Cape May Diaries
23- Meeting on Decatur Street
We met them unexpectedly on Decatur Street on the long Columbus Day weekend, her blazing blonde hair, stunning even among the vivid colors of the Victorian cottages. Her sharp‑featured face had lost most of the pained expression I'd seen during most of our previous encounters in Glen Ridge.
Although people told me Maureen Persi was a vibrant and warm person, not until seeing her walking the streets of Cape May did I believe it.
When she saw me, she beamed even brighter, and waved both hands.
As a reporter, I wasn’t always comfortable meeting people from my news beat, especially people like Persi, whose personal charms guaranteed a level of closeness that defied my ability to remain objective.
Since I had spent much of the previous year reporting on the worst year of her life ‑ helping to bring to light what might have been a tragedy ‑ she wanted to be friends, and greeted me as if we already were.
"We came here to get away," she said, her sharp red nails pinching my fingers slightly as she shook my hand. "You understand."
Her husband ‑ I never did catch his name ‑ seemed as glad to see me as she was, as both credited me for saving Persi's career.
Persi's was one of those rags to riches stories that seem more believable in the pages of pocket paperbacks than in flesh in blood. In 1970, she cut her teeth as a teacher in the Paterson school district, struggling to overcome the educational as well as social disabilities many of her students faced. And as if following the scripts to movies like "To Sir with Love" or "Up the Down staircase," she succeeded in winning the hearts and respect of her students and the admiration of a tough and political administration.
While I grew up on the streets of Paterson, I didn't meet her until I started reporting in Glen Ridge, where she had reached the supposed nirvana of an educational career, serving as elementary school principal in one of the best school districts in the state.
Her eyes shone with a look I had seen previously in the eyes of Vietnam Veterans during my brief tour in the United States Army in 1969. While she did not have the obvious wounds the grunts had ‑ not jungle rot on their feet, no missing arms and legs from contact with booby traps ‑ she wore the expression of someone who had survived combat. This did not come from her experiences in Paterson, but in that tiny oasis of education opportunity: Glen Ridge.
Parents loved her ‑ despite the fact that unlike other teachers in the Glen Ridge system, she refused to coddle the rich kids.
"She is a very demanding person," one teacher said. "But she will never ask more of you than she is willing to give of herself."
Yet she didn't allow the usual playground politics to hurt her students, and when a school bully began to pick on one boy, she protected him. When Persi found a student needed a special program, she pursued it. Such as the time when she discovered one girl had a hearing problem, and Persi made a deal with the manufacturer to test a special device for a year. When lice struck students in the posh school district, Persi led the cleanup, confronting the army of outraged parents ‑ some of whom seemed to blame Persi for the problem.
"The whole time Persi maintained her cool, standing there while a tornado hit her. She wasn't ruffled. We now know she handled the situation right," Robin Garmend, one of those parents told me later.
Her popularity had made her the target of a politically ambitious superintendent of schools, who saw Persi as a threat.
In a year long battle with Persi and parents, the superintendent manufactured excuses by which she would justify Persi's firing claiming Persi was not a team player could not handle parents, paperwork or technology. In a trial like atmosphere, parents and teachers testified on Persi's behalf, hundreds of voices protesting what seemed like an inevitable conviction. This was not Berkeley, California, 1965, but Glen Ridge, NJ, 1998, yet each person seemed as frustrated with the school board as Mario Salvo had been with his university, some even going as far as to blame the board for being "cogs in a machine" destined to destroy a wonderful administrator's career.
Although Persi would later give me credit for helping to bring down the superintendent through a series of award‑winning stories, I had no such motivation. I simply reported on the fact that the superintendent had apparently lied about her own qualifications. Yet the investigation showed by the superintendent feared the principal: Persi was more qualified to be superintendent than the superintendent was.
The board ruled in Persi's favor just before the new school year was set to start. So she had no opportunity to rest from her battles.
"We just needed to get away," she told me. "We couldn't think of a better place than this."
Even as the crowds moved around us on the narrow sidewalk, Persi seemed a different person from the persecuted principal I had seen during the school board hearings. She no longer wore the pink dress or the single strand of pearls around her neck. She did not grip her red‑rimmed reading glasses, nor bite her lower lip. Yet she still looked immeasurably sad, as if the standing ovation after the vote could not make up for the hell she had walked through.
Few people understood as well as I did her depth of pain, and for this she was extremely grateful, and she wanted to be our friend. She didn't seem to understand my reporters need for distance. Later, she rushed into the lobby of our motel to give me a gift. It was a T‑shirt with a picture of Lou Costello on it. A tribute to our mutual roots in Paterson and our brief encounter on the streets of Cape May, where we both came to lick our wounds.