Vicki (Kurzman) Ryder

Class of 1957

Family Secrets

In 1948, I was six years old and in 1st grade at PS 102 in Queens... a good little girl who knew how to keep the family secrets until one day when the teacher said, "Now we're going to go around the room and you're each going to tell me who your parents are voting for." When it was my turn, I obediently stood up, as we were trained to do, and said proudly "Henry Wallace." 

I'll never forget the look on my teacher's face. She looked at me from above her bifocals and said, with great scorn, "YOU, Vicki?! I NEVER would have expected that of YOU!" I guess it never dawned on her that this sweet little girl of six could be a subversive threat to the American way of life.

Of course, I went home and told my parents, who were in the principal's office the next day demanding that no child ever again be subjected to that kind of intimidation and violation of privacy. I wasn't wise enough, at the age of six, to plead the 5th, which is what my father did four years later when he was called before the Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee and subsequently blacklisted. 

Family secrets were a way of life for us in the ’50s. Family secrets meant having to run through the house to make sure that the most recent copy of The Daily Worker – which arrived by mail in a brown paper wrapper – wasn’t sitting out in plain sight. Family secrets meant that when we had visitors, they were introduced to my brother and me only by their first names so that when the FBI stopped us on the street to ask who those people were they had observed coming and going from our house, we couldn’t be of much help to them when they badgered us for information. 

Our family secrets came to an end in 1952 when my father’s firing from his teaching position with the NYC School District made front-page headlines in the local newspaper. He wasn’t fired for being a member of the Party – that was still legal then (not that it mattered). The charges were ‘insubordination’ and ‘conduct unbecoming a teacher’ for refusing to cooperate with their inquisition. 

The day the news broke, I remember crying inconsolably to my cat that “from now on, you’ll be the only friend I’ll ever have.”  It was then that my folks decided to send us to summer camp to show us that we were not alone. We went to Wyandot that summer and, when that camp closed due to the polio epidemic, ended up in Kinderland in the summers of 1953 and ’54. 

The rest, as they say, is history. My gratitude for having had Kinderland as my ‘safe place’ remains strong, and I treasure the time I spent there and the friends that I made. For me, it was a place where secrets finally could be told – a true tsoyberland.