Teacher by Mark Edmundson

world—from their world and that of Mace Johnson and of football, and most of all from the world of my father—that Franklin Lears would wrest me away.

Chapter Three
    BLIND GIRL
    Paul Revere rode through Medford, Massachusetts, on his famous midnight ride (on the eighteenth of April, in ’seventy-five), immortalized in verse by my ancestor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, onetime professor of modern languages at Harvard, who, could he have visited Medford in the fall of 1969, might have been surprised at how far his descendant had fallen. Revere, seeing the two beacons burning in the Old North Church in Boston and so knowing that the British were coming by sea, took off to spread “his cry of alarm to every Middlesex village and farm,” flying through Medford (“it was twelve by the village clock, / When he crossed the bridge into Medford town”) on his way to Concord, where the Revolutionary War would begin.
    Medford wasn’t entirely without distinctions beyond Revere’s ride. The great historian Francis Parkman spent summers there as a boy, hiking, swimming, and canoeing in what was eventually to become the Middlesex Fels Reservation. (My friends and I spent many hours there drinking beer and dodging the MDC police. Depending on whom you asked, MDC meant Metropolitan District Commission or More Dumb Cops.) The great aviator Amelia Earhart lived in Medford for a while; when she came back from her transatlantic flight, the town held a parade, for which 20,000 turned out. Four were arrested for pickpocketing. It’s said, too, that Medford was the site of the nation’s first traffic light. More certain is the fact that Fannie Farmer wrote her cookbook while living in Medford and that “Jingle Bells,” the Christmas song, was written there.
    In the past, Medford had days of relative prosperity. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a port town; ships were built there, and sailed in to dock on the Mystic River, which traverses Medford Square. (The city had relatively easy access to the local trading hub, Boston, eight miles away.) The most salient commodity in the town’s commercial life then was Medford Old Rum, touted as “the best rum made in the States.” The days of Medford Rum were the days of what historians refer to as “triangular trade”: New Englanders, sometimes the descendants of the Puritans, traveled to the coast of Africa, where they exchanged simple manufactured goods for slaves. Then the slaves traversed the horrid Middle Passage to the West Indies, where they were in turn traded for the molasses that, in America, in Medford, was distilled into rum. Various citizens of Medford, some of them perhaps stern abolitionists—slavery was abolished in Medford in 1787—profited from this trade no end.
    By 1969, Medford was a sad, somnolent working-class city of about 60,000. It was full of triple-decker houses, dreary, weed-grown parks, and an unremarkable square, which to me was principally defined by Brigham’s ice cream parlor, Stag’s pool hall, and Papa Gino’s pizza joint. The majority of the population was Italian; there was an Irish constituency, along with a few Jews and, in West Medford, where I lived, a black neighborhood. Though only a few miles from Boston and Cambridge, Medford was substantially another world. Many residents of Berkeley and Madison would have known more about the cultural life of Cambridge and Harvard than we, a twenty-minute drive away, did.
    All these things Franklin Lears understood about Medford before he arrived. He had probably taken a driving tour or two through the town. He had no doubt read up on the city in one book or another, sitting at his ease in the great reading room at Harvard’s Widener Library. But still, he would not really have gotten the flavor of the place, the high school in particular. You could stack up postcard visions and yellowing prose accounts forever and not convey the sense of what Medford, at least as I tasted it then, was