Chapter 26

THE GRADUATION

I suppose the best way to describe me was the school nerd. I suppose I was also the school smart ass. One time a teacher asked he how I spelled some word and when I spelled it, she told me I was wrong. I replied that she didn't ask for the correct way to spell it, she asked how I spelled it. She didn't seem to appreciate my sense of humor either.

I was a voracious reader, read everything that I could get my hands on, even textbooks if they contained anything interesting. I loved history because it told a story and would even haunt the county library located in the basement of the court house for additional material on things that I found interesting. I read everything I could find about adventure of any sort as well as every book in the library on flying, radios, engines, electric motors and boats. I was the one who discovered a copy of "All Quiet On the Western Front" and showed all the other boys the more earthy passages. As soon as the librarian found that the book was popular with the boys, she suspected the worst and removed it from the shelves.

I was also blessed with a great memory and once I'd read something, it stuck with me. I never took homework with me, usually doing it during class or study hall. Math was always easy for me. By the time I was fourteen, Mr. Zzikxz had taught me to use a slide rule, an abacus, a sextant and a book of logarithms to do celestial navigation. He also taught me many shortcuts and how to do most math problems in my head. When the math teachers would hand us a test, I could usually go down the problems and write the answers without any calculations on the paper. They always thought I was cheating somehow and often would give me a different test. I'd taken every course offered in high school, including typing and cooking (both of which I have appreciated many times over)

I had my own "shop" where I built (or destroyed) many things, mostly in trying to figure out how they worked. It's a wonder how I escaped injury from some of the things I tried. One of my experiments was successful enough that it almost got me into serious trouble with the government. /Stories/spyhunt.htm However, most of them were just smelly, noisy or led to my dad threatening to burn the place down before I did.

It was the middle of May in 1947 and the end of my tenure at Stinnett High School. I had made it through twelve years without ever playing a down of football. The coach said that the reason why I wouldn't play football was because I was too lazy to train, but the truth was that I never found a good reason for me to put myself in a position to be jumped on by 250 pound farm boys from Morse and Spearman who wore overalls and chewed Red Man Tobacco. At the beginning of my second year in high school; the coach, principal and superintendent (the only men in school except for the janitor) decided that I was going to play football whether I wanted to or not. The war was on and most of the boys old enough to join the military were gone which left the pickins rather slim when it came to fielding a football team. I was a tall, lanky string about six feet tall but weighed no more than about a hundred twenty-five pounds. I couldn't knock many people down but after years of being chased by school bullies, I'd become about the fastest kid in school which happened to be what the coach needed the most.

One afternoon as I was leaving school, the coach stopped me and said I was to report to the gym to get suited out for football. I told him that I didn't want to play but he said I didn't have a choice. I went on home and asked m