BY ELAINE VAN DEVELDE
Staff Writer
MIGUEL JUAREZ staff Third-grade students at James Monroe Elementary School, Edison, pay tribute to popular 1960s show “Bonanza” with hats, horses and song.
EDISON — The year was 1964.
Lyndon Johnson won the presidency by a landslide. Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Civil Rights Act was signed. The World’s Fair came to New York. And, a young man named Gerald Young became the youngest principal in the state when he, at 28, was hired to be the top administrator at the brand new James Monroe Elementary School.
Young was younger than the teachers in his school when he started his job at the onset of the school year.
"They were all an average age of 40 then," said Young, now 70, who still works in the district as principal of the John Marshall Elementary School and has the distinction of being the principal with the most years of service in the country. "It’s a lot different now. Most of the teachers are very young. I actually started in education in 1955 — 50 years next year. But, I will tell you that even though times have changed, my way of doing things has not and neither has the focus of the school district."
James Monroe was a small school tucked away in an old Edison neighborhood then and it still is now, Young said. Civil rights fights and rebellious dress codes rocked the world in 1964, when the school only had its doors open for a few months. But, in the somewhat insulated corner of the world where James Monroe sat, the focus was more on college than the protest of the moment.
And the biggest fear of the residents at the time was that the township would cut a road from the school directly to Route 1, wreaking traffic havoc in a sheltered neighborhood. Some things never change, Young said. People are still worried about traffic in Edison, but there is no fight over cultural diversity. It is a mainstay in the town that Young says he thinks was bred out of good values in an educated community.
"In the middle of the civil rights movement, there was no segregation to worry about here, because there really was no racial diversity," Young said. "They used to call it the country club school. Even though the kids were just in elementary school, the parents then were very focused on getting them into the best colleges — and, to my knowledge, they did."
But it wasn’t the country club mentality that got them there, Young said. It was something more important — compassion. Genuine care for one another and others outside the school trickled down from Young to the teachers, from the teachers to students and from students to parents.
"Everyone respected one another and they cared about the students," Young said. "It was something that we had all along. We may not have had the diversity, but there was no prejudice that I remember or ill feelings for others or one another. Where it took the civil rights movement elsewhere to finally force people to be kind to one another, we had that gift already. People here were tolerant because they were intelligent and very concerned about the racial problems all over. It was a wonderful academic community. The parents taught the children well. And children are, by nature, loving."
It was ironic that what is now one of the most racially diverse municipalities in the state was so sheltered from the civil unrest that eventually bred harmony years ago, he said. "But, the fact that the people then were so good natured and caring could be a big reason why Edison is so culturally diverse now. People are very proud of that diversity," Young said. "It’s nice to know that it came from the nurturing of the parents of the children I saw grow up into fine, well-educated adults with good values. A lot went on to Harvard, Yale, Brown — all the best schools."
His first stint as a principal was a calm one in a tumultuous time in history. Young looked back on some kitschy, less profound things that made his first few years in the district memorable ones.
For one, in the 21st century age of SUV-dominated roads with gridlock at the school entrances in the morning, he recalled that "in those days [1960s] all the kids were walkers. It was strictly a neighborhood school and everyone walked from their homes in the immediate area. Now, the district covers a wider area, so students have to be transported in from all over."
While styles have changed over the years, Young said he still wears now what he did then, including a short conservative hair style.
"I always had my white shirt with a suit and tie. I still do," he said. "I wish I could tell you that I had some crazy haircut or ponytail, or the kids had crazy outfits, but the truth is that, first of all, it was elementary school, so the parents were basically still dressing them and keeping the dress code conservative. The hair got longer and the outfits got crazier when they got to high school — the teachers, too."
Another difference from then to now, Young reminisced, was that boys played sports — mostly baseball — and girls jumped rope, played hop scotch and jacks outside before the bell rang in the morning.
"The kids also went home for lunch then," he said. "It was very common. In those days, they had an entire hour for lunch and not a lot of the mothers were working."
Report cards still come in large envelopes and are handwritten for elementary school students, Young said. "They look the same and have basically the same comments," he explained.
And one last thing hasn’t changed with the times. While he says he used to know all 300 students’ names at Monroe, he doesn’t know all the names of the kids at John Marshall now, but he does greet the students outside every day. He sees them off in the afternoon, and he tries to keep close tabs on who they are and what they’re all about.
"No matter what the era, if you care and you mean it and follow that tradition, the kids will turn out pretty good," he concluded.