Young added, “Yankees are different.” True enough, as he illustrated with an ironic anecdote: years ago, a rude New York merchant had sent his wife from a store in tears when, in the segregated South, Young said, a shop owner would have treated her with courtesy.
The year, 1949, was a kind of educational “phony war” for me. It was to be my freshman year at Anniston High School, but the day for registration, buying schoolbooks, and the first day of classes all passed without any command from Mother and Dad about school. What I didn’t know, and only vaguely suspected from taking a battery of tests none of my friends did, was that a decision had been taken from on high—long before family conferences came into vogue. I was being sent away, to a small Episcopal boarding school near the then-grimy manufacturing town of Danbury, Connecticut. Mother and Dad decided on the Wooster School, because the “name” schools such as Andover and Lawrenceville would have to put me back a year or two. Anniston schools evidently weren’t up to speed. Wooster would take a chance, because I had a detectable IQ pulse and because my family liked the values Wooster put up front in its catalogue: “Religion, Simplicity, Intellectual Excellence and Hard Work.”
The announcement of my fate was duly made and I awaited banishment with trepidation. Elise tried to calm my fears, without success. Finally, the day came for Dad and me to board the train for New York. In Manhattan, dressed in my favorite powder blue suit and whitebuck loafers, we went to Brooks Brothers to buy weird, pinched, dull, gray and blue suits and a gray jacket made of little Vs. I was outfitted as a proper preppie, and I hated the look. Dad took me to school, where we met the friendly headmaster, the Reverend John D. Verdery, and finally the dreaded moment came when Dad left me alone on the stone walk leading up to the New Building. It was a gray, cold September day in the foothills of the Berkshires—just right for a sense of desolate abandonment.
Before the mood could overtake me, however, a couple of older boys greeted me, one wearing a white sweater with a maroon “W”—a figure of awe to a third former. The older boys were kind, and I soon discovered that Wooster was a friendly, special place, a formative experience in my life. The student pool was not as old-money, first-family New England as Groton under its fabled Rector, Endicott Peabody, but it bore a resemblance to the model he cast. “If some Groton boys do not enter public life and do something for our land,” intoned the Rector, “it will not be because they have not been urged.” The handsome young headmaster of Wooster, John Verdery, was not so formidable as Peabody and his masters did not preach public service so didactically. Wooster did not hide its values, but it wasn’t grim about them. Without trivializing either school, Wooster was Groton Lite. The style of the place and what I took from it are summarized in the citation that was given to me as the Alumnus of the Year for 1998 [see Appendix].
The citation’s style fit the place: just short of jaunty, no strained praise or funereal solemnity, an honest, not terribly impressed salute to a life that, on balance, had been above-average okay. It was read in the school’s spare, old chapel where, in my speech I acknowledged the presence of so many friendly ghosts . . .
One was John Verdery, who preached there every Sunday, but whose manly, understated grace was a more lasting model than any of his sermons. His wife, Sue, whose slightly scatter-brained charm, good looks, and mastery of French cooking made their house a warm haven as a student and for years afterward. Babysitting their children gave me a feeling of family far from my real home. In my senior year it also got me close to their nurse, the full-lipped, shapely Mitzi Henz, the only girl our age on campus, which made me the envy of the class.
Another was Joe Grover, who tried to bring order to my chaotic essays. Still another was the rumpled “Mr. Chips” of my years there, Donald Schwartz, whose all-day final exam in the combined American history and literature class asked us to use our readings to respond to William Faulkner’s Nobel Acceptance Speech that year, “man will not only endure, he will prevail.”
I don’t recall if after the award and speech in 1998 I looked deliberately at the spot outside West Cottage remembering how the Head had queried me about a pending Supreme Court decision that I knew nothing about, but surely I must have. If I had I would have shaken my head in wonder that I left Wooster completely innocent of the thunderclap that would shake the South in the second semester of my freshman year at the University of Alabama.
3
A whole civilization lay dying around me in the six years after prep school, but I was too self-absorbed to notice. For four of those years, I was concentrated on the pleasures of sorority girls, bad sex, and cheap bourbon as an undistinguished undergraduate at the University of Alabama, and for two more as a U.S. Navy enlisted man. A classmate who truly was distinguished, David Mathews, later became president of the University, Secretary of Health Education and Welfare in the Ford administration, and president of the Kettering Foundation. We didn’t know each other in school but became friends when he was a dean of students at UA. Once during his presidency I asked, “David, why didn’t I ever see you drinking beer in any of the fraternity basements?” He answered, “Why didn’t I ever see you in the library?” That pretty well summed up my first wave of university life—a sensual explosion on escaping the monastic restraints of prep school and entering the relative license of college.
At the white-columned brick Phi Gamma Delta house, we paid scant attention to news of the outside world, which came to us on a black and white TV set in what was laughingly called the library. TV told, for instance, about a governor of Virginia invoking a shadowy power called “interposition” to prohibit blacks from going to white schools. Mildly interesting, but of more immediate interest were the weekend parties. The nuances of federal v. state authority gave way to defining the corporate personality of the top sororities: Kappa Deltas, bitchy but interesting; Tri Delts, too sweet for our taste; Kappa Kappa Gamma, natural and fun, good ol’ girls.
While most of us grieved at the mighty Crimson Tide football team’s losing seasons, beneath us the socio-political geology rumbled on its axis. But we could not feel or hear it. A warning tremor had been felt by Dad’s generation earlier, in Birmingham at the July 1948 “Dixiecrat” convention led by former Alabama Governor Frank Dixon. Among the delegates, five Southern governors mingled with a who’s-who of such violent racists as Gerald L. K. Smith and J. B. Stoner. They nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate to oppose the reelection of President Harry Truman, and to preserve “States’ Rights,” meaning a state’s right to deny Negroes the vote, and the minimal conveniences of dining, sleeping, or using bathrooms when and where they were needed. The 1948 Dixiecrat convention was the first in a series of “Pickett’s Charges” in the war to preserve white supremacy.
But we happy-little-idiot fraternity boys didn’t know we were playing on a social fault line that was in motion. We knew we had a genial giant as governor, six-foot eight-inch James E. Folsom, because we sang a song about his paternity problems. Well-to-do parents were embarrassed by what they considered his crudities, and didn’t care for his populist appeal. “Y’all Come” was the slogan of his second successful gubernatorial campaign, an appeal to all the bypassed working folks, urban and rural, to come visit him in the Governor’s Mansion. We chuckled at the disarming honesty of his sexual exploits: “If they bait a trap with a pretty woman, they’re gonna catch Big Jim every time.” There is a story repeated so often that, if it isn’t true, it ought to be. It stands as a metaphor for dealing with a sexual scandal that might have instructed President Clinton. In the story, Governor Folsom is confronted by reporters who ask if it is true that he slept with a “colored” girl in a Phenix City motel the night before. Folsom answered, “It’s a damn lie; not a word of truth to it—didn’t sleep a wink! “ Over beer and cheap bourbon in fraternity basements, we sang a song about our colorful governor:
She was poor, but she was honest.
