Cheesy Grits: Midwood High School

Who, where, or what was Midwood High School in Brooklyn? Being an Amish Mennonite originally from Lancaster County, I of course had no idea. Even though I had lived in Manhattan for two years while completing my alternative service at NYU Medical Center in lieu of serving in the military (maybe I'll get to that story sometime), I had never gotten out of Manhattan much, and had no idea where Midwood High School might have been. My New York stretched from Chinatown to Lincoln Center on the West Side and the Guggenheim on the East Side. I was tabula rasa about anywhere else. Never once went to see the Mets or Yankees play.

Jane wasn't sure either, although she remembered driving to Brooklyn with her mother to see her grandfather when she was very young—so young that she remembered no details.



I no longer remember what the complete occasion was that took me to New York City, but so it goes: one fine day in March, 1983, I know that I traipsed up the imposing steps, behind the tall columns, and into the front doors of Midwood High School at 2839 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, hard by Brooklyn College.

Midwood High School
(photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Midwood High School turns out to be one of the crown jewels in the New York City public school system. I've linked here to the Wiki article about Midwood, which has a listing of famous Midwood alums. Among them is one Allen Stewart Konigsberg, a/k/a Woody Allen, who in Annie Hall made a nasty crack about gym teachers. He may have been one of Jane’s grandfather’s students in the early ‘50s, although he seems to have preferred baseball to track.

Once the initial excitement of being at Midwood had worn off, I realized that I wasn't really getting anywhere looking at yearbooks. We were really more interested in his biography than his professional career, so when I got back home, I wrote to the Personnel Department of the Board of Education of the City School District of New York to ask them for a brief biographical sketch of Jane's grandfather—the kind of sketch provided by organizations in their press releases announcing promotions, retirements, and so on.

The Board of Education kindly replied to our query with the following in a letter in outline form:

• Born in South Carolina on August 4, 1892 (no town listed)
• Moved to New York at an early age
• Attended schools in New York
• Married in City Hall in New York
• Retirement from the NYC Board of Education in 1958.

Considering what we had started with, the letter was a genealogical windfall. Born in South Carolina?! Who knew?!

I'll end this post with a photo of Coach George Ralston and some of his charges at Midwood in the early to mid '50s. We don't know its provenance; the otherwise unidentified print was in the family collection.

Coach George Ralston (center) and the Midwood Track Team.
We don't know the year of this photo or who took it. It looks
like a yearbook or newspaper photo from the 1950s.