David Bruce: Don’t Fear the Reaper Death, Education

Death

• According to etiquette expert Grace Fox, if you are choking, you should not leave the table. You may need someone to perform the Heimlich maneuver on you and save your life. (It’s very impolite to choke to death at a dinner party or a restaurant.)

• While traveling abroad, Mark Twain read newspapers reports that he had died, so he sent this telegram to the Associated Press: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Education

• On 26 February 1993, a terrorist bomb exploded in the underground parking garage beneath the World Trade Center in New York. Among the people on the 107th floor of the South Tower were nearly 100 children from the five kindergarten classes at Brooklyn’s Public School 95. Three classes of children made it down the elevator safely before the bomb exploded. Anna Marie Tesoriero and her class of children, as well as other passengers and a few parents, were in the elevator when the bomb exploded. The elevator stopped, and four hours later they were rescued. Still on the 107th floor was Rosemarie Russo with her class of kindergartners. Smoke began to fill the air, and Ms. Russo and her class and the other people on the 107th floor went to the roof, five floors higher, for fresh air. The children interlocked their arms and climbed the escalators, which of course were no longer running. A light snow was falling, and Ms. Russo kept the children close to a wall for shelter from the wind. Some people around them gave Ms. Russo some clothing — a coat, some gloves, and scarves — to help keep the children warm. Ms. Russo said, “One of my little girls was wearing patent leather shoes and anklets, and a man who worked in the building picked her up and put her on his shoulders so her feet wouldn’t get cold from the snow.” Ms. Russo was an experienced teacher, and she had brought a shopping bag filled with supplies, including lollipops, popcorn, pretzels, and raisins, because, she said, “You never know with kids.” She passed out the treats. She also had the children sing songs as they waited. Ms. Russo says about her students, “They were fine. They forgot about the emergency; they forgot about the cold.” Hours later, the smoke had cleared, and everyone on the roof was able to begin walking down the stairs to street level — over 100 stories. Two firefighters used their axes to break the glass door of a gift shop and take out boxes of small souvenir penlights. Each kindergartner got a penlight to help light the way down the dark stairs. Ms. Russo said that while the penlights were being passed out, “They [the kindergartners] played all kinds of games with them. They used them to play dentist and look in one another’s mouths. They looked in one another’s ears.” Then they started walking down the stairs. Once they reached the 95th floor, they stopped to eat a snack of cookies, milk, and juice at tables that emergency workers had set up. Then they started walking down the stairs again. Usually, the children counted each step on a flight of stairs — 20 stairs to each flight. Ms. Russo says about her students, “It was an adventure for them.” At the bottom of each flight, Ms. Russo, who led the way down, called to her educational assistant, Dorothy Byrd, who brought up the rear, “Everything OK, Dorothy?” She also checked with the parents who were present. In addition, firefighters and other emergency personnel often checked in with the group to see if everything was OK. The floors were numbered, and so Ms. Russo always knew how many floors were left to go down. She would tell the children things such as, “Just 67 more. Not far. Not far.” Finally, they reached the street level. The children shouted, “We made it! We made it!” Climbing down the stairs from the roof had taken two and one-half hours. Ms. Tesoriero and Ms. Russo and their classes took the same bus back to Public School 95, where the children were reunited with happy parents. One mother said, “My son can go to the Bronx Zoo or the Botanical Gardens, to concerts or shows, but nothing with an elevator.

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