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a lawrenceville story

lessons our daddies taught us

Campus Life


Sports

We at Lawrenceville inherited the conviction that character is built on the athletic field.

On my arrival as a Second Former in the fall of 1962, my only choice for athletics was to play on the house intramural eight-man, 120-pound-limit tackle football team. The bigger boys competed on teams that had no upper weight limit. Anyway, the monster 120-pounders on our team crunched me every day in practice. If you were without speed or ball-handling skills, you played line, so I started out as a guard. That's right, an 85-pound (with equipment), Quaker-pacifist, turn-the-other-cheek pulling guard.

I later switched to center, but Tom Farley, our quarterback, complained about my passes from center when he was in the shotgun position. They tended to dribble end over end across the grass, instead of flying in a tight spiral through the air, as they were supposed to. I could center the ball okay in practice, but in a live scrimmage, I always seemed to choke and do one of my little dribbling numbers. So much for my football career.

In mid-fall we switched to soccer. If you were small, they put you at forward, where you had to contend with the larger defensive backs. I had no soccer skills. I did discover, however, that if I ran hard in practice, I could challenge the backs when they had the ball, hoping they'd goof up and turn it over. Not that I would have known what to do with it if they had.

One thing you have to love about the character-building sports of football and soccer was that they were played outdoors in any weather. You haven't lived until you've played football in the pouring rain or soccer in the cold weather. Falling on a frozen field is about like falling on concrete. I felt bad for the goalies, who needed to dive while trying to block a shot. The rest of us tried our best to stay on our feet.

In the winter, we played basketball, indoors. It wasn't that I was lousy at basketball, it was only that I couldn't dribble, pass, or shoot well. Also, to be honest, I was a little porous on defense. I tried to develop a jump shot, which looked cool when other people did it. Figuring out how to properly release the ball was a challenge, however. It kept rolling harmlessly off the tips of my double-jointed fingers. I quickly gave up on basketball.

I don't know how I made it through that grueling first year of athletics. The following year, however, I decided to kick it up to the next level. The tryouts for the school tennis team were held outdoors on a cold, windy day in March. That's normal weather in New Jersey at that time of year. I played a tanned baseliner from some oil-rich nation in South America. He was well trained in tennis, even if his game was a little boring and predictable. Well, boring and predictable won that day. My Pancho Gonzales wannabe slugger game never got loosened up and I lost 6-0. That was the end of my tennis career at Lawrenceville.

As I said, I was smaller than most of the other boys upon my arrival. I was also late to enter puberty. This was a little embarrassing in the locker room, when people would say things like, "You don't need a jock strap — a peanut shell and rubber band will do just fine." This is not great for a young man who is already struggling with his self-esteem.

I don't want to say that I looked young for my age, either, but I do recall an incident involving an eponymous but unrelated student in my French class. He was two forms ahead of me and was a star on the varsity football team. His name in that class was "Monsieur Ford le grand" and mine was "Monsieur Ford le petit." On one occasion, as we were sitting around before class, someone asked, "Are you two guys related?" Before I could answer, someone else piped up, "Yeah, father and son."

I compensated for my lack of size and athletic prowess, however, by being selected to be in jock houses that won most of the intramural competitions. For balance, even a jock house needed one or two players like me who were "spastics" (lacking in motor coordination). After all, this is school, not the professional leagues, and everyone is supposed to be able to participate for the sake of the classical Greek ideals of mind and body. It's ironic, therefore, that my yearbook entry shows numerous house championships. I have no recollection of actually playing in any of those games.

Lesson: If you can't, at least surround yourself with those who can.

On one occasion, however, I almost got into a Circle House soccer game. I was supposed to be the first player off the bench that day. That's a polite way of saying that everyone else except me was selected to play. The problem was that I got into a big discussion while sitting on the bench with my friend and fellow aesthete Dennis Nurkse. I don't know how he ended up there that day — maybe he was in the same situation with the other team. I don't remember what we were talking about, either, but it probably wasn't soccer. When John Petito, my team captain, called to the sidelines for a substitute, I didn't hear him. By the time I realized what was happening, he had changed his mind about bringing me into the game. (I wonder why.) For what it's worth, Dennis has remained true to his artistic roots. He has published numerous volumes of poetry and served as the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, New York. (He's the son of Ragnar Nurkse, the noted Marxist economist, but that's a different story.)

Lesson: Never let a silly soccer game ruin a fine afternoon.

The media glorify sports and sportspersons, but being on a team isn't as glamorous as it looks. The dirty secret is that during practice there's much standing around waiting for something to happen, like in the military.

I tried out for the track and field team in about the Fourth Form. Having grown a little taller by then, but still lacking any specific athletic skills, I figured I might become a runner. The sprints were out of the question, as I wasn't fast, and I had little stomach for the grueling long-distance races. So I tried out for the middle distances, along with a gaggle of other students who apparently shared my reasoning. I had run a little over the summer, but the first day of practice at school was more than I could handle. We did 440-yard dashes, one lap around the football field, one after another, all afternoon. My leg muscles tightened up that night and the next morning I had trouble getting out of bed. I swore I would never abuse my body that way again, and I haven't.

Lesson: Listen to your body.

You might wonder why there was such a heavy emphasis on sports in prep school. Let's put it this way: Suppose you're in charge of discipline for six hundred rambunctious teenage boys. Which would you rather deal with, the whole school at a basketball game screaming and yelling for the home team, or everybody sitting around the dorms and getting into shaving-cream fights?

How To Be a Preppie

As I said, a coat and tie were required for all official school functions, including classes and meals. Some of the boys had thirty or forty coats in their closets. These were not (yet) CEO's of Fortune 500 companies who needed to entertain their mover-and-shaker clients. That's a fifteen-year-old school boy.

For the record, I've never in my life worn a tie to work — except perhaps once or twice when I had a job interview.

There were no uniforms as such, but the boys usually dressed in tweed jackets or blue blazers, along with tight slacks. Blue jeans were prohibited. The preferred footwear was penny loafers, preferably brown Bass Weejuns with cordovan polish. Dress shirts were of the button-down variety, mostly with narrow pinstripes or washed-out solid colors like white, light blue, or yellow. A dark suit was required at the Sunday morning chapel service that was mandatory for all residential students.

A Lawrenceville boy was nothing if not well dressed, but his sense of fashion sometimes collided with his equally powerful school spirit. The school colors were red and black, and on the day of a big game, some of the boys were known to wear retinal-pain producing, fire-engine red socks, much to the amazement of our outside visitors.

Lesson: If you want to drive everyone crazy, wear the same
tie every day. This works even better than wearing a fish tie.

Hair was parted on the left side, often with bangs descending to about mid-forehead, never lower than the eyebrows. Faces were clean-shaven and usually worn with a careless scowl. You are now a preppy, circa the mid-1960s.

Speaking of faces, you could tell the better-off students by their deep tans even in the wintertime. As I said, a New Jersey resident would be hard pressed to get in much quality sunbathing time between October and April. Some guys, however, would come back from winter or spring break with fabulous Florida tans. The rest of us sheepishly wore a pasty white.

Legacies

If you like to drop names, this is the place for you. There were legacy boys everywhere. One of my Woodhull housemates was Clint Frank, Jr. His father, Clint, Sr, is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame and was one of the first winners of the Heisman Trophy, which is awarded annually to the nation's leading college football player. Two other housemates were the brothers Burk Murchison and Clint Murchison III. Their daddy and uncle owned the Dallas Cowboys football team ("America's Team"), along with other businesses in Texas. Those kinds of connections were impressive calling cards among sports-obsessed young men.

When I was in the Second Form, Turki Faisal was in the Fifth Form. His uncle was the king of Saudi Arabia. On the King's death a few years after Turki's graduation, Turki's Dad ascended to the throne. Turki's room at Lawrenceville was rumored to have had wall-to-wall carpeting and a TV, luxuries that were denied to other students. His allowance was said to be $10,000 per month. That was a lot of money in the early 1960s. By comparison, the yearly bill for room, board, and tuition at Lawrenceville was around $3,000.

After graduating from college in the US, Turki returned home and became the head of the Saudi foreign intelligence service. In 1996, his government shifted its allegiance in Afghanistan from the US CIA-supported Mujahedin to the then-splinter Taliban. Shortly before the September 11, 2001, attacks, the senior Saudi leadership relieved Turki of his duties at the agency. Perhaps they knew or suspected that international trouble was brewing, and were taking steps to minimize Saudi exposure. I don't know.

Perhaps we will learn more soon. Turki was named in 2002 as a defendant in a $1 trillion lawsuit on behalf of the surviving relatives of the September 11 victims. The suit alleged that he was "Osama bin Laden's nexus to the network of charities, foundations and other funding sources."

Lesson: Oh, well, easy come, easy go.

Despite the September 11 disaster, however, Turki managed to land on his feet. He became ambassador to the UK in 2003 and ambassador to the US in 2005.

On a lighter note, Pete Saxon was also in my house. His dad was Charles Saxon, the longtime cartoonist and cover artist at the New Yorker magazine. While we were in school, the magazine published a multi-paged series of cartoons the elder Saxon had done about Parents' Weekend. He didn't identify the school in the cartoons, but it looked a lot like Lawrenceville. As you might expect, the younger Saxon was a good guy, a decent student, and a talented artist.

John Metzger and Jim Kilgore were in my class and were also fellow day (commuter) students from Princeton. One Monday morning at the bus stop, a classmate confessed to me that he had felt intimidated while a guest at the Metzger house the previous weekend. It seemed that while he and John were playing baseball in the back yard, John's father was upstairs writing a novel in Greek! Bruce Metzger was a leading scholar at the Theological Seminary, and is remembered for his contributions to the textual study of the New Testament and for his editorial work on the Revised Standard and New Revised Standard Versions of the Bible.

Jim's dad was Bernard Kilgore, the longtime managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. He is given credit for transforming it from a geeky local sheet to an influential multifaceted national newspaper. There were several members of the Delaware DuPont family at Lawrenceville as well.

You get the picture.

Lesson: Choose your 'rents carefully.

There was another guy whose Momma was allegedly worth a hundred and fifty million dollars. He had an extensive wardrobe and always seemed to be on his way to or from the dry cleaners. His outfits were so colorful, almost loud, that even the preppies hated his guts. He was the only guy I knew who wore an ascot during leisure moments around the house. I don't want to say that this student had an attitude toward those who were from a different social class. He was, however, given to making unprompted asides like, "I like peasants — we own several of them." He also didn't think that Lawrenceville should accept non-Christians. The last I heard, he was traveling around the country giving lectures on art history.

Lesson: Don't choose your 'rents TOO carefully.

If the legacy boys made be said to be Lawrenceville's financial layer of solid geological rock, then the rest of us were its gravel, sand, and sediment.

One step below the legacies were those who aspired to go out and make a name for themselves. At the tender age of thirty-one, my classmate Brandon Tartikoff became the youngest president of NBC Entertainment in its history. At Lawrenceville, he was the hardworking editor of the school's weekly newspaper, The Lawrence. Other than the yearbook and the literary magazine, the paper was the only student-run media outlet on campus.

On one occasion, I was having breakfast with Brandon in Upper House when another student approached our table. He asked Brandon about a quote he needed for a news article he was writing. Brandon, bleary-eyed after having been up all night with the paper, advised him to write the quote himself, and then get the source to approve it. My heart sank; until then I had naively assumed that a source who was quoted in the newspaper had actually spoken or written the attributed words.

Lesson: Don't believe everything you read.

Brandon ran NBC for roughly the decade of the 1980s. He was responsible for such intellectually stimulating programming as The A-Team, starring the classically trained actor and noted Shakespearean orator, Mr T.

Speaking of less-than-stellar programming, a 2002 feature in TV Guide magazine listed no fewer than seven of Brandon's creations among its top fifty worst programs of all time. Programs that it said were "not mediocre" but "bad ... enough to make anyone cry." Not surprisingly, perhaps, six of these clunkers happened in Brandon's first five years at the network. Among them are the infamous Manimal and Casablanca (both 1983), each of which the magazine rated even worse than that widely acknowledged nadir of TV programming, The PTL Club.

Okay, maybe it took Brandon a few years to hit his stride. I can understand that. To his credit, he did better in the second half of the decade. NBC had no more world-class stinkers until 1989 when the notorious Baywatch series found its way onto the airwaves. (By itself, I'm sure.) In what must have been an exceptionally difficult judgment call for the TV Guide editors — and one that I'm sure will keep connoisseurs of artistic futility at each other's throats for decades to come — the magazine ranked Baywatch even worse than the E! Network's tasteless, reprehensible, and irredeemable Howard Stern Show.

But I'm having far too much fun at poor Brandon's expense. To be fair, his other credits at NBC include such critical and popular successes as Cheers, The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Hill Street Blues, LA Law, Matlock, Miami Vice, Seinfeld, and St Elsewhere.

It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, I'm told, and at the end of the decade Brandon got the axe at NBC. He moved laterally to Paramount Pictures, where, wasting little time, he oversaw the creation of such culturally uplifting films as Wayne's World.

Lesson: As the saying goes, no one ever
lost money underestimating the public taste.

Hugh Cregg, who was in the form after mine, and whom I did not know, became a middle-of-the-road rocker under the name Huey Lewis. In 1985, he and his band, The News, won a Grammy for their musical video, "The Heart of Rock 'n' Roll." They also received an Academy Award nomination the same year for their soundtrack to the hit movie Back to the Future. More importantly, perhaps, the News captured the spirit of the 1980s with their hit single, "Hip to be Square." The song announced, somewhat belatedly, the end of our decade, the decade of the 1960s, when — and I'm dating myself here — it was hip to be hip and square to be square.

Dick Tuggle, who was in my Fifth Form math class, also found it hard to resist the allure of Hollywood's bright lights. He wrote the screenplay for Escape from Alcatraz (1979), starring Clint Eastwood and Patrick McGoohan. This movie is given credit for reviving a lagging tourist interest in the island, an interest that remains strong to this day.

Dick also wrote and directed Tightrope (1984), starring Eastwood and Geneviève Bujold, and he directed Out of Bounds (1986), starring Anthony Michael Hall and — Dick never being one to be outdone by Brandon — that classically trained Shakespearean actor, Meatloaf.

Bob Ryan, who was two forms ahead of me, became a sportswriter at the Boston Globe. He has written books on Larry Bird and the Red Sox. You might say that he has been able to cover the athletic waterfront from perpetual winner to, until recently, longtime losers without even leaving town. At Lawrenceville, he played basketball and covered sports for The Lawrence. Believe it or not, his nickname then was Scribe.

Lesson (Extra-Credit): Most of those whom the
media present as having made it are little more
than well-paid servants of the ruling classes.

Discipline

Before you can serve the ruling classes, however, you must first learn discipline, which was harsh at Lawrenceville. The first level of disciplinary action was Restrictions. This was the punishment for accumulating too many unexcused absences from class or chapel. A student on Restrictions couldn't go into town to shop or for any other reason. This was a hardship for guys who were used to eating decent, tasty food in the restaurants in town instead of the repetitious food in the house dining rooms. You also couldn't take weekend leave. You were grounded. Conduct Warning was for more serious offenses, such as cheating, and Conduct Probation for even more serious offenses.

The school gave the ultimate sanction — expulsion — to several students each year. This is one difference between public and private education. In the private schools, they can kick your ass right out of there, no questions asked, but in the public schools, they can't. Getting caught with booze — this was before illegal drugs hit the middle class — got you expelled in a big hurry. You were on the next plane home.

Most of us hated school, but you couldn't show it. On one occasion when I was in Second Form, we were goofing around as usual in the classroom before English class. A student who was always failing everything wrote on the blackboard an obscenity directed at the master. Of course, just then the master walked in. The student was standing in such a place that from the door the master couldn't see what the student had written. He quickly erased the message, but the master noticed what was going on and said, "You can get Conduct Probation for that." If anyone cares, the student's father was a famous orthopedist in New York City who once operated on Elizabeth Taylor.

A student named David was the most earnest and sincere guy you'll ever meet, but he lacked organizational skills. Think of Pigpen in the comic strip Peanuts. He was known for his consistent inability to find his homework. Most masters are aware of the "I did the homework, but I just can't find it" routine. But with David, it was different. Every month or two, after much laborious searching through his incredibly messy notebook, he would find his homework, blowing everybody's mind. Maybe he was telling the truth all those times he said he couldn't find it. According to the alumni directory, he's now a chiropractor in Denver.

Lesson: Persistence pays off.

The Headmaster

The headmaster, Dr Bruce McClellan, was known as FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition, more World War II-era slang), or Foobs, for short. Everyone hated his guts. Every weekday morning, he sat facing us, like Pontius Pilate, on his throne-like seat in the chapel. He also called a school-wide meeting every Saturday at noon, with attendance taken. To us, this was just one more prison count, precisely at the moment when everyone wanted to loosen their ties after a long week of classes. In all the years I was there, FUBAR never once made an announcement of any importance at any of those meetings. Rather, he began each with a weak joke about the lousy New Jersey weather, at which everyone groaned, and then went on to say nothing.

Okay, maybe once or twice a year, he would announce the screening of a two- or three-year-old feature-length movie in the field house. Otherwise, there was nothing to do on a Saturday night, as you couldn't ordinarily leave campus. He wanted to be the one to announce the movie. I guess he wanted to get "suck" points with us. As I said, we hated his guts.

Lesson: Don't trust anyone who has an obscene nickname.

Daily Chapel

The school day began at 8:05 with a fifteen- or twenty-minute chapel service. To make it easier for the masters to take attendance, the seats were assigned. The designated speaker for the week was usually a faculty member, sometimes an outside speaker. Some of the most frequent comments I heard from the pulpit were variations of President Kennedy's statement, "Of those to whom much is given, much is required." I guess he knew what he was talking about, as he, too, was a product of the prep school system.

When the speakers talked about public service and public responsibility, they often did so with an air of resignation in their voices. Or so it seemed to me. It was as if they believed that nothing they said would make much of a difference with us. One speaker, for example, emphasized the obvious fact that, by most standards, our circumstances at Lawrenceville were quite plush. He did, however, concede that the food was, by almost any standard, awful. Most of us were more concerned with the bad food part than with the noble service part.

As I said, the students published a weekly school newspaper. It was understood, however, that you couldn't write anything that was even mildly critical of the administration. Sometimes the Fifth Formers (senior class), who sat in the front rows in chapel, would register their disapproval of what was being said from the pulpit by coughing. That was one of the few legal ways to stand up to authority. They couldn't easily discipline you for that.

House Life

I can't say much about house life, because I was a day student for my first three years. Three or four of us Princetonians made the daily six-mile trip to Lawrenceville on the county bus, along with several dozens of boys and girls bound for the Notre Dame High School in suburban Trenton. Their ethnic, working-class parents were presumably sending them there for the discipline and the Catholic education, and to get them away from the chaotic public school system. Except for the religious part, these were more or less the same reasons our parents were sending us to Lawrenceville.

The conversation among the Catholic boys on the bus, however, tended to be about the exploits of Bill Bradley, the Protestant future US Senator who was then a star basketball player at Princeton. About once a year, the Notre Damers would serenade us as we got off the bus with a spirited chorus of "Goodbye, Preppies," to the tune of "Good Night, Ladies."

Lesson: Keep a stiff upper lip.

The give-and-take in Lower School was, however, as physical as it was verbal. It was hard to walk down the hall without coming into some kind of physical contact with the other boys. I doubt that many students escaped without at least once being either a victim or a perpetrator of unwanted touching or other physical abuse.

I did, however, board my Fifth Form year, when most of the hijinks were behind us. By that time, it was considered juvenile to spend most of your time harassing your fellow students or trying to put a big practical joke over on the housemaster.

Lesson: A prisoner's behavior often improves
noticeably when he sees that the end is near.


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