Inever could understand Ben, a chemistry teacher in a New York City high school where I taught in the late 1960s. A middle-aged, never-married man with a Ph.D. (from the City University, where higher education was then free), Ben lived in Brooklyn in a house he had inherited from his parents. He commuted to and from Manhattan by subway.

In addition to his full-time job as a teacher and chair of the chemistry department at a local high school, Ben had another full-time job as well: teaching night school — five nights a week.

Obviously, Ben had been a child during the Great Depression, but the fact that he never ate in the teachers’ cafeteria (he carried a sandwich and an apple in a re-used paper bag) and the fact that he dressed in a threadbare suit under a tattered and soiled trench coat

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