“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” – UNCF [United Negro College Fund] slogan
“So is a heart.” – Hal
A Halloween Costume
Cleaning out my childhood home in 2000, I found the robot costume, just cardboard and aluminum foil, I’d worn for Halloween 1960. I’d hidden it away.
For some reason, it made me want to cry. I didn’t let myself stop to think about why.
Wasn’t supposed to. Things to do.
The story of so much of my life.
It was like a message in a bottle.
What did it mean?
It took me another twenty years to start to understand.
Perchance that costume was the only way I knew to express how I felt. “Just a robot.”
A Happy Kid
That wasn’t how I’d felt five months earlier. Leaving first grade, I had eleven friends I can name. I can still walk to their homes. Summer was going to be fun visiting and playing. Fairmount Park was two blocks away. It even had a pop machine – for just a nickel. What more could a kid want?
I never saw those friends again.
Hobson’s Choice
After first grade, Mom and Dad had to get me out of Wichita’s public schools. Based on testing, School Superintendent Shepoiser had decreed that I’d have to skip five grades. My parents resisted all they could. After a school board discussion, his decision was final.
I was going to be a nine-year-old sophomore at East High. A walking freak show.
“You’re not doing that to our son.”
My parents looked everywhere without finding any good options. Home schooling “wasn’t done” back then, and the best schools in Kansas City weren’t any better than Wichita’s. The only good private schools that would consider taking a brilliant kid with not much money were at least a thousand miles away. “We’d love to have him, but afraid he’d have trouble fitting in so far from home.”
The only local alternatives were the parochial schools. Mom chose Wichita Lutheran East. No Catholic school for Lois George’s child, back before Vatican II.
And so my troubles began.
Local History
Meanwhile, my neighborhood was “blockbusted.” My friends’ parents left. “For our kids,” they said.
Much nicer for their self-image than admitting, “We don’t want to live near any Negroes.”
We stayed. One night, Dad told Mom, “If that’s why your friends are moving, I don’t want to be neighbors with people like that.” I didn’t know what that meant, but for Dad to raise his voice, this had to be important.
Now I understand. Mom was right about real estate values. As they collapsed, her friends moved away. Dad was right about the values that matter. For him, they outweighed money or “society.”
Right on, Dad!
Eventually, I learned that Fairmount, my neighborhood school, was, years after Brown vs. Board of Education, the only integrated elementary school in Wichita.
In 1957, the Superintendent said, “[Don’t worry.] This is only an experiment. The neighborhood parents have agreed to it.”
Dad kept some newspaper clippings in our garage.
Second Grade
The school year began. Riding somewhere new, I remember being puzzled. What’s going on?
My new classroom was austere, even more crowded than the “temporary” buildings at Fairmount. Maybe thirty-five kids.
It was a lousy school.
We graded each other’s spelling papers. One day, when I counted forty errors in the paper I was grading, not including the misspelled name, I said something. Was I thanked for paying attention and being careful? No. The paper was taken away from me, abruptly: “Don’t be so picky, Hal.”
What?
Chapel and its rituals were unfamiliar. I learned to keep my hands down and my mouth shut.
That’s everything I learned at school that year.
At recess, the only person I remember playing with is Marla Luedtke. We must have been frequent playmates; I remember our being taunted with choruses of “Hal and Marla, sitting in a tree…”
I had a friend. That’s my only happy memory.
The principal knew I was miserable and called Mom in for a conference with me. Listening to a conversation about how unhappy I was didn’t help. Nothing changed.
That’s everything I remember from school that year. It was completely unlike kindergarten and first grade, where I have numerous specific memories. I get it; I’ve blanked it out. It hurt too much. The gap in my memory is the telltale clue.
That was the year I stopped smiling. It shows in all my pictures, from second grade on. Last year, Sis told me, “Everyone noticed. Before that, you were such a happy little boy.”
Why didn’t someone do something? Mom and Sis were busy with their own lives, and Grandma had started fading. Dad had the cemetery and all its families to support.
Anyway, what could they do? What do you do for a kid who’s not like anyone people in town have ever met? No one knew.
They cared. They did their best. What more can any of us do?
“Not Worth a Nickel”
One Saturday towards the end of the year, I called Marla, just to talk. She was angry. “Your call cost me five cents. Don’t call again.”
Marla didn’t need to tell me twice. Stunned, I got it.
I wasn’t worth a nickel, even to her, my best friend, my only friend, the only person I remember from second grade.
That’s that, then. Judgment rendered. I’m not worth a nickel.
I can’t say I’ll ever lose that feeling. Anything that feels like rejection can bring it back.
“Bud, You’re Different”
The afternoon I found all those spelling errors, I went to Dad’s cemetery after school and mentioned what had happened. I stood by the built-in safe [a 1900 model that still works] while he enlightened me.
“Bud, you’re different. You can see and do things hardly anyone else can see or do. It’s an extraordinary gift. I started noticing when you were two; you’ve been tested several times. Get an education and find Good things to use it for. Don’t ever think it makes you better; you’re just different. Your gift is a responsibility. When you figure something out, try to figure out how to help other people see it, if they need to.
“You’re obviously different. It’s hard for people to understand. You may never be popular. Just do the right thing. Try to deserve respect.
“There are lots of things other kids do that you can’t: baseball and riding a bike, for example. There always will be. That’s fine; we’re here to help each other, not to be the same.”
How many parents would notice? How many would do something about it? I’ve known too many gifted kids whose parents did nothing for them, or, worse, held their kids down.
Our conversation may have been the most valuable fifteen minutes of my life.
So What?
That year changed me, but I didn’t know how to express it.
Some songs have always touched me, speaking to and for my heart.
Janis Ian sang that she “learned the truth at seventeen.”
I “learned the truth” at seven.
I felt valued for my mind. Only that.
The Alan Parsons song “Soirée Fantastique” begins:
“Now a trick that is done with mirrors
“To exist and not to be alive
“I’m the man who has disappeared in his own eyes…”
That feels like what people wanted from me. Demanded, actually. “Go away, don’t bother us. No one cares how you feel. We’ll call you if we want you to figure something out.”
I obliged them. Accepted invisibility. Everywhere, even at home. This is how it is. How I’m supposed to be. I hid my heart, my intuition, my feelings, from almost everywhere.\. Worst of all, from myself. Feelings only get me in trouble. Anyway, they’re not rational. And why should I trust my intuition?
I lived, far too much, as a walking, talking, calculating machine.
Almost robotic, like I had pretended to be, back when I was barely seven.
Robots can be very useful. They’re quiet. They disappear on command.
But they’re not alive.
I was alive, but numbed.
It was sixty years before I began recognizing this and how it all began.
I don‘t have to be a robot.