Bronx Revisited : Old Schools Survive and Thrive

Unterberger the hero. Unterberger who did not go to Los Angeles.

I think of him while negotiating the sidewalks of my old Bronx neighborhood threading carefully among the drug addicts, derelicts and the quiet majority of scared but decent people. Victims and future victims of the ever present juvenile delinquents, the least of whose crimes is the graffiti that climbs over the schools like kudzu vines determined to strangle the willow trees.

But, surprisingly, they have not killed my old schools--P.S. 96, Christopher Columbus H.S. and once proud City College. Education, that great rope ladder up for the immigrant and minority poor, lives against terrible odds in this northeast corner of the Bronx, thanks to teachers and parents who refuse to give up. People like Unterberger.

Quality Education

Of course, it’s not the same as in the 40s and 50s, when I went to these schools, when the world looked to this city’s system as a model for what free, universal education could achieve. Then democracy meant first of all quality education for everyone, the poor, minorities, immigrants included, with New York showing the way.

Now public education almost everywhere is perceived more as a problem than a promise. In New York, as in many urban areas, people who can afford it turn to private schools and starve the schools left to the rest. Others, like me, pull up in station wagons depositing their children at carefully selected suburban schools eager to make sure their kids profit from the inequality in public education.

Refuse to Give Up

So I go back to the Bronx to check on what is left of an important dream and am startled out of my pessimism by P.S. 96 Principal Martin Unterberger, who is quick to point out that he is no different than many other overworked and underpaid teachers around the country, L.A. included, who have refused to give up.

Unterberger the improbable hero.

How else to describe him? And what does that make me, a coward?

What makes Unterberger so tough that he is still in the Bronx serving, while I am in Huntington Beach shopping? Didn’t we both go to “City,” City College of New York, uptown, to be precise, where we majored in social commitment before we majored in anything else? And what is social commit-ment if not staying where you are when it’s become a mess and helping your own? Nothing against Huntington Beach mind you, but it’s not my village, and try as I might, the surfers will never be my landsmen.

So why am I there while Unterberger is here in the Bronx? Did I leave out of fear? No, it was too long ago, and all I wanted was the sun. The Bronx was good but California has been great. But could I live here? Today, I think not.

Sure L.A. has problems. At night you only have to wander a few blocks from The Times building downtown to enter a no-man’s land of terror softened only by the pathos of hundreds of wasted humans sleeping in cardboard condos delineated by stolen shopping carts and garbage bags.

The Bronx has no franchise on despair.

A State of Being

What’s changed is that in the good old days--and they were not so hot--the Bronx was not as important for what it was as for what it believed. It was unique not as a state of being, but as a state of mind--the borough of unreasonable hope. That is no more.

Let me not exaggerate. On the main avenue, Allerton Avenue, there are cops and life is not, in the daytime, menacing. And three blocks up the avenue, across the IRT White Plains elevated line, where the Sicilians have dug in, life goes on somewhat like before. Gino’s bar has expanded and serves the best prawns diavalo in New York, and the Koreans who have moved into the sacred domain of fresh produce marketing do a better job of stacking, squeezing and hawking than their fabled Italian predecessors.

But there is fear and the merchants complain about constant theft and harassment. They are not alone.

Normie’s Mother

Prowling these ruins of a civilization that once fascinated me, I, too, become an object of fear when I spot Normie’s mother and she scurries away because a stranger can only be trouble. Normie’s mother, who used to chase me down the street with a jar of milk she wanted me to drink. Milk for the brain, always the brain, on this the Jewish side of Allerton Avenue.

I never knew much about the other world up Allerton on the other side of the “El” where the Italians lived and still live. Now theirs is the safe stable world and the world of the Bronx neighborhood Jews is no more.

In the old days this part of the Bronx was a sanctuary from the sweat, boredom and despair of the dead-end garment shops. A happy place, bustling with intellectual energy, ambition and the pursuit of excellence. No one expected to have their kids work at their parents’ job. All was possible through the magic of learning--and the palaces of magic were the schools. Now they are often, at best, temporary sanctuaries from child abuse, drunkenness, street gangs and the other ingredients of a pervasive fear.

Confront Vandals

The question of fear is not irrelevant to the life of a Bronx principal. Imagine this demure man, who is shorter than some of the sixth graders walking past him in the school’s still institutional green halls, who will go outside to confront the vandals that appear to be twice his size. He will play Edward G. Robinson (who, I can’t resist noting, also went to City) and stare down or call the cops, whatever works to protect his little garden of learning.

Unterberger wants his school to be a garden: “Many of our children come from depressed areas, the south Bronx, Harlem and when they first come here they are overwhelmed, they have never seen such a beautiful tranquil place.” Unterberger cannot use the word “children” without implying treasure the way others might speak of their stocks or jewelry.

And the treasure is secured, at least for the hours of the day that he controls. The heavyset female guard at the front door comes around quickly from her desk to give the too-energetic visitor something of a flying tackle until he produces a visitor’s permission slip. In the principal’s office there is the button to summon the police who seem to circle Bronx schools with some regularity.

Kids File In

Unterberger’s car, parked a block from the school, was stolen one day this past winter. But whatever the chaos outside, every morning at a quarter of an hour before the first class the leather covered doors of the old auditorium are opened and kids file in to collect themselves and remember where they are. In a school.

Unterberger got the district to remodel the auditorium but preserved the old chandeliers and the leather trim on the doors. “Imagine, they wanted to put plastic doors but these are beautiful. So I held out.” One senses that the leather doors are a mark of excellence and this principal insists that kids in the Bronx have the right to know excellence. Not just to get by. Not just to be parked here.

The classrooms are quiet and purposeful, hallway traffic bustles but is orderly and the taxed resources of a tiny cafeteria serving shifts of hungry youngsters prove adequate to provide what is for many their best meal of the day. Despite enormous differences of language and prior education, most of the kids seem to come through.

‘Can’t Write English’

Unterberger, ever prowling the halls, points to some older youngsters, 10- and 11-year-old recent immigrants from Jamaica: “No schooling at all; they can speak but can’t write English.” And a knot of Cambodians who can do neither: “For some reason they are attracted to this neighborhood,” Unterberger says with a trace of pride.

As to their lack of skills? So what? There are solutions and Unterberger begins to tick off the details of the phonics program, the work of the two special reading teachers the district has assigned and the poetry written by one kid a few years after entering as a functional illiterate.

We thought we had a melting pot with our mostly Jewish and Italian base and a few Puerto Rican and blacks thrown in for some additional spice. But it was nothing like this.

20% of Enrollment

The Jews and Italians together now make up less than 20% of enrollment, whereas only 10 years ago they numbered more than 90%, mostly Jewish. Their place has been taken by blacks, Puerto Ricans, Yugoslavs, Cubans, Vietnamese, Afghans, and representatives from virtually every South American and Caribbean country. At least 10 languages are used in informal cafeteria conversation along with English.

This crazy choir including Cambodians, Iranians and Ukrainians is welded together by a variety of techniques. While stressing that P.S. 96 is a “traditional school with great emphasis on academic skills and disciplines,” Unterberger adds that “we try to build in certain values: concern for fellow students and other people beside themselves. We try to tell them what we expect when they come in from other outlying school districts and from the Caribbean and think they can do what they want. They soon find they can’t. We have standards and they fall in line rather nicely because we are interested in them.” (It is not unusual in the Bronx to refer to the Caribbean as an outlying school district.)

There is discipline. Children are suspended for various infractions and Unterberger sets an example wandering the halls to calm the wilder outbursts with his mere presence which, while genial on the edges, can also be stern. But most of all he takes pride in tales of peer group pressure, as when a kid taps the shoulder of a newcomer who is pulling a crayon along the wall and says, “We don’t do that here.”

‘Anything That Works’

But there is also experimentation: “We experiment all the time with new approaches, linguistic, phonetic, anything that works with the children. We have to try new things all the time to meet the needs of these children who come in with all these new needs. I’m hopeful that we find solutions; this is not a school that’s stagnant.”

One solution that Unterberger has found is music. When he arrived at the school he hung up a picture of Richard Rodgers and renamed the school and its auditorium after the musical half of the Rodgers and Hammerstein team. The hand bell choir is the only one in the city. There is the school symphony orchestra which instructs in almost the full range of classical instruments. And to top it all there is the annual musically driven theatrical production that is taken very seriously. This year it was Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” with a cast like a UNICEF poster come alive.

Music Is ‘Wonderful’

Why music? Unterberger looked annoyed with a question only an obvious Philistine would pose. It was particularly surprising coming, as it did, from a P.S. 96 graduate. At first he said simply that music is “wonderful.” But then, perhaps sensing that in a time of budgetary restraints something more than wonderful is required, he ventured his own theory of music as an aid to reading:

“Music, it’s a form of decoding. To really learn to read music one has to learn to decode, and what is reading if not a form of decoding?”

And Unterberger has test scores to prove that his methods work. Seventy-five percent of his students read on or above grade level on the last New York statewide reading tests. Not bad considering that a significant minority of them, Unterberger estimates 20%, knew little or no English when they first showed up.

Lurid Graffiti

He is a realist about what befalls many of these kids each day after school and after they graduate. The lurid graffiti on the outer walls which frame the schoolyard provide a grim reminder of the chaotic streets these kids return to when the last bell of the day rings. One corner of the school yard was intended for a garden but that project had to be abandoned because neighborhood derelicts turned it into a hobo camp sleeping and defecating there at night.

After graduation from P.S. 96 it quickly gets rougher. The folklore among some older residents in the streets is that families with children pack up and move out when their eldest kid passes the sixth grade. Some choose parochial schools and seem reassured.

Others who must or want to use the public schools seem to have mixed feelings about the high school. It was named after Christopher Columbus because, as the surely inaccurate legend of my childhood had it, the Mafia wouldn’t allow anything but an Italian name. The word Mafia, then as now, was used loosely to mean anyone who had a private house and wasn’t Jewish or Irish.

Strong Ties

Whereas P.S. 96 used to be in a solidly Jewish area, Columbus, only 10 blocks away, seemed as distant as Palermo, Sicily, a town that seemed to come up more often in cafeteria conversation than did Washington, D.C. We never talked about Vilna or those other funny places in Eastern Europe that our parents were determined to forget, but the Italian kids had strong ties that were often reinforced by new arrivals from the old country and the vacations they took there. And still take.

The whites who are Jewish, and who in my day, provided 50% of the student body, have left and those who remain, most of them recent immigrants from Russia, now make up only about 3% or 4% of the Columbus population. Jews do remain a majority of the teaching staff, although most commute from New Jersey or Upstate New York to their jobs.

It is the Italians from the rows of private homes built and owned primarily by contractors, construction workers, garbage collectors and small merchants who have stayed rooted. But even their closely guarded world has been invaded. Whereas they also once provided 50% of the high school students, it has now dwindled to 12%. Some grumble that St. Lucy’s Catholic Church now features Spanish masses and its famous grotto, which struck me as a bit medieval back in the good old days when some of the more pugnacious Italian kids insisted rather pointedly that the Jews had killed Christ, is now locked up to prevent vandalism.

There are still Italian toughs around--the fabled Arthur Avenue Italians have replaced the once legendary Guinea Dukes as arbiters of the faith--and their ranks are augmented by even tougher Albanians and Yugoslavs who seem to bear particular animosity toward blacks. Not that all Italians and Albanians are so inclined, but the small minority that is cast quite a shadow in the school. For that reason, a number of teachers interviewed at Columbus scoffed at the idea of white flight from black violence.

Columbus does have a large black and Puerto Rican population but, again contrary to white folklore, it is mostly from the neighborhood, the logical result of huge public housing projects planted in the midst of the Italian haven over the years.

I Call Her Mrs.

But Mrs. Rosa, the Columbus principal, wouldn’t like this kind of talk. She denies that there were Italian gangs in the old days or that there is ethnic and racial hostility now. I have to call her Mrs. Rosa, just like it’s Mr. Unterberger, because I will go to my grave unable to call the principals of my old schools by their first names even though they have invited me to.

Saying anything negative about Columbus would cross Grace Rosa, who has put in long days to turn a floundering school into a showcase of Bronx education. And it is. Crime is lower than at surrounding schools, test scores are better.

This is largely due to Mrs. Rosa, who fought to get this job against what she perceived as prejudice against a woman and an Italian-American. She had a mission to restore Columbus to what she still perceives as its days of glory, when she was a student there in the late 40s.

Crucial Commitment

“When I returned here seven years ago I can’t tell you how many 17-year-olds we had wandering around the halls with less than 10 credits toward graduation. We started a remedial program and another program to help kids pass the graduate equivalency exam.” Her personal commitment was crucial and now, having waged the good fight, she will retire this summer, at the age of 55 after 32 years of teaching. She will live in Upstate New York, a bit removed from the battle.

Columbus’ success is relative. Last year it made the list of one of the worst schools in New York state, as did almost all of the New York City schools. Such is the state of public education at the high school level in a city that once set the national standard for free education.

Most of the other schools in the city failed to meet statewide standards in math, reading, writing and drop-out rates. Mrs. Rosa is quick to point out that Columbus flunked on only one count, its 10% drop out rate. But even there she can claim improvement since the rate was a whopping 23% when she first took over.

Illustrious Graduate

As vivacious as Anne Bancroft--nee Anna Marie Louise Italiano--the school’s most illustrious graduate who preceded her by a year, Mrs. Rosa throws off sparks as she lays low Columbus’ detractors. “The whole city had an increase of just one regents scholar last year, while we went up 63% from 27 to 44, and 79% of our kids now go on to college. Let me get the list here, Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, and a place out there where you are, Irvine something.”

Mrs. Rosa is proud of the fact that seven of the 44 recent regents scholars--New York’s statewide scholarship program to subsidize qualified graduates--were black and another seven Puerto Rican, which is nonetheless an underrepresentation given that the two groups account for 50% of the student body. Like Unterberger, she thrills to the ethnic diversity of the school. “You name it, we got it,” she said, “it’s like the United Nations.”

Focus of Terror

But there isn’t much ethnic mixing in the cafeteria, which seems modeled on the Balkans at the turn of the century, and which is the focus of terror and opportunity depending upon one’s strength and willingness to employ it as well as the restraining efforts of the lunchroom teacher guards.

“It’s not nice down here,” Myrna Laracuente, dean of the cafeteria noted with some understatement as two young ladies shot by without passes pausing only to observe that the dean was in their estimation a “bitch.”

“At least I understand their language, much of the time these kids can only make themselves understood in a language I don’t recognize,” Laracuente, a jovial woman in her 40s observed. And as if to punctuate her point, a Cambodian student in command of a handful of English words appeared to translate for his cousin, who knew none. They were not hostile, merely totally perplexed as to where they were supposed to be at that given time. She didn’t know and they melted quietly into an onrushing mass of students eager to eat or carry on food fights in the next cafeteria period.

Miserable Salaries

In this, the world’s most powerful and richest city, the schools that are expected to solve the most intractable of social problems are starved for resources. In the case of Columbus there is money to support only the barest athletic program, which means a bit of soccer and no football, which might relieve some of the tension. The cafeteria is pitifully small, the food starchy and uninteresting and the schoolyard rocky and unkempt. Teachers salaries have gone up a bit in recent years but they are still miserable by comparison to the city’s cost of living. Downtown, where I retreated at night, the yuppies in advertising and on Wall Street chortle happily about loving the Big Apple, while here, in one of the best schools, despite the best efforts of a highly motivated principal and staff, a teacher could speak of this “human garbage pit.”

That exaggerates. But what does it say about the expectations for the young from so many nations who have been entrusted to this school? A resident New York City police officer assisted by eight security officers from the Board of Education have made Columbus secure, but what else is it?

Sense Excitement

What has been lost in the 35 years since my class graduated? It can be summarized as a vanished expectation of excellence. Perhaps I remember incorrectly or rely too much on the experience of my crowd of friends, but I can still sense that excitement, walking out of the Loewe’s Paradise movie house on the Grand Concourse, on graduation day, that I and most of my classmates could learn to do and be anything no matter how difficult or exalted. We were in awe of no elite.

We were products of a public education milieu that gave us the confidence to feel the equal of graduates of any private, parochial or public school in the land. The Paradise is now closed, the Grand Concourse is a slum, and while some successful graduates from Columbus may feel that way, most have been educated to be graceful losers. Excellence in education for the masses had been at the core of the democratic dream, and excellence, even in a good school in the Bronx, seems to have gone under in the wake of budgetary cuts and severe urban decay.

Applies to Colleges

And what’s true for the high schools applies sadly enough to that once great network of free municipal colleges that at one time provided a fantastic education for hundreds of thousands of the best of the New York’s high school graduates, some of whom became the next generation of school teachers. This process still goes on, most of the teachers are still trained at one of the city colleges but it can no longer be assumed that the best students go there or that the education is any longer fantastic.

To understand what went before, consider the sight in my neighborhood, when two months after graduating from Columbus we turn up one fall morning to hitchhike across Bronx Park to get the subway to go to a college in Harlem brimming with the excitement that this college is our first choice. A few of my classmates had gone off on scholarships to some Ivy League school, but this was a time before there were many scholarships for kids from the Bronx, particularly Jewish kids. It didn’t matter. CCNY was the secular yeshiva and anything the goyim had was presumed intellectually, if not socially, inferior--and intellectual was what we cared about.

More Nobel Winners

CCNY, the flagship of the municipal colleges, founded in 1847, has graduated more Nobel Prize winners than any other undergraduate public institution in the country. And it was free, which made us free. Books were once even provided without charge to be returned. But more important you could live at home, work a part-time job, take the subway and learn without draining the family resources.

Arriving at City for the first time and seeing those beautiful buildings built from the black granite of Manhattan island, I felt that I had entered the grandest palace of learning. The feeling has never left me or hardly anyone else that I have ever met who went there. People remember The Great Hall where Clarence Darrow, Felix Frankfurter, Bertrand Russell and Norman Thomas had held forth.

They remember the City College cafeteria with its dozen or so alcoves, each one populated by a different ideological or artistic tendency from Trotskyist to Ayn Rand libertarians, to Charlie Mingus jazz fanatics. And the debates in class: Marxist student Larry Gorkin standing in Stanley Page’s Russian history class armed with three feet of citations to refute the previous day’s lecture, while Herb Rommerstein of the Young Americans for Freedom waited his turn to refute Gorkin.

Open Enrollment

It’s not quite like that now. Some blame open enrollment which they claim lowered the once high standards for admission. Others note the deterioration of Harlem, which they claim frightened whites away.

This time going back to City after a stopover at Columbus, the school’s music teacher, also an alumnus, warned me not to drive there because my car would be stolen. She ruled out the train as a place of random but inevitable violence. Cab drivers won’t go there. And of course hitchhiking is suicidal.

I took a chance on parking my Hertz rental and lost not a hubcap. But I was shocked at what time, and urban blight had wrought. Before City went, Harlem went. Harlem was once a center of culture that enveloped City and now it is a dangerous ruin. The capital of Negro America--filled with institutes, churches, bookstores, ideologies, orators, musicians, and historians--had become a fringe outpost of black America filled with drug addicts. Yes, there are churches and families and dreamers left in Harlem but they are most often reduced to flotsam in a rollicking tide of druggie despair and stupidity that wells up at each street corner in brief euphoric highs that are then slept off in urine-filled hallways.

In the Top Half

Into this came the “specter” of open enrollment. Anyone could go to the City University who had graduated in the top half of a New York high school class or maintained an 80% average.

Open enrollment, as an educational experiment, remains interesting and controversial but it hardly proved the disaster claimed by its detractors. Quality education goes on at City and in some ways better than ever if the standard is one of serving the desperate need of the community for learning.

To begin with, the assumption by some critics that blacks seized City and destroyed its standards in order to grant worthless degrees is wrong on all counts. Statistics show that the initial benefit from open enrollment didn’t go primarily to blacks or Puerto Ricans but rather to ethnic whites and newer immigrants who previously had not been able to measure up to the entrance requirements.

Take Six Years

Nor are the degrees phony. Proof of serious standards is offered by the unusually high attrition rate at City and the fact that those who do graduate take an average of six years to accomplish that feat. Not normal for a private clubby school elsewhere, but just about what one would expect from a working-class subway college whose students tend to be older and self-supporting.

What was wrong with open enrollment at first, most observers agree, is that inadequate preparation and resources were made available for screening, redirecting, remedial educating and orienting of a vastly expanded and differentiated student body. The experiment was interesting but the experimenters, those politicians who voted for such a monumental change, were not seriously committed. As with so much of the “social engineering” of the 60s, open enrollment was a ploy rather than a plan.

To judge City, one has to first establish the standard, and I happen to cherish the one set out by Horace Webster the colleges’ first president who in 1849 said, “The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people--the children of the whole people--can be educated; and whether an institution of learning of the highest grade can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.” Judged by that standard, CCNY today is an enormous success.

Most of “the people” in New York City are black, Puerto Rican and immigrants and those are the people now educated by this college. Three out of four of City’s students are nonwhite, which breaks down into 33% black, 25% Latino and 17% Asian. City can also stand as the peoples’ U.N. with half of its students having been born in more than 80 different countries.

85% Need Aid

And, like most people, they work. Seventy percent have a job, and 30% work more than 20 hours a week. Despite this commitment to the work ethic, 85% of the student body still requires financial aid of some kind.

One positive result of open enrollment, which began in 1970, is that City is now fifth in the country in producing black engineers, coming right after schools that had been historically black colleges. The engineering program at City is highly respected and is one of the largest suppliers of engineers to AT&T;, which has reciprocated by making some grants to the college. City is also among the dozen leading schools in the country for placing minority students in medical school.

City is different from when I attended it, as it should be. With each new wave of immigrants the college changed dramatically and that was its strength, although few alumni seem to thrill to it. The children of German and Irish immigrants were the first to benefit and apparently enjoyed the stuffy atmosphere imposed by the West Point graduates who were the school’s first two presidents. Many of the first graduates bemoaned the opening to the new wave of Jewish immigrants who soon overwhelmed the school with their numbers and culture. Anti-Semitic resistance saw to it that Jews had a hard time getting on the faculty as illustrated by the fact that no Jew was hired in the City College mathematics department until the mid 1930s.

Tension Is Inevitable

Now there are as few Jews as there were blacks when I was there and blacks complain about racial discrimination in faculty hiring. The tension is inevitable. This is a municipal college paid for by the sweat of taxpayers who want the place to work for them. If it can do that and keep high standards, then it succeeds. If it only does one, it fails. It’s too early to tell.

But there is a spirit at City that makes me optimistic. The same spirit I found at Unterberger’s P.S 96 and for all of its problems, at Mrs. Rosa’s Columbus H.S. The spirit is not about athletics or social life, which are barely present. It is about the secular American dream. There is this naive insistence that being touched by learning leads to salvation in this world. Naive because obviously there are many reasons to think that learning will not lift one out of the morass of the Bronx or Harlem. Naive because who believes in book learning anymore or that ideas matter?

Yet there it is. Up at City people still read and argue. They may do this often in languages and accents that I find impenetrable, but what does that matter?

The Great Hall

Before departing I went up to pay my respects to The Great Hall in Shepard Hall that I had entered so reverently more than three decades ago. A bit worn, but still beautiful and I thought now as then how wonderful it was that somehow such a fantastic place had been made available to people who are not of privilege.

Albert Einstein lectured in Shepard Hall, giving his first series of lectures in the United States at City College in 1921. Einstein, who was judged not very smart as a youngster, who always looked and talked funny, a grateful immigrant who nonetheless remained a rebel and a critic even of those who took him in.

On my last visit one of the old timers who is still on the staff was taking me around while bemoaning that “it’s just not the same as when we went here.” She had been in a sorority. I didn’t know they had them.

Famous Alcoves

We went into a Quonset hut of temporary offices plunked down insultingly next to the grand Gothic Shepard Hall, home of The Great Hall and the famous alcoves of the cafeteria. True the alcoves of dissent that I lived in are no more. True there are guards all over the place, passes are required, thefts occur, and violence, too.

But there in the Quonset hut we encountered the nests of thinkers and agitators from the Chess Club to the Anti-Apartheid Coalition, from the Black Engineering Society to the Caribbean Students Assn. On the wall there was a sign that read “Free Nelson Mandela.” My old alum guide asked, “Who is Nelson Mandela?” Suddenly it was clear. We had not gone to the same college back in the good old days and we were not looking at the same one now. I politely excused myself from the tour and picked a Quonset office at random to flop down in. The next thing I knew I was being organized to do good, just as I might have been some 30 years before.

Seated in front of me was one Diana Kilos, a pretty, energetic, supersmart, Nisei senior who heads up the Ralph Nader-spawned public interest group on campus. I had signed up for four projects ranging from lower subway fares and tuition to ending apartheid in South Africa before I remembered that my student activist days are over. City lives.

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this article.