When I went the word "elite" was never tagged onto the school, nor when my father went there 30 years before me. It was always one of the three city high schools you had to take an admissions test for. There was no such thing, and still isn't, anything that would resemble legacy admissions, or hardship, diversity admissions.
When I went, the school, then still all male, the students were maybe 65-70% Jewish. No one cried that it needed to be more "diverse." Now the mayor is proposing that 20% of the students come from black and Spanish middle school students who didn't pass the test, but who should get extra instruction to enable them to go there. There is of course controversy over the plan, and Comrade Bill will probably be out of office before anything along those lines gets enacted.
A recent newsletter tells of the StuyPrep program, "sponsored by the Alumni Association to help students in underrepresented neighborhoods on New York City gain admission to the specialized high schools." Admission is highly competitive. It is reported 30,000 8th-graders took the exam last October. My guess is there are 1,000 or so admitted.
Aside from all that, the school has a very active and influential alumni. There is a quarterly glossy newsletter produced that is mailed to dues paying alumni.
Typical class notes and In Memoriams are posted. I renewed my friendship with a classmate when he put a notice in the newsletter looking for contacts from the Class of '66. I think I was the only one who got in touch with him. We were in the same home room, seated alphabetically. My surname with a D and his with an A put us a row apart, and close enough to talk to leaning over. I never really became friends with anyone whose last names were after the letter G, because they were too many rows over.
Because of its heavy math and science curriculum, there are a good number of the alumni who went on to become engineers and doctors. Several alumni are Nobel Prize winners. There are a lot of familiar names that can be listed, in science and the arts, whose high school education was attained at Stuyvesant.
When someone of distinction passes away and they rate a tribute obit in the NYT, I always attach more interest in their passing because of the common high school. Thus, when Elias M. Stein, mathematician of fluctuations passed away i January at 87 I took interest in the tidbit that he went to Stuyvesant. It was described that to join the math club at the time he had to "read an advanced mathematics textbook and steal a math book from Barnes and Noble's flagship store at Fifth Avenue and 18th street." Mr. Stein admitted in an interview in 2012 that he stole what was not a very valuable book.
I was a math tutor but never tried to join the Math Club, so I have no idea if that initiation was kept in place. I did get a kick of the Barnes and Noble store being described as a "flagship" store. It was their only store, and was the go-to place for all levels of textbooks, and all kinds of testing review books, Regents tests, civil service exams, anything you needed to study for any exam.. Popular literature was not there. Nor were note pads, Godiva chocolate, or T-shirts.
The Stuyvesant connection is strong. In 1986 my father was in St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, New York awaiting a mitral valve replacement. I visited him the night before (surgery went well). The fellow in the other bed was a Stuyvesant grad and the fellow who just passed away and was being noted on the TV was also a Stuyvesant grad: James Cagney. At that moment, there were four of us in a hospital with a high school in common.
My daughter works in Long Island hospitals as a speech therapist and sometimes tells me of someone who she found out is also a Stuyvesant grad. There was a judge in his 90s, and just recently my mechanical drawing teacher was being treated. She talked to his son, who gave her the personal bio information. Mr. G. had a withered hand that he always kept in his pocket. We never knew anything about it. His son told my daughter of his WWII service, and now I can imagine he suffered a war injury. After all, by the time I started high school the war wasn't even over for 20 years. It was still a current event.
The most recent passing of a Stuyvesant grad is someone of such high, but bygone notoriety that I'm somewhat dying to see if they mention his passing in the newsletter. He might get listed, but I doubt they'll do a bio. But, who knows how the passing of Morton Sobell at 101 will be treated.
Mr. Sobell, for those who the name rings no bells, was the third defendant in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage trail in 1951. The Rosenbergs were found guilty of passing atomic bomb technology to the Russians and were executed at Sing Sing in 1953. Mr. Sobell got 30 years for conspiracy, spending 18 years in Federal prison that included Alcatraz.
After graduating Stuyvesant, Mr. Sobell went to City college to study engineering. It was at that time he joined the Communist Party, which in the 30s was seen as an attractive ideology. After release from prison he taught engineering and worked at a medical supply company developing a low-cost hearing aid. The obit is full of information.
Not in the obit, but something I gave thought to, was if Mr. Sobell used his name after release from prison, or did he go under another surname? He was living on Manhattan's Upper West Side when he passed away.
Sometime in the 1960s I can still remember my father spotting Alger Hiss, a convicted Soviet spy, who lived in the apartment house, 157 East 18th Street that housed the family flower shop on the corner at 206 Third Avenue. There was no Hiss name on the building's buzzers. The Hiss obit acknowledged he lived in the area.
Stuyvesant: lots of graduates; lots of stories.
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