Remembering the Masters School

By Raanan Geberer

One rarely thinks of attending a school for disturbed children as being a golden time in one’s life. And yet, that was the case for the three years I attended the Masters Children’s Center, described as a “therapeutic nursery school” for autistic children, although it actually continued through the lower grades of elementary school.

When I was four and a half, my “regular” nursery school teachers began to notice that I was acting withdrawn and wasn’t interacting with the other children. The teachers recommended to my parents that I be sent to a “special” nursery that was being organized at Jacobi Hospital, right there in the Bronx. In the fall, my mother started to take me there every day. The school was run by old-school Viennese psychoanalysts who had come to the U.S. just before World War II, and they soon diagnosed me as having “infantile autistic psychosis.” None of these things meant anything to me at that age, of course. What did is that I enjoyed the school. I began to read and write, and wrote down some of my thoughts, with stick figure-like drawings and the assistance of my mother, in a notebook that I still have to this day.

The next year, the school moved down to an old brownstone in Greenwich Village, and that’s where I really began to thrive. There were three floors – one for kids like myself, one for non-autistic siblings (such as my brother), and a third for kids who were more seriously, violently disturbed. My group was very small–there were about six or seven.

Although my memory is dim, we spent most of the day playing. The teacher, Mrs. DelFiore, was friendly and helped me write and draw stories starring  my imaginary characters (many of which were based on the stuffed toys and dolls at the school). There was a train set made of wooden blocks and a ‘train’ with wooden wheels that I played with endlessly. I loved constantly devising new layouts for the train, then showing them to my friends. .

One day, I made a tunnel for the train to go through. Ronnie, one of my fellow students, pointed inside the tunnel and said the immortal words: “there’s eh-eh in there!” “Eh-eh” was her word for feces. To this day, the phrase is a running joke between me and my wife.

Sometimes, we had group play. We would line up, Mrs. DelFiore would play records of children’s songs like “A Hunting We Will Go” and “Pony Boy,” and we’d run in place to the music. Other times, we’d go in the back yard and go on the swings and the slide. This was called “Jungle Gym”

Actual learning was done individually. Mrs. DelFiore or the other teacher would call me or one of the other students over to the table and give a lesson in reading or math. The reading sessions were straight out of “Dick and Jane,” but they helped me with my penmanship, and I learned how to write in “big” and “small” letters rather than in my previous all-caps style.

 I also saw a psychiatrist there, but I didn’t know it – the teachers called him a “play doctor.” Interestingly, the last time I looked him up, this particular “play doctor” was still practicing, although he must be in his early nineties now.

After three years at both Jacobi and Masters, it was decreed that I attend a “regular” school, or public school. The school’s supervisor, one of the old-time Viennese psychoanalysts, wrote a note intended for the principal of the school, explaining that while I had been extremely withdrawn when I came to Masters, now I not only played with the other children but often invented stories and games and led them in activities.

My first semester in the public school, I continued to be a leader – it just came naturally-- and was elected president of the class. Sometime during the Christmas vacation, my mother took me back to Masters for a visit. I noticed one of the kids, Peter, playing with a toy racing car. “What happened to the train?” I asked. “You’re not here, so we don’t play with trains anymore!” he answered. I felt a little betrayed!

That spring, a tragic incident happened that left me in a state of shock. My mother had a nervous breakdown and was taken to the psychiatric wing of Jacobi Hospital, where she stayed for six weeks Little by little, I became withdrawn and fearful again. Within a year, I went from being one of the most popular kids in the class to being one of the least popular. Clearly, the Freudian psychonalytic methods espoused by Masters (and probably by most mental health professionals in those days) didn’t inadequately prepare kids like myself for the real world, with its trials and tribulations. I continued to see a psychiatrist after school, but he didn’t help me either. It wasn’t until I was older and sought out more unorthodox methods of therapy, like bioenergetics and primal therapy, that I began to make some progress.

My mother kept up with Beatrice, Ronnie’s mother. Ronnie apparently wasn’t able to handle either the work world or the school world, and eventually went into a group home. At my mother’s funeral in the 1980s, one of the other mothers from Master’s showed up and told me that her son, Jim, now worked for the Sanitation Department.

The Masters School is no longer there, and the brownstone is now a private residence. The school didn’t completely succeed in its mission, at least not where I was concerned. But while I was there, it provided me with a wonderful time.