Brooklyn Technical High School was about order, discipline and study. Arnie was giving engineering a close look and made that his major. From 8:30 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon, 6,000 boys rotated from math, to shop, to industrial science and chemistry. Science and math took up the majority of the lectures and labs and were grounded in preparing students for college. Arnie loved it. He excelled at his studies and was praised for his work. He understood how guys thought and acted and enjoyed the macho, no nonsense atmosphere.
He joined the school’s service squad, which were like elite hall monitors. They were given badges for their duties and were generally well respected. It was no small task to keep 6,000 boys moving from class to class through long hot or cold days in New York City and make sure they all arrived and left school safely. The service squad kept the boys in line in the morning, as they waited to enter school and get on the freight elevators that would take a hundred at a time to various floors. The line stretched all the way out to Fort Green Place, the street in front of the school and down the sidewalk. And there were the lunch periods – three in a row with 2,000 students per period. To say Arnie and the service squad had their hands full, on top of their own studies and responsibilities, is an understatement.
When he joined the service squad he had only just turned fifteen. It was his first taste of authority and in spite of the immense challenges it provided or because of it, he felt like he had found his niche, his place, a reason to be proud of who he was and what he did. It wasn’t long until he was promoted to lieutenant and had his first command. Even though it was as a civilian and as part of the service squad in school, it gave him the experience he wanted and a peek into the possibilities for his future.
His time at Brooklyn Technical High School and as a member of the school service squad were exemplary, except for a little strain of rebellion that eventually broke through the cracks of his all-business demeanor. It was the food that did him in and provided the only reprimand he received in four years of service.
After two years of eating the mush the cafeteria staff called food, Arnie decided he’d had enough and took it upon himself to organize the only act of civil disobedience he has ever committed then or now. As a sign of protest, he convinced over 2,000 students to all bring pennies to pay for their lunch on a specific day. The cafeteria staff was outraged as they frantically took payment from thousands of students who waited in line jingling their pockets full of pennies. Arnie and the students told the staff they’d start paying with dollars when the meals improved. When it was learned that Arnie Leff was the ring leader of these actions, he was reprimanded. It had only been symbolic, but the administration claimed it was petty and irresponsible. As Mr. Leff was in a position of “authority” he “should have known better”. A most interesting coincidence however, was that the cafeteria food became more varied and better tasting, at least for a few months.
One of the drawbacks to a school that took kids from all over the city, was that they all went home to their respective area of town after school and didn’t have many opportunities to play, study and hang out together. Boys from Queens went home to Queens, guys from the Bronx returned to their familiar streets and kids from Manhattan returned to their island. The advantages included learning how to get along with people from different backgrounds and providing a sense of unity, understanding and common purpose among borough’s that historically mistrusted or disliked people that weren’t from their neighborhood.
One of the boys Arnie befriended in his sophomore year was a kid named Joe Petti, from Queens. It was during lunch one rare sunny fall afternoon that Joe told Arnie about the Civil Air Patrol. He said that his big brother Jerry and he had both joined and it was “really cool”. He invited Arnie to join him for one of their upcoming meetings at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Arnie agreed and stepped into his next home away from home. It would be his first official membership in the US military and his first social encounters with the opposite sex, as girls could also join the Civil Air Patrol and attended the same meetings.
Dr. Leff recalls his first meeting of the Civil Air Patrol. “I saw shiny Air Force uniforms and as is the case with most fourteen year olds, I was enthralled. I joined the cadet corps of that volunteer civilian auxiliary of the United States Air Force. Little was I to know that seven years later I would still be an active member; nor did I realize that this organization, dedicated to leadership and aviation training for teenagers and the saving of lives through air search and rescue, would have such profound effects upon me. In my seven years as an active member, I learned leadership and compassion; service and dedication. My pay: great satisfaction.”
The Civil Air Patrol was founded at the beginning of World War II to protect the coasts of the US. They provided countless hours of surveillance on the watch-out for German or Japanese submarines. Most of their planes were small Piper Cubs, not military fighting machines that were used overseas. After the war the Air Patrol continued as a voluntary search and research organization. The United States Congress then made it an official auxiliary of the US Air Force. By joining the Air Patrol in 1955, Arnie Leff essentially joined the Air force as a young volunteer. It had a cadet core that was trained in military protocol and expectations and some of the cadets were women.
Joe Petti, his brother Jerry and Arnie were having a blast. They attended meetings and trainings in full uniform and “had crushes on all the women”. Arnie got so involved in Air Patrol activities that for the first time in his life his grades dropped at school. They didn’t drop enough to cause any trouble, but he knew it was significant.
On the weekends they would go to Floyd Naval Air Station and learn how to fly old rusted aircraft that made Arnie’s mother, “pull out her hair”. They learned how to navigate, use radio for communication and how to fly. In the summertime they attended two weeks at a Civil Air Patrol Military Camp, which were held at Air Force bases in the area. The camps provided training, discipline, skills, ribbons and ranks. Occasionally, they were called up to go search for a plane or boat that had crashed or disappeared.
Arnie got a student pilots license “that I never used” and obtained the rank of captain. A rank of captain for a high school student was impressive. The Civil Air Patrol ranks cadets the same as the Air Force, which starts at airman first class and goes up the latter to airman second class, third class, staff sergeant, master sergeant, warrant officer, second lieutenant, first lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel, full colonel and general. In the Air Corp the highest ranking was major.
As he became a senior Air Patrol cadet Captain Leff began teaching the leadership courses and military practice to younger cadets. He especially enjoined attending the Mirror Air Show (sponsored by the New York Daily Mirror) as a senior cadet, where they would recruit new cadets and talk to young people about the Air Force. He was proud of the organization, his part promoting it and in what his uniform signified. He felt that they were doing good and “making a difference”.
By the time Captain Leff was a senior at high school, as well as a senior cadet, he was nominated by the Brooklyn Civil Air Patrol to participate in their national Cadet Exchange program. This program would take a few selected cadets from the United States and pay all their expenses to visit another country. That country would do the same and send its cadets to the US. Only one or two cadets from the entire state of New York would be chosen from all those nominated and Arnie Leff was one. “When I was selected I had no idea where we were going. For all I knew it could have been Antarctica or Timbuktu”. It turned out to be Switzerland.
A few months later, a young group of seven cadets assembled at Mitchell Air Force Base in New York to begin their journey for a months stay as guests of the Swiss government. They flew from Mitchell to Bolling Air Base and then took another flight to Goose Bay, Labrador, in northern Canada. They spent the night at Goose Bay and were able to witness the beauty of the Northern Lights. They couldn’t fly directly to Europe at the time, as their DC6 didn’t have enough fuel capacity to fly from New York straight to Switzerland. Now it would take about five to six hours. In 1959 it took days.
They were treated like royalty, met government officials, spoke to the press, stayed in the best hotels and were chauffeured around in army limousines. It didn’t hurt that