a rather privileged boy in the village. “He had a motorcycle at one time and a saddle horse, the equipment necessary to his wireless set, along with his violins and cello. In those days, a kid who owned a fielder’s glove, or a ball and bat, a .22 rifle, and a bicycle was considered well-off,” said Robert Griffith.
Fayette was proud of Bill and had great expectations for him. “Uncle Fayette thought Will was the smartest person that ever was,” an aged cousin recalled. “He was smart. He made that radio!” she added, referring to Bill’s experiments with a wireless set.
Since Fayette read a great deal himself, he probably helped encourage Bill’s early interest in reading. He read travel books to Bill, and that spurred a strong interest in other kinds of reading: “The Heidi books and the Alger books, and all kinds of things that kids used to read in that time,’’ Bill said.
A neighbor, Rose Landon, installed a circulating library in her father’s deserted cobbler shop. “I began to be a voracious reader myself as quickly as I got the ability, reading anything and everything that came into that library. In fact, I used to sleep very little when on these reading sprees. I would seemingly go to bed after being sent there rather sternly by my grandfather, and then I would wait until I felt they wouldn’t notice the light, light up the old kerosene lamp, place it on the floor, and lay a book alongside and hang off the edge of my bed to read, sometimes all night.”
Encouraged by his grandfather, Bill plunged into a succession of activities with single-minded determination — a trait that remained with him throughout his life. One project that stood out in his memory was the boomerang project.
“My grandfather got in the habit of coming to me with what he thought were impossible projects,” Bill recalled. “One day, he said to me, ‘Will’ — for that’s what he called me — ‘Will, I’ve been reading a book on Australia, and it says that the natives down there have something they call boomerangs, which is a weapon that they throw, and if it misses its mark, it turns and returns to the thrower. And Will,’ he said very challengingly, ‘it says in this book that nobody but an Australian can make and throw a boomerang.’
“My hackles rose when he said that nobody but an Australian could do it. I can remember how I cried out, ‘Well, I will be the first white man ever to make and throw a boomerang!’ I suppose at this particular juncture I was 11 or 12.”
For most children, Bill later reflected, such an ambition might have lasted a few days or at most a few weeks. “But mine was a power drive that kept on for six months, and I did nothing else during all that time but whittle on those infernal boomerangs. I sawed the headboard out of my bed to get just the right piece of wood, and out in the old workshop at night by the light of the lantern I whittled away.”
Finally, the day came when Bill made a boomerang that worked. He called his grandfather to watch as he threw the boomerang. It circled the churchyard near their house and almost struck Fayette in the head as it came back.
“I remember how ecstatically happy and stimulated I was by this crowning success,” Bill said. “I had become a Number One man.”
Success with the boomerang now set Bill to proving himself a Number One man in other activities. He decided that with enough perseverance and determination, he could do anything he set his mind to. With surprising tenacity and fierce concentration, he began to excel in scientific endeavors, in baseball, and in music. “In my schoolwork, if my interest was high (as it was in chemistry, physical geography, and astronomy), my marks would range from 95 to 98 percent. Other subjects, including English and algebra, caused me trouble, and I received poor grades.”
Bill later described himself as extremely happy during this period of his life, because he was succeeding on all fronts that mattered to him. “It was during this period that I can see how my willpower and yearning for distinction, later to keynote my entire life, were developed. I had many playmates, but I think I regarded them all as competitors. At everything, I must excel. I felt I had to be able to wrestle like Hackensmith, bat like Ty Cobb, walk the tightrope like the folks in the circus, and shoot like Buffalo Bill, who I had seen at the circus riding a horse and breaking glass balls thrown in the air.
“My attempt to make a replica of this performance consisted in taking out a hod of coal and holding my rifle in one hand and tossing a lump of coal into the air with the other. I would try to break the lumps with the rifle, and got so good that I could do about two out of three, although it was a wonder I didn’t kill some of the farmers about, as it was a very high-powered gun.”
He turned his room into a chemical laboratory for a while. Then, he started experimenting with radio, a brand-new invention at the time. “I believe I had one of the first wireless-reception sets in Vermont. I studied Morse code and was always amazed that I never could keep up with the fast operators. But my radio adventures created quite a sensation in the town and marked me out for distinction, something which, of course, I increasingly craved, until at last it became an obsession.’’
Bill’s grandfather challenged him to learn the violin — so he did, first rebuilding an old fiddle that he found in the attic; it had once belonged to his Uncle Clarence. He taught himself to play by pasting a diagram on the fingerboard and then sawing away until the right notes emerged, whereupon he announced his intention to become the leader of the school orchestra. He spent hours listening to the Victrola, after which he would return to his fiddle practice, neglecting all else.
Nearly accomplishing his announced ambition, Bill became first violin in the high school orchestra. He would later downplay this by describing himself as a very bad first violin and the orchestra as very poor. Although he would dismiss his achievement as just another bid for recognition, music would nonetheless provide him a satisfying outlet all his life.
In the period when the Wright brothers first proved their ideas about heavier-than-air flying machines, Bill built a glider. “Like many of his other projects, it didn’t exactly work out,” his sister Dorothy said — Bill had given her the dubious privilege of piloting the craft off the roof of a building. Fortunately, it plummeted softly into a haystack.
“He did a great many useful things, too,” Dorothy said. “He made maple syrup every year out in the backyard, using a huge iron kettle.” She remembered the dogged way he stayed with the job. “It didn’t matter if it got dark or if he had to get more wood. The sap was running, and he would keep at it. That was the way he was built.’’
Was he merely stubborn? Dorothy didn’t think so. “Persistent is a better word,’’ she said. “People who are stubborn are apt to be disagreeable. And I never remember Bill being disagreeable.”
Bill also made bows and arrows, an iceboat, jackjumpers (a jackjumper is a one-legged stool mounted on a short ski), skis, and sleds. His grandfather insisted that he learn how to do farm work. He spent sweaty afternoons in the cornfields, getting in the fodder, milking the cows.
Of all Bill’s adolescent activities, it was probably baseball that claimed most of his physical energies and brought him the recognition he craved. In primary school, he excelled at baseball but later declared that the other players there had not been much good. It was a different matter in secondary school, where he found real competition on the baseball field.
It started badly for him. “On my very first appearance on the field, someone hit a fly ball,” Bill recalled. “I put up my hands and somehow missed catching it, and it hit me on the head. It knocked me down, and I was immediately surrounded by a crowd of concerned kids. But the moment they saw I wasn’t hurt, they all started to laugh at my awkwardness, and I remember the terrible spasm of rage that came up in me. I jumped up and shook my fist and said, ‘I’ll show you! I’ll be captain of your baseball team.’ And there was another laugh. This
