High School
While at Peddie, my only home vacation was Christmas in Kansas City. The other vacations I spent with friends. One time I went with Jerry Snavely who lived in the Amish part of Pennsylvania (at that time, I didn't know that people still lived like that—no one had phones, they used horses and buggies, and dressed in solid black). Weekends I frequently had dinner at my roommate Ace Barkley's house, who lived only 15 minutes away in Cranberry, New Jersey. His parents were great people and 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.
There was a wonderful new athletic facility at Yale, and I was tempted, Yale was still an all-male school, and since I was just finishing four years of all male schools, I needed a change. I thought it would be good to go to a top ranked school somewhere in the Midwest. In the end, my decision was influenced by the fact that the current love of my life, Robbie Gibbon, was going to Northwestern.
I had met Robbie during the summer of 1946, when I was 15 (see my story, Love at First Sight). A group of sailors from Lake Lotawana had decided to take their sailboats north to try them out against the sailors from Lake Okoboji, a beautiful blue water Lake in Northern Iowa, near the Minnesota border. I went along as one of the crew. We were unloading our boats from the farm trailers we had used to transport them when a beautiful wood-paneled Chrysler convertible pulled up and two gorgeous young ladies got out to watch the entertainment. The most gorgeous was Robbie Gibbon and she took my breath away.
Although Robbie lived in Sioux City, her parents rented a summer home at Okoboji. The following summer I had my driver's license and went with a friend, Joe Birmingham, to visit the Gibbons. This led to an on-and-off romance that somehow survived even when I went to England for a year of school after my junior year of high school. More on Robbie later (See Love at First Sight: Robbie Gibbon). Now, onto college.