From Troublemaker to Stand-Up Citizen

Early School Days: Mischief

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
– Mark Twain

I can truly say that I was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, à la Abe Lincoln. When I was five years old, I attended a one-room schoolhouse that was just off the lake—about three miles away. I understand that on good days I walked the three miles to and from school, but I don't really remember kindergarten.

The first school I remember attending was J.C. Nichols School where each desk had an ink well in the upper left corner. Can you believe that the teacher got upset with me when I dipped a girl’s pigtail into my inkwell?

After we moved, I went to Hale Cook for the rest of my elementary school career. The next school was the Bryant School on the south side of Kansas City. I was able to stay out of trouble there until one day I was called to the principal's office. It seemed that someone had written my name in rather bold black letters on one of the risers of the steps at the second entrance to the school. I would have been in serious trouble if I had not pointed out to the principal that it could not have been my work since whoever had painted the name had spelled my name wrong. The culprit had spelled it C-O-A-T-S. Logic prevailed and I was exonerated.

In those days in Kansas City you went from the 7th  grade right into high school whereas the rest of the world had an 8th grade. We started practicing for our 7th grade graduation ceremony before Christmas so that by the time graduation came along in June, we had perfected the songs we were going to sing for our parents. I will never forget the night of graduation. We were all dressed up, ready to go on stage for the big performance, when the teacher came up to me and said, “don't sing, just move your mouth, you might spoil it!” I was deeply hurt, but I sang anyway. That was the end of my musical ambitions.

While most of my contemporaries around the country were going into eighth grade, I was only thirteen when I enrolled in Southwest High, along with 1500+ other students. Southwest was a big, impersonal high school with large classes. I'm sure it was good scholastically, but you had to be highly motivated to get a good education. It was easy to get lost in the shuffle, which happened to me, it didn’t help that I was more interested in sports and girls than I was in education.

Louie House was the Southwest High football coach, who I got to know the following summer when my parents sent me to camp So So (Sosawagaming) located on the banks of Lake Superior, in the upper Peninsula of Michigan. Coach House was a camp counselor and seemed to take an interest in me as I remember him giving me stern lectures on the evils of smoking (which I never did). Besides coach House, my memories are of frigid plunges into the icy waters of Lake Superior that all camp goers were required to take every morning and standing between two cabins at night trying to hit the bats that whistled by with tennis rackets.

Some of us Missouri boys had talked our parents into buying us motor scooters.  Technically, you need a driver's license to drive a motor scooter, although at first the police were lax. Then they started to crack down. In Missouri you had to be 16 to drive, but in Kansas you could drive at 14 if you were "going to and from school or on errands for your parents." All my Kansas friends drove; they were always on ‘errands’ for their parents.

One night a group of us were touring on our scooters when police stopped us, determined that we were underage drivers, and told us to follow them to the station. I wasn’t supposed to be out that night and I was afraid of the consequences from my parents, so as we were driving down the street I made a sharp right-hand turn down a side street and reached under the seat to turn the scooter lights off. The police left one officer to guard my buddies and took off after me. I had enough of a head start that I was able to duck up a dark driveway and the police went by without seeing me.

I'll never forget how I agonized that weekend. My parents had taken me to their boat on the Lake of the Ozark and since this was long before the days of cellphones, there was no way for me to find out what had happened to my buddies. No phones, no communication of any kind and we returned too late on Sunday for me to call any of my friends. On Monday, the room phone rang, the teacher looked at me and said I was needed in the principal's office. The jig was up – my friends had ratted on me.  I was in trouble with the police, and in a lot more trouble with my parents. That was the end of my motor scooter days for some time.

 I hate to admit it, but my friend Richard Miller and I were always in trouble. There was a streetcar line not far from our home. It electrically propelled cars by an overhead line connected to the streetcar by a long, spring-loaded pole. We made great sport of waiting for a streetcar to stop, running behind it, and pulling on the wire that ran to the pole, disconnecting it from its electrical source. All the lights would go out and the conductor would have to reconnect the pole and restore power. If we were really brave, we'd do it a second time before the driver got started again—it drove 'ern nuts.

We also were known to throw rocks at an occasional streetlight and sometimes were accurate enough to hit and break one. I'm chagrined to say that we also "borrowed" a few cars when friends' parents left the keys in the ignition. I don't know why we were constantly looking for trouble. Maybe we had too much energy. We definitely had too much free time on our hands.

The classes at Southwest were big enough that I could generally get a C with little or no studying, and that's what I did. The first semester of my sophomore year I brought home a D and the shit hit the fan. My parents decided I was in a bad environment and that I needed to go away to school. Strangely enough, I realized that myself and didn't fight the idea at all.

They selected the Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, because a friend of theirs by the name of Art Weidman (See the characters section for more on Art) had gone there. That’s when things started to turn around for me. 

Boarding School

My parents were afraid I might become a juvenile delinquent if I continued going to Kansas City public schools. I could not seem to focus on anything but sports, girls and mischief, so they decided to send me to Peddie, a private boys school in Hightstown, New Jersey. They picked Peddie because that is where their close friend, Art Wideman, had gone to school. Even though he had graduated in 1925, I am sure my parents hoped Peddie would turn me into a gentleman like Art. (See my essay on Art in the Characters section.)

To get me off to a good start, they asked Art to accompany me on the long train ride East. We had a lot of time to talk on that trip. He explained that I had a unique opportunity as I was going to a school where no one knew me and or my reputation, so I had the unique chance to make anything I wanted of myself. Since I didn't know a single person at Peddie, I took Arts advice and concentrated on school work and sports. I was proud to make the honors list while playing varsity football, basketball and track, and later. During my sophomore year I earned a fully paid scholarship to study for a year abroad in England. (See my essay on my year abroad.)

Many people and moments have changed my life, but none more than Art Weidman and the advice he gave me on that train.

Although school in England was a great experience, I received no scholastic credit for it. I returned to Peddie for my junior year, which was a good year with lots of studying, sports, and a limited social life. Six of us lived on the edge of campus in a house called Wycoff, where Don Rich was the housemaster. He was a good guy, a fun teacher who got us all interested in politics and current events, and we students had a certain amount of freedom.

While at Peddie, my only home vacation was for Christmas in Kansas City. The other vacations I spent with friends. One time I went with Jerry Snavely who lived deep in the Amish part of Pennsylvania (at that time, I didn't know that people still lived like that—no one had a phone, they dressed all in black, and used horses and buggies instead of cars). Weekends I frequently had dinner at my roommate, Ace Barkley's house, who lived only 15 minutes away in Cranberry, New Jersey. His parents, Marian and Shag, were great characters and we had fun times together.

Like most high school seniors, I was very interested in applying to college. I applied to two, Yale and Northwestern, and was accepted to both. I took a weekend to go to New Haven to see what Yale was like and was given a wonderful reception. For some reason, Herman Hickman, who was their famous football coach at the time, thought I had potential as a player (he was wrong), so I got the royal treatment.

I was tempted to go to Yale. There was a wonderful new athletic facility but it was still an all-male school, and as I was just finishing four years of all male schools, I figured I needed a change. In the end, my decision was influenced by the fact that the current love of my life, Robbie Gibbon, was going to Northwestern. I have often wondered how my life would have been different had I chosen Yale.