NOTE: Bob Burke has lived in Newton Highlands for most of his life. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, as told to Highlands resident and professional memoirist, Andrew Szanton.
I played a lot of sports as a teenager. Pickup games after school, often on the Aqueduct. I played with Jimmy Smith, a quiet kid who lived on Waldorf Street in back of Eliot Station.
I went to the Hyde School and to Weeks Junior High with Jimmy. My friend Johnny Seery was a terrific athlete. Touch football, baseball — any sport he tried. There was Bob and John Chesbro, brothers who lived on Carver Street, close to the Green Line tracks. With these boys and others, we’d have tag football games. Two-hand touch.
At that time, the 1950’s, Waban was the Jewish area, and the Highlands was Christian. About 85% of the people over there on Stanley Road were Jewish. They played by themselves and we played by ourselves.
At that time, there was no fence over the railroad tracks, and you could walk everywhere.
It would have been easy enough for the Jews and the Christians to meet and play touch football — we just had never done it. The “fence” was in our minds, the sense that Jews and Christians were different and should stay away from each other. We were a stone’s throw away from each other — but we didn’t know each other.
We never reached out to the Jewish kids — and they never reached out to us. Why would they, when they didn’t know what kind of reception they’d get?
I was in a unique position, though. I happened to be the only non-Jewish kid who was active on the Debating Team at Newton High. On that team was a Jewish boy named Harris Funkenstein. Harris was so intelligent — almost a genius, but very down-to-earth and friendly also. Curious to learn about anything he didn’t know.
In time, Harris got a National Merit Scholarship, went off to Princeton and graduated summa cum laude. Then he got a Rhodes Scholarship and was accepted at Harvard Medical School. He ended up coordinating some important research on Alzheimer’s Disease and various childhood disabilities. And you could see all this coming from the way Harris was as a teenager: so smart, hard-working and a caring person. None of his success surprised anyone in Newton.
Harris lived in a ranch-style home on Stanley Road. I thought of how much I liked Harris and one day in 10th or 11th grade, about 1954, he and I got to talking about getting up a touch football game with all the Christian and Jewish kids. We chewed on that for a while. I found that one or two of my Christian friends didn’t want to do it, but most of us did.
As for the Jewish kids, most wanted to have this game. I think maybe one of them was forbidden by his family to play with us, but the other families were fine with it.
It would have defeated the purpose to have the game be the Jews against the Christians, so we split up the players so there were both Jews and Christians on each team.
And it was fun. There were no problems between the two religious groups — it was just a football game. As the game went along, you could see these boys who’d never spoken to each other before beginning to bond because they were on the same team.
We played two or three more of those games, and all of them were fun. And after that, I heard from several Jewish boys that their parents had said “Bob Burke’s okay.” That was pretty high praise from a Jewish parent at that time. They’d had problems with some of the Irish, and I couldn’t blame them for being apprehensive about this tall, rugged Irish-American kid who was asking to play football with their son.
I told myself, “Bob, they don’t know you. When they get to know you, they’ll let down their guard.”
That’s what always ends bigotry — when people get to know each other.
