Chapter 3
High School
My high
school years were not happy ones. I went
to Dowling High, an all-boys school in Des Moines. It was the only Catholic high school for
boys, and drew students from all over the city.
This promoted cliques to the extreme, and I fell through the cracks. There were the affluent westsiders, then the
Italians, then ones from other parts of the city and parishes. And the athletes, theirs was the ultimate
clique, for basketball and football were very important at Dowling, as they are
in most Catholic high schools to this day.
I was a
nerd, with no athletic ability, slight of frame, rather shy, poor, with no
brothers and sisters and no father living with us. I made friends with a few others like myself,
but we were not an admired minority. I
excelled in my studies, but this was not much of a status achievement to
compensate for the other deficiencies.
While I did well in all courses, English may have been my best, and I
began to feel my mastery of writing,
whether essays, exams or term papers.
The most
notable event of this period occurred my first few months in high school—Pearl
Harbor. I remember that Sunday in
December when the news came over the radio of the attack. I was too young to be involved in the draft
that was to come, but the stories of battles played to a boy's daydreams of
heroic deeds and momentous strategies—the Civil War brought to the
present. I know now how the excitement
of war can bring young men flooding to enlist—until the awful realities are
finally experienced.
The war
played little part in my life. I was
finally called to the draft my senior year with the war almost over, but the
old heart murmur kept me out and I had no regrets.
Nowadays
my lack of war experience bothers me some when I'm with men who are just a few
years older and who served in the military.
In a bridge group of four or five of us who meet weekly, one is a
renowned B-17 pilot who successfully brought his plane through the bombings of
Germany. Sixty years later he cannot
help talking about it, and he has souvenirs galore of those days, and he even
gets together every year with comrades, though their numbers diminish, as they
meet in England near the sites of old airfields. As he tells about the now-glorious adventures,
the rest of us are silent, having no such experiences to relate, and I have
none at all.
I
finished high school in 1945 number 2 in my class of 66. Although I would have liked to go to Notre
Dame, probably because of the great stories of Knute Rockne and the Four
Horsemen and the glamour of this premier Catholic university, Drake University
had to be the choice. It was local,
within easy streetcar distance of our apartment, and they had offered me a full
tuition scholarship. While my father was
obligated to pay any reasonable tuition through college, in addition to the
fifty dollars a month support for my mother, still living away from home would
incur far more expenses than being a commuter student.
to save enough to buy a car. World War II had ended and carmakers turned from tanks to passenger
cars, although with the pent-up demand from four years of abstinence, waiting lists for new cars were
months long.
I had
been working at Penney's part-time through the last several years of high
school. Dad helped me get started there
by coming with me to meet the manager of the local store, which was one of the
major retailers downtown, and one of the biggest Penney stores in the
company. (Sam Walton worked in this same
store a few years before I did, and used this experience to go on and found
Wal-Mart. Needless to say, it did not
have the same effect on me.) Since Dad
had been with Penney's years before, he easily got me a job as a part-time salesman. I proved to be good at selling and by my
senior year was working in the men's clothing department, selling suits, coats,
slacks, and related items.
By the
time I finished high school in June 1945, veterans were flooding back in
ever-increasing numbers, and they all needed civilian clothing. Working on commission during this time of
peak demand was a bonanza, and delaying college for a year seemed a good
decision, especially since I was only 17 at the time. When I started at Drake in the Fall of 1946,
I had saved enough to pay cash for a little dream car, a black Dodge
3-passenger coupe with red wheels.
We did
not have a car before this, and my only experience with driving was when I
visited Dad for two weeks most summers.
There he let me drive, starting in the small town of Atwood in the
western part of the state, and soon I was driving on the two-lane rather empty
highways to other small towns where he had stores. Usually during the two weeks we would all go
to Denver and the mountains just west of Denver, and now my driving experience
could be honed both in big-city traffic and mountain roads. Dad coached me at first, then had to say
little except, "Slow down a little," "Don't take those curves so
fast," and "Come to a complete stop at these stop signs. The local cop doesn't like coasting
stops.” Dad was a very good driver, and
it must have rubbed off on me.
But the
first time I drove the little black Dodge with red wheels was a disaster.
They
delivered the car outside our apartment house, gave me the keys, and then
left. Mom and I quickly went down to try
out the dream machine. Only something
seemed not right with it.
"What's wrong?" Mom asked,
her voice rising.
"It
doesn't want to move," I said. I
finally gunned it in low gear and it grudgingly moved ahead a few yards, but as
soon as I let up on the accelerator, it quickly came to a stop. We got about a block when the car started
smoking.
Full of
deep concern and disappointment, we called the dealer. It took the serviceman just a few minutes to
discover the problem.
"You
didn't take off your parking brake. You
can't drive with the parking brake on!"
I
stared wide-eyed at him. How could I
have been so stupid?
"Is
the car ruined?" Mom asked. This
was of particular concern to us since the owners manual said that a new car
should be treated gently the first 1,000 miles, not to drive too fast or
subject it to much strain.
"Naw,"
said the serviceman. "You probably
wore out a little parking brake lining, but that shouldn't cause any
problem."
"What
about the strain on the engine?" I wanted to know.
"It
should be ok long as you didn't go too far.
A block shouldn't hurt it much."
With
that, he left and we contemplated this beautiful car that now seemed somehow
tainted.
The car
turned out to be an oil burner. The
owners manual said to expect a greater use of oil the first thousand or so
miles to get the pistons well set. But
ours was using 3 to 4 quarts per thousand miles. The dealer told us this was a little unusual
but it meant that the engine was just getting "well lubricated."
There
was a bottle of Four Roses whiskey in the cabinet, and a jigger glass. I tested myself an ounce at a time, recording
how I felt and acted with each additional ounce. Looking at this today, I think I must have
taken the whiskey straight, which would suggest a pretty strong stomach. I'd hate to take it that way now, so maybe I
did use some water. I don't
remember. I do know that over the course
of an hour I got to 8 or 9 ounces. I
still could walk all right, and could talk fairly normally. I could even write about normal. I must have great capacity for alcohol, I
told myself. By now I was feeling a
little sleepy, so I thought I'd rest on the couch for a bit.
I woke
when Mom came home, and rather sheepishly told her about my research study, and
how I seemed to hold my liquor pretty good. I tried walking, and was as steady as
ever. And I was no longer sleepy. "I know now that a few drinks are not
going to make me drunk, Mom. So this was
an important research study."
"How
many did you have?"
"Eight
or nine ounces."
"Eight
or nine? That would put me under the
table." She really didn't seem
shocked at how I had spent the evening.
Maybe I had mentioned the possibility of testing my drinking capability
sometime, as kind of preparation for college.
Now she looked at me keenly.
"I don't remember you ever going to sleep at ten o'clock in the
evening."
I
considered this statement. True, and it
had been so easily done. "You think
it was the whiskey?" I asked. She
nodded.
I felt
that this experiment was a trailblazing effort that presaged lifetime insights
into the art of drinking responsibly.
For I shunned being an out-of-control drunk. "Do you think I have a greater tolerance
for alcohol than most people?" I asked her.
She
thought about this. "Considering
that you haven't had more than a beer or two before this, maybe. You must be careful though not to go too far,
not to cross the line." I
nodded. "You must make sure you can
stop after a few drinks, and not be dependent on it so that you can't get by
without a drink." She looked
sternly at me. "Do you think you
can do this when you're out with other boys?" I nodded.
"You must keep control of your drinking, not let yourself either
become unruly or go into a stupor. A
stupor is really what you got into this evening, you know."
In my
college and immediate years after college, I adhered to this advice most of the
time. Still, I had a few occasions when
I drank too much beer, and felt a hangover the next morning. I didn't like such mornings after, and seldom
let myself get to that point. My body
also acted as a control mechanism, for if I drank four or five beers rather
quickly, I had a tendency to throw up. I
remember one time when a group of us were walking down the sidewalk after
leaving a bar, and I suddenly had to retch uncontrollably on the sidewalk, to
the laughter of my companions and my acute embarrassment—no one else seemed to
have such problems with drinking a few beers.
No comments:
Post a Comment