2. P.S. 73, 251 MacDougal Street
Gleason was eight when he entered P.S. 73 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Jackie was late in going to school, but it didn’t seem to matter, because he could already read, thanks to his mother, and he had an unusually retentive memory,” notes author William John Weatherby in Jackie Gleason: An Intimate Portrait of the Great One. “He soon became a nuisance to teachers, because he read ahead of the class and asked awkward questions and argued with the faculty.”
Among the pranks Gleason played at P.S. 73 was spreading Limburger cheese on the radiators, ensuring early dismissal as janitors searched for it. Gleason credited graduation day at the school as his start in show business.
”I did a recitation of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in Yiddish, and in the middle of it, I knocked over the cardboard prop microphone,” Gleason recalled in the Chicago Tribune. “The principal leaned over to pick it up, and I said, ‘That’s the first thing you ever did for us kids.’ On the way home, my mother told me, ‘You were good, but you were too fresh.’”
