Preface

If you’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption you may remember what Red said during his parole hearing in the later part of the movie. “Not a day goes by I don’t feel regret, and not because I’m in here or because you think I should. I look back on myself the way I was…stupid kid who did that terrible crime…wish I could talk sense to him. Tell him how things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone, this old man is all that’s left, and I have to live with that.”

Now, I didn’t commit a terrible crime and I don’t look back on myself as a stupid kid, but still 50 years later, I wish I could talk sense to the kid I was as a junior and senior in high school. Just give him some friendly advice, get him to see a few things differently and implore him to act a little more boldly or at least less timidly and work on defeating my sometimes-paralyzing shyness.

Even if I could give that kid the advice I could give him now, it probably would not have changed the course of my life for the better. My life by most measures has turned out pretty good if not great so far. So why do I find myself sighing so often and even swearing out loud like I’ve hit a bad golf shot when I think back on those last two years of high school? 

Chapter 1
My First Business Trip

The morning after school let out for the summer in 1973, I drove the family’s 1971 Impala from our home in Fairfax, Virginia 300 miles to Vestal High School in Vestal, New York. To be able to do this at age 17 was an indication of the amount of freedom my parents allowed me and the trust they had in me. I arrived in the early afternoon. School had a couple more days to go in Vestal and I was looking forward to seeing my friends for the first time in three months but there was some business that was even more pressing to me.

I had only been gone three months so I felt right at home walking through the main entrance and down the familiar corridors of Vestal High School and I could feel the breezy “final days of school” vibe on my way to the Guidance Counselors’ offices. Along the way I was greeted cheerily by my ninth-grade algebra teacher. I’m sure she didn’t know I wasn’t a student there anymore.

The receptionist in “Guidance” waived me through when I told her I was there to see my former counselor. I don’t remember the counselor’s name, but I can still picture her. She was a tall, slender woman in her late 30s or early 40s who I would have found attractive if I’d been 10 to 15 years older. She was friendly, easy to talk to but at the same time professional. I told her I wanted to transfer back to Vestal High School for my senior year.  My parents and I had moved from Vestal to Fairfax in March because my father, a middle manager in finance for IBM, had accepted a transfer. After finishing the last three sad and isolated months of my junior year at Herndon High School in Virginia, I was desperate to get back to Vestal.

My plan was to move in with my best friend Ed Welch and his family.  I had the approval from my parents and Ed’s even though my father said he hoped I wouldn’t go because he would miss me. My last hurdle was to get the Vestal Independent School District to sign off on the scheme.  I could tell it pained my former counselor to explain that my scheme was half-baked. The only way I could come back was for Ed’s parents to become my legal guardians. This was a non-starter. I loved my parents completely and unreservedly. Nobody else would be my legal guardian no matter how perfect I thought my life would be as a senior at Vestal High School.

So, I was disappointed that it was not to be, but I gained a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in giving it my best shot.  You know, leaving no stone unturned.

I spent the next three or four days in Vestal celebrating the end of the school year with Ed and many other friends. We played basketball, golf, went to parties, and drank beer and I almost got lucky a couple of times. It was bittersweet. The reality of September and Herndon High School loomed over the good time I was having.

Chapter 2
Cut
About six months before we moved to Virginia, my father received IBM’s coveted Outstanding Contribution award for the success of a project he and his finance team had worked on. IBMers referred to the award as an O.C. This was a big achievement for my father, which included a bonus and inclusion in special events and dinners for the winners of an O.C. I didn’t know this at the time but the O.C. probably led to the job opportunity with IBM in Manassas, Virginia, which included a significant raise in pay, that my father accepted in December of 1972.

So, in March of 1973, we made an IBM move for the fourth time. It was the third since I was of school age. The first two times I was in elementary school, so it goes without saying that I was not consulted by my parents before those moves. Besides, the transitions to new schools and new friends in a different part of the country were relatively easy for me when I was a first grader and three years later as a fourth grader.

This move was different. My father asked me what I thought about moving to Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington D.C. He was giving me the chance to veto the deal. I was proud of my father. I was proud the way he easily related to my friends, of his ability, in his 50s, to be an emergency fill in for pickup basketball games in our driveway, of his IBM Club championships in golf, of the way he dressed in Brooks Brothers suits, and I was especially proud of his IBM career which held a certain status in Vestal and upstate New York.  I couldn’t begin to imagine vetoing a job promotion for my father because it would be inconvenient for me. And it wasn’t completely selfless that I didn’t want to impede my father’s career. I thought it would be cool to move south to a better climate. Also, I was into history and politics, and it wouldn’t have been a big stretch to say I was politically active so living in the D.C. suburbs was alluring.

In November 1971, more than a year before my father accepted the job in Manassas, I had suffered the biggest disappointment and setback of my 16-year-old life. I was cut during tryouts for the junior varsity basketball team. It was a devastating blow. Devastating to my ego, my self-esteem, and not least of all, my social life. It seemed that everything important in my life was wiped out. I felt bankrupt. After all,

what 16-year-old can take inventory of his life and see that this setback wasn’t in some way fatal.    I had played organized competitive basketball since the fifth grade. I played on one of the two Vestal High School Freshmen teams in the eighth and ninth grades. Making the freshman team as an eighth grader was a big deal. Wearing a coat and tie to junior high school on the days of away games let everyone know I was on the freshman basketball team. That year I rode the end of the bench. In my second year I was the first shooting guard/forward to come off the bench. Even as the first sub, I only played about one quarter a game, but I made the most of that playing time averaging seven points a game.  I scored 11 points in the second half of a game against Owego. I shot 79% from the foul line for the season. With my experience on the freshmen team, I was a good prospect to make the J.V. team. I wasn’t a lock, but I did expect to make it.

In reflection then and now, three things happened during tryouts that standout.

I was in shape when tryouts started. I had been running the wind sprint drills for two weeks before tryouts started that we ran in freshman basketball, and I knew we would run during JV tryouts. When we ran these drills during tryouts, I routinely finished in the top five of the 30 or so participants.

During one of the full court scrimmages, my good friend Will Cheng hit me with a pass on a fast break that I converted by hitting a 15-foot jump shot from the left wing. The JV Head Coach called out Will for making a good pass. He said nothing about me hitting the shot.

This one haunts me. During another full court scrimmage, after the opposing team scored, the Varsity head coach called out for me to go get the inbound pass. Our opponents were in a full court press, and I couldn’t shake free of my defender to receive the pass. This seemed like an unfair test. The player guarding me and everybody in the gym knew that the pass was supposed to go to me, and I didn’t have a teammate setting a pick for me. Not only that but I wasn’t a point guard, I wasn’t quick enough. I was shooting guard and a proven one at that on the freshman team. I think my failure here probably sealed my fate.

*******

A week or so before tryouts started, I was walking down the hallway between classes when I was approached by Sue Lasky and Cindy Cable. I had known them since elementary school, and I considered them the two most attractive girls in Vestal High School. I had flirtatious relationships with both in the sixth grade. The one with Sue during the last couple of weeks of school that year was especially memorable. We sat next to each other in class, and she had privately shared information with me on Robert Kennedy’s condition the morning after he had been shot, that she was getting on her transistor radio. I had liked her all that year and after that morning I was totally smitten. She asked me if she could wear the hippie love beads that I brought to class on one of the last days of school. This really made me happy. It’s the first time I can remember wanting to grab a girl and kiss her. I guess it was one of those friendships that had suddenly caught fire. But school was over a couple days later and the relationship never went anywhere. Sue kept the love beads.

Sue and Cindy were going to be JV Basketball cheerleaders. Sue asked me if Phil Matthews was going to be on the JV team. I told her yes probably (Phil had been the leading scorer on our freshman team we were on).  But what about me I thought to myself. I was a little hurt that Sue had asked me about Phil and not me. Later, I remembered it as an ironic foreshadowing that I wasn’t going to make the team.

Vestal High School was a jock school. Football was king but basketball wasn’t far behind. In terms of your high school status if you were a guy, you were either a jock or you weren’t. I didn’t play football, baseball, or soccer. I played basketball and I was cut. I was no longer a jock. Therefore, I had no status. In my mind I was one of the nobodies in a school of 2,200 students. Even members of the band, orchestra, and the mathletes had more status than I did.

Two out of my three best friends, Will Cheng and Ed Welch made the team. Bob Burwasser did not but for him the tryout was an afterthought. He was on the golf team and a lock to make the JV Baseball team. Phil Matthews, Bob Luciano, and Jim Arndt, who had been good friends since elementary school also made the team.  A few days after the first JV basketball game of the season, Will told a few of us sitting around a study hall table about the pregame speech the coach gave the team. The theme of the speech was, welcome to the exclusive club of Vestal High School Basketball, a club with a rich history, a history that included my older brother David.  I hurt so badly, and I didn’t know how I was going to get through it.

A group of guys organized an intramural basketball team and named it the Longhorns. I had nothing to do with the naming. It shows the power of the brand that in December 1971, in Vestal, New York a group of 10^th grade guys named their intramural team the Longhorns. Anyway, they invited me to join the team and it was obvious from the outset that I was the best player.  We won our first two games and I dominated. I hit outside shots, I drove hard to the basket and scored, I dominated the boards. But even though we won our first two games, my teammates voted to kick me off the team for being a ball hog and a jerk. “Guilty” on both counts. I was out to prove to the world that I should have made the J.V. Basketball team.

Getting kicked off an intramural team didn’t bother me. I had reasserted myself in small measure as a basketball player, at least in my own mind and I enjoyed the I infamy I had achieved for being kicked off the team even though I was its best player.

At the close of the school year, I took the New York State Regents exams in geometry and biology.  I scored just outside the top 10 percent of all New York state students taking the exams. The accomplishment boosted my self-esteem and made my parents proud.

The morning of the biology exam, I woke up with a stomach bug and after I threw up, I didn’t feel like eating breakfast. My mother implored me to try and eat something before I left for the exam, which was at noon, but I knew I would throw up if I did, so I headed off to take the test on an empty nauseated stomach. I had done well on practice exams so I was confident I would do well despite my nausea, and I guess my concentration helped block it out during the exam. But in the last five minutes or so and as I handed in my test, I knew that I was going to throw up momentarily. I ran out of the building and into a school courtyard and threw up what little was still in my stomach. Then I had dry heaves for a couple of minutes. Sharon Austin a biology classmate had noticed me running into the courtyard and witnessed my retching. She was concerned about me and suspected that I had been drinking the night before. I was stunned to have to deny it, but she believed me. She and I were friends, and I knew she was interested in being more than friends. Typically, I did nothing about it.

That summer was sublime. It was my first equipped with a driver’s license and I had a couple of summertime flings. Not with girls who would have been my first choice (you can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes you’ll find you get what you need.)  Bob Burwasser and I canvassed for the George McGovern presidential campaign together. We were shy and timid about it at first but soldiered on and it turned into an interesting and sometimes humorous adventure.

In the fall, my junior year, I had a complete falling out with Bob Burwasser and Will Cheng. The three of us had formed a tight inner circle since the beginning of high school but by late fall Bob and Will began shunning me.  It was hard to comprehend that it was really happening, and I was slow to realize what was going on. They pushed me out of the circle. I’m not sure why. I know Bob was responsible, so I tried, to no avail, to make a “Separate Peace “with Will. My mother recognized what was going on before I before I did and got mad at me for behaving like a lap dog when she heard me making a phone call to Will one afternoon after school.

In the early stages of the fallout the three of us were still in a carpool taking turns driving to school a couple of days a week.  One afternoon at school the day before Bob was driving, he berated me in front of several people about having to backtrack to pick me up in the morning. He lived about a mile closer to the school than I did. At that point I had had enough of Bob and Will’s abuse, and I responded to his obnoxious rant by saying, “Fine, don’t pick me up!”  It was the first time I had responded to his abuse, and it was gratifying. He shot back, “Okay I won’t!”

I took Bob at his word and the next morning I got on the school bus. As the bus drove down my street, I saw Bob’s car heading towards my house.  I was surprised. I didn’t doubt him when he said he wouldn’t pick me up. I easily imagined Bob’s anger when he showed up at my house to learn I had taken the bus. It was satisfying but I knew at that moment that my friendship with Burwasser was over. I didn’t speak to Cheng or Burwasser and they didn’t speak to me for at least the next three months. It was strange to say the least, passing them in the hallways and seeing them at football games or parties and having nothing to do with them. The break was complete.

The Number 1 Top 40 Song from March 17, 1973