Excerpt From ‘For The Love of God: My Life Spread Thin’

A memoir by Marion Gillon, TGS staff member

A few weeks later I received a telephone call from the Group School, informing me there was a teacher/advisor position there for me. One of the students, Michael Partridge, had recommended I get the job. Michael had been one of the preteen boys at the Cambridge Friends School summer teen center where I had been a counselor the summer of 1968. The following summer a couple of students from the Harvard Education School were counselors there and eventually organized the teenagers and helped them start their own school. The Group School was an alternative to the Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School for school phobic dropouts and possible future dropouts. Most of them lived in the city’s public housing projects. It was a bold and progressive concept for a high school run democratically by the students and staff. Each individual in the school (student and staff) had one vote, giving the students the controlling vote in the “Community Meeting” where all decisions made by the various school committees (including the Board of Directors) were reviewed and could possibly be overturned. Surprisingly, the students were much more conservative than the staff; they were resolutely protective of the school’s continued existence. They didn’t want to run the risk of the school straying too far from the traditional concept of a public school and jeopardizing their arrangement with the Cambridge School Department to grant them high school diplomas after finishing The Group School. I was the only staff member on the “Discipline Committee” and often the only hope for the accused student standing before the committee. The students on the committee were more likely than not to vote for suspension as I was for giving the accused a second chance.

Looking back it is surprising to me that I was at the Group School for only five years, considering the magnitude of the influence it has had on my life. It not only fulfilled my dream to be a high school teacher, the job was tailored made for me. It was the perfect place and opportunity for me to also fulfill my life’s purpose as revealed to me during my 1967 visit to the void via a movie theater in Montreal, to have as many meaningful encounters with others as possible. There was a continuous flow of interesting people coming and going through the school with whom to interact each year I was there. I met Larry Aaronson for the first time after hearing about him from mutual friends for months; our friendship started instantly. He and I co-taught the freshman orientation course, “Breaking and Entering” and the labor history course, “Hard Times”. He and Adria Steinberg, the academic coordinator, were veteran educators and excellent mentors. The Group School was the perfect teacher preparation program and starting point for my forty-five year career as an educator. 

I was on the hiring committee when Tyronne Johnson came to interview for the math teacher position. I thought he was the perfect candidate for the position. He was clearly an excellent and experienced math teacher. He was also an African American man, and if hired I would no longer be the only black male staff member at the Group School. Most importantly, he was a world-class musician who played piano, and if hired the Group School Choir would have an accompanist, and my music class would have a teacher who read music. Midway through the interview I had decided that I would take no prisoners in my fight to get him hired. Fortunately, there was no fight, every member of the committee agreed that he was perfect, and the vote to hire him was unanimous. Tyronne was an incredible person with an attractive personality who was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina a few years before I was born in Alabama. He had been in the Peace Corp teaching math in Cameroon, Africa, and he spent several years teaching in the Upward Bound Program at UMass-Amherst. That is where Mark Pawlak, the Group School math teacher, discovered him. I remember Mark telling me, “Marion, you are not going to believe this man.”

The young MIT student who volunteered to teach science invited me to his place to sample the LSD he had made in the MIT chemistry lab.  The acid trip we shared that night was not quite as extraordinary as the trip I had in Montreal in 1967, but it was one I will never forget. In addition to being an expert chemist he also had a passion for designing “airships” aka blimps.  It was a beautiful summer night, and we went upstairs to hangout on the roof, where he talked non-stop about airships. Before long a blimp came into view and hovered over the roof for what seemed to be hours. It was flying so low that we could see the silhouette of a person in the pilot’s gondola. It was unbelievable at the time, but in retrospect I believe he must have known the pilot, and the occasion was prearranged just to blow my mind. I wish I could remember the MIT student’s name.

Speaking of chemists, Caroline Hunter was also at the Group School. She had been hired by the Polaroid Corporation to be a chemist; she was the first African American to be on their science/research staff. She moved to Cambridge from her home in New Orleans to take the job. She met her husband, Ken Williams, there; he was on the janitorial staff. One afternoon while having lunch in the Polaroid cafeteria, they found a badge pinned to the bulletin board with the photograph of a black South African man that was taken with a Polaroid camera. Inadvertently, they had discovered the Polaroid Corporation had been hired by the South African Government to produce the passbook photos that the black citizens were required to have on their person at all times to facilitate the South African government’s enforcement of its apartheid system. Caroline and Ken founded the Polaroid Revolutionary Worker Movement (PRWM), and organized a boycott against Polaroid. Eventually and after Caroline testified before the United Nations advocating a boycott of Polaroid products, the Polaroid Corporation ended its relationship with South Africa. More importantly, Caroline and Ken sparked the international South Africa Divestment Movement that resulted in the end of apartheid in South Africa and the eventual release of Nelson Mandela from prison after serving twenty-seven years. 

On June 23, 1990, thanks to my dear friend, Tchioo aka Claudy Boy, I had the opportunity to see Nelson Mandela when he visited Boston just four months after he was released from prison. More than 250,000 people came to the esplanade on the Charles River to hear him speak. A throng of people jam-packed the Boston bank of the Charles River stretching from the esplanade to the Mass Ave Bridge. Tchioo was on the organizing committee that sponsored Mandela’s visit to Boston, and she gave Larry and me tickets to seats near the esplanade stage. It was an incredible day. I could see Jesse Jackson in the press section when he stepped out of his RV to wave to the crowd. There were amazing performances by Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, and many others including an electrifying performance by a Native American dance troop. I will never forget them dressed in their traditional regalia, beating their drums and dancing as if suspended from invisible strings slowly floating through the air in a circle around the center of the stage. It was magical, and I hadn’t taken a hit of acid or even smoked a joint. When Mandela came to the stage I started to cry uncontrollably tears of great joy. What a blessing that day was. 

Amazingly, the Group School came with a special bonus. My friend, Patty Collinge, whom I had met at Tougaloo in 1964 and started the chain of events that led me to Cambridge and Harvard, was there. She and another excellent teacher, Steve Seidel, co-taught the drama class. I looked forward to participating in the plays they produced every year (sometimes as a member of the cast and other times as a member of the crew).  In addition to the plays, Patty’s husband and film maker, Jan Egleson, produced and directed three movies that featured Henry Tomaszewski, a Group School student, as well as other Group School students and staff. Henry Tomaszewski was an exceptionally gifted actor and was on the road to becoming a movie star until the reality of his life in Cambridge and his fragile mental condition consumed him. He won an obscure European International Film Award in 1981 for “Best Child Actor”; he had a contract with a prestigious talent agency in Hollywood that landed him a role in a movie with Martin Sheen. He moved to Los Angeles and was being mentored by and lived with Paul Benedict, a successful television actor who had a central role in the popular television sitcom, “The Jeffersons”. Benedict also co-starred with Henry in the Jan Egleson film, “Billy in the Lowlands”. Henry could not adjust to his new life in Hollywood and returned to Cambridge unceremoniously to resume his life in the Jefferson Park housing project and his addiction to alcohol. Steve Seidel overheard a therapist at a cocktail party describing with amazement a delusional patient he had seen recently who had constructed his delusion of being an actor with amazing details, including descriptions of moving to Hollywood, living with Paul Benedict, and having a driver pick him up every morning to drive him to the studio to film his movie with Martin Sheen. 

My role in Jan Egelson’s movie, “The Dark End of the Street”, is my claim to fame. I was in a movie with Ben Affleck. I had two lines; Ben had none. (Never mind it was his first movie, and he was only five years old). I also recorded the title song, “The Dark End of the Street” for the movie’s soundtrack. I spent a day in a recording studio that I will never forget with Tyronne Johnson, my pianist. The movie debuted in New York City, and my friend, Jack Romano, came with several of his students and theater friends. He was impressed that I had a full frame in the credits with Tyronne Johnson for producing the music. My friend, John St. George was there also. He was in New York by chance and saw notices about the movie. There was an after party, and a couple of people asked for my autograph. It was an unforgettable evening.

Thanks to Patty Collinge, I had a great apartment on the corner of Franklin and Bay Streets. She passed it to me after she and Jan moved into their home on Larch Road. It was a spacious two bedroom apartment on the third floor of a three-family house. The militant revolutionary slogans painted on the walls of the closets by previous tenants, members of the “Weather Underground” (the white version of the Black Panthers) were still visible and untouched. The apartment was in a great location, one block from Massachusetts Avenue, half way between Harvard Square and Central Square, and less than a block from The Group School. It was an extension of the school for meetings and classes; the door was never locked. My Group School job was an all-time job; I was on call twenty-four hours seven days every week. Every student in the school knew where they could reach me at any time. 

Whenever I walked into the Group School office and there was a student there waiting for me, I knew it would be a serious problem. One morning one of my favorite students was there waiting for me. She was crying as she told me her family had been evicted that morning and all of their furniture and things had been taken by the city constable and put into a storage facility. Her mother had gone to work and her younger brother and sister had gone to their elementary school. I called her mother and told her to bring the children to my place after she got off work, and they could live with me until she got another place.  The student moved in with another Group School teacher/advisor, who also lived on Franklin Street a few houses from mine. Her mother moved into my room and the two children moved into the second bedroom. I put a mattress on the floor of the alcove in the vestibule and moved into it. A few days later the mother moved her boyfriend in to share my bedroom with her. A few weeks after that, the oldest son was discharged from the air force, and he moved into the living room and slept on the couch.   

The family lived with me for a year; the mother and her boyfriend spent most of the time in my room with the door closed. I liked the children very much; both were good students and spent hours doing homework every night and asking me to check it. All the meals their mother made came from a box or a can, so I started making meals for the children. The young son asked if it would be okay if he called me “daddy”, I gave him a hug and I asked him not to. The mother and her boyfriend felt very much at home; she was making no plans to find a place, and she avoided all my attempts to have a conversation about anything other than the weather.   

Because of the stress from my job as the Group School’s advisor coordinator, I met with a psychologist every other week to discuss any issues I was dealing with at the time. Often the psychologist advised me that I had a problem establishing boundaries, that I had no sense of ownership of my space, that I felt I had no right to my own space. He said that I was suffering from “survival guilt” because I had left my family and friends in Alabama, and the guilt was magnified because I was not home when my mother died. He said he would help me develop a plan to get the family out of my place and that she was going to hold me to the plan. We found a homeless shelter for families in the Boston Government Center area that housed families until they found a home. We arranged for the family to move there, and when I told the mother she would be moving there she was fine with it, even though she couldn’t bring her boyfriend. I learned later that she stayed in the homeless shelter so long, the shelter changed its “stay as long as it takes” policy to a specific number of weeks.

Another morning another student was waiting for me when I arrived. He was very upset and it took a while for me to find out what was upsetting him. He had never met his father, and his mother would not talk about his father with him. He was seventeen, and it was dawning on him that what the other students had been saying about him for years based upon his appearance might be true, his father was probably white. The main message he conveyed to me that morning was he “hated” his mother. He was one of the few students in the school who didn’t live in a city housing project. His mother was a registered nurse who worked on the night shift at the Cambridge City Hospital. I called her and asked if we could meet later that morning. I wanted to talk to her about getting her son a therapist; he clearly needed help that I couldn’t provide. She didn’t think that would be necessary; she said her son was a “spoiled brat” who needed to grow up. I decided I would put it on the agenda for my next meeting with my psychologist, but the next morning I got a call from the student’s mother. He was in jail. She said while she was working the night shift at the City Hospital, her son stabbed his girlfriend with a knife. The girlfriend survived with less than serious physical injury, and the student was charged with attempted murder. I told her, “Yesterday he needed a therapist; today he needs a good lawyer.” I called Bill Homan, who had been my attorney when Steve Goldin, his brother David, and I were arrested back in 1965 trying to stop the evictions on North Harvard Street. Bill cautioned me; he told me of a similar case he had previously, when he got the accused young man an acquittal, to find out a few months later that he murdered his girlfriend. He said it was a regret he had to live with, but he would take my student’s case if I wanted him to take it. I asked him to take the case, but not pro bono, the mother needs to pay something. I testified at the trial and he was released on probation with a requirement of mandatory visits with a psychiatrist.  

A couple years later I walked into the subway station on Washington Street; it was late and the entrance to the station was dark. The student on whose behalf I had testified in an attempted murder case was there with a young woman. He had her pinned against the wall. He was as surprised as I was when our eyes met, and I asked, “What’s going on?” He said they were kissing and making out. I asked the young woman if she was okay, and she said yes. I insisted we take the subway into Cambridge together, and he agreed without complaining. During the subway ride to Cambridge they sat across from me. They appeared to be a young couple in love, and I was wondering if I should say something or do something. I decided to say nothing and do nothing; he was no longer my student, he was an adult now. I never saw him or heard from him again, but until this day I remember Bill Homan’s cautionary advise and often regret not doing more that night.    

The Group School had developed a reputation for successfully transitioning its students into productive lives after high school. The guidance counselor, Susan Klaw, created the “Group School Advocacy Program” that placed students into internships in government and nonprofit agencies that promoted social justice. The percentage of Group School graduates who attended college after graduation was impressive. I was particularly proud of the students like Michael Pelham and Pat Simpson who became counselors in social services agencies. The Group School was no longer just an alternative for dropouts and school phobic students, it had become attractive to students who wanted help getting into college and finding careers after graduation. There was a waiting list of students applying to get into the Group School, and to be fair we conducted an annual admissions lottery. We drew names from a hat for boys and another hat for girls. One year Michael Deluca’s name was drawn, and he was assigned to my advisor group. After a week he hadn’t shown up to the school, so I went to his house to see why. Michael lived in East Cambridge, the only child of a single mother. He had no interest in going to school; he was fourteen and was waiting until he was sixteen to dropout. I asked him how he spent his days at home alone, and he said playing his guitar. I told him he could bring his guitar to school and we would find a room for him to play the guitar when and as much as he wanted. As it turned out, Michael had a high aptitude for math and science; he was not school phobic, he just hadn’t been challenged and was bored with school. He became one of our star students; he was even elected to a seat on the Board of Directors. I was helping him with his college application, and he kept worrying that he wouldn’t get into any college because he had no money to pay for tuition. I took out my checkbook and wrote him a check for one million dollars, and said, “You’re millionaire now, let’s finish this application.” He kept that check for years and sometimes he would threaten to cash it. His guitar playing skills got better each year, and my old friend, Michael Partridge, joined Michael Deluca and me to form a band to perform at his graduation. The Group School graduation was a major event, second only to the annual Group School play. We decorated the school with flowers and converted the old automobile garage turned school into a magical room. The choir always performed to an audience of happy students, staff, and parents, and always got a standing ovation. The Mayor of Cambridge came to hand the graduating students their diplomas.

Later, Michael told me he wanted to be a pilot and that he was taking flying lessons. I believe it was because his mother, Angela Deluca, worked as a waitress in a restaurant at Logan Airport when he was a child…maybe, maybe not. He got his flying license, and we celebrated. After a while he told me he had gotten a job with Butler Aviation delivering checks to an airport in New Jersey and returning to Logan with cancelled checks every night. After that he called me to tell me he had gotten a job as a pilot for Commuter Airlines flying a plane that had seats for fourteen passengers. He invited me to come with him for his last Butler Aviation flight to New Jersey. I met him at the Butler terminal at Logan and watched him admiringly while he filed his flight plan. I fell asleep shortly after we took off, and when I woke up we were approaching the George Washington Bridge with the New York City skyline in the background. It took a moment for me to get my bearing; I thought I might be dreaming. I looked at the bridge and the skyline and then at Michael flying the plane. I didn’t say anything, but I had never felt such pride for anyone before. Young Michael Deluca had grown up to be an incredible human being. That fact became even clearer when he landed the plane in New Jersey, and I saw how he related to the ground crew. The three young men were about the same age as Michael, and I could tell that they admired their friend, the pilot. Michael said, “Hey guys, this is my teacher I was telling you about.” After his son, Michael Junior, was born, he asked me to be his godfather; he said he wanted me to be in his son’s life. My friend Richie, the Combat Zone mob enforcer, asked me if I knew what an honor it is to be asked by an Italian to be the godfather of his child. Captain Michael Deluca is a thirty year plus veteran pilot for American Airlines. He came to my retirement party with his future new wife in 2012.

Roland De Barros was a cocky but lovable fourteen year old student when I met him. He came up to me after the freshman orientation meeting and said, “You will be my first black teacher. Don’t let me down.” He was among the first black students at the Group School. He was a good student and very involved in school governance. He was highly opinionated and served on several committees to express his different opinions. During his senior year we bought Greyhound Bus “Travel America” passports for $99 each on which passengers could travel all over America for two weeks. Roland had grown up in Cambridge and had never been to the South or experienced a situation where black people were the majority. After we got further south, he was amazed to see that the drivers of most cars we passed were black. We stopped first in Birmingham to visit my family and where Roland complained to me that my grandmother had washed his clothes without asking him. Then we went to Mississippi to visit Tougaloo College. It had been more than twenty years since the last time I was at Tougaloo. It felt good being there. My friend, Jerry Ward, was now Head of the English Department, and my friend, Jerry Rice, was Dean of Students. Roland liked it and submitted an application.

From there we went to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to visit my friend, Bob Kelly. He had moved there from Montreal to teach and coach tennis. He also managed a hotel. He put Roland and me into one of his nicest rooms and said we could stay as long as we wanted. Near the end of the trip as we traveled from New York back to Boston my ankles and feet were swollen, and I swore I would never ride another Greyhound bus as long as I live. So far, I have kept my promise. Just before the bus pulled into the Boston terminal, Roland announced to me as only Roland could, “Well, I can tell the guys that you didn’t try anything; you must not be gay.” I told him to mind his own business. The following September he, his mother, younger brother, and I drove to Tougaloo to enroll him in his first year of college. After we left, I was imagining a group of men approaching Roland and greeting him with, “Welcome to Tougaloo, fellow”. 

The one problem with working at the Group School was the pay, which was less than minimum wage. I never had enough to pay my living expenses, and I was in debt for many years while at the Group School and after I left. One morning I was teaching my “Close Encounters” class, when one of the students ran in to tell me a moving truck was parked in front of my apartment building and men were taking my things from my apartment. I was being evicted, and by the time I got there the moving men were carrying my mattress down the stairs. I didn’t bother to ask them about the money I had hidden under the mattress. It wasn’t much, but it was all that I had. Now I had no money and no place to live, until Caroline Hunter said I could move into her building later that day. Caroline and Ken had taken over a building on Clark Street in the Area 4 section of Cambridge and said I could live there as long as I wanted; I just had to pay for the utilities. I can’t remember how Caroline and Ken managed to commandeer the building. But, I couldn’t imagine anyone trying to stop them, for after all they had taken down the mighty Polaroid Corporation. 

Looking back I remember living down stairs from Caroline and Ken as a very happy time. Ken was a jazz lover and music critic, and music was blasting throughout the building all day and night. The first thing Ken did every morning was put a record on the player and continued doing that until he went to bed later that night. Sometimes I would call to ask him to turn the volume up, because I couldn’t hear the lyrics to a song. He always loved that. The hallway often smelled of spicy food that Caroline was cooking to which I was sometimes invited to share. The above ground pool the city constructed every summer for the neighborhood children was next to our building. I had a key to the pool’s fence gate and would take a swim after the pool was closed to the children. The Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House owned the lot across from our building. The Board petitioned the city to till the land and cover it with top soil to prepare it for a community garden. I loved working in the garden; I grew corn, tomatoes, greens and beans. I waited until the night of the full moon to plant my seeds. 

I was president of the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House Board of Directors at the time. The long-time Cambridge social services organization was located in the house built in 1807 as the childhood home of Sarah Margaret Fuller, who was an early women’s rights activist, and according to Wikipedia was “a noted author, feminist, and Transcendentalist”. The house on Cherry Street was reinvented in 1902 as one of the first settlement houses in the United States. After decades of providing services to women, immigrants, and the poorest citizens of Cambridge, because of the lack of funding in 1979 the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House was threaten with receivership by the Cambridge City Council and possible permanent closure. Because of my connection to the “Multicultural Project”, an agency operating in the House, I was asked by the staff to form a board of directors and hire a fundraiser as a last-ditch effort to save the agency. I rounded up the usual suspects, including Larry Aaronson and John St. George to meet once a week as the Board of Directors to take on the city of Cambridge. When we heard that Margaret Fuller’s grand-nephew, Buckminster Fuller, was speaking at an event in Boston we decided to solicit his support in our effort to save his great aunt’s legacy. We tracked him down and found that he was staying in a social club on Beacon Street in Boston. One morning members of the staff, representatives from the neighborhood and I showed up there to meet him. That turned out to be an awkward mistake. He invited us in, and although he was pleased to hear about the existence of the Margaret Fuller House, he explained that he was a guest of the club and didn’t feel comfortable having visitors. I was pleased to have met the famous Harvard dropout, but I knew that we had to continue our efforts without his help. 

Many of the Group School students lived in the Washington Elms and Newtown Court housing projects a couple of blocks from Clark Street. So, I had plenty of visitors. One night one of my students showed up crying and said he had a fight with his mother. He was running away from home and wanted to stay with me. After he went to bed, I called his mother, told her he was okay, and that he was sleeping. After I hung up the phone, I could see a smile of relief on his face as he pretended to be sleeping. The next morning he went home. 

When Carol Simpson, a Group School parent, was evicted from her house, her eleven and twelve year old sons, Wesley and Steven, moved in with me. They were wild children, and I was forever breaking up their fights. One of them ripped the bathroom sink off the wall; he also threaten to tell his uncles who were Ku Klux Klan members in Georgia about me. Eventually, Carol picked them up and drove them to Stinky Creek, Kentucky where they had lived before moving to Cambridge. Her youngest daughter was still living there with the lesbian couple who brought her and her children there from Cabbagetown, Georgia. Cabbagetown was a small community of poor white people in Atlanta that had not changed since the Civil War Battle of Atlanta; according to Carol the streets had never been paved and were still the narrow dirt roads on where Sherman’s Army had marched. The lesbians had rescued Carol and her seven children from an abusive husband and father. One morning after returning from visiting her brother in Georgia, she called me and said, “Boy, I had to spend a night on the street because of you. My brother kicked me out of his house when I told him I love you and my children love you”.  

When Carol was a young girl, she had a job as the liaison between the black workers in the field and the white boss in “the big house”. The boss didn’t want to be near his black workers, so Carol relayed messages between the workers in the field and the boss in the “big house”. She said she identified with the workers. Carol was a singer and songwriter. Both she and her son, Mark, played guitar. We often spent hours on their back porch in the summer singing spirituals and songs Carol had written. Once we did a Group School concert to raise funds for the school. It was advertised as “The Student, Teacher and Parent Band”. When Carol got a gig at a country music bar in Boston, I was her backup singer.