The Little Red Hen. Where the Hurry-Up Years started. When I was three.
My first 13 years seemed a kind of hurry-up exercise. The amount of reading I packed into those years was phenomenal. I was started in preschool at the age of three, two years worth. I did the presentation on shapes on the feltboard at graduation in a white cap and gown. Kindergarten was a private 7th Day Adventist school (Bible readings every day) where my first bully was the son of our teacher. As taught by my dad, I fought back and incurred his mother’s quiet but undying wrath. On the day they gave us our first reading book in First Grade at St.John’s Day School, I brought it home and read it out loud all the way through to my parents.
Alice clearly made an impression on me. Click
to enlarge and stretch more with your fingers.
During the second week of second grade, which was being taught in the same classroom with third grade, the teacher changed my seating before the lessons from the second grade side to the third grade side. She told me that’s where I’d be from now on. I was already a little young for second grade, but the hurry-up had started. My fourth grade sister was a little miffed when she found out later that day.
I went to school at St. John’s through the eighth grade, having made the Dean’s List in every single marking period every year. I wasn’t the only smart one. Almost all the children there were motivated, the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, and small business owners, and almost everyone we graduated went away to some boarding school after graduation. I had some good teachers, two indifferent ones, and two extraordinary ones who appreciated and pushed me harder than they did their own enrolled children. At home I played by myself in the dirt pile by the ice house, where I scraped out roads for my Tonka trucks, and also in the attic and in the woods behind our old restored farmhouse.
I had just a few friends I saw occasionally (long days on bikes with Andy, who died of a drug overdose my first year in college), and spent most of my time reading everything I could lay my hands on. I read on sofas, in windowsills, on radiators, in bed, and in the bathtub. My choice of reading matter was as promiscuous as I could make it. All my father’s classic novels for boys (Kidnapped, Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, etc), the Treasury then the Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes, my sister’s books for girls, my mother’s Lord of the Rings, most of Edgar Allan Poe, various Book of the Month Club selections (including sizzlers like ‘I Capture the Castle’ and ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’), my mother’s paperback mysteries (including Mickey Spillane’s ‘The Long Wait,’ discovered under the towels in the bathroom), my grandmother’s women magazines, the sports page of the Philadelphia Inquirer (Phillies!), complete series books of Thornton Burgess, Tom Swift (two different generations worth), Dr. Seuss, Nancy Drew, and Landmark History Books about American greats, multiple anthologies of popular short stories and mystery classics, all of Rex Stout, everything I could find of Thurber and Benchley, P, G, Wodehouse, and in my last summer before boarding school all the James Bond novels in a row (hadn’t been allowed to before). Also my mother’s and grandmothers’ women’s magazines (I knew better than to ask what Norforms were and figured it out myself), and dozens and dozens of the 30 years worth of National Geographics stored on the third floor of my grandfather’s house. Plus the comic books (Batman, Spider-Man…) my mother secretly let me buy at Richardson’s country store.
I was twelve when my dad drove me to Mercersburg for my interview. We drove through the little towns in central Pennsylvania in the TR3, singing together with made-up lyrics for each ‘burg. Admission wasn’t an issue. Their question was whether it might be appropriate to enroll me as a sophomore because my SSATs pegged me at grade 12 in academic capability and I’d had years of French and Latin at St. John’s. My dad said no. I was a 5’0” squirt and already at least a year and a half ahead of my chronological grade level. So I was enrolled as a freshman (“Junior” in their system) taking courses in Latin 2 and French 2, and an A-level class in English. I never failed to make high honors at Mercersburg (90 general average or better) until the final marking period of my senior year, when I had indulged in the Senior Slump of tradition. I applied to just two schools, Harvard and Yale, because my acceptance had been assured by both before the application deadline. I entered Harvard as a sophomore in the Fall of 1970, apparently still in hurry-up mode.
Rewind time. My dad had lightly applied the brakes in 1966. That turned out to be a momentous change factor in my life. A turning point that has affected everything since was the Mercersburg Chapel Walkout of 1969, when I was not a senior yet but an ‘upper middler’ who had just been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Mercersburg News, for many years one of the highest rated prep school newspapers in the country. My response was to put out the only ‘Extra’ in the paper’s history, put together in less than half the usual time, and capturing the events and the opinions of both students and faculty for the permanent archive. 50 years later I was contacted by members of the Class of ‘69 who had been ringleaders in the walkout, and they wanted to invite me to their 50th Reunion to discuss my memories of that and why I had opposed their own participation in it. As I had. After hearing their convenient memories and rationalizations of their actions back then, I refused their invitation. They were who I feared they would be.
Here’s my take, published in my blog Instapunk Rules published in 2014, five years before the ‘69 class reunion.
There’s also this, closely related in its inspiration to the Walkout experience.
I spent my senior year trying to save Mercersburg from itself. The aftermath the ‘69ers never saw because they had escaped to college. I was named to a faculty-student steering committee charged with developing a new charter for School Government, in which student voices would have voting power they’d never had before. The makeup of the Committee was skewed to those with the greatest interest in ‘reform,’ meaning liberal faculty members seeing their opportunity to participate in the youth revolution, as well as students who wanted to eliminate all the inconvenient rules they’d chafed under in the past. There was general intent but little hard work in the discussions. What they wanted was democracy, the kind where students would have enough power to say No to the school administration. They just didn’t have any idea how to go about it.
I designed a draft document describing a School Government with nearly equal student-faculty representation and the actual authority to legislate. But I gave the faculty a one-person edge over students in terms of membership. Student seats would be allocated by class year, juniors the least, seniors the most, and, vitally, while most student seats would be elected, a minority would be faculty appointments. The federalist aspect of this design was hotly debated, but I defended it, and won, by presenting it as a diversity measure. Not all the students should be successful jocks, for example. Not all the best minds were popular. There had to be checks and balances for fair representation of the whole student body. And the faculty gets one more vote because they are still the grownups who are responsible for all of us.
Surprisingly, my charter was approved and even more surprisingly I was elected as a senior member by student votes. The honeymoon was short-lived. I consistently voted against the elimination of rules and disciplinary reforms intended to let students do pretty much what they wanted. I came to be regarded as a betrayer and the liberal faculty members took the lead in demonizing me. Why I turned my back at the end of the year and basically gave away the valedictorian honor to a worthy guy who had always worked harder than I had. (He actually commented on a post at the original Instapunk.com and told me he knew I should have been Valedictorian. I told him, Nonsense. He earned it. I had been voted Laziest in the senior poll.)
I enrolled at Harvard as a sophomore, but the hurry-up momentum was gone. There was an early turning point, perhaps a premature one because I didn’t have a real freshman year. As a Robert Benchley fan, my one real ambition at Harvard was to become a member of the Harvard Lampoon. The Lampoon Castle is still my favorite building at Harvard.
It was not to be. I found out how the admission process worked and attended a launch party at which aspirants could meet the members. I had not expected it to be so social a process. I knew nothing of the complicated hierarchies and connections of Harvard clubs then. I left the party early and composed a large initial submission consisting of the monthly publication of the Sigma Delta Sigma Fraternity, including alumni conviction announcements and ads featuring genuine work shirts worn by auto workers and grape pickers for that je ne sais quoi fraternity fashion look. Submissions were returned with scrawled comments by members, which were all scornful and scatological (Shit! was one I recall), except for a thoughtful note of encouragement from a member who would go on to become President of the Lampoon. He told me to keep trying. There would be multiple submissions before “white letters” would be sent out to rejected applicants. My white letter arrived within a couple weeks.
Like everything else at Harvard I’d seen, the Lampoon had gone lefty. I moved on. My Harvard career could be considered a giant screwup because my grades were not bad but not exceptional either, and I sought refuge in a club world I’d never known existed. I became a drinker. I drank a lot. I was nominally aiming at law school, but my grades weren’t good enough and in a noteworthy lapse of judgment I took the LSAT on a morning when I was badly hungover. I didn’t do badly, but it wasn’t a Harvard-worthy score and I was still a Harvard snob. Letting myself down easily I applied to three law schools — Penn, Georgetown, and UVA — when I was still 18 and included only token essays in support of my application. I was rejected by all three obviously. My Dad and I agreed that another year at Harvard was unnecessary unless I was going to buckle down and improve my grades, and so I graduated at 19 into the post-college world of 1A draft status. (Which my Dad never even mentioned in his own consideration of fourth year advisability. Neither did I.) I’ve written a lot about Harvard, which you can find for yourself by doing a keyword search at Instapunk Returns, and despite my poor class attendance I learned a helluva lot there. But it just didn’t end well.
I was now officially a failure. As an ersatz senior in my third year, I had had no notion whatsoever of the campus support for job interviews. No one ventured to brief me and I didn’t ask.
All of which turned out for the best, even if it took me a long time to figure that out. Why the idea of outside orchestration applies to failure as well as success. Apparently, it was necessary for me to race through childhood and arrive early at the decisive moment to play a role in the most important event in Mercersburg history. It was also necessary that I pass up the standard beam-down from Harvard to Manhattan in favor of my roots in Salem and Cumberland County, for the purpose of rediscovering what had been lost during seven years away in a world that was busily tearing itself apart. Which I knew something about because I had been busily tearing myself apart too.
I’d been home less than a month when I got a phone call from an attorney who knew of me from one of his best clients, our millionaire neighbor during my childhood in Greenwich. The attorney wanted to know if I would like a job while I was considering what to do next. We set up the time for an interview and a new adventure began in a fittingly modest way. Far far more educational than first year law school would have been.
Santo Salvo was a kind but genteelly aloof gray-haired gent with a degree from Harvard Law School and a project he needed done in support of a complex real estate case. I would work out of his office in a woodsy Millville cul de sac, where I’d have a desk upstairs, but most of my time would be spent in the basement of the Cumberland County Courthouse in Bridgeton. He wanted me to record all the real estate transactions in the county for the year 1913, when the tax laws changed dramatically. He was trying to determine what land was really worth in those days, which required meticulous documentation because so many transactions were listed as “for consideration of one dollar.” I was game. It was $100 a week that wasn’t coming in from anywhere else. I started commuting from Salem to Millville and Bridgeton and I had 8-track tapes in my old red MGB roadster. Life was improving. Somewhat.
Ah, my memory is getting terrible. I can’t recall her name, but she was an education all by herself. I want to say ‘Mary’ which probably isn’t right, but it was an English Christian name, and she was a well educated lifelong resident of Bridgeton. She was friendly and kind to me, showed me how to look up the transaction books, and gave me a place at her conference table to fill in my sheets of accounting paper. She smiled when I dodged her question about where I’d gone to college with the usual evasion that I’d gone to school in Massachusetts, because it’s wearying to hear people say “Hovvid” knowingly when you tell them. I was far from feeling boastful about it just then, but she chuckled at the pretension of not telling. We warmed up to one another pretty quickly. I was there every weekday for six weeks or two months, and I gradually came to learn about a mostly silent chapter in Cumberland history. It had been the site of one of the WWII internment camps for Japanese-American citizens uprooted from California and other points west. Her family had been internees, and she remembered a childhood in the camp, though she didn’t volunteer much about that at first.
I tried to prompt her by telling her about my first grade friend Julian, whose I visited on multiple occasions. His parents were much older than mine. His mother looked like a shrunken invalid in long sleeves, quiet but attentive. It was on Julian’s dad that I detected the tattooed numbers peeking out from his shirtcuffs, blue ink on flashes of wrist. They’d been prisoners in the Nazi camps. Julian’s mother died during that one year of our friendship. As we walked the wet brick sidewalk from St.John’s Chapel to the Parish House for class, he described her cremation to me the day after it happened. “Poof,” he said, “and she was gone.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Mary said, “Not for us. There were no beatings, no murders, no tattoos. We had food and shelter. That’s not the kind of pain we lived with.” (AutoCorrect just tried to turn my “wi” into “Wuthering.” I swear to God. Try to imagine that algorithm…)
I waited, relying on the respectful silence I’d given Julian after his sharing. She elaborated carefully. It wasn’t about the privation. It was about the isolation, the humiliation of being there, the stoppage of life and its small freedoms. It was a prison, no matter how they described it to the internees and themselves.
Did they ever get over it afterward? No definitive answer there from Mary. Yes and no. Did she seem bitter, resentful, grievance-minded? No. She seemed disappointed in some permanent way with her country of birth, which had judged and sentenced her without so much as a hearing. “There was a war on. We knew that.” Was that something she thought I wanted to hear? Can’t say.
After the warm they hadn’t moved away but settled in Bridgeton and started over. That was the one thing about it I had known. Year after year, the valedictorian of the Bridgeton High School was of Japanese descent. Success is the best revenge. I had only the vaguest idea where the camp had been, but I knew why there were Japanese in the high school.
Mr.Salvo wanted to keep me on after I finished the Courthouse stint. I rented an apartment in Millville (must have gotten a raise of some sort) and was free to roam around his law library, browsing in its dense books all I wanted. I also got assignments outside the office. I was slowly realizing that Santo was more than a lawyer. He was a businessman too, a kind of silent partner in at least two, maybe more, commercial enterprises. He owned the license for a local Wawa store. He owned a successful wholesale business called Millville Plumbing Supply, to which I was dispatched for various inquiries and research tasks. I don”t remember much about what these were, except that I know now what he was up to. He was slowly recruiting me as a future addition to his legal practices and business life. He wanted me to see what was out there in a real world that might be preferable to vassal status in a big time big city law firm.
I should have felt honored, but I was confused instead. Why what I have left from that next phase is scraps. A week or two riding along with the MPS’s one business-to-business salesman an uncommunicative middle-aged Italian from Vineland who took me on his sales calls and meetings at the even smaller Salvo enterprise called Villas Plumbing supply in Atlantic County. Was doing some sullen drinking, mostly beer, at my apartment nights, where I finally got to catch up on every episode of Star Trek, in reruns on cable. The high point of that period actually. Loved me some James T, Kirk and his interplanetary flirtations. Spock was okay if a bit too much like a member of the Harvard Signet Society, and I preferred Uhura for obvious reasons, not to mention Susan Oliver in her green alien incarnation…
Work, right. After the salesman I was also a ride-along with some untitled fixer whose name escapes me, though not his colorful personage. Muscle tee shirts with short sleeves rolled up, the better more to show off his biceps. He was jovial, unabashedly crude of speech, and he was — as he showed me — a native of the hamlet called Rosenhayn just outside of Vineland. Which meant he was also a Mennonite. Okaaay. I knew of Mennonites and that’s about it. My new best friend told me all about them. They’re religious like the Amish, just not as “plain.” (I’d had a buggy ride with an Amish guy when I was a kid on a visit in Pennsylvania to my dad’s old roommate from Mercersburg and Cornell; he hadn’t struck me as plain either, with his soft-pack of Winston’s on the bouncy wooden seat beside him and his snide jokes about the English…) I learned that Mennonites could have all the comforts, cars and electric and stuff, but they were also a close-knit independent community. They had no truck with government or insurance companies or other external institutions. They all paid into a community fund that was available to help any one of them in need, including health care, rebuilding after fires, and protection from other forces of nature and civilized capitalist society. While he was explaining this he was also giving me a tour of Rosenhayn, where he even showed me the house where his girlfriend lived and told me about how she had recently cheated on him and he had smashed all the window glass out of her car with a baseball bat. Okaaay.
Then everything in SalvoWorld suddenly changed. One day I was suddenly called into Santo’s office (the door was usually closed), where I was introduced to a tall, very imposing presence named — perfectly — Harold Gunn. He had a booming voice and yet was no shouter. It’s just that you could still feel the rumble of it even when he was speaking conversationally. He was Santo’s newest business partner, and together they were acquiring a lumberyard in Vineland that was on the verge of going under after decades of negligent family ownership. Harold was going to fix all that, and Santo wanted meet learn the ropes of that business “under the Gunn” so to speak.
I felt good about the prospect. Harold Gunn changed my life, much for the better as I look back on it now. He put me through a business apprenticeship most MBAs never get. Their purpose in getting a graduate degrees to avoid this kind of ground-up training and experience. Which is their loss.
Harold Gunn. Born in Oklahoma, raw-boned and alert from the start. He was a fearless basketball player and got an athletic scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, where he played until he’d used up his eligibility and promptly lost his scholarship. He was unceremoniously dumped into the job market without a degree and went to work lifting crates for a Coca Cola bottling facility in his home town. As he told me about this, I thought of the irony of the many hours I’d spent splashing in the pool at the estate of Francis Lyman Hine, whose vast fortune was derived from the Coca Cola empire. I was pretty sure Hiney would have admired the hell out of Harold Gunn. He could have related on the athletic front at a minimum. He’d played football at Yale for four years and left school after four years as a freshman because they’d never allowed him to pass his courses as a reward for being on the football team, which was pretty hot stuff of its own in those days,
Hiney carried on from there and so did Harold. After he’d lifted enough crates to get tired of it, he began paying close attention to the business he was working for. He decided the people who were running things weren’t any smarter than he was and set about learning all their jobs too by watching them. It didn’t take him long to rise in the ranks. He became one of the youngest bottling company presidents in a few years time and then graduated into self-employment as an entrepreneur.
He was in his late thirties when I met him. He had a fine house and a red late model Corvette that was his pride and joy. Let me drive it a couple times. I refrained from showing off my motorhead propensities and he approved of my composure at the wheel. I became the guy he talked to about the problems at the lumber yard he was engaged in fixing. He was an expert mimic and he could portray any of the employees so you’d know and laugh without being told their names.
He was uniformly cordial with everyone who worked for him but he was not afraid to fire them when their time had come. He didn’t feel a need to get rid of all the dead wood, only the wood that had petrified into an obstruction. He told me which ones were on the list and when he would be ready to replace them. He told me who he would promote when the time came. He preferred building from within over sourcing outside. What he wanted from me was that I learn how the company did what it did. He’d just completed his first big rehab project of having the whole facility refurbished with a fresh coat of paint when he told me I’d be going to work across the street as a yard hand in the real center of the business.
I have written fictionally about my experiences working for Harold Gunn elsewhere. So I won’t linger on them here. I was by turns a yard hand, a truck driver, and then a collection agent assigned to fill the cash hole created by the company’s ridiculously long accounts receivable list. Meanwhile, Harold was seducing me away from Santo’s Dickinson Law School agenda to become — guess what? — the despised paper-pushing MBA. He believed in gut punchers. He said I was one. Meaning I could get what I needed from graduate B-school without getting taken for a ride.
Which is how I returned from oblivion for another round in the Ivy League, this time at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
It was not to be a complete return to the hurry-up years, but it was a necessary step in terms of my apprenticeship for what I became after my protracted final escape from the death sentence of law school.
I did not plan this escape. I self-destructed my way into it. Which, of course, is completely consistent with the oldest advice given to aspiring writers: Live your life as writer.
Why failure is as Blessèd, and sometimes more so, than success with accolades and official blessings. Which too often embody the darker connotation of that word, i.e., wounds.
I’ve got my share, for which I’m grateful every day. Which would you rather have lived — first year law school or the unpredictable pathways in SalvoWorld and Harold Gunn gut-punching? I rest my case.
Signed,
The Cryptkeeper
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