John Hart married for the third time. This stepmother, Amelia Sager Smith, was a widow with two daughters and for the first time since his natural mother died Tommy had someone who at least tried to fill the void. The problem was that after so little motherly attention Tommy was quite a handful to care for. According to his own stories, he was an active perhaps even devilish boy who, since his father was away supervising logging operations during most of the nonsummer months, required considerable looking after. When that looking after was neglected, high spirits and a sense of adventure took control—sometimes with serious consequences. For instance, there was the time Tommy and his friends burned down the hitching shed behind the church and another when a homemade bomb blew a chunk from a tree in the yard. His stepsister Maude Smith, with whom he became quite close, and other female relatives tell of high jinks that would have tried the patience of a saint, much more that of his inexperienced stepmother. Apparently his pranks did not endear him to his new mother who had her hands amply filled running her home and had not bargained on being warden to a young hellion. School officials as well took an unsympathetic view of the growing accumulation of indiscretions. The result was Tommy’s suspension, a circumstance that would inevitably mean trouble when his father returned in the spring. The solution was simple, but not inexpensive: Tommy took his savings, bought a horse, and rode to school in a nearby community. It was an act of initiative, perhaps leavened with a pinch of desperation, and indicated a resourcefulness Thomas Hart would demonstrate often in the future.
The education he got in his newly chosen school and in the small rural schools that had preceded it was scarcely quality, or that was how it seemed when he looked back seventy-five years later. When Davison was incorporated as a town in 1889 it numbered only 456 people, so it is not surprising that the schools were of the one-room, one-teacher, all-classes-meet-together variety. Only two teachers, he said, had any impact on him. One was a man, a tough, stern, “intellectual,” in Hart’s words, who scared him but, he recalled, “I needed to be scared.” The other was a woman whom he deeply respected and for whom he felt a sincere affection that inspired him to extra effort.3 With those exceptions, his early school years were rather dreary; there was neither competition nor stimulation. Although he usually finished near the top of his class, he did not consider this standing an accomplishment. Later events suggest that Tommy’s assessment of his academic achievement should not be taken too seriously, but we probably should accept his judgment that “I was rather a bad boy, taking it all together.”4
At home John Hart—probably seeking some relief from his familial responsibilities and perhaps for his new wife—arranged to send Tommy east during the summers. John’s family still lived in Maine and since he was one of nine brothers, there were plenty of relatives to welcome Tommy. These summers were perhaps the happiest times of his boyhood. There was always lots to do, many games to be played, animals to be tended and ridden, and places to be seen. There were some sobering times as well. The Harts were hardworking country people who apparently prayed the way they did everything else—fervently. Hence, during his summers in Maine Tommy got a thorough introduction into the formalities of the Methodist church. Maine meant variety, but religion meant boredom and, eventually, resistance. Partially as a result of his early exposure, he never became an avid churchman. But perhaps we should not be too hard on his well-meaning aunts and uncles. Tommy was not introspective or philosophical, so the long hours spent on hard benches in the white clapboard churches may have been simply painful and not necessarily formative.
In 1891 a change took place that had wide-ranging consequences in Tommy’s life. His father sold his small business and his farm and moved into the relative urbanity of Flint, Michigan. Not only did this mean an end to the family’s moving from town to town, but it also resulted in Tommy’s entrance into the more sophisticated and competitive school system of Flint. Since this happened in his first year of high school, the subject matter was more difficult as well; so difficult that he rebelled, ending up, according to him, with a “rather dreary showing.” Actually his grades were quite good; he made all 90s in his first semester and did only slightly less well in the spring of 1892.5 The next year his grades were uniformly worse, but in the first semester he still scored in the high 80s or low 90s in all subjects. However, his lowest grade was an 83 in general history, which hardly seems to justify his comment that he was in jeopardy of having to repeat the grade. Still, he may have known something we do not, for it is curious that he received grades in only three subjects rather than the customary four. From what we know of his previous and future experiences, it would not be surprising to learn that he was having some disciplinary difficulties.
For whatever reason, when one afternoon in the spring of 1893 Tommy saw a notice in the local paper announcing that an appointment to the Naval Academy was available, prospects of escape beckoned. From hours spent with Youth’s Companion and other literature for boys, he knew about West Point and Annapolis and they sounded exciting. When he showed the notice to his father, John Hart immediately dampened his enthusiasm. “You haven’t any chance for that appointment,” the elder Hart informed him. It seemed that Congressman David D. Aitken, who had the appointment, was a first-term Republican with whom the elder Hart was acquainted, but the acquaintance was not a happy one. John Hart knew that many boys would be after the appointment and, aside from having more influence with the congressman and better school records, they would be more mature than fifteen-year-old Tommy.
His father’s reasoning seemed sound, so the subject was dropped until a few days later when Tommy heard that a competitive exam was to be held in Orchard Lake, Michigan, to ease Congressman Aitken’s task of selection among the many applicants. With renewed hopes, Tommy asked his father for permission to go to Orchard Lake. It was something of a lark; several of his friends attended the military academy in Orchard Lake so he could see them, get out of school for two or three days and, of course, take a shot at the exam. No doubt he did not explain all this to his father who, though still dubious about his son’s prospects, agreed to let him go.
Thomas C. Hart, c. 1887. Courtesy of Mrs. T. C. Hart
It would have been hard to disagree with his father when, upon arrival at Orchard Lake, he checked out the competition. There were ten applicants for the appointment, three of them from the University of Michigan, and all older and better educated than the high-school sophomore from Flint. All hope seemed lost. But apparently the commandant of the school had turned the preparation of the examination over to an assistant who knew little about the academy curriculum. Consequently, the test was heavily weighted with basic subjects, “grammar school subjects,” to quote Hart. Most of the competitors had forgotten a lot of that material, but Tommy Hart had covered it recently. He was especially lucky that the exam had many questions in his favorite subject, mathematics, and, joy of joys, a large part of that section consisted of trick questions in which he excelled. Finally it was over and the examiner left to correct the results. When he returned, he walked to the corner, where Tommy was seeking relative security, and put his hand on the shoulder of the new appointee to Annapolis—Thomas C. Hart.
Probably no one was more surprised than Congressman Aitken but, to his credit, he abided by the result. He presented Tommy with his letter of appointment and advised him to get to Annapolis quickly and begin prepping for the formal entrance examination which was only one month away. It is easy to imagine the scene and the emotion as Tommy was bundled aboard the train bound east. Emotions were surely mixed for his parents: sorrow at seeing him leave, pride, and relief that he was going off to get some discipline. For Tommy it meant leaving a not-totally-happy home, but what he knew of the academy must have included the fact that he was bound for a rigorous life, indeed. Fortunately, he had traveled alone before, because the anxiety of this leap into the unknown was almost overwhelming.
Things did not improve when he arrived at Werntz Preparatory School on the corner of Franklin and Cathedral Streets in Annapolis. The Naval Academy had just adopted new requirements, one of which was that applicants have a year of algebra. With that blow, Tommy was about to close his bags and return to Flint. One year of algebra! The mathematics he had had, although called
