On a recent cold and windy day in Kingsbridge Heights, children and senior adults alike were keeping their bodies and their hearts warm at the New Jewish Home, Kittay Senior Apartments.
The third grade class of P.S. 340 visited the senior apartments — located at at 2550 Webb Ave. — on Dec. 19, as part of their holiday festivities. Together, they played bingo, sang Christmas carols, learned about different holidays — ranging from Hanukkah to Three Kings Day — and ate chocolate coins to spread cheer and teach kindness.
“Tom reached out to our school as part of the Kindness Club,” said Colleen Orth, the teacher of the smiling third grade students in attendance. “This time of year, we wanted to make a connection with the children and bring joy to them.”
Although the Kindness Club has been around for years and has a global network of 138 schools and more than 90,000 members, Porton was unaware of its existence. When he created the Kindness Club at the Kittay apartments, it came purely from the kindness of his heart. And while the official Kindness Club is designed around students and operates in schools, Porton’s club is composed of senior citizens.
“I noticed there was a lot of anger and unhappiness among a number of seniors,” he said of the residents there. “Myself included.”
Porton moved into the Kittay apartments — an independent living senior facility — in March 2023, where he receives three meals a day, cleaning services and a health aide, but prior to that, Porton lived at the Wayne Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in the Bronx, where he had to spend more than $100,000 of his own money to pay for his two-year stay following a traumatic surgery.
In 2021, his doctor diagnosed him with having 10% heart function. He underwent open heart surgery, but his recovery was complicated and the issue was not corrected. Following the surgery, Porton was in a coma for a month, awoke to find he had a paralyzed left foot and was put on a ventilator. According to Porton, the surgery failed to correct his heart problem and while he did not require breathing assistance prior to the surgery, he now has a permanent tracheostomy tube in his neck to help him breathe.
“And trust me, it’s no joy,” said Porton.
A few weeks after settling into his new apartment at Kittay, Porton created the “Kindness Club.”
Every Wednesday, about 15 residents of the more than hundreds that reside at the 290-apartment building get together and watch motivational movies, eat snacks and share their stories and feelings.
One example of those motivational movies is the 1967 British drama, “To Sir, With Love,” directed by James Clavell and starring Sidney Poitier as Mark Thackeray. Much like the films “Lean On Me” (1987) and “Stand and Deliver” (1988), “To Sir, With Love” is about a teacher who takes a job at a school with disobedient students in a rough and rowdy part of town. The students are rejects from other schools and give their teacher a hard time, but Thackeray’s persistence and sincere interest in the student’s success and education wins them over.
“It’s the movie that made me want to be a teacher,” said Porton.
Prior to his declining health and days in senior living, Porton was a public school teacher for 47 years, spending the majority of his employment at James Monroe High School from 1971 until his retirement in 2016. During the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in NYC during the late ‘80s and through the early ‘90s, Porton created a peer education program in conjunction with Montefiore Medical Center. Students volunteered their time to hand out flyers, literature and provide what they believed to be life-saving information.
“I had a minivan, which we turned into the ‘AIDS’ van and we went around and set up on street corners and educated people,” said Porton. “I have no doubt whatsoever that they were saving lives.”
He was able to help fund his work with BASE (Be Active in Self Education) grants. They even created and distributed what they called, “baskets of love” – packages filled with toiletries and essential needs for HIV/AIDS hospitalized patients who could not afford them otherwise, along with “friendship grams,” which were letters of moral support and kindness. But the BASE grants ran out quickly and Porton funded his efforts and those of his students with money out of his own pocket, much like he does at the Kittay apartments.
In 1995, Porton was recognized for his efforts and inducted into the National Teaching Hall of Fame. However, not everyone was a fan of his work.
In 2016, the New York Times wrote a piece on Porton’s retirement that followed a dispute with the principal of James Monroe High School.
“He said the principal eliminated his early-morning civic leadership class, which engaged students in activities such as feeding the homeless, saying it was not part of the Common Core curriculum,” reads the NYT article.
But retired or not, Porton remains a teacher and a do-gooder at heart and after falling ill and ending up at the Kittay senior apartments, he still finds a way to reach others.
“I mean look, there are a lot of people here who don’t know how to express themselves,” said Phylis Cleaver, 87, of the Kindness Club.
A Long-Island native, Cleaver has been a resident of Kittay for three years. She went on to describe her interaction with another resident by the name of Alfredo, who doesn’t speak — but Cleaver talks to him, nonetheless.
“I tell him, ‘te amo mucho’ (I love you very much) and he understands that,” she said.
Another resident of Kittay and the Kindness Club is Mike Greenly, who grew up in South Carolina as the only young Jew in his neighborhood and where kids picked on him and called him racial slurs.
“As painful as that was, it made me empathetic,” said Greenly of his own role in the Kindness Club.
Greenly, who has only been at Kittay for a few months, moved to New York City to become a playwright and instead found other work. But in 2015, he was selected to write the lyrics of the official state song of Virginia, proving that everyone has an interesting story to tell.
In the end, the Dec. 19 intergenerational holiday party was heartwarming and the children responded well to the seniors, learning about the interesting tidbits of their lives. They ended their visit with hugs, kisses and more hugs and their teacher, Colleen Orth, expressed an interest in continuing the Kindness Club at their school.
Last year, Psychology Today published an article on the health benefits of hugging, writing that there is evidence that hugs can lower blood pressure, reduce inflammation and even reduce the severity of the common cold. So, go out and be kind to a family member, a friend or even a stranger.
“It costs you nothing to do that,” Cleaver added.
Reach ET Rodriguez at etrodriguez317@gmail.com. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
