There’s nothing wrong with being middle Class. But then again, there’s nothing particularly exciting about it. And there I was, right smack in the middle of it. I was the second of two children, a boy. I had one sister, and presumably, more children yet to come. We lived in a middle class suburb, appropriately enough called Pleasant Hill . It was an average suburb to an average urb — Cincinnati, which sat right on the bottom of that most average state, Ohio—hi in the middle, and round on both ends. I attended kindergarten at Pleasant Hill Elementary School, where my classmates were burdened with average names, Jill, Bobby and Sue. My father was a pastor, not the pastor, mind you, just a pastor, at an average mainline church, with the snazzy name, College Hill Presbyterian Church. Apparently this hill was more academic, while the hill where I lived was more pleasant. My mom kept our house, and my sister was embarrassed by me. All we lacked was a dog named Spot leaping over a picket fence. It was my expectation that life would continue on as it always had done, a pleasant, but unexciting progression of warmed over clichés and cream of mushroom soup inspired casseroles. I didn’t know a thing about the white witch.
 

A decade or so ago I took a class in college on fantasy literature. We were given the option, an option I opted for, of writing, instead of a term paper, a fantasy story. I remember only two things about the story. First, I received a C for it. It too was average. The other memory was the mountain of writer’s block I encountered when trying to figure out how to move my protagonist out of the humdrum world of non-fiction into the fantastical world I was supposed to create. Looking glass was taken; same with magic wardrobe. I should have thought of the witch.

My father, like most pastors, wanted little more than to teach people what he believed to be true. (This was before everyone agreed to have their own truth.) The church where he served was a large urban church in a large city. He had large crowds for his Sunday School classes, and the Bible studies he taught. He had, in short, fans. He has the gift of teaching. Which is why a group of old friends came to see him one day. Like so many dwarves dropping into a hobbit hole, these friends arrived one day with a plan. Each of them worked in college ministry, or high school ministry. Each of them wanted to ensure that those who taught through such ministries were reasonably well taught themselves. Seminary seemed like overkill. Sunday School seemed insufficient. What they envisioned was a sort of seminary for lay-people. And they wanted my father to teach there.

Of course the world is full of good ideas. One day I thought, “I ought to write an ode to my home, a series of snapshots of a peculiar place, and a remembrance of its hold on me.” And behold, out came a book, part fact, part fiction, but all in honor of a place of magic. Some great ideas, however, die ignoble deaths. They are executed with the blade of practicality. “Who’s going to pay for all this?” and it all comes crashing down. Enter the white witch, a Gandalfian enchantress with an eminently practical bank book.

I was five when that meeting took place. I was probably still within the hallowed and pleasant halls of my school. All I know is when the first bit of magic hit. I sat down to a plate full of beans and weanies and my father uttered those magic words—“We’re going to be moving.” Fireworks exploded.

“The move” became our obsession. My parents would tell my sister and I about the little red school house we would soon be in. They explained this strange new concept to us: acreage. Stranger still, we were going to a land without sidewalks. “You mean” we asked in wonder, “you just walk right on the road?” “Yup,” came the reply, “and the road we’ll live on isn’t even paved.” And in the course of our conversation, every now and again, her name came up, Dora Hopeman. She was the one making all this possible. She would be our Grandma Moses, leading us out of the house of bland-age to the promised land.

Then we loaded up the car, and headed east. And the magic began. In the providence of God our trip, a mere five hours by car, took several days. Those days happened to overlap with my sixth birthday. We had cake at the restaurants along the way. We spent the night with great aunts and uncles, and more cake was brought forth. How powerful was the White Witch? Moses traveled on manna. I was sustained by devil’s food cake.

The home we would move into wasn’t quite ready for us when we pulled into the valley. So our average car climbed the mountain to her house. We wound back and forth, a mile or more up her driveway. We turned the final bend and there it was a magic house for a magic woman. Atop the summit it was not a house for stone-throwers, for its very walls were glass. And yet they bent, for the house was round. As we alighted from our car we were greeted by David and His Queen, a pair of champion German Shepherds with all the dignity of a pair of Beefeaters. The door opened and there she was. Though her pants were dungarees, though her straw hat was not a hat at all, but a planter, she was bejeweled with a quiet dignity. She was, after all, a sorceress. We tromped into her living room, it of the 360 degree panoramic view of the world we had entered. The first thing I noticed was the stairway. The stairs themselves were stone, rough cut and unhewn. The handrail was a tree. It had been bent and polished, but never cut. To the left of the stairs was an elevator that only went down one floor to the basement. To the right was a waterfall. That’s right, a waterfall, in the house. The real deal, not one of those toy things you get at the Cracker Barrel. This flowed from the cathedral ceiling to the floor. She offered us Hydrox cookies. Oreos were ordinary, from the old world.

I woke early the next morning, in the lair of the white witch. I made my way into the kitchen, and there she was, eating her breakfast. I was too young to have heard of Euell Gibbons, but I imagine his normal breakfast was rather like hers. It was shredded wheat, though not a single side was frosted. Neither was this the comparatively dainty bite size variety. It was one big, interwoven pillow of wheat. Just then there was a knock at the kitchen door. Mrs. Hopeman welcomed what I presumed was simply the milkman. My theory was apparently confirmed when he smiled, and handed her a glass half-gallon of milk. After he left she said, “That’s Ken Geary—he’s my handy man. He takes care of this house, and he farms the land. And this, young man, is not ordinary milk. It was taken straight from the cow this morning.” That was enough to coax me into eating my own tan colored brillo pad. Better still, it was enough to make me never forget the meal.

Within the hour the rest of the family was awake, and ready to tackle the day. We were going to our new house, though it still wouldn’t be ready for a few days. I don’t expect I noticed much the beauty of the mountains as we drove the few miles to our new home. My eyes were glued to the side of the road where, sure enough, there were no sidewalks. I had a problem with paying attention back then, not because I couldn’t focus, but because I tended to focus on the wrong things. We pulled off the gravel road onto the gravel driveway, and made our way up to where we would soon be living. I jumped from the car, and raced toward...the window wells on the front of the house. Corrugated steel half-circles pushed the rich ground away from the basement windows, to allow light in. But it wasn’t even the basement I was interested in. In those window wells, happy as a mess of toads in a window well, was a mess of toads in a window well. The little ones were hopping around like they were hopped up on sugar-coated sugar bombs, while the fat ones looked as self-satisfied as the people who hire corporate raiders. I had been told the house was a “ranch” design. No one told me it came complete with livestock.

I was dragged away from my fun to get the room by room tour of the house. The centerpiece was a massive great room, that, soon enough, would be filled with flopping Jesus freaks eager to hear my father’s teaching. Now it contained a whole different breed, the ridge runner. Please keep in mind that the one thing worse than being raised as a boring middle-class suburban kid was living in a world populated exclusively by boring middle-class suburbanites. But that was the sole “variety” of the species I had ever known. Until I met these ridge runners. These were honest men who were putting the finishing touches on our home. They were polite, hard working, and they talked funny. I figured it must have been because of how few teeth they had. While they were both strange and exotic to my six-year old eyes, I’m sorry but I remember with any clarity only one of them.

He was, not coincidentally, the friendlier of the two. He would, in the weeks to come, prop me up on a low hanging eave, and tell me that my role was to be the supervisor. He explained that the supervisor does no work; he just watches others work. (Rather, wouldn’t you say, like a writer?) He would share his bologna sandwich with me. He was a strange marriage of melancholy and joy, a veritable rednecked Puddleglum. He was also, I’m sorry to say, rather clumsy, which is how he got his name. I remember watching as he and his partner were shimmying our refrigerator into its appointed spot. Because this was the early seventies, and all notions of class, common sense and dignity were on hiatus, the kitchen was carpeted from wall to wall. So, by the way, was my parent’s bathroom. As you might expect, the refrigerator caught the carpet, and pulled up a two inch snag. My friend said forlornly, “Ohmahart.” That was his refrain, every time his two thumbs, as often as not throbbing from a close encounter with a hammer, got in his way, “ohmahart.” After several days of hearing this mysterious incantation, I finally screwed up the courage to ask my mother what it meant. (A few years later a neighbor boy, about six years himself, called me a bastard. With no reticence I asked my Mom, “What’s a bastard?” She was quick on the draw and told me, “Someone who doesn’t have a father.” I walked away murmuring my confusion, “Why in the world did Scotty call me that? He knows I have a father.” This time she smiled and told me, “He’s saying, ‘Oh, my heart’ son. It’s his way of saying, ‘oops’.” And from that day forward he was known to our family as “Ohmahart.”

That first month was a glorious one. I got to ride in a dump truck. With the neighbor kids we played hide and seek in the twenty-acre corn field. And the Thomas family arrived. They moved into the one finished house on the property. Mr. Thomas was there to get the ministry going. But I was glad for their children, to have other Cincinnati refugees share in this strange adventure. We met the neighbor children as well, on one side of the property Beth Hood, whose family practiced that mystery religion, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. On the other side we met Beth’s distant cousins, April, Barb, Peggy and Patty. Though they were grown, there were two boys as well, Barry and Robin...Hood. A few miles down the road lived Randy Queer and his brother, and further off the beaten path, Buddy Gross and his older sister. We were told their house had no electricity. Still, together they were all rather entertaining. When one of my refugee friends traveled back to Cincinnati to visit with grandparents she was asked if she had made many friends among the locals. “Yes,” came the reply, “they’re all Hoods, Grosses and Queers.” The grandmother blushed and said, “Now sweetheart, they might be a little different, but I’m sure they’re not as all bad as that.”

Chapter 2

Dropped into the Mellon Patch

Where is S.E. Hinton now? I’ve never read a single one of her novels. I’ve seen The Outsiders, but if there are more movies, I haven’t seen them. She is the bane of my existence. It was bad enough that as I began the transition from dreaming of being a rock star (which was, of course, second in the progression, after the dream of being a professional athlete) to dreaming of writing the great American novel, that along would come the literary brat pack, to match the movie version. Bret Easton Ellis stole my schtick, updating Holden Caulfield. The Less than Zero guy added a decade and gave us yuppie Holdens. And for the sake of political correctness, that two-fer Amy Tan rolled the bones and came up a winner. But before all these wet behind the ears writers made their mark, there was S.E. Hinton, the veritable Shirley Temple of earnest sophomores. Half a dozen bestsellers giving us heroes and antiheroes as clichéd as Hector and Paris. How was it possible that a teenager with all the wisdom of a teenager, could squeeze out enough verisimilitude from those cardboard characters? It had to be the names. I mean, Soda-pop and Pony-boy are just way too weird to be made up. Weirdness, in other words, is too normal to be unreal.

To get at the point we have to fast-forward a bit. A few years after we arrived in the Ligonier valley, complete with the Thompson family, a third family joined our adventure. The Thompson’s eldest son Bill was four years my senior, their second son Danny was three years my junior. I had my adventures with both, but when the Gooders arrived, I had a companion. Randy was just like me, only more so. He was my age, plus one year. He was just a little better looking than me, and more important, just a little more athletic than me. He and his family arrived a year or two after ours, but moved onto the Valley School a year before I did. You will learn more about that august institution in due time. For now, put yourself in my front yard in that first house, the one with the toads in the window wells.

Randy and I are tossing the football, as was our wont. He is explaining something of this strange life he has entered at the local private prep day school. Confusing my grown up self with my third grade self, he began by explaining how lunch worked there. (Then I didn’t care. But now, thirty years later, I still replay this part of the conversation in my mind.) But along the way he mentioned a peer of his, a Teddy Hatfield. “Hatfield” I queried, “what kind of name is ‘Hatfield’.” Of course in my mind’s eye I envisioned this garden bedecked with a variety of hats. That’s when thing’s got interesting. It seems that the school was positively overrun with Mellons. Eight year old little boys don’t think of Carnegie Mellon University or Mellon Bank. We think of watermellons, and laugh. The science teacher was likewise rather fruity, her name being Mrs. Lemon. Randy spent the rest of the afternoon entertaining me with the silly names of his classmates and teachers at that toney school.

What surprises me as I look back was that I missed the opportunity, for once in my life, to best him. I wouldn’t have many such opportunities. But back at Cook Township Elementary School, we had our share of names. They say that it is the grotesque, the picaresque that makes small southern towns come to life in fiction. I think it’s the names. In my class we had the Key. That is, my playmate Cleveland Piper, for reasons I’m still in the dark about, went by the name Key. “Key Piper” Miss Doncez would say when taking roll, and nobody even snickered.

Key was a character, a class clown in training. But his name was just the beginning. What we forget about those early years of elementary school is living in the elementary world that will be ours the rest of our lives. Just as every small town has its characters, its backdrops before which life happens, so too does grammar school. We were all nice to each other. We all had varying calls on the attention of the class. But representing the class of 1983, a decade before anyone would even think of us as “the class of...” anything were two roly-poly little boys who even in the first grade were the first citizens of our generation. Scott Emert earned his role through the business of his father Bill. He owned one of the two local gas stations, one of the two most prominent businesses in this one horse town. He had both an older brother and sister. Better still, they had an above ground pool. Duane Burns’s claim to fame was rather more tragic. His father was dead. He lived, like Scott Emert, with older brothers and an older sister. But there is this chicken and egg problem. Were they given the names because of their status, or given the status because of their names? Did we name them Peach and Beef such that we would never forget them, or did we never forget them because we had named them Peach and Beef?

Why didn’t I counter Randy’s stories with these two little boys, Peach Emert, and Beef Burns? Please understand that these nicknames were no afterthought. It wasn’t as if we trained our mouths to say Peach, or Beef, when our minds though Scott, or Duane. No, we only recovered Scott and Duane with effort and intentionality. Even when I followed Randy to the world of Lemons and Hatfields, I would never forget Peach and Beef. Nor, after leaving their school, would I be free of their world. For what allowed my backdrops to hang with me all these years was the contrast. I remember the world in which I lived precisely because I lived in so many worlds. Just as the Hebrews of old were placed in that intersection between three continents, Africa to the south, Europe to the west, and Asia to the west, so I was placed on a cultural faultline, one that still shapes me to this day.

When I tell people I grew up in western Pennslyvania they don’t react the way I would expect. Mostly they are simply polite. When I used to live in Orlando, eyes would light up like some magical electrical parade. I mean, Disney, and enough said. No doubt those who live in southern California experience much the same thing, not because of Disneyland, but because of the beaches, and the movies. Las Vegas, no doubt brings raised eyebrows, as would San Francisco. But old Penn’s woods seems to fall beneath the radar, or between the cracks. It serves as a sort of land bridge between three distinct cultures that make up much of these United States. Strangely, each of these cultures was a part of my life, and a part of the Ligonier community.

To the west of us was, of course, the great Midwest. Our region was called “The Tri-state Region” in part (exactly a one-third part) because of the state of Ohio. I have already spoken my peace on that in-illustrious region. It is the land of the bland. When we think Midwest we think suburbs, middle-class, and ordinary. Ligonier had its share of these folks. Not surprisingly they sat right in the middle of the social scale. In these families the dads carpooled to middle-management office jobs around the area. The mothers baked cookies and did some volunteer work. Their children had B averages in school, and aspired to attend college one day, so that they too might carpool to big companies. This particular crowd gathered in the hills just west of Ligonier, in a pair of developments, Oakwood Hills and Valley Heights. I suppose there were oaks up in those hills. But no one seemed to notice the oxymoronic nature of the other section. I mean, what were they going to call phase three, Mountain Depths? I had my share of friends in this group, though I saw them the least often growing up.

To the south of western Pennsylvania, one found the third of the tri-states, West Virginia. When I was a boy John Denver used to sing, “Almost heaven, West Virginia...” He should have kept going up interstate 79, and he would have made it all the way there. The state university in West Virginia had as its mascot the Mountaineers. It is no coincidence that the young men and women of the Ligonier schools likewise went into battle as “The Mounties.” (By the way, lest you get pegged as an outlander, the pronunciation isn’t MOWntie, but Montie.) Our mascot was a skinny hayseed dressed in overalls sleeping beside his musket and his little brown jug. My, how times have changed.

Our community, though it was above the Mason-Dixon line, included a kind of southern culture. We called them ridge runners. These good people tended to live in the outlying areas of Ligonier, many of them around the hamlet of Stahlstown. Here the parents carpooled as well, either to the coal mines over the mountain in Johnstown, or to the steel mills (pronounced still mills) in Pittsburgh. Or they didn’t carpool at all, but drove coal trucks over the roads. They drank their Iron City beer over at Hillbilly Haven, a bar just dark enough that you didn’t lose your appetite when you walked in. Their children took classes in the “general” track at school, before being sent off to vo-tech to learn a trade. Men and children hunted together, both for sport and meet. I remember the day Paul Stahl brought turkey legs to show and tell. You could still smell the offal on them.

These were the boys on my little league teams and my midget football teams. It wasn’t unusual to see children ten or eleven years old spitting tobacco juice into the mud of the infield, while the coach did the same in the batter’s box, hitting balls our way. Hunting was such a big deal that the local school board stopped trying to compete. The first day of doe season school was closed.

North and east of my little corner of the world was New England, which too had a distinct culture, with an outpost in Ligonier. When we think New England we think old money, lock-jawed accents, and the Preppy Handbook. In these families the father drank too much, while trying to hold down some sort of job to slow the mercurial slippage of their inheritance. The women played golf or tennis, and the children went to the Valley School, my alma mater. My introduction to this society (or perhaps I should just say “to society”) came by way of church. For reasons still unknown to me, my family one Sunday visited Saint Michaels of the Valley Episcopal church. Saint Michaels was and is the very picture-postcard cliché of the small country parish church. White clapboard kept the elements off cherry pews, complete with padding for our rumps and for our knees for those times in the liturgical dance that we needed them. The parish priest was a much loved Friar Tuck, sharing with his fictional brother a rounded middle, a burgundy-hued nose, and a love of fruit of the vine that created both.

There my father met Mr. Messer, yet another cliché. Mr. Messer, the headmaster of the Valley School dressed in camel hair jackets and oxblood loafers, and spoke in a measured English accent. He sensed from the conversation with my father that we didn’t quite fit socially in Stahlstown, and encouraged him with news of scholarships available for the likes of me. Soon I too was hanging with the Mellons, the Hatfields and learning my science from Mrs. Lemon.

I went to school every day with the blue-bloods, who were gracious to me. After school it was practice of one kind or another with the ridge runners of Stahlstown. They were puzzled by me. And on the weekends, at least eventually, I dated the Midwestern girls. They, at least I like to think, were charmed by me. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Chapter 3

Love Hurts

The Valley School was like nothing I had ever seen before. I had come from the Midwest and the white bread suburbs. I had, after three years, acclimated myself to the country and the rednecks. Now I would be swimming with the bluebloods. One of those Mellons my friend had told me about. What he didn't tell me was his name, Armour. Armour? What kind of name is Armour? My friend had also passed along a story from Armour's older brother Richard, who was in the class ahead of me. It seems that the Mellon children, like most children, liked to play Hide and Seek. Their mansion carried with it a serious occupational hazard. Once Richard was hiding, and he got lost, inside his own house. My first best friend was Tim Cairnes. Like me, Tim loved sports, had a rather round head, and wasn't the tallest sandwich in the picnic basket. Like mine, his dad ran his own company. Unlike my father, however, he never had trouble meeting payroll. Tim and I competed with each other like Gene and Finny. If you don't know who they are, you didn't get a prep school education. Tim took me to my first Steeler game, in 1974, the first year they won the Super Bowl. They didn't, however, win the game. O.J. Simpson ran for over two hundred yards over the Steel Curtain. Better days would soon come for the Steelers, though not for O.J.

Our class was rather small, which was typical of the Valley School. We had roughly fifteen students in the class, I don't think I can name them all, but here's trying. Besides Tim and Armour there was Charlie MacDougal. His family owned the local amusement park, and he lead the first of my two experiences with pot, but that's later. Gordon something left after the fourth grade, and so I remember precious little of him. Todd Laetner and Bruno Flines were the brains of the class, with Tim and I competing for the bronze medal. John Shoop was a lanky and likable young man, with a voice made for cartoons. Besides me, Critter Dokerty rounded out the boys in the class. He will play a big role in two important moments to come.

On the other side of the dance hall there were the Boyer sisters. Their father owned, I believe, a meatpacking or a printing company. They had an in-ground pool and were friendly, if a little odd. Cindy Toastin lived nearby. She had trouble ditching the baby fat, but was essentially harmless. Kacy Callaway caught the same train out of Petticoat Junction that I did. That is, she was a redneck girl from Stahlstown. Our family carpooled with theirs. Dick, her daddy, was the Jed Clampett of that clan. But he didn't discover gold so much as guns. He ran Dick's Sports Shop, one of half a dozen businesses in Stahlstown, and by far the most prosperous. Kacy the daughter wasn't only out of place like me, but was, like me, a fine athlete. She will intersect with Critter Dokerty in one of those stories I'm eager to get to.

That leaves only two other girls. These two were the most attractive in the class, which is sort of like being the skinniest person at a weight watchers meeting. Martha and Megan were the best of friends, bound together by a cord of three strings. Martha was an O'Malley, Irish to the core. Her dad taught at the Valley School, which was evidence that you didn't have to have blue blood in you to be a teacher there. Mr. O'Malley, God bless all his Irish charm, had something altogether more spiritual flowing through his veins, spirits. Megan was a Herman, her family in the old money crowd. But her Dad shared much the same weakness as Mr. O'Malley. Drinking wasn't the problem. Stopping was the problem.

Their second tie was a love for horses. Each not only went through that prepubescent ritual of little girls, reading row after row of horse fiction, as if Misty of Chincoteaque lead as interesting a life as Laura Ingalls, but each had a horse or two. Megan, anyway, used to be late for school on those days that the Rolling Rock Hunt Club was sponsoring a real live fox hunt. Martha, on the other hand, was only late when Mr. O'Malley couldn't get his Vespa started.

The third tie was a second love—for me. At least, that's what Mrs. Granite, our fourth grade teacher told me. You see, these two girls' idea of fun was to rare back a leg, and let it fly such that the toe (well shod of course) came to rest against my shin. Which became for me my own personal values clarification course. I mean, I might not have been brought up in a castle, but I had learned a thing or two of courtly manners. Not only were my hands tied, so were my feet. I couldn't kick the girls back, because boys are supposed to protect girls. You would think, wouldn't you, that my dilemma would have touched a soft spot in these girls. And I suppose it would have, had either had a soft spot. Instead, they gleefully saw it as my weakness. Imagine Mike Tyson discovering that some Amish guy just rammed his Bentley with a buggy. That's how they each looked at the matter.

By the time my shins had been turned into mush, I finally took the problem to Mrs. Granite. She was a nice enough lady, though she was married to a lawyer. She told me, as I laid out my nine-year old heart before her, that she wondered when I would come to her. She had seen the assaults the girls made on me. I told her that I couldn't fight back. This offended her feminism, but she was still gracious. Trouble was, she looked at the problem like a girl. "You know why they kick you don't you?" "No," I answered, wondering where the conversation was going. "It's because they like you" she explained. And that was the end of the conversation. Apparently she thought the whole thing hurt my feelings instead of my shins. Apparently she also thought that a buoyed self-esteem would numb the pain.

The beatings eventually ended. The girls, perhaps because their fancy turned toward him, tried the whole kicking routine on John Shoop. He responded by putting his hands down on two desks and lifting his feet off the ground. He then turned his own feet, shod as they were in those old boots from the seventies, with the brass ring on the side, into a windmill of pain. The girls stood there in shock, until their own pain moved them back. They never kicked me again.

Give a Man a Fish

That the school was old money didn’t mean that it was old-fashioned. In some ways it certainly was. In the fall we fielded a soccer team. This was another time. We had moms, and we had soccer, but there were no soccer moms back then. We wore uniforms. The academic standards were high, so high in fact that my own history text in the seventh grade that my sister had the same text at the local government school, in the eleventh grade. We met once a week for chapel, where we recited various smidgens of the Book of Common Prayer. (No one ever told me these things. I remember how embarrassed I was, that as a son of a man of the cloth I didn’t know the liturgy.) We read in English class from the canon, as was fitting for our station.

All this old stuff, however, didn’t hide the fact that we were progressive as well. That first year, my fourth grade year, we had most of the normal classes. The canonical novel we read for English was The Borrowers. We studied science, with Mrs. Lemon. We studied arithmetic. But we didn’t have a history class. Social studies had made its way to the Valley School. Worse still, we had a socialistic social studies class. I was called MACOS, and it was terrible fun. The name was an acronym for Man, A Course of Study.

We began, as I recall, with the study of some kind of seagull. I don’t remember what kind it was, but I do remember the one interesting thing about this bird, something it seems we watched over and over again in countless filmstrips. (Why, by the way, doesn’t the truth in advertising laws require that we stop calling these fuzzy courses “social studies” and instead call them “Filmstrip Class”?) This bird had a spot on its beak. That’s not the interesting part. The bird doesn’t, as such, bring worms and things to its young in the nest. Instead, the mom (I think it was the mom) stands near her young, and they would peck at that spot on the beak. Soon, dinner would arrive, because mom would vomit up the chicks’ supper. What we were supposed to learn from this, I don’t think I’ll ever know.

Later we studied some Eskimo tribe, whose name escapes me. The best part of this unit was learning to play like the Indians played. We spent every moment of our spare time, and who knows how much class time, learning to do Cat’s Cradle tricks, constructing sundry shapes out of a circle of string. We made Jacob’s ladder (that was one of my favorite ones because while I didn’t know the Episcopal liturgy, I did know what Jacob’s ladder was.) We went from there to witch’s hat, and from there (blush) to Tarzan’s underwear.

What really showed this class’s link to socialism, however, was another game we played. We pretended to be these Eskimos, and would take turns “fishing.” The class played this game that consisted of two large circles of wood, each with dozens of holes in them. In some of these holes were placed little strips of stickers, some with one sticker, some with three, even a few with five or more. These stickers represented a catch of fish, each of which would feed a family for a day. A piece of paper was placed between these two pieces of wood, concealing which holes contained the fish. The class gathered around, and took turns poking holes in the paper, looking for fish. If you and your family went three turns without any fish, you starved to death, and were out of the game. The last man standing was the winner. But what came along with the game was often subtle, often fierce pressure, if you had prospered in your fishing, to share with your classmates lest they die off. Success, according to the game’s creators, wasn’t being the last man standing, but to either have everyone die at the same time, or to empty the wooden sea of its fish. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

I don’t know if the brains that came up with this curriculum are still at work pitching it. (I do know that they don’t give it away, and never did.) It was years later when I was reading a book on the evils of the state schools (still a hobby of mine, and much more fun than poking holes in paper with a pencil) that I learned the socialist lesson that eluded me when I was a boy. This book, in exposing the socialist agenda of the socialist schools, explained the socialist lesson in the socialist curriculum. Though it is counterintuitive, it is nevertheless a common thing for old money (and new money, and I suppose, middle-aged money) to embrace a socialist mentality. If, after all, one finds wealth by luck, as in the game, why wouldn’t we feel guilty for having it?

This, however, was only the beginning. The Valley School had a far more effective tool for making socialists out of its students—Miss Manely, the fifth column, and the fifth grade teacher...

Chapter 4

Miss-teriously Manley

Children, if you will excuse the fuzziness, are innocent. They are, of course, little sinners, a truth I learned not only being catechized, but while reading more of the prep-school canon, The Lord of the Flies. Their sins, however, are rather less knowing than the sins of adults. Children tend to excel more in selfishness than blasphemy, more in ingratitude than in perversion. They, for all the darkness in their hearts, tend to take the world as they find it, and have precious little interest in what lies beneath. Steal a cookie? Yes. Undermine the fabric of society? Not so much. When I was in the second grade, for instance, my friend Tom Moore and I thought it jolly fun to pretend that a day was coming when we would be wed, to each other. More to the point, when my older sister said that such was “queer” I thought that it was indeed a little unusual which explains why we found it so humorous. (On the other hand, when, seven years later I was once more out of prep school and back in the government school, the first big scare was that Tom, now large and angry, wanted to beat me up. I guess he remembered, and felt a need to prove to me what a mannish boy he had become.)

That innocence then meant that we as children tended to miss what would be glaring to the more jaded eye. We were, to be sure, intimidated by Miss Manley. But though we had by this time progressed to long division, we weren’t able to put two and two together. Miss Manley, the fifth grade teacher at the Valley School wasn’t the most feminine pin-up girl in the calendar. She was in her late thirties, lived alone in a little cottage, and drove a blue Volkswagon bug to school every day. She didn’t smile much, and she had shaded glasses, just like Velma from Scooby Doo. And most important of all, she was an ex-nun. She was brusque, aloof, and strangely uncomfortable around children. Children tended to return the favor.

Perhaps better work for her would have been to be in the think-tank that brought us the MACOS program. I’m now confident that it was she who won approval for its use at those faculty meetings that smelled of smoke and cheap perfume. Miss Manley wasn’t merely a bona-fide liberal, but she was an adept at harnessing the power of childish idealism. It was that time when ecology first became mainstream. The hippies had pretty well been hunted off the land, but much of their dreams hung around. Remember those green flags with the big E on them? We were beyond such symbols. This was the age of that government Indian. He walked so solemnly through the woods, only to come upon empty soda cans and a highway clogged with cars. Slowly he turned to face the camera, and we saw the tear running down his cheek. Fade to black.

I was a sucker for that, and all the government ads. I nagged my poor parents about smoking, about littering, and about putting on their seat belts. I had a hair-trigger moral indignation, and wasn’t afraid to use it. Which made me perfect fodder for Miss Manley. Sometimes she was subtle, other times she had all the grace and tact of an angry feminist. (Is there any other kind?)

She began her program with reading time. Many days as the school day came to a close we were invited to put our work aside and listen while she read to us. It was just like story time when we were little, comforting and safe. But the book she had chosen was on the bestseller lists at the time. We met a sweet little warren of bunnies, once more taking us back to our kinder gardens. They played, the talked to one another, they married. And then came the tension, a bulldozer came to town, and now the rabbits were on a quest. Watership Down taught me and my classmates to hate a bulldozer with all the passion of a rabid rabbit.

We had more MACOS that year as well. But Miss Manley, before perhaps anyone had ever heard of such a thing, introduced us to unit studies. This, for the uninitiated, is how you bring unity to the diversity of the knowledge we learn in school. The plan is that you do your various subjects around a single subject matter. It could be “Your neighborhood.” For math you count the blocks in a mile. For “social studies” you would write stories about the people who work in your neighborhood. For geography you study the terrain around you, and for science you look at how weather comes to town. We didn’t look at what was in our neighborhood that year, but what Miss Manley didn’t want in our neighborhood—the Donegal Energy Park, the market driven name for the planned nuclear power plant in our back yard.

Our science class was learning how the Donegal Energy Park would make it cloudy and rainy every day. You can’t very well play baseball in the pouring rain now can you? In social studies class we learned about the glories of renewable energy sources. In math class we learned about radioactive half-lives, and how they might cut our own lives in half. And in English class (then moderned up as Language Arts) we learned to write letters to the editor. The Ligonier Echo, a weekly paper with a circulation under 5,000 at the time, was inundated with self-righteous ten year olds insisting that the Donegal Energy Park be put out of its misery before it was even born. My first published piece of prose was just such a letter that saw the light of day.

The funny thing is while I wrote with such passion, the whole issue was just way yonder too scientific for me to really care. Litter on the ground, or in the river, that I could understand. Invisible rays and particles didn’t mean so much to me. No, I wrote what I wrote not because I believed what I had said, but I did it for Miss Manley. How this stern, distant woman could inspire a ten year old boy we will look at next time.

Mannish Boy

It was easy enough to explain when I was littler. Like a yearly pilgrimage to sit-com plot hell, it was my habit to develop crushes on my school teachers. In the first grade I raced through my math dittos so I could hand them in before my competitor and best friend, Greg Thomas. Speed-adding was my service to this goddess. In the second grade we had something of a mess at school. First there was Mrs. Pritchett. She had all the beauty of Miss Donchez from the first grade, but she had a wedding band. It seems that such didn’t mean so much to her. She left us mid-year, after suffering a nervous breakdown. No, it wasn’t from the mental stress of the classroom, but from the stress, I found out decades later, of keeping her extra-marital affair a secret. Not such an easy thing to do when yours is one of all of ten houses on the main street. Mr. Van Dyke replaced her, but I didn’t see much of him, spending the second half of the school year at home with a badly broken leg.

I don’t know what, if anything, inspired me through third grade, but in the fourth grade it was back to simple crushes. But not with Miss Manley. Given her brusque manner, her hard edges, she neither coaxed a crush from me, nor managed to be even a matronly inspiration. Instead what inspired me was something far more counter-cultural than being an ex-Mary Knoller, something far more perverse than not preferring the opposite sex, something more dangerous than the International Workers Party. Miss Manley manifested, and thus birthed in me the most deadly of qualities—earnestness. She was a woman not only emotionally dead, but dead serious.

This, of course, was my first, though by no means my last, great awakening. It was the first true bud of adulthood. Prior to this time my commitments went only as far as the local sports teams. When my own mother, a year or so prior, cried in my presence for the first time (while listening to radio reports of American POW’s deplaning stateside after the end of the war in Viet Nam) it was less frightening than puzzling. What, my innocent heart pondered, could be quite so serious and important that it would lead one to cry? It wasn’t like the Pirates lost to the Reds in the playoffs.

With Miss Manley, what she was so serious about wasn’t really the point. I joined in the crusade against the nuclear plant not because I was a nascent lefty, but because it was a crusade. Crusading was what appealed to me, and all the proud smugness that went with it. For this particular change, this connection between teacher and pupil, brought with it a separation between pupil and classmates. I was moving toward maturity, while the rest of the class, emotionally speaking, was still playing with crayons.

Mind you this was still only the ten-year old version of earnestness. It wasn’t like I went to the barber and asked to have my hair cut like Lord Byron. I still woke up early each Saturday and sat transfixed by Hannah and Barbera while chowing down on Quisp or Pink Panther flakes. My idea of a good time still ran to sled-riding and hot wheels. Indeed, I suspect that, while I felt the cold chill of distance, my classmates and friends noticed nothing. I could still fit in, even though I no longer fit in.

Like some kind of emotional vampire, this earnestness only came out late at night. My affair with the radio began with my broken leg three years hence. I would listen to the Pirates’ spring training games on KDKA radio. This was the era of Bob Prince, a stalwart in the drunken baseball announcer hall of fame. He was so good that on nights when the game was on TV, and he would do the radio broadcast for the middle three innings while his sidekick handled the TV chores, I would turn off the sound of the TV and watch with the radio on. After the leg healed, the radio stayed. It was about this time that I started listening to pop music. I had no girlfriend. I sought no girlfriend (well, at least not yet. More, of course, on this angle later.) But I would lie in my bed at night, and give myself over to this earnestness while WPEZ provided the soundtrack.

WPEZ was the first and oldest top forty station on the FM dial. They agreed with Paul McCartney, that the world had not yet had its fill of silly love songs. So there I would lay, mooning along with the tunes, over girls I didn’t even know. Foolish yes, but such an emotional rush. Of course what I label as a step toward maturity, some would argue was rather immature. In our brave new world no one wants to be accused of the impertinence of being earnest. Far better to be flip, and superior.

Which leads us back to my enduring respect for this woman. She is/was Roman Catholic. I am/ever more shall be Protestant. She was on the left of her tradition, I am decidedly on the right. She, to borrow a phrase, thought government was the solution, while I think it is the problem. It was, strangely, because we were/are polar opposites, that we ended up having something in common. We cared, and for that let neither of us ever make an apology. It was this bond that inspired me, though I didn’t know it at the time. Now that I know it, I can only wonder if she knows. She remains frozen in time, while I still have chapters to go before I sleep.

Chapter 5

The Right Side of the Tracks

Ten year olds, at least those stuck somewhere in the middle, aren’t especially class conscious. To be sure they notice peculiarities, but that’s really all they are. That one family, instead of taking the bus to school, is driven by a chauffer is strange, but no stranger than that in another family the mother’s native tongue is French. “That’s different” these children think, and then they move on.

It wasn’t the news itself that drove us to check every year, but the brush with fame. That is, we weren’t particularly thinking about the meaning of staggering wealth when we looked each year in the Guinness Book of World Records to see if they were still there. But back then, they were, every year, the richest family in the world. Sure it was in small print, but it was in the second best selling book of all time, a thirty word sentence describing the wealth and history of the Richard King Mellon family.

There was a deep tie at the Valley School of Ligonier, and the Mellon family. Ligonier the town was a virtual Potemkin village, a picture postcard town with a gazebo in the town square designed and payed for by the Mellons (the town, not the gazebo). The school building itself had once been a mansion belonging to General Mellon. And the building was itself a veritable patch of Mellons. Below me two grades was a pretty little girl named Cat Mellon, a spur off the main family line. One can only hope that Cat was a nickname. Above me one grade was Richard, namesake of the patriarch. And right there in my own classroom was Armour.

They all seemed ordinary enough, even after we learned exactly why they didn’t ride the bus, and exactly who was driving them. It wasn’t that the Mellons were too good to ride the bus, but too exposed. I’ve not known many children that require an armed escort to and from school. The drivers were less drivers, and more bodyguards. Armour could be nice enough, and he could be a little less than tame. But his shenanigans, as one might expect for a ten year old, were generally more boyish than evil. He would fit more in the dipping girl’s pigtails in ink wells era than in the gunning down your enemies at school era. We weren’t the best of friends, but neither were we enemies. Which explains why, like Charlie of the chocolate factory fame, it wasn’t a complete shock that I should receive a golden ticket, an invitation to Armour’s birthday party. Grander still, it would be a sleepover.

And so one Friday afternoon, I rode the bus away from Stahlstown, and toward Laughlintown, with my host, his brother, and their bodyguards following behind us in a car straight out of cop show casting. We debussed, all fifteen or so of we guests. Some were from the grade above us, friends of Richard, including my best friend, the one who first spoke to me of the Mellon clan, Randy. We hiked half a mile or so up a country road that suddenly opened up at the Mellon estate. It was the first, and last house I have ever been in that came equipped with a name. Had I known then what I’d be doing now, I would have made a point to remember that name.

Like the gardens of Versaille, in front of the house was two hundred yards immaculate grass, gently rising to the mansion. We walked up the hill, the house growing still bigger, each of us growing smaller. I had heard that there was a “servant’s entrance” but it was nowhere in sight. (It was, in fact, naturally enough behind the house.) We trudged into the house, removed our shoes in the mudroom, made our way through the kitchen where Mrs. Mellon greeted us (we saw her only once more, when we left the party), and then it was off to the trophy room.

I had heard that we would be spending most of our time in the trophy room, but I had the wrong mental image. Somehow I had it in my head that Mr. Mellon must be some sort of champion bowler, or that his office softball team was rather accomplished. I pictured display cases of hardware acquired on the field of sport. That’s not the kind of trophy. Instead we entered the room, and found it to be some sort of cross between an exotic zoo and a wax museum. The trophies in the room were mounted heads and bodies of animals the master of the house had killed.

Dropping off our sleeping bags and such, we left the room for a brief, and partial tour. We passed room after room, and Armour made no comment. Peaking in one room and seeing nothing more than a bunch of old furniture (what more sophisticated palates would call antiques) I asked, “What’s this room for?” Armour looked a bit puzzled, trying to cross a cultural divide, and in turn gave a most honest answer—“Nothing.” The rest of the tour was less about the house, and more about the stuff. Armour lived in a virtual dreamland. We saw the matching mini-bikes he and Richard road. We saw Richard’s bedroom, with a bed shaped like a race-car. Armour had a bunk bed, done up like a fire truck. Tossed casually across the top bunk was a true marvel, and a veritable wealth building machine—a metal detector. Outside we were introduced to a trampoline, a toy we had all thus far only seen at the circus.

It was the servants who served us supper, and I presume, though I don’t remember, perhaps because such is so ordinary, a birthday cake. Then it was back to the trophy room for the evening’s entertainment. This was the strangest thing of all. It seems, if you were wealthy enough, that you could actually watch, in your own home, the movie of your choice. And so we did, not with a VCR, which then even the richest could not buy, but on a real movie projector. And the movie was just perfect for this particular crowd—Godzilla vs. King Kong.

 

Hot Lips

That night I was forced to confront two great fears, though neither had ever even appeared in a Japanese movie. As I recall we all watched the movie dutifully. While the plot was somewhat compelling, I remember that my mind was rather more focused on the magic of the technology. The projector was plugged into an outlet that wasn’t on the wall, but in the floor. The movie screen wasn’t one of those bulky monstrosities that were more difficult to set up than an army cot. A push of a button and it just descended from the ceiling. Stranger still, however, and a piece of machinery that would play a major role in a matter of hours, was the refrigerator. I’d seen plenty of those. We even had two at my house, one in the kitchen and one in the garage. But this one was half-size, in the trophy room, and built into the wall. It was like watching a movie at the Jetson’s house.

I don’t recall who won the epic battle of the bad guys. I do remember getting into more sophisticated tastes. I liked being scared. Hitchcock was already a favorite, both the empty eye socket scene in Birds and the bottom of the basement stairs scene in Psycho, already etched in my memory. But this was the mid-seventies, and Hollywood was demon happy. Rosemary had already had her baby, and the exorcist was our omen of scares to come. I was ten years old, on my way to a midget football game. My father was driving and was hoping to add a little juice to my aggression. “If you play particularly well today, if you have several strong tackles, I’ll get you something special. What would you like?” That was a tough one. Dirt bike I figured, would be asking too big. Candy bar was too little. So I asked, “Will you take me to a devil movie?” I don’t recall how well I played that day, but I know he didn’t take me to a devil movie.

Which didn’t keep me from looking for the devil himself. After the movie ended, and after the caregivers left us to our own devices, a group of us kids turned a flashlight into a makeshift candle, and gathered around in a circle holding hands. No, it wasn’t a prayer meeting. We didn’t sing “It Only Takes a Spark.” We conducted, as best as we were able, our own little séance. This was my first, though not my last dabbling in such matters, though as I look back I think God was being gracious to me in inviting me to turn back. We whispered ever more loudly and furiously at each other to be quiet, until finally silence reigned. Someone, perhaps the birthday boy himself, began to call upon the spirits. With as much solemnity as a grade schooler could muster he invoked the spirits of the dead. With an eerie marriage of naiveté and earnestness, he asked that if a spirit were in our midst, that they would give us a sign. He implored, and waited. He called forth, and waited.