The Child Buyer (8 page)

Alfred E. Newman, you have half a dozen Al Capones and Lucky Lucianos and Tommy Manvilles. Sure there's a lot of leeway in the ideals of the younger generation, but I'll stake my career on the fact that idealism is on a higher plane among school kids than it is among their parents. Right today, if it was up to me to sell a program of idealism, hard work, and sacrifice for the sake of a distant goal, and if I had to choose between selling this program to youngsters or middle-aged people, I wouldn't hesitate a minute to pick on the young ones. All right, people can say I'm a starry-eyed visionary, an ivory-tower character, who doesn't know what life really is. I doubt that. I was born on a Western Connecticut milk farm that went broke when I was ten years of age. I missed a few meals from time to time. After high school I attended college through various means, chiefly by working at night in a cotton mill. I've worked summers and spare times, in shops, in cotton mills, as a dishwasher, in dairies, driving trucks, and even, once, in a foundry. I've run crews for the State agriculture service. I've worked as a member of C.I.O. unions, and I've been out on strike. And I've slaved at the books. Oh, yes, I've worked. I've got a B.A. and a B.S. and four master's degrees and a Ph.D. During the Depression I couldn't get summer jobs, so I took nine straight summer quarters at Silvcrbury College; everything they offered came up on rotation, and I took it all, not for degrees but to learn it, to know it. And listen, I've been a teacher for nearly half a century: that's where if you've been in an ivory tower, you come out. I don't think I qualify as an ivory-tower person. I've seen characters that would make your hair stand on end. I reject any ivory-tower classification for myself. If I'm an educational visionary it's not from having been shut in an ivory tower but from rubbing elbows with people who've succeeded through educational endeavor. I'm not soft. Don't think I'm a softy, just because I believe in people. I can be rough and tough when it's needed:

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listen: I'm not at all averse to having a little humor going in my school, but I don't have the slightest intention of having a noisy school, and one tap of my pencil on my desk in my office will bring a hush to the whole building/

Mr. BROADBENT. You told Mr. Jones all this?

Dr. GOZAR. I did!

Senator VOYOLKO. What about the kid?

Dr. GOZAR. Yes, I talked to the child buyer about Barry, too. I asked him, did he want to know how I got interested in Barry Rudd? Well, here's how. I work in the biology lab at Wairy High two hours before breakfast every morning. You see, when I first got to college, at Silverbury, I got the idea of being a biologist, to work for the U.S. conservation service. I took two bachelor's degrees, one in biology and one in history, because I figured I wanted to know what I was conserving—a B.S. and a B.A. I worked extra on it and got both degrees in one year; not combined but double. All the time I worked nights in a cotton mill. My shift got off at two in the morning, so I could do some studying before I turned in. I only had eight a.m. classes three times a week. I could get a solid four hours' sleep and be blessed with ordinary good health, and I have maintained that average ever since, to the present time. Four hours of sleep a night. This means I save four hours per night over the usual individual, and when you calculate that I've been doing that for half a century, it works out that I've enjoyed some seventy-five thousand hours of life most people miss. I could sleep longer quite readily, but I've set myself. And I thrive on it. I've been out from work exactly six days in all these years—I had an operation for piles in my late forties.

Senator MANSFIELD. About the child, if you please, Doctor.

Dr. GOZAR. Yes. I've kept up the habit of doing research work in biology. I like the search in research; a research person is a person looking for something intelligently—but it's fun, too.

Did you know, my dear Mr. Chairman, that 'research* and 'circus' are related etymologically? Know who told me that? Barry! Words are his daily bread. Anyway, one morning two years ago, it'll be two years ago in February, I was working at five a.m. in the biology lab at Wairy High, on a project on the caste system of termites—how a soldier termite can develop from a nymph that wouldn't normally become a soldier; in other words, the caste system isn't hereditary. Very instructive for us mortals. I usually work under a single hooded lamp in that big room, with slate tops on the big lab tables, and a sink at each end, and I concentrate pretty hard. It's as silent as King Tut's tomb in there; you could practically hear the queen termites laying their eggs. Well, that morning I heard a gentle stirring, and the edge of my mind thought, 'My God, I'm going to have to set me a mouse trap in here,' and a couple minutes later I looked up, and here was this pale circle of paste at the edge of the light with two of the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen in it, not looking at me but staring at my termites. I don't know to this day how that boy knew about my early-morning work, or how he contrived to get away from home at that hour. His home is in a tenement block on River Street, a quarter-mile from the school, and it was dead-o'-winter, and five in the morning. Anyway, he was just there, and he said, 'Mind if I watch, Dr. Gozar?' He came the next morning, and he had a piece of paper with a list of questions he wanted to ask me. Mind you, the child was only eight—fourth grade. He's been coming ever since. How I love that boy!

Mr. BROADBENT. You think the man Wissey Jones was right, then, in selecting him for purchase?

Dr. GOZAR. There's no child better. Barry combines drive and a keen, keen mind. He calls me Dr. Gozar, and I call him Mr. Rudd. I always call my high-school students 'Mr.' and 'Miss'— you see, besides being principal at Lincoln, I teach biology

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courses in both of the Pequot high schools—and so I call Barry 'Mr./ too. He learns from me, and I learn from him. He doesn't mind showing his ignorance to me—why should I mind showing mine to him?

Mr. BROADBENT. What else did you tell Mr. Jones?

Dr. GOZAR. I told him the real reason Barry had been passed over in deary's stupid wizard hunt was that Barry isn't a stereo-typic Brain. lie's fat—

Senator VOYOLKO. You told me that. The kid's fat.

Dr. GOZAR. —but he doesn't have an enlarged head, or a pigeon chest, or spindly legs and floppy wrists, or crybaby eyes, lie doesn't even wear horn-rimmed glasses, or any glasses at all.

Senator SKYPACK. You mean this little twerp is a boy's boy?

Dr. GOZAR. Are you a man's man, Senator?

Senator SKYPACK. You damn right.

Dr. GOZAR. Well, these categories are beyond me, sir. All I'm saying is that Barry isn't the commonplace bespectacled Brain. He has a marvelous diffidence about him:

'Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more/

Mr. BROADBENT. And did Mr. Jones get around to his proposition?

Dr. GOZAR. Yes, he came to it, sir. Roundabout.

Mr. BROADBENT. How do you mean, roundabout?

Dr. GOZAR. He began by saying that what we need to relieve our talent shortage in this country is a crash program, and I told him I thought that was the worst possible thing you could do. The way they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Manhattan Project to work up the atom bomb has a lot of people thinking that all you need to do to unlock supreme mysteries is to have an act of Congress, and empty Fort Knox, and start up a vast Federal agency—that money solves everything. We'll be having a crash program to locate God one of these days, pin

down a definite location for His throne. But I told Jones you can't free talent with dollars. You can't package talent, you can't put it in uniform bottles and boxes with labels. Ability slips through the cogs of a machine; machines are only as bright as the men who feed them data. I don't want an IBM machine telling me which of my kids'll be a doctor, which a lawyer, which a beggarman, which a thief. I don't want these government and industry scholarships for my youngsters, because a scholarship is a moral loan; there's quid pro quo in scholarships handed out under something called a National Defense Education Act. The only real defense for a democracy is improvement. Crisis and triumph over crisis. It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense. I tell you, I can sound off on that subject! And you should have seen friend Jones when I got going that way. He got red as a Mclntosh apple. The red spread from his nose outward. He began to sputter and wheeze. So I asked him, straight out, what he wanted of me, and he told me about wanting to buy a youngster. Perhaps Barry Rudd, if the boy lived up to his billing.

Mr. BROADBENT. And?

Dr. GOZAR. I threw him out.

Senator MANSFIELD. With your bare hands, Doctor? Nape of the neck and seat of the pants?

Dr. GOZAR. No, sir. My tongue's my bouncer.

Senator SKYPACK. Did he tell you what he has told this committee in confidence, in Executive Session, about what his company does with these brains he buys?

Dr. GOZAR. No, thank you, Senator, I wouldn't be interested in any of that. The idea of the purchase of talent was enough for me.

Senator SKYPACK. Mr. Chairman, I submit that if the public knew about the fine patriotic work that company is doing down there, a witness like this—

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Senator MANSFIELD. Mr. Jones has put us on our honor, Jack. I don't see how we can change that without his permission.

Dr. GOZAR. 'We Must All Obey!'

Senator MANSFIELD. That's not fair, Doctor. There's such a thing as honor, you know.

Dr. GOZAR. I believe in it, but I see very little of it as I wander around.

Senator MANSFIELD. Did you have any further questions, Mr. Broadbent?

Mr. BROADBENT. That's all, sir. You may be excused, Doctor. I will call Miss Charity Perrin.

Senator MANSFIELD. Thank you, Dr. Gozar. . . . Please stand —right there, miss—and well swear you in.

Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give this committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Miss PERRIN. I do.

TESTIMONY OF Miss CHABITY M. PERRIN, SCHOOLTEACHER, TOWN OF PEQUOT

Mr. BROADBENT. Kindly identify yourself for the record, miss, as to name, address, occupation.

Miss PERRIN. The record?

Senator MANSFIELD. Matter of form, Miss Perrin. We're only trying to do our duty.

Miss PERRIN. Charity M. Perrin. 94 Second Street, Pequot. Teacher.

Mr. BROADBENT. Miss Perrin, were you present, either in the auditorium of Lincoln School in Pequot, or immediately outside the auditorium windows on the black-top playground, at the instant on Tuesday afternoon last when a bomb—a stink bomb —was exploded in front of the stage of the—

MissPERRiN. I . . . Gracious, I . . .

Senator MANSFIELD. No need to be agitated, my dear Miss Pcrrin. Don't be fearful.

Mr. BROADBENT. Exactly where were you during the lecture—

Miss PERRIN. If ... I wasn't . . .

Senator MANSFIELD. Please, Mr. Broadbent, you are aware—

Mr. BROADBENT. Very well, miss, let's go back to the beginning.

Miss PERRIN. The beginning! Oh, dear . . . What do you want me to say?

Mr. BROADBENT. Begin at the beginning. How you were hired, and all that.

Miss PERRIN. Sir, I was hired into the Pequot system as a sixth-grade teacher, let me see, it was January, 19—. That was a queer time of year to be hired; you'll say it was a suspicious time of year to be taken on. Here's how it happened. . . . But let me say, first off, you have to remember that those were different times. We teachers were poor. I mean, there was a depression, hot-lunch money was not provided for teachers unless they were extreme hardship cases, multiple dependency—

Senator MANSFIELD. Broadbent, I don't see why we have to go back that far.

Mr. BROADBENT. If you wouldn't mind holding your horses just a moment, Senator, I think we've just had a rather remarkable statement from this lady. Do you mean to suggest, miss, that a teacher ought to be supplied, gratis, with all the amenities—hot soup, medical insurance, fringe benefits of all kinds? Is that what you mean?

Miss PERRIN. Oh no, sir, I didn't mean ... I don't hold with . . .

Mr. BROADBENT. Do you mean to suggest that teaching is not a service career, a calling—I mean, that people go into teaching for the material ends of life? Do you mean that, Miss Perrin?

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Miss PERRIN. Oh, no, sir. I believe a teacher is a servant of society. I have a real sense of vocation about my teaching. I like to take second place.

Mr. BROADBENT. That's more like it, ma'am.

Miss PERRIN. The only thing is—

Mr. BROADBENT. Don't forget you're under oath, miss.

Miss PERRIN. When it comes to being treated like a servant— well, I get uncomfortable under the collar. I hasten to tell you, sir, it's very hard for me to be angry at anyone: I usually just get hives or the sniffles or a bad case of the scares. But all the same, for a teacher—

Senator SKYPACK. I assume, miss, since they've kept you on in Pequot all these years—

Miss PERRIN. I was born a few blocks east of Lincoln School. I never taught west of it. I've been twenty-four years in the one classroom. I guess I'm sort of provincial, sir, you'd have to call me that.

Senator MANSFIELD. That's neither here nor there, Miss Per-rin. Mr. Broadbent, please.

Mr. BROADBENT. The day you first were contacted by the child buyer, ma'am. Tell us.

Miss PERRIN. Actually, Mr. Jones visited my class last Friday, but he came in after the second bell and left before the morning was over, and no one ever told me who he was; he didn't even speak to me himself. I assumed he was some professor of education or State evaluator or I-don't-know-what. They're always barging in.