. The first pair belonged to a round-faced boy, whose thatch of coppery hair sprouted above a galaxy of freckles. His crutches splayed sideways like the legs of a day-old fawn.
But it was the second pair of eyes that really demanded my attention. Those big blue eyes were very big, magnified behind lenses thick as family Bibles. The girl had hair the color of dry autumn leaves, with poofy bangs that spoke of first-day tussles with the curling iron. Tall and skinny and pressed up against the fireplace, she jerked her head in my direction: Get over here, you dingbat, before they mow you down.
I glanced back. Mom and Grandma were waving goodbye. I shrugged, and launched myself into anarchy.
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That school, formerly the Cincinnati School for Crippled Children, had been renamed sometime in the 1930s for Randall J. Condon, the Cincinnati superintendent of schools. He had (for the times) a radical philosophy: that disabled children should receive a standard academic education. At the time, most schools for disabled children were residential warehouses that provided minimal vocational training and basic literacy, if that, so their students/inmates could qualify for service or industrial jobs.
When I enrolled in 1963, offering standard education to disabled children still qualified as progressive pedagogy.
Kids were sent to Condon on the recommendation of their doctors. Condon had been designed for children with orthopedic impairments, but it eventually included students with cognitive, sensory, and intellectual disabilities. Enrollment in 1963 was less than three hundred students, far fewer than the number of disabled children one would expect in a city the size of Cincinnati. I assume that many of the missing were warehoused or tucked away in the family home and never schooled at all.
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The architectural style of Condon School might be called “Spanish Colonial Convalescent”: three stories of cream-yellow stucco that combined modernist simplicity with an unhinged level of ornamentation. Above the scrolled-brass entry gates hung enormous ceramic medallions of women (nurses? teachers? saints?) cradling small children, part of a cornice line featuring a mélange of griffins, globes, books, flags, frowny neoclassical heads, and dimpled cherubs brandishing scissors. (Flying with scissors was apparently perfectly fine.)
Inside, fairy tales roamed the halls. A WPA painting of Red Riding Hood stood guard over the library door, while outside the principal’s office, a Rookwood drinking fountain depicted a gaunt, redheaded Pied Piper playing his shawm for a blank-faced boy. Condon School was decorated with pictures of children in danger.
Yet the sheer square footage of medicalized space demonstrated that ours was indeed a “special school.” The elevators fitted four wheelchairs each. A long banister ran the length of every hallway, allowing us to pull ourselves along like children climbing a horizontal rope. The second floor boasted an extensive medical suite, with a nurse’s office, doctor’s office, dentist’s office, pharmacy, and exam rooms. When we were sick, we lay down in one of five curtained bays, divided by thin slabs of marble.
Delegations of doctors came through to treat, observe, and assess us, though it wasn’t always clear whether we were being seen for our needs or theirs. Medical services blurred the line between school and hospital, a distinction that disappeared several times a day when the nurse came into class with little paper cups full of medication.
And just as in the hospital, we had physical therapy every day. We’d be hoisted onto high wooden treatment tables that loomed above a floor full of mats, littered with exercise equipment that looked like toys. (Trust me, they were not.) Even the outside of the building was medical: the top floor sprouted a row of “sun balconies” constructed for some of Condon’s original students—children with tuberculosis—who’d been wheeled out to breathe the fresh air circulating above the parking lot.
A student seeing the doctor and nurse, circa the early 1960s
Classrooms were predictable provinces of education, with their expanses of blackboard, shelves of books and globes, pull-down maps and charts, and construction-paper alphabets, turkeys, snowmen, leaves, flowers, and pumpkins. Except that the wooden lockers were built at wheelchair height, and the desks were interspersed with refectory tables that accommodated wheelchairs. Every classroom contained a bathroom, with a communicating door between it and the room next door. We had to be careful to lock both doors or the rest of the day would be one of embarrassment.
Classes covered the usual K-through-8 curriculum: English, math, science, social studies, etc. In addition, we were required to have physical therapy, psychotherapy, speech therapy, audiological assessments, and occupational therapy. If it included the word “therapy,” we had it.
Nonetheless, our curriculum was considered so innovative, so radical, that educators came from all over the world to observe us.*2 Several times a year, cadres of strangers would sidle in and stand in the back of the room, quiet men and women who carried notebooks and clipboards and watched. Whispered. Often the whispers weren’t in English; sometimes the strangers came from as far away as Japan.
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But back to the fireplace: