Grad School Days (2)

((I turned 65 yesterday, which is the main reason I've been thinking so much about the old days of school and otherwise. So please forgive the ego stuff--I'll be better soon, honest!))

The first thing a newly graduated male, 18 or older, had to think about in 1964 was military service. Vietnam was starting to heat up, bodies were being called up... There really was a draft back then, and within a couple of years, as some may remember, it became a huge issue--vocal resistance, draftcard burnings, young men fleeing to Canada or using their parents' clout to get exempted somehow (hmmm, sounds like a President or two I've heard about).

I didn't have much to worry about, actually. I had gotten married as a Senior, and my then-wife was pregnant, so I had that solid bit of protection. And if I moved straight on into grad school, that too would serve as a shield of sorts. I had already signed up to continue on at the UW and had proved myself sufficiently as a serious Senior that I received another scholarship and a part-time Teaching Assistant job. (I worked at Safeway stores too. Yeah, those were the days: a 32-hours-a-week job as grocery clerk, a teaching schedule to fulfill, graduate English classes to wrestle into submission, creative writing that drove me to pen and paper, and a fledgling marriage and pregnant wife to worry about.)

What I really hadn't settled for sure, and this drifted in and out of our lives for a few years, was what career I wanted. Working on a Master's Degree, I was in line to become a college professor and publishing poet, but I quickly learned that academia was--sadly? luckily?--not for me. I disliked the over-zealous, competitive grad students, I found many professors arrogant and mean-spirited and boring, I still got A's but foolishly resented the drudgery of lengthy footnoted papers and such. But, really, it was down to me. Back at Northwestern, I had joined and then quickly dropped out of ROTC; and the same stubborn resistance to order-taking I'd felt then seemed to influence my attitude toward academia. I could do the work and often beat out other grads for honors, but I didn't want the results, or the pressure, or... I don't know.

So I was casting about for what to do next. Safeway store clerk didn't seem the answer. A side note for a moment. One of the customers where I worked as stocker and cashier was an ex-wife of country singer Tex Ritter; she would come in from time to time with their preteen daughter. She looked at me one evening and said, deadpan, "There is no safe way," then walked out. (I've split the store name in her sentence, because I believe that's how she meant the layered pun, with which I belatedly agreed.)

Here's where one's snap, or even considered, decisions can affect a lifetime... I'd have a Master's in Lit by summer 1966, trained to do only one sort of thing, teach Lit or write. So I applied for various teaching jobs, and was offered positions at regional community colleges, even at Pacific Lutheran University (where I would be a sort of guest poet teaching creative writing), but turned them all down--in the case of PLU because I didn't want any religious stuff hanging over my head. (Would I have found things that onerous, really? I was desperate for excuses.)

I applied to New York University's famous film school (one of very few existing back in those distant days) and was offered a slot but no scholarship money. Then-wife and I had already agreed that she would be an at-home Mom, so I would have had to work full-time in NYC as well as go to school. (I was too unsure of costs and my stamina and resolve--basically chicken. Another opportunity wasted.)

I applied to a university in the Sussex area of England where I would supposedly continue on towards a Doctorate in English Lit, imagining that the slightly exotic locale might inspire me onwards--was welcomed too, but passed on the opportunity again, still convinced that the money problems couldn't be overcome. (No Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen environments on our horizon.)

Clearly, I just wasn't brave enough to tackle the challenges each opportunity offered.

Finally, lazily, desultorily, I settled for becoming a writer-editor for the University Relations Office at the UW, initially preparing press releases and alumni news for the campus Alumnus Magazine. And I did all right at the small stuff, and soon was writing full-length magazine pieces, and then I moved on to Seattle Magazine, where... but I've already covered that experience in an earlier posting. (See chapter titled A Whale of a Tale, from May 27 last year.)

The point is this: I finally, for better or worse, was off on a full-time writing career--which would carry me into film work, and then advertising and production, in and out of poetry and plays, and eventually around the world and back again, to become a semi-retired bookseller.

But I coulda been a contender. I had my chance at academia, and campus literary lion, and New York magazine stardom, and successful Hollywood screenwriter on strike, and who-knows-what-all might have been... but passed on them all.

Rightly or wrongly, here I sit, blogging. School days do part-shape one's life.

School Days (1)

"Good old golden rule days..."--what does that mean anyway? Nuns rapping your knuckles with a ruler? Schoolyard bullies stealing your lunch money? Some sort of Athenian democracy of equals working usefully together? Hard to see how anyone's school experience fits some fine Golden Rule.

And I write as one who pretty much had it easy. We changed schools often (Air Force family), but I knew how to keep quiet among my peers and keep my head down, focussed on homework or tests. I had a quick intelligence, evidently, and a good memory, so doing the work was never a problem. I always made straight A's, only had a couple of fights, played sports with minor success by hustling harder than my skills allowed for, survived a couple of unrequited crushes, etc.

But my lasting school memories are limited, really. I remember my Third/Fourth grade teacher encouraged me to start creative writing. (My first stories were about a Chinese boy so inept with chopsticks he had to invent the fork, and a dumb science fiction parody of television's Dragnet I called "Pla-net"!) And I remember walking home one day through fields where I found a fire starting to spread and, rather than running off to get help, I just brashly beat it out with my quickly-ruined, Davy Crockett fringed leather jacket. That small moment of feeling heroic may have been the highlight of my gradeschool days.

But we kept moving on, so I got to experience the preteen dating mores and general racial attitudes of Montgomery, Alabama, 1955-56, making for a difficult Seventh grade year (see the blog chapter called Two Kings). And then we shipped out to Izmir, Turkey--where my grades were so solid and the school so small that the teachers decided to skip me from Eighth into Ninth instead. I went from being somewhat older for Eighth to being younger than most of the other students. But aside from another fight or two, things and I adapted.

The most interesting events were hints of hard drugs circa 1957--at least one senior, an aspiring Jazz drummer, was toying with marijuana and maybe even heroin--and having to play Turkish highschool teams in soccer and basketball. A local "highschool" guy might mean a 35-year-old, a huge and definitely hardened worker or mechanic, even ex-Army maybe. Us American kids routinely got our shins and asses kicked!

When we moved to Tacoma for my Junior and Senior years, I managed to sidle back into the structure; played intermural sports, held minor student government and/or dance committee jobs, and kept getting good grades. In fact, by the end of school, because Clover Park HS offered some college-level courses worth extra credit, I managed to graduate with a 4.02 grade point. But for some reason, I have blanked out on graduation itself; I think I was number one in the graduating class of 1200 seniors, but I don't remember delivering any valedictorian speech, nor indeed the big event itself...

I'd played the plan-for-college game, so I was accepted to a few spots across the country (even tried for the recently-opened Air Force Academy; didn't make it), but picked Northwestern, in Evanston right by Chicago, because my parents were off to another duty tour elsewhere, and I had relatives nearby in Illinois, in case of any problems. Between a healthy scholarship, family support, student loans, and part-time jobs ranging from kitchen clean-up at a popular campus hangout to an excellent assistant slot with Northwestern's offical events impresario (I got to read/press-clip the New York Times every day and be a "gopher" at all the campus drama and musical events), I managed to last there for the first two, very expensive years (1960-1962).

Then I transferred west to the considerably cheaper University of Washington. At Northwestern I had started with the idea of majoring in Mathematics and Computers (Fortran machine-language and punchcards were the order of business in those days), but quickly found the programming boring and the math daunting. So then I was a general Liberal Arts guy, sort of toying with Languages and Linguistics, until I reached the UW and had to get serious. First it was Political Science with a Latin American focus (I was imagining a career in the diplomatic service), but the gathering storm against America's interference around the world--Guatemala, Chile, the beginnings of Vietnam--coupled with my own lefty-populist ideals, convinced me I couldn't blithely support my government as an embassy worker somewhere.

Also, one rotten PoliSci professor gave me the only C I got in six years of college (B's a couple of times), because I didn't do the extra-credit scrapbook we had been told would NOT count against us, but would instead only boost our grades; well, I had B's at worst on tests, including the final, but wound up with that damned C grade. I was too foolishly proud to do more than squawk to the T.A., but it cost me in the long run, because my final college grade point was one tiny percentage away from Summa cum Laude, and a B would have put me in. (On the other hand, aside from pride, I really never did put much stock in grades or I.Q. numbers; so I got A's, was 139 or something, did great on College Boards--did any of it make me a better man or someone better able to cope with the changes/problems in life? I don't think so.)

So I switched to a major in Spanish for a couple of quarters, for no good reason except the courses I had taken, until I realized I really didn't want to teach Spanish somewhere--which was the only job I could imagine in my naive, anti-entrepreneurial way... "Go into business? Never." Suddenly I was facing the Senior year with no plan or major. The only thing I could think to do was fall back on what I had always enjoyed doing, reading and writing. I shifted straight into English Literature, took solid English courses for the next four quarters, and graduated with a B.A. in Lit in August of 1964.

"Now what?" I thought.

((The answer comes next time.))