The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 52

.8 NorthWpst THE BOSTON SUNDAYGLOBE JANUARY 1,1995 Former librarian has special link to Japanese island By Mark Sullivan SPECIAL TO THK GLOBE other sailing ships launched from its yards on the Mystic River. Medford ships traveled the world, Lavine said, carrying "ostrich feathers, pepper anything, everything. They went to Holland, the West Indies. Skins, the fur trade you name it, they were in it." In September 1885, the Med-ford-built bark Cashmere, lugging a cargo of kerosene, lost its mast in a typhoon off Tanegashima, one of a chain of islands that stretches from southeastern tip of Japan. A few survivors were washed ashore, where villagers nursed them back to health on a diet of baked sweet and white potatoes, hardboiled eggs, raw radishes and dried minnows.

The kindness shown the sailors by their Japanese rescuers "amazed" Americans back home, Lavine said. "Japan was a pretty closed society at the time," Lavine said. "The Japanese were supposed to be so vicious, so awful, that anyone washed ashore was murdered." In May 1888, President Grover Cleveland signed a measure, passed by a grateful Congress, to reward the farmers and fishermen of Tanegashima. A special gold medal was sent to the island, along with a gift of $5,000. The money was used to build a school, which still stands, and the medal remains on display in a village museum, said Lavine.

Tanegashima remains a remote place. Lavine said he and his wife, Katherine, visiting the island in 1982, "were probably the first Caucasians they had ever seen. They're pretty isolated out there." On the island outpost, where an estimated 1,000 residents still make their living fishing and farming, a reservoir of goodwill has remained over the years toward America. During the World War II, Lavine said, villagers defied the Japanese government and kept a monument on the beach commemorating the rescue of American sailors. ing center on the Charles River Esplanade.

When Jewish independence forces in Palestine sought American volunteers with sailing experience to help transport European Jews to their homeland, he enlisted. The Exodus, which sailed from France with 4,500 passengers, was blocked by the British, then governing Palestine, whose policy was to turn back refugee ships. Lavine, clubbed on the head during hand-to-hand fighting with a British boarding party, was confined for a time in a British internment camp in Germany. He was released in 1948, when British rule in Palestine expired and the Jewish state of Israel was established. Lavine went on to a career as a librarian, capped by nearly two decades as director of the Medford Public Library.

He retired in 1988. He said his research into the Cashmere kindled his interest in Medford's sailing past. In the 19th century, Medford was renowned for the clippers and GLOBE PHOTO HELENE STEINBERG Frank Lavine sits among the books of the Medford Public Library where he was library director for many years. school in Medford has roots in r1 0 Frank I tXlii 1 av'ne taes BPec'a' I it I'll 1 inroimct in tho unwlt of the Cashmere, the Medford merchant ship whose marooned crew members were rescued by Japanese fishing-villagers in 1885. "I'm an old sailor," said the retired director of the Medford Public Library, who has traveled to the island of Tanegashima and met with descendants of the fishermen who saved the American sailors 109 years ago.

In fact, the 71-year-old Lavine is himself a veteran of a remarkable mercy mission on the seas. As a young ex-serviceman in 1947, Lavine served as a volunteer crew member on the Exodus, a ship that attempted to bring Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to Palestine. Lavine, a native of Boston's West End, had learned to sail as a youngster at the Community Boat Japanese MEDFORD fontinued from Page 1 i classrooms at Medford High, is considered one of the best in the country, according to John Cox, director Community Education at Medford High School. Cox said some 460 students, be tween the ages of three and 17, at tend classes in Japanese and mathematics at the language school, which meets for three hours on Saturdays. The vast majority of the pupils will eventually return to school in Japan.

Their parents, in many cases, hold five- or six-year appointments at area universities, hospitals and high-tech companies, according to 'the president of the school's parent- Dtsions HUNTED HRIR SHLOH 326 Great Road Rte. 4 and 225 Bedford, MA 617-275-7366 1 There is precedent to the ties one finds today binding Japan and Medford. N.H., works the rest of the week as a Japanese teacher at Constantino Middle School in Haverhill. She said her first grade class focuses on language skills. The writing of Japanese letters, difficult to learn, comes later.

"Some of the kids couldn't hold the pencil," McWilliams observed. "Maybe in second or third grade, they may use the brush." Like those of six-year-olds the world over, the tastes of McWilliams' first-graders run to pictures, playing shipping ed books, magazines and videos on Japan. "It might be the only Japanese resource center at a public high school in Massachusetts," said Cox. The materials will be donated by the International Society for Educational Information, a Japanese organization whose mission, according to Cox, is "to see textbooks throughout the world give a fair depiction of modern Japan." Errors that the International Society for Educational Information has turned up in American textbooks have included wrong historical dates and ancient battle sites mislabeled on maps, according to Robert Terra-no, a science teacher at Lincoln Middle School in Medford who visited Japan this fall under a travel grant from the International Society for Educational Information. The society, which receives funds from both the Japanese government and private sources, has established resource centers in 90 locations across America, including the Chil ton.

"We're hopeful the project has a better chance now that we are proposing to keep it within the debt restrictions imposed by Proposition 24." Damiani said the $5.8 million project, which will cost the town $2.8 million after anticipated state assistance and before financing costs, would allow the School Department to close the aging Wildwood School and move its 431 pupils to the Francis Wyman, the town's second junior high school, which was closed in 1979. The move would allow school officials to provide equitable art and music instruction to Wildwood students as well as deal with classroom overcrowding issues at the other school buildings, Damiani said. and Power Rangers. "I like artwork," said Shigeru Morooka, a bespectacled boy, currently living in Winchester, who said his preferred artistic subjects are "turtles and decorations." Aoi Takahashi, a girl from Hokkaido whose family lives in Belmont, said she hopes one day to "work making pictures, making designs and things like that" At the age of seven, however, world-traveler Aoi already has the makings of a United Nations attache. When classmate Chisaki Kuriha-ra, six, of Chiba, Japan, and Belmont, was asked by an English-speaking visitor to name her favorite subject in school, Aoi played translator, phrasing the question in Japanese for her friend, then relaying the answer in English.

"She likes recess," Aoi announced. The school library at Medford High School will soon house a Japanese resource center, stocked with thousands of dollars worth of donat financing costs will raise taxes by an average of $606 per household. Officials in both towns are attempting to win support in their communities for their school projects by June 30, the date the current state aid reimbursement formula expires. Although local legislators and officials from the state Department of Education expect the Legislature to re-authorize the aid mechanism, Burlington and Boxborough official say they fear the state could reduce their current reimbursement rate of 58 percent "Even though the original project would have added only $45 to the average taxpayer's bill, I think what killed our project was the word said Damiani in Burling teacher association, Hidenori Fuku-toku, an international transport-firm executive who lives in Hamilton. The principal of the school, Yos-himasa Tachikawa, here under a three-year appointment from the Japanese government, lives in Belmont One recent Saturday morning, in a Medford High School classroom decorated with portraits of Abraham Lincoln and John F.

Kennedy, 17 Japanese first graders, their legs dangling from their chairs, studied textbooks lettered in intricate Japanese calligraphy. Before being dismissed for the day, the six- and seven-year-old students sat up straight and, bowing politely, said sayonara to their teacher, Mayumi McWilliams. Greater emphasis is placed on order and discipline in the Japanese classroom than in the American, observed McWilliams, who has experi- enced both: The 34-year-old Tokyo native, now a resident of Pelham, Burlington URLINGTON Follow-I ing the rejection of a $9.8 million comprehensive eie-XmJ mentary school renovation Ummm nrniurr hv vntos at a 'j special election last month, voters here will be asked to reconsider a scaled-back version of the project at a special town meeting Jan. 9. School officials will request $5.8 million to reopen the Francis Wy-man Junior High School for elementary pupils, an amount that will not 0RECK XL Hotel Upright Super Buster Compact Reg! 150 Oreck Free Shipping Total Reg.

479 BOTH OUrSISI FRE Save 1 80 voters to decide on school project Jan. 9 require an increase in property taxes, according to School Committee chairwoman Lucy Damiani. The rejected project would have allowed renovations to the town's two other elementary schools as well. Boxborough officials, on the other hand, are proceeding with the next step to win voter approval for a $7.8 million addition to the town's only elementary school, Blanchard Memorial. They were buoyed by the willingness of voters to spend $417,000 on architectural fees, according to Cheryl Levine, chairwoman of the school's Parent, Teacher and Friends Organization.

Voters passed the design costs Dec. 5 by 221 voters, 541 to 321, despite projections that the first year's days dren's Museum in Boston and Smith College, according to Medford historian Jay Griffin. Griffin, curator of the Royall House Museum in Medford and a part-time history teacher in the alternative-education program at Medford High, accompanied Terra-no on the Japan tour this fall. In the past five years, teachers from Medford, Wilmington, Arlington, North Reading, Andover, North Andover and Winchester have visited Japan under International Society for Educational Information travel grants. Cox, who visited Japan under a grant in 1993, said the Japanese exchanges represent an exercise in propaganda, of the positive sort.

"The purpose of our propaganda," Cox said, "is to make clear: The more you travel around this world, the more you realize human beings are all related. We've got a hell of a lot more in common than these superficial differences." In Boxborough, Levine said she is confident her community has been convinced the school addition is necessary even if the cost to individual taxpayers is high. "We're not going to assume it will be voted in, but I think passing the architectural fees was a real good show of faith," Levine said. "I think the electorate realizes that we are in a tight spot." Boxborough's elementary school enrollment of 460 has doubled since 1990 with school officials expecting 90 more students next September. The Blanchard was built to accommodate 275 students 40 years ago.

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