4. Cheating High School

I have attended two of my high school class reunions in recent years, the thirty-fifth anniversary of our graduation in 1995, and the forty-fifth in 2005. If all goes well and I should live long enough, I expect to attend our fiftieth in 2010. I enjoyed them both, though I had sworn for years that I would never attend one. The reason was not that I did not value my class or my classmates or that I did not like such celebrations. It was because of some profoundly deep-seated embarrassments that accompanied high school graduation for me, embarrassments that it took me years to overcome. Like so many things that affect our lives, the reasons for my embarrassment may seem trivial to others, but to me at the time (and for some years after) they were not trivial at all; in fact, they became those implicit but potent goads toward actions that otherwise I probably would not have taken.

Let me go back to the beginning of high school. To start with, I simply did not want my family to move from Mt. Pulaski to Lincoln, all of ten miles or so, in that summer of 1956. I had just graduated from elementary school and was ready to go with my friends to Mt. Pulaski High School. Lincoln High School was, to me, the school in the “city,” all of 25,000 people, but compared to the couple of thousand in Mt. Pulaski, we were the little town. I had never lived in a city, and, frankly, the idea of it was intimidating.

To make matters worse, in an odd way I already knew some of the students in Lincoln, and they were intimidating to me as well. For two years at Mt. Pulaski Elementary School I had played on the heavyweight basketball team. We were not bad, but a couple of times each year, notably at tournament time, we ended up playing against Lincoln Central, the big elementary school in Lincoln. They were always bigger and better than we were and both years that I was on our team, we came in second to them in the county tournament. I got to know those guys—well, not know them exactly, but know who they were. Lincoln Central had Brackney and Goebel and Hoeffert and I don’t remember who else. And while we were all the same age, they were big and good. And my idea of Lincoln, and Lincoln High School, revolved around my perception of them.

The fact is that all I had known in an extracurricular way at Mt. Pulaski Elementary was sports—basketball and track mainly. And since I had grown fairly rapidly, I did OK, at least through eighth grade. But the minute I entered high school, everyone was larger, taller, faster, more highly skilled, and who knows what else than I was. Still, as a freshman at Lincoln High School, I tried out for sports, since it was all I knew to do.

It was a very different world, though, as I expected it to be, than I had known in Mt Pulaski; and everywhere I turned I simply could not make the grade. I tried in basketball and then in track and even for a couple of weeks in baseball. But I was simply not athletic enough. But it was still the single biggest thing I had experienced up until then in life. My failure athletically contributed greatly to how lost I was at the old downtown high school those first two years. I just didn’t fit in anywhere; or so it seemed to me. I had never been as miserable as I was during those two years.

Then, between my sophomore and junior years, halfway through high school, things began to change. In retrospect, I am convinced it was caused by the Big Move. The whole high school moved from the dilapidated old downtown building out to the edge of town into a brand spanking new place; not just a new building but a whole new campus, with athletic fields and parking lots, with music rooms and even a beautiful new theatre. I had never seen anything like it in my life. And now, or at least I felt, we all—the Lincoln kids and even the few like me who were trying to become Lincoln kids—were all on the same footing. None of us knew our way around; and we would figure this new place out together, in a sense. I remember being very aware of that.

I had given up the idea of athletics of any kind as my freshman year came to a close the year before, and during my sophomore year, when I was fifteen, I landed a part-time job that was already starting to fill the void of “what could I do.” My dad told me it was time to get a job, and even though I tried to duck the idea, he kept on me about it. His idea, he made clear, was that I needed to get after school work and make my own spending money. It was then that he told me for the first time about how hard he had worked before and after school when he was in high school. He wasn’t trying for guilt, I don’t think, but it sure had that effect.

The last thing that I wanted to do, though, was bag groceries at Herb Alexander’s or Kroger’s, but beyond that I couldn’t think of much else I could do. I got an idea one afternoon, though, and, without telling anyone, I got on my bike after school and rode out to the edge of town, to the service road along Route 66. I headed for the Lincoln radio station, WPRC, located in a little stand-alone building with a modest tower next to the parking lot behind it. I went in. Two women sitting at desks looked up at me. Standing between their desks was an enormous man with a wrinkled face with a big shock of white hair; and, as it turned out, a very gruff voice.

“What do you want?” he barked at me.

“I would like to work at this radio station,” I said.

He laughed a moment, but then stopped and looked at me fairly seriously. He asked how I had gotten there—“did somebody bring you?”—he asked. No, I replied, I rode my bicycle. He thought for a moment, picked up some papers from a desk and told me to come with him. He pulled open a door and led me into a small hallway with two closed doors. “Take these papers and go in there,” he said, and he pointed to one of the doors. “Sit down and read them when I point to you.” He disappeared behind the other door. When I sat down behind the all the radio equipment in front of a microphone, he was now behind a window straight across from me in the next room. He fiddled with something and then pointed to me. I started to read in the best voice I could muster. After a bit, he waved me off and motioned to me to come out. I followed him back into the outer room where we had started.

Only then did he tell me who he was. He was Ray Knochel, the station’s owner. Then he asked if I could work before school and after school, whenever he needed me. The morning man, he said, who drove thirty miles in each day from Springfield, was Earle Layman, and for the first couple of weeks Layman would teach me the operation. After that, from six to eight in the morning I would be on my own. After school often became work time, too, as it turned out, and summers would be very close to a full-time job. I would come to love radio, and that radio station out on Route 66, and would keep my radio work for almost five full years, my last two and a half years of high school and another two and half years while I was in college—also in Lincoln.

As full as the radio work made my high school student life, it was not the only thing that would consume me in the last couple of years at Lincoln Community High School. In my junior year, having learned from radio that I really liked “performing,” I determined to try my hand at competitive public speaking and drama. Again, I found a niche that fit who I was, one that set me constantly in mind of my dad’s preaching “performances” in that elegant pulpit of his before a couple of hundred people at the Mt. Pulaski church. The pull of that was always at work in my mind during those years.

In my junior year, I would try out for plays and for the annual musicals. At one point early on, I asked the drama teacher when I tried out for a play what some good books would be for learning to act. And, with a flourish (as I recall) he had said “read Stanislavski,” though I am sure, looking back, that he was joking. I didn’t take it as a joke, but went to the library and found two books by Stanislavski and read them carefully, learning all about “method acting” and doing my level best to practice doing it.

It was not long after that that I landed the lead role of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s play, “Our Town.” Later, I would play the “brother” in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie;” I wanted the part of the “gentleman caller,” but Steve Miller got it. We would do a piece of Shakespeare for drama competition, and there would be a choice singing role in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance.”

To complicate things during those last two years of high school, the activities of my church youth group, a large church with a large group of high schoolers, occupied more and more of my time, what there was of it. Ironically, many who had become my circle of high school friends were not the same ones that became important to me through the church. I was drawn to the church in ways that I did not fully appreciate until years later. For the first time in the church I had role models not too far removed from my own age, talented, exuberant youth ministers. Until then, I was only conscious of being attracted to the public life of my father; now, though, I was seeing a way to truly channel my interests in drama and music—including public speaking and radio—into something very specific ahead of me.

I realized about this time, during my junior year, that I didn’t miss athletics. I was finally busier than I had ever been. Through drama, through the plays, and even through the music department, I finally felt a part of Lincoln Community High School. It had taken a fairly long time to reach that point. But I no longer wished I was back in Mt. Pulaski, as I had those first two years and some. I realized that I was getting to do things that would not even have been possible in Mt. Pulaski.

It was sometime toward the end of my senior year, though, in a casual conversation with a teacher whom I had come to admire, that I realized what high school had become for me. I realized that very little of my high school time and energy had gone into academic or intellectual (not the word I would have used at the time) activities. In fact, it would have been shocking (as it still is to me now) to actually try to figure out how much honest-to-God studying I had done during my high school experience. The fact is that I had done very little. I was too busy with other things. I had consciously and deliberately stayed away from courses, apart from those that were required, that would have required serious study commitments to get through them. I had actually managed to get around almost all of the rigorous courses and demanding teachers.

I liked the so-called humanities courses, history, English, social studies, and, of course, the arts. But I got around the maths, the algebras, the sciences, things I should have stuck with but found too time-consuming and strenuous. I got through geometry, but during the very first algebra I exam, which I signed up for as a junior, I failed so miserably that Miss Joos agreed that I should drop the course, noting, though, with her firm red-ink pen, that the sketches of the classmates around me that I had drawn on the back of the exam sheet were “very promising” and I should probably drop algebra and take an art class.

In short, it began to dawn on me, even in that senior year but much more intensely later, that high school was not, for me, a compelling academic experience. If I am honest, it probably was not, for me, about academic growth or progress at all—at least not as it was intended to be. This is not to say I did not learn a lot along the way from a host of good teachers. I did become deeply interested in and well-introduced to history, music and drama, and to economics, the most difficult and rewarding subject that I stuck with. And I liked English grammar, composition, and literature, the subjects that challenged me the most as well as the ones that I most wanted to master in later years.

Still, high school for me turned out not to be about the courses I took or about my trying to challenge myself intellectually. Instead, high school for me became a time to work on developing an identity, not my mind. It was not about what I was going to know, but about who, or what, I was going to be.

Everything for me was about the activities that demanded my attention, my time, and my enthusiasm. I started the day at the radio station almost every single morning of those last two years of high school. I got up at four o’clock five days a week. My dad, who didn’t have to go to work on campus at Lincoln Christian College until after seven, also got up at four when I did, and while I got ready to go he went to the kitchen, turned on the lights, and cooked a good breakfast for himself and me; he knew that he could only insist that I eat breakfast if he did, too. It was scrambled eggs and toast one day, French toast another, pancakes another. For two solid years, he and I would talk, however briefly, as we ate that early-morning breakfast together. By my junior year when we lived across town from the radio station, I had my first car and would drive the ’54 Ford to the station at five, prepare and go on the air at six and would work until just before eight when Earle Laymen would arrive to take over. Then I would drive to school.

Many days, particularly as a week went on, I would be home from school by four thirty in the afternoon only to fall asleep involuntarily by six or seven o’clock to get up at four the next morning. Many evenings, particularly Fridays, when I wanted to go to a football or basketball game, it would not be possible. I would have fallen asleep before it was time to go.

I would make it to play or musical rehearsals, though—those were the great exceptions to my early evening nappings. I am convinced that my lifelong requirement of no more than five or so hours of sleep a night had its beginnings during those countless short nights of radio work and drama rehearsals. The weekends were devoted to church activities, not just Sundays, but even on most Saturdays at Lincoln Christian Church. There I clearly found something special, and few things—not even radio or school drama—would develop the hold over my attention and commitment that that church did. It was “home base” for my life during those high school years.

What I have laid the groundwork for here are the two embarrassments—in retrospect I still must call both of them that—that I would struggle with for several years into my adult life. The first was tied up with learning, right near the end of our senior year, that I had “won” the honor of being the “salutatorian” of our graduating class of almost 200. Ron Musick, clearly the purest intellect of our class, was the valedictorian, and I was “second,” salutatorian. As number one and number two academically in our class, we would be the speakers at our Commencement.

I was first startled, surprised. I not only had no idea that it was coming, but I had given no thought to even the idea of it. I thought that there had to be some mistake, and I told Mr. Hodges, the principle, so. He shrugged it off. Then I was disturbed. Really disturbed. And finally the embarrassment began setting in.

I only wanted to graduate. I had paid little attention, even, to what my grades were, to say nothing of my grade point average. I was not working on grades. I just wanted to do my best and get by as easily as possible, as strange as that sounds. What I knew very well, though, even then, was that there was no way whatever that I deserved to be the class salutatorian. I had not excelled academically. I had taken courses in which I had done OK, but not courses that were challenging or that required great efforts of study. I enjoyed the classes I took, but I had no sense of intellectual accomplishment. With good reason.

More than that, I was keenly aware that I was surrounded by a number of fellow students who had taken the truly demanding courses and courses of study, classmates who had worked long hours and excelled in their courses, students who clearly deserved to receive what I was being given.

I didn’t know who they were exactly. But I guessed that classmates like Tom Zimmerman and Gerry Dehner and George Janet and Bob Goebel, and, among the girls, Rhoda Holland and Sally Heinz and Jean Goldhammer and others—they had all amassed excellent academic records. And while, in a technical way my “grade point average” might have been higher, I had cheated high school, and, in a sense, cheated them—not cheated in high school, but cheated high school, something that I have mixed feelings about to this day. I had been there not to study hard and learn a lot, but, at least in those last two years, to try my wings in other ways. I was embarrassed at being given an academic honor that should, clearly, have gone to someone who deserved it a lot more than I did.

I loved the idea of getting to speak at graduation and I remember how hard I worked on my speech based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If.” Speaking was what I loved to do—it had, in an oddly ironic way, been what my high school experience had been about. But it came about in what, to this day, causes me embarrassment, just as it kept me away for years from the high school classmates, some of whom I suspect knew very well that they deserved to be salutatorian far more than I did.

The second embarrassment of high school graduation is only tangentially related to that one. While I mean no disrespect to my parents, and particularly my father who at that time was Dean of Lincoln Christian College right there in Lincoln, I was faced with hearing the classmates that I respected most announce that after graduation they were going off to the University of Illinois or to Illinois State or Indiana State or Ball State or even Notre Dame, or, in a couple of cases, to Ivy League schools, prestigious places all. The list of my classmates’ colleges and universities was impressive.

I had decided to stay in Lincoln after high school and attend Lincoln Christian College, the local religious school. For better or worse, I found myself embarrassed by that, at least right there at graduation time. I did want to go off to a big-name university. But there was no money for that, and, despite the salutatorian designation, my overall academic record was neither broad enough nor strong enough to merit a good scholarship at a first-rate university. In an odd sort of way, though, I was going to attend the college I wanted to attend. I wanted to study for the ministry—the church had become central to my life.

Still, I was embarrassed. Looking back, I realize that I determined then that some day I would change that when I went to graduate school. I would go to a great university. I would prove myself an intellectual. I would overcome my embarrassment, but only in time.