I was born on March 2, 1945, as the Allies fought their way across Germany towards the Rhine on their way to Berlin, and American forces bombarded the Ryukyu islands in the Pacific. Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be our president for another month or so, and there were still a few Civil War veterans alive. When I was delivered by Dr. Gowey at Berea General Hospital, my parents were living in a little cottage set back about five hundred feet in the woods on the north side of the 16000 block of Whitney Road in Strongsville in the western suburbs of Cleveland. Back then the area was semi-rural. There was an open field across the road from our house, and in the middle of that field sat a small, tired-looking rocking horse oil derrick, clearly abandoned after it failed to produce any oil. Mom’s parents lived in a house next door to us. My earliest memory – when I was about two and a half – was seeing a kitchen grease fire reflected in a porch door window.
The closest I could come to sounding the alarm was to cry, “Sire in the kikin!”. You don’t articulate well when you’re that young, but, nevertheless, some events can make a lasting impression and a child’s environment can seem large and mysterious. There was a little creek behind the house and, to me, it was a wondrous world of trickling water, pebbles, moss and salamanders. Any tuft of grass or patch of bare ground could be the scene of adventure. At about the time that my brother Steve was born in 1948, my parents bought a one acre parcel of land at 7805 Big Creek Parkway in Middleburg Heights. Dad designed and helped build a small contemporary house with a swimming pool and an attached two car garage. I think Mom was the driving aesthetic force in the choice of style. Dad said he actually preferred the old-fashioned Victorian residential style he had grown up with. There were wooded areas where I could wander alone to watch daddy-long leg spiders and find the shells of robin eggs on the ground after they had hatched. I remember an encounter with a luna moth which I found clinging to a wall inside our garage. It was improbably large and beautiful, with great wings of luminous, pastel green. Certainly too nice for our garage and almost too delicate and wonderful for the natural world. Our house was right next to a power line right-of-way and the fields under the towers, thick with Queen Anne’s Lace, were a child’s delight to explore. In later years when I read adventure stories, in my mind’s eye I would often place a story’s action in those fields. One day, coming back from an excursion there and cutting through a stand of sumac, I was attacked by yellow jackets. I still recall my flying feet pounding the ground as I flew crying to the sanctuary of the house. When we decided to play indoors to avoid the insects, there was a nice play room where we made terrible messes and put on occasional puppet shows and plays. I remember an early exposure to gambling that made a big impression on me. For some reason Dad came into possession of a slot machine which he brought home for our edification. Naturally everybody started putting in dimes to watch the wheels spin. On my third attempt, with a rumble of thunder and a hallelujah choir sounding in the sky, the stars aligned and I hit the jackpot. It wasn’t all that much but it was magical to watch about a hundred dimes sluice out into my hands. My parents were probably just jealous, but they wouldn’t let me keep the money!! Not even to put into a savings account! They just took it! Well, that left me with a deep emotional scar that to this day has not healed. We had a neighbor named Wolfkamer who was kind of a slob. He would walk around in work shorts with his big belly hanging out. Mom wouldn’t let him on our property unless he was wearing a shirt. And she certainly didn’t invite him along when she and Dad made one of their early trips to Florida. They left us with a babysitter for a week of fishing and idling around in the Keys. Mom brought back a little bottle filled with sea water so we could taste how salty the ocean was.
Our area had a semi-rural feel to it and there weren’t too many kids who lived on my street, but if I went east beyond our rear property boundary, I came upon the backyards of people whose houses faced Pearl Road, and there I had some playmates. People always keep their junk and their projects in the back and that’s the most interesting stuff. One guy had set up a small plastic injection molding business in his garage. I was never sure what he made but there was always a strong chemical odor of hot plastic when he had his equipment cranked up. Another family had a root cellar hidden in bushes in a far corner of their yard. It was sunk in the ground with a low roof, little windows, and crumbling steps leading down to a small door. It had been designed to look like a gnome’s cave and the entrance was guarded by cast concrete dwarf-like figures which crouched by the doorway. The whole thing was moldy, overgrown with weeds and very creepy. It was so dark inside the cellar you couldn’t be sure what might be waiting for you. For a delicate, impressionable child like myself, it was the stuff of nightmares.
The family that lived just north of us on the other side of the power lines put up a horse barn and, as the structure rose, I was a daily front row spectator, fascinated by the tools and piles of lumber, and the assembly work. I never forgot their process of lifting the individual wall sections up onto the foundation and joining them together, and the memory of that method guided me sixty years later when I drew up plans to build our cabin on Paul Creek in Montana.
Our Big Creek Parkway house has since been torn down and replaced with another home. I went to Loomis elementary school where one of my teachers was a Miss Jeffries. I distinctly remember having one African-American classmate, a girl.
We did our shopping mostly in Berea, and I made the front page of the Berea News on one of those trips in 1949. We were in the local hardware store in the center of town on what is now the Berea Triangle and I got separated from my parents. Looking for them, I ran out of the store, into the street, and got hit by a car. I remember my right shoulder grinding up against the left rear wheel well. The headlines screamed, “Boy, 4, Hit By Car!!”. The story never did get developed into a film and a television mini-series as we all expected.
As I grew and collected memories from the late 1940s and early 1950s, many of the things I saw would eventually disappear from the American landscape. I recall riding around in a fat old Hudson Hornet which had a deep and cavernous back seat where I could move around at will in those pre-seat belt days. When we stopped at a railroad crossing while a train passed, I always waited eagerly to see the red caboose, which had the important job of being last – like an exclamation point – and making sure nothing got left behind. The signalman would lean over the rail and wave at us. I imagined that he had a warm and cozy living room inside and could serve himself tea and snacks.
The cab and the man have been replaced by automation. At roadside construction sites, workers would place black, round smudge pots which would burn with a smoky flame as a safety warning. They’ve been replaced by plastic sawhorses with flashing, battery-powered strobe lights. There used to be a man who drove a dairy truck and delivered milk to our house in heavy glass bottles with paper lids. The inside of his truck was always cold because of the blocks of ice he carried to keep the milk fresh. Back then the dairy came to you but, for a long time now, you’ve had to go get it yourself. In the early 1950s, our family went to see the circus – the actual “Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows”. Back in those days it was the real, old-school deal, a spectacular, eye-popping, politically-incorrect, animal-exploiting extravaganza. We watched trapeze artists, dancing elephants, lion-tamers and sword-swallowers do their carefully rehearsed routines. And, of course, there was the sideshow. There was a Nordic giant who was eight feet, eight inches tall. He gave me a souvenir plastic ring that fit his own enormous finger and was so big I could almost put my entire hand through it. Many years later, perhaps with the kids, I visited another sideshow that claimed to have a live bigfoot and showed a huge circus poster of a hairy, snow-white monster with bloody fangs climbing a Himalayan peak. However, when you paid your money and went inside, what you saw in a roped-off six foot by six foot enclosure was a pathetic sight – a small, barefooted man seated on a chair with his arms folded wearing a windbreaker and shorts, his feet splayed out in front of him. He had a medical condition that had caused his lower legs and feet to become enormously swollen. There were a dozen people standing around looking at him. Someone asked, “Where are you from?”. He looked up with a good-natured expression on his face and said, “Nicaragua”.
Dad continued his work with the Krill company during those early years and eventually made good enough money that he could assist Mom with her wish to move to the east side. She wanted to live in Gates Mills and build a modern-style home. This was a strange notion and a contradiction in terms, since Gates Mills is noted for its carefully preserved New England village architecture. They plowed ahead anyway and bought four acres of land on Old Mill Road and retained the services of architect Marcel Breuer. He designed the contemporary residence Mom wanted, but only after a prolonged and sometimes contentious approval process with the Gates Mills architectural review board. There were some challenges building on the hilly site. To prevent the whole structure from eventually sliding downhill, it had to be anchored to a thick concrete slab which ran back like a great claw deep into the upside slope behind the house. However, the finished product, completed in 1954, was airy, pleasant and fun to live in, although rather small by today’s standards.
Mom had her own art studio with a north-facing glass wall for good indirect painter’s light. It was a detached one-room building in the woods uphill behind the house, and she heated it with a little cast iron stove that burned wood or charcoal. That was her haven and sanctuary. She hung out a sign that said, “Don’t go away mad. Just go away.” In one of my dark humor periods, I bought her a large, creepy-looking Donald Duck doll. She liked it, put a rope around its neck and hung it from a wall as a source of artistic inspiration. Painting was a fire that for most of her life burned inside her with a steady flame, and she could rightly be considered an active member of the “Cleveland School” – a robust local arts community that included Leza and Bill McVey and Victor Schrekengost. She won first prize for a still life in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show and over the years also collected several honorable mentions in that annual exhibition. To keep Mom company, Dad eventually built an addition for himself attached to the uphill side of the studio. It had its own door and served as his office. However, since it also had a billiard table, it was a great place to hang out and practice one’s three cushion technique. His man-cave had the appropriately hazy saloon atmosphere from the enormous H. Upmann cigars he favored. Although he claimed to be healthy since he didn’t smoke cigarettes and inhale, he still got plenty of exposure to tobacco carcinogens. There was a great irony that this staunch anti-communist Republican went to considerable lengths to obtain those Cuban stogies and indirectly support Fidel’s people’s republic. He felt that the strict US embargo against Havana didn’t apply to him and paid substantial amounts of money to have those Magnum torpedoes air-freighted to him from a tobacconist in Lausanne, Switzerland.
They enrolled Sue in Hathaway Brown girls school in Shaker Heights. She recalls sitting in the back of English class and reading Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” as she gradually developed her non-conformist skills. Steve and I attended Gates Mills elementary school for a few years. Like our Mom before us, we made a new circle of friends and we did some growing up in a small community that had a life centered around a town hall, fire department, post office and a grocery store.
Near the center of the village there was an unused iron trestle rail bridge that long ago used to carry the interurban commuter train from Cleveland. Next to it on River Road was an old building built out on stilts over the slope which ran down to the river. It was owned by Millie Newman, a real estate broker who had her office in one half of the building. The other half was the Old Livery Tavern operated by her brother Henry. It was a general store with beer, wine, cigarettes and candy. That’s where I got Three Musketeers chocolate bars for five cents and my parents got a bottle of California Almaden wine for $1.50. Henry was a quiet man who had served as an airborne trooper during the war and had fought in New Guinea. The memory of that experience must have been unpleasant because he didn’t like to talk about it.
I was tapped by an older kid to replace him as the new neighborhood newspaper carrier for the Cleveland Press, so I wound up with a paper route in the center of the village. I’m not sure I made any money but it was a good early lesson in the work world and a priceless opportunity to peek into other people’s houses as you made your daily delivery.
We were close to the Chagrin river, which offered endless opportunities for adventure and mischief. The main bridge over the river was built with two arched steel beams – each about twelve inches wide – to support the road. Steve must have paused one day to regard its structural beauty and to notice that the beams made steep but scalable pathways. We know this because a horrified neighbor reported to us that she had seen Steve standing at the very apex of one of the curving beams, enjoying the view from forty feet in the air, like an aspiring Sir Edmund Hillary, without the benefit of ropes or guardrails or common sense.
Storms would regularly uproot trees and wash them into the river where they would snag on the bottom. Snakes would drape themselves on the tangles of branches in midstream and warm themselves up in the sun. A kid named Richard Oulihan lived in the center of town and was a partner in trouble making. He and I would make trotlines for fishing, then bait the multiple hooks with dough balls and occasionally find a carp or a sucker the next morning. Crayfish sometimes clamped onto a twig held in front of them and could be lifted out of the stream. Soft-shelled turtles with their long snouts could be seen gliding silently just under the surface of the water. Once on a dare, and ignorant of the risks, I picked up the tail of a rather large snapping turtle and hauled it out of a mill race. I couldn’t hold it far enough away from my body and it reached out and took a piece of my blue jeans. An excellent way to lose a finger.
At Gates Mills Elementary school, I became friends with Mac Wellman, Bruce Smalheer and Joe Parker. We all had bicycles and would tear up and down the local roads, with no helmets, constantly putting ourselves in harm’s way. At Mac’s house on Wilson Mills Road, we would mix Kool Aid and cook garlic knocker sausages. His family liked to fix old cars and one of their purchases was a model T Ford, which was rescued from some forgotten barn for about a hundred dollars. It was quite dilapidated, had not been restored at all, but still ran and had a wonderful garage smell of old crankcase oil, musty leather and neglect.
One especially nutty undertaking with Mac was making a Mason jar bomb. By emptying out firecrackers, we came up with a small quantity of gunpowder. We packed it into a jar which had been liberated from the canning supply shelf in Mac’s home. After we equipped our device with a home-made fuse, we drove out one night to an isolated country road in Geauga county. Without stopping the car, we lit the fuse and threw our bomb into the bushes at the side of the road. As we looked back, after a few seconds, we saw a pathetic little puff of orange flame which demonstrated that we had been successful but also that we had nothing to contribute to the science of explosives.
In Gates Mills there was a gun club, which I believe was organized – surprisingly – by a local artist named Paul Meunier. I joined up to go on weekend target practice sessions. Our volunteer instructors would line us up along one side of a big field and have us fire our motley assortment of guns at paper targets that seemed impossibly far away. I was a terrible shot but it was an entertaining activity. Special tracer ammunition fired occasionally by our instructors would leave a momentary trail, like a particle in a cloud chamber, visible even in the brightest sunlight. My dad owned two old rifles, both .22 caliber. I used the Savage bolt-action for the gun club. The other was a slender, truly antique pump-action – possibly a Winchester Model 1890 previously used as a carnival gallery gun – with a badly-worn receiver and the faded words “Old Smoky” painted on the wooden stock. When I held that enchanted piece of junk in my hands, it felt alive with its own memories. Dad kept both pieces lying around in the workshop, unloaded, unlocked and forgotten. While everyone was busy growing up and had lost interest in target shooting, those guns disappeared unnoticed into a fold of time and I never knew what became of them.
One summer evening, there was a community function of some sort in the Gates Mills elementary school gymnasium and I got to meet Bob Feller, one of the greatest pitchers in the history of major league baseball. He had recently retired from twenty years with the Cleveland Indians and owned a house on River Road. There were no pretensions or aloofness in this relaxed, easy-going country boy from Van Meter, Iowa, and he happily autographed a baseball for me. “Rapid Robert” threw right-handed and I stared in awe at his enormous, heavily-muscled right shoulder developed from a long career of constant throwing. This gave him an odd, asymmetrical appearance, similar to the way I imagined medieval English yeoman archers must have looked with one abnormally large shoulder developed from a lifetime of drawing bows and firing arrows at the King’s enemies.
One of my acquaintances was a true juvenile delinquent, and, with his BB gun, we shot out the glass cover of a property owner’s electric meter in his back woods. Some days later we returned to inspect the scene of our crime and, as we were admiring our work, the owner popped out of a hole where he had been working, seized us both by our collars and drove us to the Gates Mills police station. His hopes for swift and severe justice were thwarted, however, because the building was completely empty. Not an officer, not a secretary, no one. Law enforcement was very relaxed in Gates Mills. He eventually let us go since he hadn’t actually witnessed the crime and didn’t want to be accused of kidnapping.
One day my mother drove me to an unfamiliar place where I sat in a room, took some tests and talked to people I didn’t know. Since I was a minor, my consent wasn’t needed for any of this. I eventually figured out I was leaving Gates Mills elementary school and was being transferred to University School in Shaker Heights. Thus I entered Seymour Peyser’s sixth grade class at US and became a Prepper. Mr. Peyser was a good teacher and demanded the best from his students, but he was also a bad-tempered grouch who talked about his mastoid operations and had hair growing out of his nose. He never had a good word to say about me when my parents showed up for open house. Maybe he didn’t like me because he coached the tennis team and I didn’t play tennis. Steve followed me to US and also struggled through the dark and foreboding Vale of Peyser.
Middle school was grades seven through nine. I was an unhappy adolescent. On the academic front, I remember that I had very average grades and seemed intent on being bland and anonymous. One of my teachers was Clifford Rhiel, a polio victim with a withered right arm who, despite that punishment from the fates, had thrived as a husband, father, math teacher and tennis coach. One day after class, he told me that his hobby was coin collecting and that I would enjoy it myself. He gave me a blue Whitman coin folder for the Lincoln pennies from 1909 to 1958 and told me to start filling it. Orders were orders, so I went to the bank with a handful of dollar bills and exchanged them for rolls of pennies. The idea of beginner’s numismatics is that you dump five hundred to a thousand pennies on a table and slowly and tediously sort through the pile and begin to fill up those blank folder albums. I loved it. It was the perfect solitary activity for a social retard. The holy grail of penny collecting was to find a 1909 S VDB which at the time was worth a barely imaginable $150. I never found one but did eventually find, in the endless mounds of general circulation coins that I dragged home from the bank, a 1909 S, a 1914 D and, believe it or not, a real life 1899 Indian head cent. To me this was hot stuff and I moved on to nickles, dimes and quarters. As of 2022, with that elusive 1909 S VDB now worth many thousands, I still have my coin collection stashed away in a closet and waiting for one of my grandkids to express an interest in it. To counterbalance this hermit hobby, I found out that I could run fast and wound up on the track team. For some reason, despite being skinny and underweight, I also threw the shotput and discus. University School believed in keeping its pupils busy, so, in addition to several hours of homework each evening, we also had semester projects that took months to complete. I grew hydroponic green beans in my bedroom. I kept a colony of white mice and discovered that, even though they only pee a little, their nests still smell like urine. I stuck an assembly of tubes and beakers on a board to demonstrate Bernoulli’s Principle of hydrodynamic equilibrium. This made a very uninteresting entry in a regional science fair. For a Latin project, I used Dad’s well-provided workbench and my interest in woodworking to make two Roman siege weapons, an onager [catapult] and a ballista [bow-and-arrow on steroids]. They were both fully functional and have been more or less preserved.
We took a number of family vacations to Florida. My folks seemed to gravitate towards Miami and the Keys and I remember going out deep sea fishing in a boat called the Sea Boots and coming home with tired arms from hauling in all the fish we caught in the gulfstream. On that excursion, Susan struggled to land a big Mahi Mahi and, just as she was about to get it in the boat, the line went slack and she reeled in only the head – a shark having had a quick snack at her expense. We stayed at a little motel on Marathon Key. This area offered shallow water fishing in the flats for bonefish, Dad’s great passion. The heat and light were intense. Once, after being out in the boat under the sun all day, I was walking along the highway near our motel and started to get dizzy and confused from the heat. I couldn’t remember where I was and just wanted to get out of the heat. The first door I got to was a little dance studio about to start class. The instructor closed the door in my face. The next place I tried was an electrician’s store. I must have scared the poor guy there with my babbling, although by that time I could remember the name of the place we were staying at. The nice man led me to his truck, pushed a flashlight and other equipment out of the passenger seat and eventually reunited me with my parents.
We took two spring breaks in The Bahamas and each time stayed at the Rock Sound Club on Eleuthera Island. We flew from Miami to Nassau on a big airliner but the leg of our trip from Nassau to Rock Sound was on a tiny DeHavilland Heron. It was possibly the world’s smallest four engine plane. It had only one seat on each side of the aisle and featured a wing spar that intruded into the passenger cabin, requiring you to step over it as you moved about. Needless to say, Steve and I thought this was all very interesting and we both stood outside the cockpit watching the captain. The first officer’s seat on the right was empty and he eventually looked at us with a grin and said, “Would one of you eager beavers like to help me fly this plane?” So Steve and I took turns sitting in that copilot’s seat with our hands on the yoke. I remember the captain telling me to just keep the plane level with the horizon. He then pretended to do some paperwork while I sat there terrified, unable to do anything. Eventually we made it to Rock Sound and spent an idyllic week snorkeling and spearfishing. The coral sand beach was the whitest I had ever seen and the water was the clearest blue. The ecosystem was very healthy in those days and the reef teemed with fish. I became the prey on one occasion when, as I was aimlessly splashing around, I looked over my shoulder and saw an enormous barracuda that had swum up to within two feet of me to assess a potential meal. We had our meals in the resort clubhouse and the after dinner entertainment was a calypso band that played George Symonette hits as well as our favorite, “Jones, Oh, Jones!” One one occasion, I wandered through the old town of Rock Sound and came upon a bar called the Jolly Boys’ Club. It was a happy, noise place but one of the African-Bahamian patrons correctly saw that I was an out-of-place white kid in a tough neighborhood so he told me some scary stories about party-goers at Junkanoo time who carried machetes under their shirts and then suggested I head straight back to the resort.
I spent the summers of 1958 and 1959 at Camp Wachusett in Holderness, New Hampshire on Little Squam Lake. The camp had been founded in 1903 by a local educator, but when I was there in the late 1950s, the owner and director was Bill Triplett, whose regular job was at the Landon School in Washington, DC. His was a dynamic and enthusiastic personality and he heartily endorsed that late nineteenth century romantic back-to-nature philosophy that boys and girls – separately, of course – needed to get out of the city in the summer and do some tree hugging. Several University School teachers were associated with the camp and through their recruiting efforts there was a contingent of both campers and counselors from Cleveland. My parents drove me there and stayed for a brief orientation by the camp staff, which gave them some idea of what they were getting in return for spending a lot of money to get me out of their hair for the summer. The season’s agenda was shockingly wholesome: hiking! boating! camping! sailing! archery! horseshoes! This would be my first extended stay away from home and, after Mom and Dad had gone, I suddenly felt terribly homesick and wanted to be back in Cleveland. But that only lasted one day, and the next morning, I plunged into the endless healthy activities they provided. Looking back at that scene with an objective eye, the racial and cultural divides of our society were sharp and obvious in Wachusett’s camping population. It was made up exclusively of white Anglo-Saxon protestant boys from privileged backgrounds. The harsher critics of our country could easily have seen us as an orderly, mindless collection of proto-Hitlerjugend. The kids were divided up in groups by age and assigned to tent barracks. I was in Kiowa House and learned to live with the constant smell of canvas, always worse on a hot windless day. In the morning campers tidied up their individual areas, made their beds military style with carefully creased and folded corners, and stood stiffly at attention as a counselor passed in review. If your work didn’t pass inspection, you had to do it again. I discovered that a milkshake in New England had undergone a mysterious French transformation and was called a “frappe”. Overall those two summers had a significant influence on me and, corny as it may sound, actually helped me grow as a person. We swam off an old white-painted wooden dock. My first taste of northern lake water made a lasting impression on me. It had a pure, clean taste that made me think of ancient and undisturbed wild lands. From that old dock I learned that I could swim fast, and that eventually led to competitive swimming back at University School. I took a Red Cross junior life savings course and to this day still remember how to disengage myself from the death grip of a drowning swimmer and then haul the victim to safety using the cross chest carry. The only contact we had with females our age was a dance arranged with a girls camp over on Squam Lake. Picture the stiff and awkward scene as a roomful of adolescents in shorts, T-shirts and tennis shoes move clumsily around the floor to the days’s popular songs played on a tiny record player. I danced with a pretty girl named Olivia Street. Emperor Triplett had a rather cruel old-school sense of humor and managed to keep a straight face as he explained to the assembled campers how a snipe hunt works, and, yes, a group of the youngest campers suffered the emotional trauma of sitting dutifully in the cold dark woods all night holding a burlap bag waiting to capture the gaggles of snipe that they had been assured would run through the camp’s surrounding forest into their sack. I found that I was good at archery and really loved camping and backpacking. We took several extended backpacking trips into the White Mountains. These were my first hikes in old-growth conifer forest. The experience of following those winding trails over and around moss covered rocks and breathing in the close damp smell of pine needles was intoxicating. With the Kiowa gang I made my first ascent of Mt. Washington on a warm, sunny day with a gentle breeze and discovered that, after struggling to the summit on my own two feet with a heavy pack, I had been preceded by a crowd of fat, out-of-shape tourists who had either driven their cars to the top or taken the cog railroad. That tame experience hid the mountain’s dark reputation as one of the most dangerous peaks in North America, a place where over a hundred people have died from falls and hypothermia and which, at 231 miles per hour, has the highest wind speed ever recorded on the surface of the earth. On a separate outing, I was in a small group of older campers who gained renown in the camp’s history by completing a seemingly impossible long-distance hike in the Presidential range. We climbed Liberty, Lincoln and Lafayette and covered well over one hundred miles in only four or five days. Head honcho Triplett was duly astonished at our Teddy Roosevelt-style fortitude and wilderness grit. He had a commemorative plaque created to remind posterity of our heroic deed. The actual truth was that halfway through that hike we happened to be sitting, exhausted, at a point where the trail ran alongside a road. A bald man driving an enormous new Pontiac Bonneville convertible stopped and asked us if we wanted a ride. We five campers looked at our counselor, who looked back at us. The answer was a resounding “oh, heck yes”, and all six of us piled into his car, with our packs, and got a fifty mile lift. We took an oath of silence about our foul deed, and soaked shamelessly in the undeserved glory showered on us upon our return. By contrast, the same gang of seniors took an extended canoe trip on the enormous Lake Winnipesaukee that was all work and no cheating. We paddled those big aluminum canoes all day long under the hot sun with aching backs and sore shoulders to prove that we were real men-in-the-making. Winnipesaukee – so big that sometimes we couldn’t see the opposite shore – has an almost oceanic feel to it. One kid entertained himself by eating about two pounds of dry cocoa mix and achieving an exquisite state of dehydration and malaise.
Wachusett had a rustic stone lodge that was the center of operations. We ate our meals in its spartan dining hall. Mornings were cold and we would show up for breakfast feeling chilled and hoping for some hot comfort food. Instead, we unfailingly got Kellogg’s Corn Pops with powdered milk which we ate from aluminum cups. As our cheap spoons scraped the bottom of the cup, the sound was like nails on a chalkboard and just made us feel colder. That was followed by powdered scrambled eggs, which were always cold by the time they reached our plates. If our teeth hadn’t been chattering so violently, we might have been warmed by the family atmosphere provided by the presence of the married counselors’ wives and children. There were little tykes running around, getting into trouble, and we had substitute moms if we needed them. The main lodge also housed the office of the camp nurse. Somebody was always getting hurt and it simply made sense to have a health care provider on the scene. Wachusett’s nurse was skilled and compassionate and did a wonderful job of treating the inevitable mishaps which occur in a summer population of young males with no self-control. There was, however, one problem, and it was a serious problem that had no solution. The problem was that our nurse was young, very sweet, and very beautiful. Every camper and most of the male staff – married or not – were in love with her. I recall that her name was Elaine. Routine bumps and bruises that most kids would normally ignore were now considered serious enough that they must be evaluated by nurse Elaine, who would place the injured camper on the examination table and lean over closely with a smile and soft whispered words of comfort as she attended to a bruised elbow or a scraped knee. Her patients willingly submitted to this therapy, and, having bathed in that angel’s dreamy warmth and scent, would stagger in a drunken state from her first aid station, the harm to elbow and knee completely forgotten. The tale of nurse Elaine got an unexpected and delectable twist one day as we were all lounging in our barracks making our individual plans to marry her. An older and rather worldly camper, who had a knack for uncovering secrets and sharing them in dramatic fashion with his young and clueless peers, came into the Kiowa tent and gathered us all in a circle to relate a scandalous scene he had witnessed late the night before as he walked by the shore. It was just before midnight and there was a beautiful moon shining over the lake. He thought he saw people swimming off the dock. He wasn’t sure, so he watched and waited. Soon two figures climbed out of the water, clearly outlined against the dark water by the pale light. Two adults – a man and a woman – came up the ladder. Here, the narrator’s circle of Kiowa listeners tightened around him, eyes wide. Yes, he said, there was a young man and a young woman, dripping wet and (here he paused for dramatic effect)….without clothing. He couldn’t identify the man but he guessed it was one of the counselors. There was no doubt, however, that the curvaceous female figure belonged to our nurse Elaine. This spicy tale of a naughty summer escapade was almost too much for our adolescent heads to manage. Our fevered minds swarmed with emotions of excitement and jealousy. Of course we still wanted to marry her, but how come she never asked any of us to go skinnydipping in the moonlight?
Our beloved nurse didn’t accompany the senior campers when we took a trip to Quebec City. Most of us piled into an enormous two and a half ton truck which in the back had a canvas roof over three rows of bare wooden benches, guaranteeing a truly bottom-numbing trip. The overflow campers stuffed themselves into an old station wagon. Of course, these were the days before seat belts, airbags, or even common sense. This dangerous and unbelted little convoy rattled north through New Hampshire’s hills and across the border into Canada’s version of the French countryside. Commander Triplett didn’t come with us but had given us older boys an extended and stern lecture about the dangers of visiting a place where English wasn’t spoken. If we were to believe him, the entire province of Quebec – villages, farms, not to mention the cities – were swarming with prostitutes, pimps and hustlers who would drag us all into a horrid miasma of sin and debauchery before finally robbing and murdering us. He was giving us entirely too much credit. There was little danger that this group of innocent and timid virgins was going to be out soliciting hookers. Nonetheless, we had a great time in Quebec City. We admired the elegant Chateau Frontenac, toured the old port and viewed the plain of Abraham where some of the Seven Years War was fought. We even took a side trip down the St. Lawrence seaway to visit the grand basilica of St. Anne de Beaupre, which to our eyes was just a big church, although we were all impressed by the huge collection of crutches, braces and wheelchairs left behind by the faithful who had experienced miraculous cures after praying to Saint Anne, whoever she was. On our way back from the basilica to our cheap motels, I was in the back seat of the station wagon when we hit a parked car. Naturally , I arced gracefully through the air into the front seat where my lip encountered the back of another camper’s head. I bled like a stuck pig and got to keep the driver/counselor’ handkerchief as a wound dressing. We all returned alive to New Hampshire, but back at camp, the whispered rumor was that during our adventure north two of our counselors had in fact availed themselves of the services of des putains Quebecoises.
During those years, we took some memorable family trips. One outing in the late 1950s was a cross country trek to the west coast in a VW microbus. It was a pretty tight fit with five people, luggage and camping equipment. Sue was a new driver at the time, and in one stretch of open, windy highway in Nevada, she learned some hair-raising lessons about what happens when you’re driving with the wheel set against the wind and an oncoming truck, momentarily cutting off that breeze, makes your car jump into the next lane. I saw my first elk peering from the woods by a lonely mountain highway. We camped in Yellowstone and I ruined some perfectly good enamel cookware – to my mother’s intense dismay – by beating on it with a metal bar to scare away some bears which, in those days, were still fed at the roadside by tourists and routinely scrounged through garbage cans and campers’ food. In the mountains near Yosemite, Dad organized a guys-only day trip to fish in an isolated alpine lake. His plan was to snag some trout and cook them right by the shore. It was quite a steep ascent and Dad was huffing and puffing and showing his years, but he was at the top of his game with the fly rod. He landed a mess of trout, cleaned them, wrapped them in tin foil and cooked them over juniper brush that Steve and I collected. He even brought along butter, salt and lemon. It was truly a transcendent experience for all of us and with that outing our father was truly enshrined in the pantheon of Super Dads . We shared some of the trout with an envious kid whose dad didn’t fish, and watched him eagerly tuck into it, even though he cried since he had recently been hit in the mouth with a baseball bat and the lemon juice stung his unhealed cuts.
In the summer of 1960, we went to Europe and Egypt. I don’t remember visiting England but we did quite the extended continental tour and saw France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal. I have a particularly strong memory of the pounding Atlantic surf on the Portuguese coast at Estoril. I was into collecting souvenir rocks and broke off a piece of the Coliseum’s brickwork without being caught. While I was committing this piece of cultural vandalism, I noticed that the mortar used by the original masons was so incredibly tough that in many places the bricks had worn away completely, leaving an odd rectangular latticework of cement. Those guys could also pour concrete underwater. We had a memorable dinner of fettuccine in Rome at the famous Alfredo’s restaurant and it made a sufficiently strong impression on me that I was to return for more in two years. We made a delightful side trip south of Rome to the Via Appia Antica where we marveled at the Romans ability to build a road in a straight line that seemed to go on forever. We walked on the original massive paving stones with their deep grooves cut by generations of chariots and wagon traffic in a countryside decorated in true romantic fashion with crumbling walls, stately poplars and the ruins of villas and mausoleums. With my vandalic urges at full throttle and once in Athens, I got whistled at for trying to take a stone from the Acropolis. At the archeological sites in Egypt, it felt like you were walking on crunchy gravel but it was actually a five thousand year old layer of terra cotta and alabaster pottery fragments. In Athens, Steve had an attack of appendicitis. The Hotel Grande Bretagne, where we were staying, summoned a Dr. Polymeropolis to the bedside. The doc’s considered judgment was that surgical intervention was not needed. Thus, Steve just cooled his heels for a few days, got better, and dodged the Greek scalpel. A major highlight was about a week in Egypt. Dad was very excited because he was an amateur Egyptologist and could read and write hieroglyphics. I cannot imagine a stranger hobby or more obscure academic undertaking. He purchased textbooks for introductory hieroglyphics and would sit on the couch and test himself with flashcards. He found a few people – equally disturbed – who shared the same interest and with whom he could correspond in a dead language. We trudged through the museums in Cairo, saw King Tut’s sarcophagus, and braved 120 degree heat to tour Luxor, the Karnak temple and the Valley of the Kings. Nothing was air conditioned in those days. On the overnight train trip back to Cairo, my parents unkindly stuck me in a sleeping compartment with a stranger. I was in the upper bunk and accidentally dropped a knife on his head. He was a Belgian who was leaving the Congo because of political turmoil there. We also met some Americans who had been isolated for so many years in remote jungle outposts in sub-Saharan Africa that their English sounded flat and hesitant. In Luxor, I learned the Arabic words for “thank you” and “go away” from an elderly Egyptian guide named Billy Brown.
One weekend back in Cleveland my parents made a memorable and commendable effort to introduce their kids to the hip culture of the day by taking the family to a dinner and music joint at the corner of Mayfield and Euclid in University Circle. The place was called the Jazz Temple and would regularly feature the top talent in the country. That saturday night it was Dizzy Gillespie on stage. My parents sounded extremely au courant as they gave us clueless youngsters the lowdown on John Birks Gillespie, who as a young man played with Cab Calloway at Harlem’s Cotton Club and went on to create bebop and pioneer fusions of Latin music with jazz. He really had the house jumpin’ that night as he blew his unique trumpet with his signature puffed-out cheeks. The bell of his trumpet pointed up at 45 degrees instead of straight out. My mom even had the backstory on that. It seems that in 1953 someone fell on Dizzy’s instrument and put that skyward bend in it. He liked the way it played afterwards. It projected sound better to the back rows of the audience and he never had it fixed. When the show was over, he even stopped by our table to say hello and chat for a minute. He may have been famous but he was also friendly and down-to-earth. It was many years before I learned the Jazz Temple’s backstory. It was founded in 1962 by a local African-American real estate developer and entrepreneur named Winston E. Willis. He was correct in his hunch that being close to Case Western Reserve University would draw a steady stream of students from the campus. The problem he did not anticipate was the reaction of the bigots in nearby Little Italy to the young and racially mixed crowd that came to this increasingly popular venue. After a long series of threats, the club finally disappeared in 1965 in a huge after-hours explosion that completely destroyed the building and marked the end to a brave social and business venture.
In the upper school at US, grades 10 through 12, the focus is on college preparation. We took the SAT exams. Then we took them again. Guest speakers came to morning assembly and told us how to become Joe College. Higher education applicants had to appear well-rounded in their activities, so I started joining clubs and committees. Since I had developed an interest in travel and foreign affairs, I became involved with the school’s Junior Council on World Affairs and religiously read the international section of Time magazine. I was probably8 the only kid in school who knew who the president of South Vietnam was. Our JCWA club attended a Cleveland-area mock UN assembly where we represented Burma and explained to our clueless peers that the Burmese were in some ways ethnically akin to certain Sino-Tibetan cultures. I got the sense that no one cared. To help me sort through the college application process, Dad took me on a road trip through the east to visit institutions I might be interested in. I vaguely recall seeing Hamilton, Trinity and Dartmouth. I did have a group interview at Yale with an admissions officer. We made the trip in Dad’s Rover sedan (not to be confused with a four wheel drive Land Rover). It was a poorly made English car. As we headed across rural New Hampshire, a truck came at us which I thought Dad didn’t see. I screamed in alarm. Dad still had great reaction time and he slammed the brakes so quickly and so hard that the brake fluid lines burst and we could only stop the car with the hand-operated emergency brake. So picture the scene. I’m feeling guilty for saving both our lives. Dad’s in a very bad mood and his arm is tired from using the hand brake. After a very unpleasant and unsafe day on the road, we eventually located a one-man garage which serviced Rovers and we were able to get the brake lines fixed. The best memory from that repair experience was in a corner of the garage where the owner-mechanic had stored a rare 1930s-era Bugatti Type 57SC coupe which he said he was going to repair someday. Even covered with dirt and dust, it looked sleek and sexy. We survived our college road trip and I plunged back into the academic rat race at US.
We knew that as seniors we would each be required to give a speech to the entire school. As I recall, we got AFS students from various countries during junior year. There was Yavuz Ergovan from Turkey – smart, polished, perfect English, outstanding soccer player. Jon Gunter came from Australia – short, powerful, played football. Jon told an Australian joke. Question: why are turds tapered? Answer: so your ass doesn’t slam shut. There was an exchange student at Laurel School who hailed from South Africa. She was white, of course. We had a conversation about apartheid. I attacked it, and, as expected, she defended it with a relaxed confidence which arose from her life-long conviction that separating the races into grotesque inequality was a natural and appropriate social policy. I wonder how she’s doing today.
During those years, I became increasingly active in sports and swam in the winter and ran track in the spring. In my junior and senior years, my girlfriend was Hillary Saunders. This was the first real relationship for either of us, and I would say that, as we fumbled our way through it, we did some growing up and had some fun times. There were lots of local adventures which beckoned us. We took a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon in the autumn and visited the great geodesic dome built by the American Society of Metals in Geauga county. For lunch we had a picnic nearby in a small nineteenth century cemetery. It was an overgrown and neglected place and seemed happy to have two young people liven things up with their energy and laughter. One weekend we went out to dinner at a Greek restaurant. I was familiar with the retsina wine that came with the meal but Hillary’s face was a study in surprise and disgust after her first sip. We maintained that evening’s international theme and drove down to the Cleveland port to see if any foreign ships were docked. There was one freighter with it’s bored-looking crew leaning over the rails. No one spoke English but I was able to chat with them in French and we got invited onboard for coffee in the captain’s quarter. It was like going to Europe without leaving town. Euclid Beach Park was in the twilight of its years in the early sixties but we went there many times to enjoy the Racing Coaster, the Rotor, the Hall of Mirrors, pink cotton candy and their famous popcorn balls. The farthest afield we ever got was a trip to Pennsylvania to see a Peter, Paul and Mary concert. We drove my mother’s Karmann Ghia, which I remember as rather slow and only moderately stylish.
My grades remained mediocre until the end of my junior year, when there was the beginning of a transformation in my academic performance. In that spring of 1962, I remember having a chance conversation with classmate Al Havighurst about our college plans, to which subject I had given absolutely no thought. He reminded me that University School’s headmaster – a sad alcoholic named Harold Cruikshank – had attended Yale and every year managed to get four or five students admitted to that fine institution. Al offered his opinion that if I applied myself I could improve my grades and get into Yale. To this day I’m not sure how or why it happened but I decided I would try to achieve that goal. I had until that fall to make a plan.
The summer months were busy since I not only had to reinvent myself but also do some traveling. In June I sailed to Europe on the student ship Aurelia with friend Richard Oulihan. Try to imagine being confined at sea in very close quarters with five hundred immature people like yourself. It wasn’t something you would want to do frequently. My best memory was the smell of fresh bread coming from the ship’s bakery at dawn. With a handful of rolls that were still hot, we would stand at the railing and watch the morning sun change the Atlantic from dark slate to orange and pink and blue. Our general plan was to purchase bicycles and pedal north. We docked at Southampton with a plan to take a train to London, though we didn’t yet have a place to stay. While asking advice from some young dock workers, we suggested with airy bravado that we might just sleep in one of the city parks. They got a big laugh out of that and warned us that the streetwalkers and thugs would make short work of us. We eventually took the safe option and stayed at a youth hostel. Our time in London was brief and very short on sightseeing. I only remember visiting the Hyde Park speakers’ corner and listening to a black gentleman in a dark suit and bowler hat exercise his freedom of speech. He delivered a tirade against all things white and British. All the fingers from his left hand were missing and he would beat the remaining stump viciously on the wooden lectern to emphasize his oratorical points. Once recovered from that spectacle, we headed to Gamages department store to purchase our bicycles. My choice was a Raleigh Blue Streak with a rear luggage rack from which I hung pannier bags to hold all my junk. It was now early July and our wheels initially took us west along the Thames. The English don’t have much room to work with on their sceptred isle and, to our American eyes at least, everything in the countryside seemed very small, very quaint and very close together. Fate led us to the town of Henley and, from the crowds thronging the streets, we could be forgiven for thinking that the community had thrown a party and a fashion parade just for us. Men strutted by in ridiculous striped blazers and straw boaters. The ladies swirled along in flowery dresses and great, impractical sun hats. It seems that we had stumbled onto the annual Henley Royal Regatta, England’s premier amateur rowing competition, featuring a wide range of events over a long weekend with teams from all over the world. Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon were the royal patrons and blessed the commoners with their presence as they made sure everyone was properly dressed. After we had reassured ourselves that Henley could manage without us, we bent our path to the north. We went through Stratford only because it lay on our path, not because of the Bard. My bike had become banged up and we stopped at a bicycle shop there and had a mechanic “true up” a wheel. On our way north, totally lacking helmets or other safety considerations, we ran a daily risk of being flattened by highway traffic as we weaved a dangerous path through the countryside. Back in those days, road signs giving mileage and directions were often just tiny stone posts, and you almost had to get down on your hands and knees to see that, for example, Banbury was six miles ahead. We slept in hostels, in barns, in ditches, or the cheapest (therefore sleaziest) hotels we could find. I slept on sheets that probably hadn’t been washed since the second world war. We sometimes shipped our bicycles ahead and hitchhiked for several days before we picked them up again. One day, grubby and unwashed, as we had our thumbs out on a lonely stretch of highway, a luxurious Jaguar sedan suddenly pulled over and stopped right next to us. We looked at each other in disbelief at our good fortune and immediately piled into the back seat and offered profuse thanks to the elegantly dressed couple in front. When they both turned around with a look of surprise on their faces, we sensed that something might be wrong. In fact, they had only stopped to look at a map but were too startled and too polite to throw us out of the car. So we all drove on in awkward silence as we stank up their beautiful vehicle. We got a hundred miles out of it and they got a story to tell about the smelly Americans. After the Jaguar adventure, we continued to rely on hitchhiking, buses and trains to get to Scotland. We eventually reached as far north as Pitlochry, where I swam in the icy, heart-stopping waters of Loch Tummel. Some Scottish youth I met at the local hostel laughed till tears rolled down their cheeks at my mispronunciation of local place names, but it wasn’t my fault that their version of English is so strange and their brogue so thick as to be nearly incomprehensible. We had a very difficult time hitchhiking from Pitlochry back south to Edinburgh to retrieve our bicycles. We got a ride from a farmer who dropped us on a bleak stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere with not a car in sight. In the space of several hours, we saw perhaps three cars but they didn’t stop. It was getting dark and we were cold and hungry and facing the prospect of sleeping in a ditch when a tired little bus came into view, headed south. We screamed, jumped up and down and did everything but throw ourselves under the wheels to get it to stop. There was hardly room for us but we squeezed in with loud and sincere thanks. Edinburgh was a sight for sore eyes and we had a joyful reunion with our wheels.
Richard went on to see family in Ireland and I went on to the continent’s youth hostels by myself – age sixteen – and cycled and took trains through Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. A woman in Belgium, from whom I was seeking directions, correctly assessed that I only spoke French “une toute petite peu” and said that I must “traversez le pont” to continue on my way, all of which I barely understood. In a classic example of anxiety-driven overkill and over-preparation, I carried an extensive AAA Trip-Tik of my European route. This was a heavy, fifty page tome of minutely detailed and sequentially organized maps of my proposed journey. I quickly determined that I could manage perfectly well simply by reading road signs. In any case, I was better off than the young people who depended on hitchhiking. I remember seeing long lines of kids strung out along the highway with their backpacks and their thumbs stuck out. This was a rather undependable mode of transport – especially miserable in the rain – and one which would eventually disappear almost completely from the European and North American landscape as car ownership rose and public transportation improved. I learned about the process of poste restante, wherein a post office will hold a letter until you pick it up and during my trip I received a great deal of mail this way from my parents and from Hillary. I crossed into Germany and was waiting out a rainstorm in the town of Julich when I was spontaneously befriended by a man named Peter Lennartz. Neither of us spoke a word of the other’s language, but that didn’t slow him down a bit. He took me to his house to meet his family and to feed me lunch. Through sign language and gestures, I learned that he was a printer. We exchanged addresses and somehow corresponded afterwards. Herr Lennartz looked to be in his mid- to late-forties and I wondered if he had served in the Wehrmacht during the war. In 2019, an internet search reveals that a middle aged man named Peter Lennartz still lives in Julich. Perhaps his son or grandson?
My path took me south from Koln upstream along the Rhine. This was true fairy tale country. Medieval castles commanding great vistas perched on hillsides overlooking the river, and gingerbread villages like Rudesheim sat warm in the summer sun by the water’s edge. As my wheels turned and Mannheim and Karlsruhe slipped by, I eventually reached Freiburg on the edge of the Black Forest, arriving late in the day and unable to find a barn or a hostel. With a starry sky promising clear weather, it was a natural choice to hide my bike in some bushes and spread my sleeping bag in a field, as I had already done numerous times. So I crawled into my “schlafsack” and went to sleep. I awoke in the morning rested and ready to go. It wasn’t until many years later that I started having new and unusual memories of that night, memories in which a dark figure was standing nearby and looking down at me as I slept. The recollection is more strange than scary. Perhaps it was the owner of the farm wanting to charge me for lodging? Maybe an alien considering me as a candidate for brain surgery? I carry no visible scars on my scalp and I can offer no explanation.
From the Black Forest, I headed west in the general direction of Munich. In order to make bicycling easier, I had sent some of my luggage ahead to be picked up later. A real problem arose when I lost my glasses somewhere near Ulm. I had a replacement pair but they had been shipped ahead. There I was, pedaling virtually blind, unable to read signs unless I had my nose pressed against them. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, my eyesight changed. The sight in my left eye, which is bad to begin with, became acutely worse and blurred over, and my right eye increased in sharpness so that everything around me – even things miles away – were in startling, razor-sharp focus. It was like having the vision of an eagle. That lasted for several days until I had rendezvoused with my second pair of spectacles. Then my sight returned to the way it had been. I was having some bizarre experiences in Germany.
I didn’t relish the prospect of grunting my way south over the Alps on my Raleigh, so my bike became baggage and I enjoyed the scenery of an alpine train ride over the mountains to Italian lake country. Back on my trusty wheels, as I cruised south along the shores of Lake Como, dining in little trattorias to the sound of the latest American pop songs, I thought, this is more like it. Italy’s fun. Thus, the last leg of my trip was a pleasant mix of trains and road work through fair Verona, Venice and Florence under the Tuscan sun. I spent a few days in Rome and had a nostalgic return to Alfredo’s restaurant for a plate of fettuccine. Unlike 1960, however, when I had dined there with my family and looked spiffy in clean clothes, this time around I was covered in road dirt and wore a grubby pair of lederhosen. My southern terminus was the bay of Naples where I engaged in some exceptional lunacy. I rode my bike along the steep, tortuous and famously dangerous Amalfi coast road, which gave me about two inches of clearance between trucks on my left and a near-vertical mountain face on my right. I made it through Positano and over to Sorrento, where I took a ferry to the Isle of Capri. I had developed a romantic obsession with swimming in Capri’s Grotta Azzurra – the Blue Grotto. Guides take tourists in tiny rowboats to the mouth of the grotto and, by timing the waves carefully, are able to slip through a low opening into a large cavern which has a bright and magical luminescence from indirect sunlight. The stodgy, middle-aged passengers in my boat were scandalized when I stripped down to my Speedo and jumped overboard, but, hey, at least I wasn’t naked. I paddled around for a minute, dodging sharp rocks and the multiple rowboats. When no one else tore off their clothes to join me, I clambered back into my boat, feeling wet, silly but fulfilled – in a very immature way, of course. From that touristic high point, I hopped a train back to Rome, where I somehow survived the congested traffic and fumes as I finalized my return plans. I disassembled my bike to baggage size and flew home with it to Cleveland. During this trip, I collected travel patches from the various cities and regions I visited and sewed them onto a jacket as I acquired them. I hadn’t brought a camera so they were my nostalgic little reminders of where I’d been. That needle and thread work was usually my evening’s entertainment at my youth hostel lodgings. Towards the end of the trip I had about fifty patches decorating that jacket and they collectively looked somewhat ostentatious and rather ridiculous, so when I got back to Cleveland I snipped them off the jacket and framed them and was able to enjoy them on the wall for many years. However, even items that you treasure sometimes disappear and somewhere along the way I lost them. It was sad that they slipped through my fingers but it was also a lesson in letting go.
That summer experience was culturally broadening and gave me a new sense of confidence, as if I had crossed a threshold from one stage of my life to another. At any rate, when I got back home for the last year of high school, I was on fire academically and started getting straight A-s.
The culture at University School encouraged participation and achievement and I unquestioningly threw myself into that world. I got good grades. I did sports. I was involved with lots of extracurricular activities. My travels prompted me to join the Junior Council on World Affairs as a future global citizen, and I recall listening with fascination to the war stories of Dutchman Pieter Hoets, a US teacher who had fought the Nazis as a member of the Dutch underground. I looked good enough on paper that Yale said they would take a chance on me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was badly overextending myself, sort of running on fumes and borrowed energy. My parents were proud of me and I was proud of myself, but after graduation I realized how tired I was. That summer I just wanted to vegetate, although Rick Taft and I put together an ad hoc tree business with a Jeep, a trailer, and an old-fashioned 60 lb chainsaw. Of course, this was done without insurance and or a single piece of safety equipment. We called ourselves Fester and Carbuncle of the Fly-By-Night Tree Service and, on one occasion, came within eighteen inches of destroying a customer’s house when a tree unexpectedly fell ninety degrees the wrong direction. We were not shining examples of good business management, but it put some money in my pocket and kept me busy until I headed off to college.