I saw John Hellemann on the Chris Matthews Show this morning make reference to covering a story about pedophilia at the American Boy Choir School in Princeton, New Jersey. I hadn’t heard anything about it, so I went and found Helleman’s article, which he wrote in 2006. Let me tell you something. I now have a major case of The Creeps. While this rampant sexual abuse was taking place in the 1970’s, I was going to school less than a half mile up the road at Johnson Park Elementary School. We had our own problem.
I can’t find anything about it on the internet, but when I was in 4th grade we had a janitor named Eddie who was very cool and who all the kids loved. We were sad when he was moved to Riverside Elementary School on the other side of town. Over at Riverside he was allowed to run an afterschool basketball program. And he spent the next seven or eight years using that program to molest kids. When I was in middle school, I went with a friend who lived nearby to play basketball with Eddie at Riverside a couple of times. When his crimes came to light several years later, I felt truly lucky to not have become a victim.
The scariest thing I read in the article about the Boychoir School was this:
In Lessig’s final year, he found himself gripped by “an insane depression,” he says, over “the insanity of what was happening.” In his closet he’d found a hatch in the ceiling that led to a crawl space above. He climbed up there and crouched alone for hours in the dark.
One evening near the end of Lessig’s final year at the school, he went with Hanson for a walk around the grounds. As darkness descended on Albemarle, Lessig finally, tentatively, gave voice to his gathering misgivings about Hanson’s behavior.
“Is this really right? Should you really be doing this?” Lessig asked.
“You have to understand,” Hanson replied, “this is essential to producing a great boychoir.” By sexualizing the students, he explained, he was transforming them from innocents into more complicated creatures, enabling them to render choral music in all its sublime passion. “It’s what all great boychoirs do,” Hanson said.
Back in the 1970’s, I only rarely came into contact with the kids from the Boychoir. But, whenever I did, I got an uneasy feeling. Now that I know that at least 30% of them were being routinely raped by the choir director, I wonder about that feeling I had as a little boy.
