A Lawrenceville Story

Lessons Our Daddies Taught Us

Copyright © 2001 by Paul Ford, Class of 1966

Rhiniehood

The School Doctor

One of the first things you noticed about the Lawrenceville School, besides the green lawns, the leafy trees, and the world-class landscape architecture, was the funny doctor. His name was Blackmar, but we called him Quackmar. At the beginning of each year, you would have to go to his office and strip to your underpants. He would sit on a chair in front of you, tell you to drop your shorts, grab your balls, and ask you to turn your head and cough. That comes to 600 pairs of nuts!

Lesson: All abuse begins with sexual abuse.

I know that everyone has their own ideas about what they would do if only they were the headmaster. But if I had been headmaster, I would have imposed a strict limit on early-season feeling-up activities of no more than a hundred pairs of balls, tops. I mean, let's be reasonable.

Lesson: Not everyone in a position of authority has your best interest in mind.

Then there were the shenanigans with the mandatory urine sample. Someone would sneak some apple juice into the infirmary and put it into his beaker. Then he would announce to no one in particular, "Looks a little thin — I think I'll run it through again," and drink the contents of the beaker. The nurses would freak out. Or so it was alleged.

Lesson: Don't believe everything you hear.

The English School System

Another challenge for a new student was the strange vocabulary. Many subcultures that are isolated from the rest of society have their own jargon. Modeled after the English public school, Lawrenceville had houses instead of dorms, masters instead of teachers, and forms instead of grades. There were five forms, with the First Form corresponding to the Eighth Grade, and so on, up to Fifth Form, or Twelfth Grade. First and Second Formers lived in one of the four houses that comprised the Lower School; Third and Fourth Former lived in one of the eight Circle Houses; and Fifth Formers lived in Upper House or any of several smaller houses for seniors only.

Lesson: Beware of subcultures that have their own jargon.

Besides the official jargon, there was an unofficial slang. For example, everybody wanted to know if you were a "suck-butt." Elsewhere, you might hear the term, "brown-noser." A suck-butt was at best an opportunist and at worst a dangerous collaborator with the enemy. Most students appeared to be convinced that those who got good grades were at least fawning and obsequious, if not prone to opening their anuses for the pleasure of their masters. A student who got good grades knew that they usually came through hard work, but such sentiments bought him little slack in the locker rooms or house bullsessions.

A related term was "having suck," as in, "Ford has super-suck with the science master." The expression meant, roughly, "teacher's pet."

Lesson: When expressing yourself, use only the crudest kinds of excretory or sexual imagery.

A rhinie was a student who was in his first year at the school, regardless of his form. He was, of course, at the bottom of the social hierarchy. He was ignorant of the arcane rules, vocabulary, and practices, and needed to be patiently indulged until he mercifully escaped rhinie-hood in his second year. He would then be filled with condescension and barely disguised contempt toward the new crop of rhinies. In practice, however, a rhinie who is well-connected on the outside and who has prep credentials is often treated better than a longtime student who lacks such credentials.

The origin of the word rhinie is obscure. The closest analogy in the real world is the baseball rookie, another wonderful idiom. You can be thirty years old, but if you're in your first year in the big leagues, you're still a rookie, and you had better watch out for the hazing.

Lesson: Don't be a rhinie, unless you're well connected.

A "hacker" was a fellow who was creative in his efforts to avoid doing any real work. The other meanings of the word had yet to enter the language. No, there were no computers on our campus in the early 1960s, although I heard that there were one or two room-sized computers up the road at Princeton University. To use them you had to be at least a graduate student. There weren't even any hand-held calculators at Lawrenceville. We used slide rules in science class, and nothing more than pencil and paper, or chalk and blackboard, in math class.

To "rack" meant to do well on a test, as in, "He really racked on that test." A more contemporary term might be to ace a test.

A "full boat" was a full-period test, a test that lasted the duration of a fifty-minute class. As in, "Don't bother me; I've got three full boats and two quizzes next week." The image was presumably that of a sinking ship. A "Jap" quiz was one that came without warning. We considered any master who gave such a quiz to be only slightly more advanced on the evolutionary scale than crotch fungus, but this didn't stop them from giving us pop quizzes anyway. A student achieved racially insensitive jargonistic nirvana when he was able to describe a surprise full-period test as a "Japanese full boat." That was really something to talk about at lunch.

You can see the lingering effects on our speech of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent war in the Pacific. These events meant little to us, as we had all been born after its conclusion. The jargon had apparently been handed down from class to class, from older brother to younger brother, and from father to son.

Lesson: To paraphrase Anwar al-Sadat, language is immortal, for it harbors many historical mysteries. One might add that slang, too, is immortal, for it gives refuge to many folk mysteries.

You had to wear a coat and tie to all official school functions, including morning chapel, classes, and meals. As in the military, you always addressed a master as "Sir." That is, you always said, "Yes, Sir" or "No, Sir" in place of a simple "Yes" or "No." You could also address a master by the title of mister, as in "Mr Smith," but never by his first name. The only exceptions were for the handful of PhD's on campus, whom you usually addressed as Doctor, as in "Dr Kiernan" or "Dr Harrison."

Meanwhile, masters and students alike usually addressed a student by his last name only.

Lesson: You might think of preparatory school as a quasi-military academy.

The High Society

I heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, that may help you understand what the social life was like. A student on his summer vacation left a party without his date. Word of the transgression reached the headmistress of the girl's school. She in turn prevailed on the Lawrenceville headmaster to discipline the boy, which he did when school began in the fall.

Lesson: This is not High School USA.

Lesson: The upper classes have their own internal systems of control, which have nothing to do with the standard police, courts, and jails.

Sex

For a school where all the students were officially celibate, there was a surprising amount of sex at Lawrenceville. The atmosphere of an all-boys residential school was, to say the least, homoerotically charged. Someone once said that there are three genders: men, women, and clergy. For the sake of argument, let's say that roughly a third of the faculty fell into each of these categories. That is, one-third was flamingly heterosexual with small children on their shoulders and a wife two or three steps behind; one-third was swishy and effeminate with no visible women in their lives; and the remaining third was of indeterminate sexuality.

Fully a third of the faculty was what we would today call openly gay. Except that this was the 1960s and few if any gays were out of the closet. They could easily lose their jobs, be committed to a mental hospital, get beat up, or get sent to jail. While being swishy by itself proves nothing about a man's orientation, the fact remains that many of the masters had a reputation for putting their hands all over you when you went to them for extra help. You learned quickly which masters you could seek help from, while maintaining the integrity of your body, and which ones you could not.

Lesson: Some people choose their profession for its perks and benefits (namely, your rear end).

I used to feel sorry for these masters — grown men who were nuts about pubescent boys. Apparently, no one else and nothing else did it for them. They were condemned to either remain painfully frustrated all their lives, or else be a child molester, a criminal. The terror and excitement of it all overwhelmed our little minds.

Lesson: No one is as pathetic as a person who cannot satisfy his sexual desires without breaking a major social taboo.

Although many faculty members were the equivalent of eunuchs, the sad truth is that all of them — gay, straight, or clergy — functioned as stand-in fathers for the boys. Though their families may have been wealthy, many students were the equivalent of abandoned children. What loving parent would pack a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old off to boarding school like so much luggage? I think of Lawrenceville as twenty-four-hour day care with AP courses and a state-of-the-art field house.

A sizable number of masters were known as Daddy, as in Daddy Down or Daddy Bear Girstell. Most of the Daddies were of the large, hulking, hairy type. Body type seemed to be the main criterion for surrogate fatherhood. I had heard of choosing a mate by body type, but choosing a parent in such a way was a new one on me.

Lesson: You cannot escape the imperatives of biology.

It's hard to describe the sexual dynamics of an all-male boarding school. I don't want to say that the boys were starved for female companionship, but I once saw a student spend an entire afternoon talking to a three-year-old girl. She was the daughter of our housemaster. And the boy was no loser; he was the captain of the varsity football team.

At any given time, the only women on campus under the age of twenty-five might be two or three of the younger masters' wives. Of course, even twenty-five is positively ancient when you're sixteen. If a young wife were beautiful, however, there would inevitably be rumors that she was fucking one or another of the Fifth Formers.

Finding appropriate female companionship at a single-sex school was impossible, so the boys often bragged about how many girlfriends they had at home. Knowing no better, I at first believed the hype. Until the later forms, that is, when someone said something that made me look at the situation a bit differently. Suppose, he said, you make a friend over the summer and then go away to school in the fall. Expecting her to still be there waiting for you when you returned home for the winter holidays would be wholly unrealistic. Things don't work that way, he said. I now know that, despite the hype, few, if any, of the boys were able to maintain meaningful, steady relationships with girls or women.

Like prison inmates, the boys at Lawrenceville were distributed along a spectrum from masculine to feminine. Both settings mirror the real world, but in a perverted, twisted way. The difference, of course, is that in the outside world, biological females usually present the feminine qualities and biological males usually present the masculine qualities. Being slim, mild-mannered, and more of an aesthete than an athlete, I was taken to be a fem. For my part, I was happy to leave the macho posturing and jock-asshole bullshit to others.

In Fourth Form, I had a distant crush on a guy called Chris, a soft, gender-ambiguous name. I regret to inform the reader that, despite the crush, I never had a romantic relationship, hetero or homo, while in school, and I never had a sexual relationship of any description until long after graduation. I was a late bloomer.

Like many of my fellow prisoners, I reverted to exclusive heterosexuality soon after my release from prep school.

Lesson: A medium-security prison is a medium- security prison, even if they call it a prep school.

Lesson: People are people, whether they are over- privileged preppies or convicts from the inner city.

Lesson (to those in prep school): Don't worry — they do eventually let you out.

Lesson (Extra-Credit): Sexuality is relative.

Race & Religion

Okay, the girl situation wasn't so hot. How about the race situation? To my recollection, there were no blacks among the faculty, administration, or student body. Nor, to my knowledge, had there ever been. The only blacks on campus were the kitchen help, whom we referred to as "the boons."

Our intolerance sometimes manifested itself in even uglier ways. There was an older African-American worker in the field house who had a light, almost albino, complexion and frizzy white hair. Some of the boys had a habit of taunting him mercilessly and repeatedly calling him "Snowball" to his face.

As far as other races and ethnicities in the student body are concerned, there were two or three non-Europeans in each class. They tended to be from well-to-do families in oil-rich countries like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. But their wealth and position at home didn't stop us from calling them "Spics" or "A-rabs" to their faces and making fun of their accents or parentage.

Someone once said that Britain's austere public school system prepared a person well for spending time in Third World jails. Now, that's what I call the practical benefits of an education.

Lesson: Some lessons aren't worth learning.

Campus Life

Sports

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

When I arrived 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 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 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 and has 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 after another, all afternoon. My leg muscles tightened up that night and the next morning I had trouble getting out of bed and walking to the bus stop. 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 football or 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 brown penny loafers, preferably Bass Weejuns with cordovan polish. Dress shirts were of the button-down variety, mostly with narrow pinstripes or 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-1960's.

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. He's the son of the first winner of the Heisman Trophy, which is awarded annually to the nation's leading college football player. Two other housemates were 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. Just a few months 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. I remember another classmate once complaining about feeling somewhat intimidated while a guest at the Metzger house. It seemed that while he and John were playing baseball in the back yard, John's father was upstairs writing a novel in Greek! The late 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 took a different career path. Bernard Kilgore was the longtime publisher 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 there 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.

One step below the legacy boys 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, 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 an article he was writing. Brandon 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 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 world-class stinkers until 1989 when the notorious Baywatch series somehow found its way onto its 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, 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, perhaps, 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 Genevieve 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 could and did give the ultimate sanction — expulsion — to several students each year. That's one difference between public and private education. In the private schools, they can kick your butt 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 he 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 surgeon 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 constant 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 this student, 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, as if in Pontius Pilate-like judgement, 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 the four 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 that night. 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 resignation in their voices. Or so it seemed to me. It was as if they believed that nothing they said would make much 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, 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 made the daily six-mile trip from Princeton 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 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."

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 a victim or 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 your time harassing your fellow students or trying to put a big one over on the housemaster.

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

Studies

I bet you were wondering when I'd mention our studies. Okay. By about Fourth Form, the shit started to get thick, and you had to buckle down for college admission. This was, after all, college preparatory school. The atmosphere was competitive in all forms, but it was even more so in the later ones. The masters posted the student grades for all to see at mid-semester and at the end of each semester. In addition, our ranked, weighted grade point averages were posted in every house. If you were screwing up, everyone knew it right away.

It was universally acknowledged that the most solemn and important academic challenge facing each of us was learning how to bullshit. At least in the liberal arts subjects, that is. Those students who had mastered the art of bullshitting were the objects of immense admiration. (I never met one, but I knew many students who insisted that they had.) The most accomplished bullshit artists were usually Fifth Formers, unless you yourself were a Fifth Former, in which case you realized that there weren't as many as you had once thought.

In any case, bullshitting was the key to success in school, in college, and in the great beyond called life. Yes, it was sad but true that one's success depended on a well-developed capacity for creative dishonesty and skillful obfuscation. Or so we believed.

Lesson: Now you know why ethics scandals regularly rock the business and professional worlds.

At our level, bullshitting meant not doing the reading but being able to give the impression in class that you had. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the hang of bullshitting. It was a bit like my attempted jump shots rolling harmlessly off the fingertips. The problem was that the bullshitting ethic is based on the assumption that if you had in fact read the material, then you would know what was going on. This was not the case with me. I was clueless about literature and history, whether or not I had done the reading. I can tell you, however, that this kind of thinking is still alive and well in education. I once had a professor in graduate school, an author of books, who coached us on how not to read the assigned book.

Lesson: If the prof says don't bother, don't bother.

We believed that what separated the merely good from the truly great in any endeavor was the ability to bullshit an enormous, steaming pile. If you're a Democrat, think of the devious Richard Nixon, and if you're a Republican, think of the dissembling Bill Clinton. Both are masters of verbal deception, built up over a lifetime, one word and phrase at a time.

Lesson: Style is always more important than substance.

Curriculum

The curriculum was traditional: English, history, and math every year; at least one foreign language; at least one lab science; electives in art and music; a short class in religion for Fifth Formers.

The humanities classes were small, with no more than twelve or thirteen students in each. They all had oval wooden tables that were designed, we were told, to facilitate class discussions. The students faced each other, not the master. I can tell you that there was precious little in the way of engaging discussion in my classes. Not that it mattered much to me. Even on those rare occasions when there was a discussion, I couldn't understand what they were talking about.

In math and the sciences, the classes were a little bigger, maybe fifteen students. The master lectured from the blackboard in the traditional way, with all the student desks facing him.

Tears of Music Class

Arthur Graham Down, the music master, was one of the shallowest people I've ever met. That he gave me my lowest grade, a 62 (60 being the lowest passing grade), in my four years has nothing to do with my dislike of him. Well, okay, maybe a little. Anyway, in my opinion, he was a mile wide and an inch deep.

A tall, almost towering, high-strung man with a massive, balding forehead and a perpetual five-o'clock shadow, Mr Down was a dynamo of nervous energy. He taught music and history, and served as the master of Upper House, the biggest house on campus. He also served as the academic advisor for the entire Fifth Form, the biggest form. I'm sure there's one such person in every school.

He also had the biggest mouth on campus. The thickness of his British accent only made the loudness of his voice and the abruptness of his interpersonal style all the more inadvertently comical. As someone once said, he not only overflowed with learning, but he stood ankle deep in the slop. That our music textbook didn't mention any genre of music other than classical didn't exactly play to my strengths. (It has since been revised to include sections on jazz and blues.)

What was more important to us, however, was that no one could figure out whether Mr Down was gay, straight, or clergy. Someone said that, although he played religious music on the organ every morning in chapel, he didn't believe in God. I guess that eliminates clergy. No one had ever seen him within ten feet of a woman. I guess that eliminates straight, too. But neither had anyone ever seen him with an adult male friend. I believe that he has since gone on to an educational think tank or some such thing. He should be quite comfortable there, gassing it up all day about something as inherently nonsensical as educational policy.

Lesson: Beware mile-wide, inch-deep.

To be fair to Mr Down, I did learn one term in his class: Tiers de Picardy. Tears of ... what? No, not Tears. Tiers. Tiers de Picardy. That's when a composition that's written in a minor key ends on a major tonic chord. How did I remember this term so many years later? Simple, the name is so bizarre, you can't forget it.

Lesson: There's a psychological lesson in there somewhere; I don't know where.

I noticed in our twenty-fifth reunion questionnaire that several of my classmates cited Mr Down as best teacher. Go figure. Maybe I was missing something. Were I to mention a couple of masters who influenced me positively, I'd say Dudley Morris, the art master, and Ross Harrison of the math department.

Mr Morris was a painter who used to pick up a few dollars now and then by selling his oils of Nassau Hall to rich Princeton grads.

Lesson: Understand your market.

Unlike that of the high-strung Mr Down, Mr Morris's classroom style was low-key. Sometimes he would walk around the studio and make a few quick comments about your work. For the rest of the class, he sat on a stool in the front of the room as we worked, and made random remarks, many of them of a sexual or bathroom nature, to no one in particular. He never lectured. The year was divided into thirds: first drawing and oil painting, then sculpture, and finally architecture. I struggled with the drawing and painting. The only useful thing I learned about oils was how to make a cool-looking mahogany color out of the primaries.

One of the drawing lessons involved three-dimensional objects like cones, spheres, and rectangular solids. We were supposed to learn how to shade these objects from a light source, and this was supposed to help us in our attempted depictions of buildings, streets, and interiors. To Mr Morris's chagrin, however, all I wanted to do was more abstract cones, spheres, and rectangular solids. I had little desire to depict reality.

For the final project in the oil painting section, I was able to do a still life that looked a little like a still life. The painting was of a wooden bowl done in my favorite color, mahogany.

Lesson: The hardest thing in the world is to have a creative breakthrough while working under time pressure.

Sculpture was harder than painting. The master took one look at a shrunken human head I was trying to do in clay and advised me to move along quickly to the architecture component of the class. I preferred the architecture.

Lesson: Don't worry about what you can't do. Focus on what you can do.

Mr Morris's style may have been quirky, but he was willing to work individually with each student. He never judged you or threatened to fail you if you were lacking in talent. He motivated by encouraging, not discouraging.

Due to a mistake in the academic office at the beginning of my rhinie year, I ended up in an accelerated math class with a bunch of guys who were headed for Harvard University and other such places. The other master who would affect me, Dr Harrison, taught this class. He was a real piece of work: a PhD, an outstanding teacher, and a rotten human being. He was in the habit of hitting students who didn't know the answers, or, even worse, inducing them to hit each other.

We were supposed to be doing two years of algebra and one of geometry in just two years, and the pace was scorching. I tried my best to keep up and am happy to report that I did reasonably well.

On one occasion, a new student from somewhere in the Middle East, as I recall, arrived in the class. His English was good, but not perfect. Dr Harrison nevertheless publicly criticized his speech and sarcastically referred to him as "our exchange student from Outer Mongolia." The student left school the next day.

I'm fond of saying that, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the atmosphere of fear in his classroom, I learned more math from Dr Harrison than I've learned from all the other teachers I've had. I say that as someone who majored in math in college and took an additional year of graduate study in applied math as well. He taught me how to think mathematically. The simplicity, the discipline of mathematics. As math lovers sometimes say, you can't realize its beauty and power unless you're willing to undergo its rigor. I know that sounds corny, but it's the truth. That's the secret of mathematics, and he knew how to teach it.

As any calculus teacher can tell you, your success in the subject depends heavily on your understanding of elementary algebra and geometry. The payoff for being in Dr Harrison's accelerated classes came in Fourth Form, when I took calculus. Through a rare statistical fluke, I ended up with the calculus prize. I had never thought about the prize or where I stood relative to it. I always assumed that it would go to one of the golden boys who walked around campus with an air of inevitable success in life. After all, they were getting all the other prizes. I was happy to be simply keeping up and enjoying what I thought was a fast-moving but well-taught class.

I attended the final all-school meeting at which the headmaster awarded the prizes. The same golden boys marched to the podium to receive their awards. I failed to notice that he hadn't awarded the calculus prize that day. I was, therefore, surprised a couple of weeks later when I received a letter informing me that I had won.

Lesson: You don't need to set explicit goals. It's often more important simply to pursue your interests.

The Native Tongue as a Foreign Language

Let's face it — if you're in school for twelve years, you're going to have your share of rotten, stinking teachers. I know I've had mine. I must say, however, that each of the four English masters I had at Lawrenceville are among the worst teachers I've had in any subject at any level. In Second Form, I had Henry Woods (Ivanhoe and The Merchant of Venice); in Third Form, it was Dony Easterline (The Grapes of Wrath and Romeo and Juliet); in Fourth, it was the late L Wendell Estey (Wuthering Heights and Macbeth); and I'm blanking on my in Fifth Form master, perhaps it was Hugh King Wright (Hamlet).

Of these masters, I would have to say that for outstanding persistence, dedication, and creativity in being bad, Mr Estey was the worst of the bunch. Let me first say by way of disclosure that he was a friend of my family and was one of the kindest, gentlest, and most generous men I've known — outside the classroom. But back to the way he taught my Fourth Form English class. He was the only teacher I ever had who would regularly kill class time by reading aloud. No context, just reading. Not, here's something I really like, for the following reasons. Not, the work I'm about to read illustrates the following principles of good writing. Just reading, seemingly at random, to kill time.

John Burnaby used to sit every day at the opposite end of the table from Mr Estey and mumble along with him as he read. Mr Estey couldn't hear the mumbling, but the rest of us could. Everybody was cracking up under their breaths, but he never knew the difference. He was also the slowest teacher I ever had when it came to returning corrected papers. He was retired on the job. I heard through the grapevine that the school hadn't given him a raise in twenty years.

I hate to pick on my English masters, but they are such a big, fat target that I can't resist. Most of them repeatedly made the same comments on all of my compositions. For example, one wrote, "thin" at the bottom of all of my papers. Others might, on rare occasions, write "good" or "nice job." These were the same people who would stand up in front of a class and talk with a straight face about the importance of using colorful, evocative words that excite the reader's imagination, not bland, almost meaningless words like good or nice.

Lesson: Do as I say ...

My English masters also insisted that our papers contain what they called "specific references to the text," rather than vague generalizations. Their comments, however, appeared without any specific reference to my paper, again violating their own rules. It might have helped me to develop as a writer if I had known which parts of my papers were good, or nice, or thin, and which were not.

I now know that teaching, much like writing a student essay, is an exercise in communication. It's an attempt to get ideas across within the constraints of a given medium. Here the medium was the master's comment area at the bottom of the student's paper. If I were grading my masters, I'd give most of them an F, for lack of effort and imagination.

My English masters' writing may have been substandard, but their point was clear: "I have no time for you; nor will I even offer you the dignity of following my own rules in your presence." We got the message. They only had time for you if you were a superstar and were able to massage their egos. They liked you if you appeared to be one of them, a nascent English teacher, an up-and-coming literary critic, and had little time for you otherwise.

The usual excuse is that teachers are overworked and underpaid. They were too busy doing ... what?

I've always felt that the educational system is backward. The students should be grading the teachers, not the other way around. They work for us, not we for them. Employees should be evaluated regularly. Now you know why I had a spotty record in school.

Looking back, I wish I had had courses on more useful subjects like cooking, typing, or household finance. I'm sure they would have enhanced my life in ways the other courses haven't.

The school offered no such courses for a reason, however. It was assumed that you would be a professional man, that you would have a Girl Friday to do your typing and office chores. I've never had an assistant in my life — I've always done all my own paperwork. It was also assumed that you would go home at night to a wife who was from the right social class and who would fuck you mechanically when she wasn't cooking, cleaning, or raising the results of all the mechanical fucking.

Lesson (Extra-Credit): Pay particular attention to the ideas that remain unspoken.

Speaking of fucking, I would add human sexuality to my list of missing courses, but it frightens me to contemplate what kind of Victorian sexuality they might have taught. It probably would have been either punitive abstinence or perverted whips and chains, with nothing in between.

The History of Me

Instead of teaching us practical things, they taught history, for example. Or one version of it. As I remember them, all the readings were about kings, wars, and treaties. For example, in 1598 King Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes, which gave the Huguenots a degree of religious and civic freedom. Whatever the hell that means. But if you don't memorize it for the test, you flunk.

Here was the history sequence: First and Second Forms: ancient Greece and Rome; Third and Fourth Forms: early and modern European history; Fifth Form: United States. You get the picture: Western, Western, and Western, with a heavy emphasis on empires, as viewed from the top down. In short, we learned all about the barbaric ways in which the various empires treated each other and the rest of the world.

Yes, the indestructible Great Man Theory of History. There was little mention of women, children, slaves, peasants, nonwhites, heathens, or plain, ordinary folk with runny noses and gaps between their teeth. Unless, of course, the folk got sick of it all and rose up and created Big Problems for the Great Men.

Lesson: Ambrose Bierce was right when he defined history as, "An account, mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools."

Lesson: There's a difference between history and The History of Me.

On one occasion, Frank Heyniger, my Fourth Form history master, took a break from his riveting monologue on the Holy Roman Empire (yawn) long enough to draw a long, straight, horizontal line on the blackboard. The line, he said, represented the contemporary American political spectrum from extreme left to extreme right. He drew a short vertical line in the middle of the board to indicate the center of the spectrum. Then he put a big, fat dot a couple of inches to the left of the center line, and announced, "Here's where you want to be."

Twelve boys nodded.

If he were still teaching today, he'd probably put the big, fat dot about two inches to the right of center, but the idea would be the same.

Lesson: Times change. Witness the migration of the political consensus in only a generation or two from two inches to the left of center to two inches to the right.

If you want to understand what prep school is about, you have to understand people like Mr Heyniger. He was independently wealthy; he didn't need to teach at Lawrenceville or anywhere else. I heard that he took a yearly paycheck of one dollar. He coached the golf team and embodied the spirit and aesthetic of amateur golf. He was the only master I knew of who lived in his own house on the school's golf course. He dressed meticulously in well-cut blazers and slacks and colorful but tasteful ties.

His face was as red as a beet. At first I thought that this was because of his preference for extra-tight Ivy-League-style button-down collars, or perhaps because of the long spring or late-summer afternoons on the links. I realized later that booze may have been a factor.

In any case, Mr Heyniger taught the slow sections, like mine. He complained that there was only one student in the class who was college material. (For what it's worth, Walter Plaut is now a fisherman in Maine.) Mr Heyniger warned the rest of us not to ask him for a recommendation to college. We didn't worry about it much, though. We all knew that, as long as we graduated, one college or another would be more than happy to take our parents' money.

Lesson: Not everyone is college material, but anyone with money can go to college.

Two Cultures

I excelled in math and science, where there were right and wrong answers, but floundered in the arts, where everything was a matter of interpretation. The accelerated classes were fun and challenging and exciting, and the dumbed-down ones were a form of lengthy and exquisite punishment of doubtful constitutionality. In my opinion, the tracking system and honors or AP classes are heaven for the better students and hell for everybody else. That is, the few accelerated classes robbed the many regular classes of their life, of their best students and teachers. This created a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy of mediocrity for the many.

Lesson (Extra-Credit): To quote my classmate Jack McCarthy, who is now a lawyer in Princeton, "Never let school interfere with your education."

College Admissions

Overall, I was a good, but not a great, student. I was in the top half, but not the top third, of my class. I told myself not to worry too much, as Lawrenceville was an academic high school. I graduated with one AP credit, which again was nothing to be ashamed of, but not great, either.

An example of a better student was Pete Howard, who was in the math sequence I described above. Students like him drove students like me nuts. Besides being the starting single-wing quarterback on the varsity football team and a varsity lacrosse player, Pete somehow found the time to rack up seven AP credits. I didn't know that the school offered that many AP courses. One more and he could have started at Yale University as a junior. (According to the alumni directory, he now practices clinical psychology in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

Pete took the best and most complete class notes I've ever seen. To make matters worse, his handwriting was highly legible, unusual for a boy. That's right, a blocking back with gorgeous handwriting. I, on the other hand, was a rotten note-taker. I could only manage to get onto paper about one-fourth of what the master said, and afterwards I could barely read my own writing.

Then there's the sticky question of standardized tests. Sometimes I think they are meaningless and should be tossed out as good for nothing. Other times I think that they do measure something useful, and are okay if kept in a proper perspective. I guess there's plenty of evidence on both sides. Confessing your SAT scores is like confessing your salary, your medical history, or the size of your wee-wee, but here goes: there was a 300-point gap between my worst score, which was in English, and my best, which was in math. I didn't know whether to cry or laugh. You could drive a GMC truck through that hole. Native English speakers aren't supposed to have a gap that wide. In mathematical terms, that's three whole standard deviations. I knew I was deviant, but I didn't know how deviant until I took the SAT's. I've since learned that there are psychological terms (such as "scatter" and "islands of ability") associated with this phenomenon. They are usually related to early childhood developmental issues, but that's a different essay.

Speaking of arrested development, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, the home of the Educational Testing Service, the company that produces the SAT's and many other standardized tests. So I have my own perspective on these issues. ETS is a business like any other. Some companies sell soda pop, some sell lawn mowers, and others sell standardized tests. The business model at ETS depends on the notion that everybody has to take their test. It should be obvious that they are not going to do or say anything that will discourage the notion and hurt their bottom line.

Lesson: Take all testing with a grain of salt. Don't believe the advertising and hype any more than you would believe the ads for baldness remedies or surefire investment deals.

My so-so grades worked in my favor when I made the trip as a Fifth Former to Swarthmore College in suburban Philadelphia. My parents had gone there and wanted me to apply, but I wanted nothing to do with any college that had anything to do with my parents.

In any case, the admissions department made you fill out a form and check a box for A (90 to 100), B (80 to 89), or C (70 to 79). My average was a respectable but not brilliant 78. When the interviewer saw the C, he advised me not to bother applying, which I was more than happy not to do.

Post-Grads

The school accepted about ten or twenty postgraduate students each year. The PG year was attractive to students who hadn't gotten into the college of their choice on their first try. It provided them with an extra, finishing year to fatten up their resumes. The venerable, ivy-covered colleges had "standards" and felt that they couldn't accept any old stupid son of an alumnus. So the back door into Daddy's college was to continue taking extra work until you met its minimum requirements.

On reading our twenty-fifth reunion questionnaire, I was dismayed to see that many athletes who were mediocre students nevertheless ended up attending top colleges. Meanwhile, some of the better students who happened to be non-athletes went to lesser schools.

Lesson: It's a jock world.

Around Christmas of my senior year, I learned that I would be accepted at my first choice, Brown University. It had a good, solid, if somewhat boring, reputation. It was coed, if you want to say that a ratio of five male students at Brown for every two women at Pembroke, the coordinated women's college, is "coed." I had applied for the Bachelor of Science program in Chemistry, and apparently my grades and scores in math and science had impressed whoever read my application. That is, they accepted me on my strengths and ignored the rest of my record. Bless their hearts.

Lesson: Some people will give you a break, but this isn't necessarily a good thing.

I guess that my acceptance at Brown was the high point of my academic career. By the end of my Fourth Form year, I had under my belt an academic prize and a perfect score on a standardized test. My life has been mostly downhill from there, with the occasional rise. Think of a scenic, but frostbitten, cross-country ski trail that winds from the top of a modest hill to the warmth, safety, and hot chocolate, with marshmallows, of the base lodge below.

Our class was the first in the school's century-and-a-half-long history that didn't send its largest group to Princeton. For various reasons, more guys in our class ended up at Harvard than any other school. Its image was softer than that of Princeton. Like Brown, Harvard had a coordinated women's college (Radcliffe), but Princeton didn't. Harvard was near a big city, with nightlife and cultural activities, but Princeton was in the sticks. Harvard was good-old-boy, to be sure, but not as self-consciously so as Princeton. And, of course, Harvard had a great academic reputation. Twenty or twenty-five guys ended up at Harvard, out of a class of 170 or so, with smaller groups going to each of the other Ivies, including Princeton, Yale, and Brown. A few went to Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT or other selective institutions. Others went to smaller private men's colleges in New England like Tufts, Amherst, or Williams. Many of those who had achieved the so-called "Gentleman's C" went to the venerable southern universities like North Carolina, Virginia, and Duke.

My recollection is that everyone in our graduating class went to college the following fall except for one who joined the service. (This was during the Vietnam War.) Jared Wickware has spent his career as an artist and draftsman in the Navy.

The winds of social change had begun to blow in the mid-1960s, and no institution, not even Lawrenceville, was fully protected from all the back breezes. Being born to be more mild than wild, our way of rebelling against tradition was to try to leverage whatever smarts we may have had, instead of relying solely on the wealth-legacy system to carry us along. Many of us chose not to attend our daddy's alma mater, as had long been the custom.

Relative to most previous classes, ours was more interested in pursuing challenging academic and professional opportunities than in simply replicating the financial and social successes of our parents. We gravitated, therefore, toward those colleges that offered us what we believed were the best opportunities for personal advancement. This may not sound revolutionary by the standards of bomb-chucking anarchists, but, by Lawrenceville's standards, it was more than evolutionary.

I think of Lawrenceville as either the southernmost of the northern prep schools, or the northernmost of the southern preps. It's situated just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, in the marshy wasteland of central New Jersey. Like Afghanistan, New Jersey is a kind of politically corrupt demilitarized zone surrounded and dominated by large, powerful city-states. It's perhaps best known to the outside world as the birthplace of such cultural abominations as the toxic waste dump, the strip mall, and Bruce Springsteen. Small wonder that it harbored the World Trade Center bombers of 1993 and the anthrax terrorists of 2001.

Despite its tradition of sending large numbers of students to Princeton and other venerable colleges, Lawrenceville was hardly the most Ivy of the preps. For hard-core Ivy, try the New England blue-blood schools like Andover, Choate, or St Paul's. Compared with our counterparts at these schools, we had a reputation as competent but unexceptional students who got by on the strength of our connections in the mid-Atlantic and border-state upper bourgeoisie.

We also knew that there were many public schools whose academic standards were higher than ours. For examples, we couldn't compete in math and science with the Bronx High School of Science, nor in the humanities with Boston Latin.

The Legacy of Me

Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of." I hope that this is not the case. Lawrenceville in my day was sexist, homophobic, classist, and racist. You might argue that the world as a whole was also less than perfect when it came to these issues. The "everybody-does-it" argument. I would love to be able to say that the world is a kinder, more inclusive place today than it was forty years ago when I entered Lawrenceville. But I can't. I guess my preppy friends will have the last laugh, as money, power, and birthright make the world go around as much today as they ever did. In the interim, Britain, the old empire, has become something of a democracy, and America, the new empire, has become a monarchy.

I didn't fit in at Lawrenceville, and I wouldn't wish that feeling on a dog. On the other hand, you might say that not fitting in early in life prepared me well for not fitting in later. There are many Third World jails, some of them inside the mother country, and I can say that Lawrenceville has prepared me well for all of them.

While it's undeniable that Lawrenceville's credits, such as they are, continue to give forever, it's equally true that its debits continue to take forever. They have asked me for money nearly every year since I graduated. I have yet to give a single dollar. In other words, if it were up to me, not even Mr Heyniger would receive a salary.

I have no money to give, but if I did, I wouldn't give it to them. I'd give it to the local soup kitchen or homeless shelter or to street people who have nothing. I wouldn't give to institutions, no matter how excellent, that already have money.

Lesson: Those who ask for money the most often need it the least.

I've never been back to Lawrenceville. Let me amend that slightly. On one occasion, a couple of months after we graduated, a mutual friend took Dennis and me for a car ride on the banked, grassy dipsy-doodles that border the athletic fields. The same fields where I had once chatted with Dennis.

Lesson: Don't be afraid to take a joy ride on your past.