I liked Raymond the best. I felt close to him, we didn’t need to speak. He was retarded, a big boy at six. Overalls and suspenders. We played together in the kindergarten “shop.” There were also frogs and tadpoles. I learned to eat lettuce, we probably had bunnies. We played outside in the garden of the Cooper-Hewitt mansion where the school was housed.
NYSFNY was great. It was an experimental product of a group of teachers from the Yale school of Education. Each student worked at her own pace, handing in and going over workbooks with one of the teachers who would then hand out the next.
I was in third grade reading and fourth grade numbers when I left and went to first grade at Nightingale-Bamford, just around the corner on East 92nd Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. NYSFNY had become part of the Horace Mann schools but girls wouldn’t be admitted until 1964 when I was in third grade by which time I was acclimated to Nightingale.