The Common Vein

on Norman Sandler

The ?Boss?, ?Norm?

Copyright 2009

Sam James

Steve Selesnick

somewhere someone mentioned neville dove wanted to matriculate 1 year earlier and Mr Sandler said no. and then yes.
a friend of mine, and yes i had afriend back then, not in our year, was approached by Sandler in Form 4 and told that he must do B stream he was very upset as his dream was to be a doctor. sandler laughed and said no-no, but after my friend?s parents said that he would go to another school and mr sandler saw the money going , he agreed to it and advised they were wasting their money.
my friend passed, did a bsc, did medicine and came to live in north america where he practiced as a cardiologist. many years later, his brother had a major heart attack and needed a new heart. because of my friends position, his brother had surgery and survives.
if my friend and family had listened to MISTER sandler it might have had a different outcome.
how many lives did that ass hole ruin? we might never know. how many dreams did he crush? we might never know that too.

(Davis)  Dear Steve,
I must disagree with u. Uncle Norm was an incredible character. I remember when the red light on the intercom started flashing, when his head appeared at the only clear window pane, when the whole class was ordered to the administration block, the dark brown corridor that led to his office, the door opened after the sounds of four lashings, then the next student entered? I attended our school gathering in Newport Beach California. My wife was stunned that we would be attending a school reunion for me, an African American, and that we had never attended one of her school reunions. Karen was educated in Boston. I told her that as soon as they start dancing the Horah we will leave. Before the appetizers were served everyone was doing the Horah. Karen looked at me. I told her we cannot leave because these are my people. Uncle Norm was there from Australia. I introduced myself to him. Personally I don?t think he remembered me but hopefully he remembered my dad who was very active in organizing the KDHS fetes. Life is unfair and it only gets worse but I still respect Uncle Norm and I thank u all for this rejuvenating 40th gathering.

Aubrey Ginsberg

My vote goes to Gary
I believe that he was the right man at the right time can u imagine what all us spoilt Jewish brats (especially me )would have become without a bit of the ?boss? I must still hold the record for the most cuts in any year not being one of the better scholars i believe that he gave me a sense of values and also a pretty good Jewish background . Gary dont remember much? Hora? but have very fond memories of the downstairs toilet where many cigarettes and joints were smoked

Sheryl Lopis

He was never my hero either ? I think I was totally intimidated by ?the Boss? at school.
But I must say, I arrived in perth, alone, in 2000, never having been here before, and not knowing anyone ( my family stayed in Jhb and only joined me later). The Boss was among the first to call me, and extend some real Yiddish hospitality and warmth. He was already quiteill at that stage, and I was touched by his kindness. And I must say he remembered us all!

Ashley Davidoff

E mail communication with Naomi Stein together with the conversations about the boss have been playing on my mind and bothering me ? both prompting me to wake up at 4:30 this morning and rush to try and work the bother out on ?conversation with friends on the web?
?. so this was an extract of my communication with Naomi

?I woke up early this morning ? prompted by what you said about not speaking to boys I think, and also prompted by some conversations on facebook regarding Norman Sandler who fostered the ?talented? and tended to ignore those who were not talented in the ?classicial way? ? sports and academics A whole group of people were left out

For some reason the boy girl thing seemed only for early romantic whimperings of those who were popular and hormonally mature There was no interaction on a human level between boys and girls. (No ?platonic friendships? as we used to say). I had no idea what was going on in the minds of the girls at the time ? and just knew their academic talents (because the boss had stratified the ?smart? from the ?not so smart?, and in sports as an ?a team? or ?b team? or a ?no team? person. Life at King David School (and perhaps in many schools at the time) was about competition and winning or losing.

So now we are 40 years older, and a little wiser, and from the boy-girl thing I realise how much we missed out. I am not surprised at our strong need to get to know each other at this level now.?
It is much different with my children and their friends even in the ?dog eat dog? culture of America. It is a pleasure to see the ?platonic? interactions of our children. Wish I could understand this more mature and healthy interaction .

I am trying to work these two things out and whether they have anything to do with each other ? ie the boss created a situation where certain people were idolised  ? demeaning by default others who were not ? loss of self esteem and the consequences in relationships  invite your thoughts ? particulalrly the psychologists among us

Lindsay Leveen

The thing about Sandler is so true. Sam sharp can comment on my statistical analysis but Sandler?s name should never have been Norm. Norm mean the average and the part of a normal bell curve that includes the mean. Sandler did not include the mean he was just mean. Steve Selesnic is not on this thread so I will post to thread three as well as Steve brought up that Norm was a poephol. Sandler had a passion and interest for those that were a standard deviation and above the mean. In a normal distribution this only includes some 5% of the population. With 150 kids in each form her liked about 10 and did not give a hoot about the others except that they should pass matric and not ruin his averages. It is paradoxical he was called Norm when he had no interest in the norm. Maybe he should have been called Deviant Sandler as he was only interested those who had positive deviations.

Tevis Shapiro

I arrived at KDHS at the beginning of the 2nd term in 1967. Strange timing but this was occasioned by an anti-semitic incident at my school in Vryheid. It was caused by a teacher who had been in the Whermacht during the war and he had some comments about my late father who, like Terry?s dad, had been captured in North Africa, put ?in the bag? and ?gone over the wire? when the Italians capitulated. He also kept in touch with the Italian families who helped him make it to Switzerland. He was a typical Litvak so didn?t talk about that period of his life. History lost!
I recall my 1st day at KDHS. Felt the pressure so decided to go for a smoke in the bottom bog after the 1st period. Robert Lawrence walked but wasn?t wearing his blazer. Asked me what I thought I was doing. I replied that if he didn?t know I was having a smoke he had better wise up!!
He returned 5 minutes later wearing his blazer and off to the Boss. Norman?s words were ?I knew I would see you soon but I didn?t think it would be this soon? Also said ?This will hurt me more than you?
Might add he had a vested interest! His family in Kimberley introduced my parents to each other!

David Garb

I actually did fulfill one of the Garb criteria but felt it had limited value. I certainly was no academic. My nightmare part of the year every year that featured them were those weeks that preceded the dreaded ?parents night? where my mother would more often than not return home in tears.

I was socially inept and could call no girls friends except for my next-door neighbours Deanne Garb and Cynthia Fogel. I had several crushes but they might keep for Ash?s new ?Romances? idea.

But I was in the 1st cricket team from Form 3 onwards and yes, this won me favour from Norm. Once I was sent to the office for something or other and instead of collecting flaps I returned with an autographed Dudley Nourse cricket bat that he gave me.
Outrageous favouritism. And when I did something good on the field he would greet me warmly in the playground the next day.

But what the analysis misses is it did not make me any happier at school. What I craved was acceptance not from the headmaster but from my peers and most didn?t give a stuff about cricket. Perhaps academic success would have given me more confidence but only Garbian criterion number 3 would have done it I am afraid and that was never going to happen.

Up until 1969 I was the only captain of the 1st IX in the history of the school not to have been made a prefect. Please believe me when I say that I did not particularly want to be a prefect but that little anomaly played on my mind for years. Why was I different?

Naomi talks of the Boss?s bullying. We all experienced that. I saw, years later, how it could have been otherwise. In the US, my daughter?s primary school principal would go down on one knee from which position he would gently address his smaller students, so that at approximately their height he would not intimidate them. In Australia, I once witnessed Peter Nixon (a former SA Progressive politician some of you might remember), while headmaster of a Jewish day High school, talking to his students in tones of respect that must have made them feel worthy as individuals- exactly the sort of sentiment you want them to carry with them throughout their lives. Instead we got ?you miserable little worm? and plenty of physical abuse ? at least the boys did. The girls, it could be argued, got worse. Their punishment was to learn lines of poetry. A strategy beautifully designed to engender a real love of that particular form of literature. What an idiot.

And yet, at least in aggregate many of you, like me, feel positive about the school experience. In my case I had the the fortune of having a few wonderful teachers who offered me the most important gift they had to give; encouragement. When Noya Shapira told me that I wrote Hebrew like an Israeli or Heather Rosenberg praised an essay I wrote, or Sue Freed liked my interpretation of a bit of poetry, I felt like maybe I could do this stuff. I also had great friends, like Errol Price, Stephen Friedman and Philip Cramer from whom I learnt a great deal, especially politically, toward the end of high-school.

What I am saying is that despite his best efforts, Norman could not ruin our experience totally. Nor could not actually influence what went on in the classroom when it was being led by one of the better teachers. A revealing moment that I remember vividly was Dr Thomas one day giving us one of her ?stories?. She was lying prone on the table and most of us were in a similar recline as she waxed on fascinatingly about vestal virgins and other Roman delights. Norman was on one of his rounds. I saw him at the moment he first took this sight in. He was about to explode but then hesitated, thought better of
it and, incredibly, moved on. That moment told me that his power was not absolute. He could bully some teachers but he valued others far too much to humiliate them publicly.