When I was in the second grade, I said, “I want to be a geologist.”

The other kids in the class, who wanted to be firemen, and policemen and doctors, and brick layers looked at me. Mrs. Callahan looked at me, one eyebrow raised questioningly. “A geologist?”

“Yes. Either that, or a musician.”

From that day on, I knew I was different. I didn’t want to play kickball in the playground; I wanted to look for druzy quartz samples in the freshly cut hillside. So I did. They didn’t understand. My teachers called me “antisocial” or “socially retarded” because I didn’t want to screw around with games when there was real information to be learned, with real rules, not some made-up game rules, in the world around me.

Homework in the first and second grade consisted mostly of “busy work.” “Color the ball red” and that sort of crap. I did it quickly, and haphazardly. I was NOT interested in spending time to keep the red crayon inside the lines, and I knew what the color Red was (and how to read the word) so decided that if I scribbled a big bunch of red across the ball, it would be done, and I could move on to more interesting things. My work, though always technically correct, was never put on the bulletin board in either the First, or the Second grade.

Reading and spelling were even worse, if such a thing be possible. We had a series of readers, in which we were expressly FORBIDDEN to “read ahead.” So every day, I had to sit with the “Robins” while some girl – usually Norma Jean Koening, or Lynn Isaac - struggled through, “Oh, oh, look. See what the car has. It has a flat tire. Look. Look. Look. Damn. Damn. Damn.” (How many times did that dead horse named “Look” need to be flogged, anyway?) I was bored silly.

I DID have one high point in the First, or maybe it was Second – they run together, because I had the same teacher for both – grade. (Mom always said she was very good, but I personally wondered, yet never said so – I had not yet learned that I knew more than my teachers about some subjects that they were supposed to be able to teach. That day was not far off, though.) It seems our class had earned more money for the PTA – or gotten more from them, or something – I really neither remember nor care – than any of the other classes. Anyway, we wrote a “class letter” to the PTA. And someone – the person who could read it fluently, and deliver it most easily – had to attend the PTA meeting and deliver the speech. So I got to do that. Actually it was much easier than playing piano recitals, which I had been doing since age five. Everyone oh’d and ah’d over what I thought was mostly a piece of cake. It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned that most people’s biggest fear is public speaking.

In the Third grade, my teacher got angry with me, when I was conducting an experiment with rainwater flow in the gutter, instead of playing in the playground. She grabbed me by the arm, and jerked me up from my squatting position, where I had been carefully aligning sticks of different lengths, to see which was fastest; the long or the short ones. All she said was, “You should know better than to be playing in the mud.” There was no point in telling her. When she jerked me away, all the sticks, so carefully selected to match diameters and staightness, and painstakingly broken so there were two of each length had long since gone down the storm drain. I was disgusted and she didn’t understand why.

In the Fourth grade, we studied Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Geology. That year was an absolute disaster. Mrs. Whiteside may have known how to teach mathematics, or reading (by this time, I was reading on a seventh grade level, and was excused from reading classes to go to the library – one of the few things they did right) but she didn’t know anywhere near as much as I did about Roman, Greek, or Egyptian life and mythology, and she knew even less about geology. After I caught her in about the third mistake – and, of course, being a kid, corrected her in class and was punished for it – I decided teachers were idiots, and were merely trying to force me into a mold of conformity.

To make things even more miserable, that was the year they taught long division. Now you have to understand – addition and multiplication are commutative processes; that is, two times four is the same as four times two, and six times seven is the same as seven times six. Well, yours truly saw that relationship early on, so did not bother to learn what seven times six is. He knew in his head, he could reverse them and say "six sevens are forty two." He had done that with all the addition and multiplication tables. (In fact, to this day, I still do not know what seven times six is, but I know what six times seven is.) That is all well and good but as they say about many things, going up is much easier than coming down. Subtraction, I could finesse, by secretly curling the fingers of my left hand to count on them. But that does not work with division. So I was stuck. But I came up with an ingenious way around my problem. I invented a form of interpolation. Faced, for example, with the problem of fifty four divided by six, I know that six times ten is sixty. I also know that six eights are forty eight, so the answer, since the starting number was between forty eight and sixty, must be nine. A little quick mental check confirmed it; sure enough, six nines are fifty four. And that got me through math, though not with good grades, until I hit Algebra.

Fourth grade, incidentally was also the year that we all got our first hint of my future profession as a civil engineer; I built a model of a Roman arched aqueduct, using sugar cubes. I had read somewhere that the Romans, although they had a form of cement, built most of their works by cutting the stones to fit together and stay in place without mortar. So I assayed to do the same. Ultimately, it didn't work, and I had to resort to using a mix of confectioner's sugar and water as glue, hidden within the structure, so the joints looked like it was all built dry. I now know my problem was one of scale; sugar blocks, cut to the right size to look right at the scale of the arch I was building, haven't sufficient weight to counteract surface irregularities.Therefore, there cannot be sufficient friction and inertia between the pieces to overcome the force of gravity. I suspect also in hindsight, my span was too wide for the height of my arch. (The gothic arch is much more an efficient gravity structure than the Roman one.) I didn't have a drawing to work from, so traced the form of an arch from the little photograph in an encyclopedia. I didn't know anything about keystones, but as I constructed the arch, it became obvious to me that the stone in the center had to do three things: It had to be in the center; it had to be shaped so that it fit snugly against either side of the arch; and, it had to have, or had to have placed above it, enough weight so that the pieces against it would not force it upward out of position.

From fourth grade on, I questioned everything. It was at about this time, I had a huge argument with my friend Roger Storm, about the existence of God. I was pretty sure there was no such thing, but after arguing with him all the way home on the school bus one day, I decided it takes just as much faith to deny God, as it does to believe. Neither is scientifically provable. Ever since then, I have taken the approach that worrying about God’s existence is a waste of time, and a pointless exercise, so I don’t do it.

Well – as school moved on from elementary through high school, so did I – mostly by the skin on my teeth, which is to say, just barely. Oh, there were high points – geometry was one – the entire system made sense to me. I liked geometry. It started with a simple premise that a straight line never intersects itself, and went from there. It was pure logic, and there was a clear reason for everything. There was none of this business of taking it on blind faith that two numbers, when added together will always be the same answer, forever. And there was no silliness about imaginary numbers. Square root of minus 1 is imaginary. I reasoned if that is so, then minus one itself is imaginary, therefore all negative numbers must be imaginary. This made perfect sense to me, because one cannot have, nor can one count, fewer than no things. So when they told me the negative number series is real, but that the square roots of the negative numbers are imaginary, I jumped ship. I said to myself, “That is BS. You are trying to rationalize your thinking about minus numbers, but your original premise that they are real is flawed. I will continue to use Algebra as it suits my purpose, but don’t ask me to use it with negative numbers, except in a purely arithmetic way.”

So, needless to say, grade school and high school were pretty horrible. The problem is public schools are for the public. They work just fine for the sheep with a strong herd instinct, and for the average or slightly below average intelligence student. But they have no way of coping with the very smart, or the very willful child. And a child who is both smart and willful gives them real problems.

The Navy has no such problems. For everything that is done, there are three ways of doing it; the right way, the wrong way, and the Navy way. If you do things the right way, they make you do physical exercises. If you do things the wrong way, they make you do physical exercises. If you do things the Navy way they might not make you do physical exercises, but sometimes they make you do physical exercises, just because they like to make you do physical exercises. And because they CAN. Of course, there is always an alternative choice to doing anything, including exercises. If you chose not to do anything they tell you to, you go to jail, where if you do not do what you are told to, they beat you up or shoot you. It is your choice. So eventually, the willful child learned not to question, and to do things the Navy way and, as they like to say in the Navy, “smartly”. That is Navy talk for “damned fast”.

Eventually, I got used to the routine, and figured out where I could take short cuts, and maybe do a little something my way, and I learned how to not let that show. There is an adage in business and in government that, “The nail that sticks up, gets pounded down.” That is also true in the Navy. The big difference is, the Navy is more efficient at finding and pounding the nails than civilians are. That means of course that you can’t stick up as far, before you get pounded. And when you are pounded, they pound harder than in civilian life; they want to make sure that both the nail that was pounded, and all the other nails around it stay down. In general, the nails pretty much stay down, and I learned how to do that well enough, though I found it a little confining.

There were one or two occasions where I stood up though. In April of every year, there is a large formal officer’s dinner, to celebrate the official birthday of the Marine Corps (which is actually a sub branch of the Navy, though they hate having it pointed out to them – any sailor with a lick of sense does not talk about that to any Marine, unless the Marine in question is outnumbered by at least eight to one) So, as the resident piccolo player, I was assigned to play “Roast Beef of Old England”, the traditional mess call of the old Navy. I got a wild hair and decided to play it on fife, as it was originally done. So Dick Klotz, the drummer, and I appeared at the Naval Operating Base Officer’s Mess at the proper time, and proceeded to do our job. The next day, Dick happened to mention it to the Chief that I had played it on fife. Lord, you would have thought I had committed a mortal sin. So I was called to the band office, and Chief Richardson was thoroughly reaming me a new asshole, when the phone rang. It was the admiral’s office. They wanted to talk to the fife player who played last night. I was like Corporal O’Reilly on M.A.S.H.. I was standing at attention while on the phone with Admiral Moorer, and saying “Yes Sir, Your Admiralness,” and such silliness, when he said, “First off, my name is Tom, not your admiralness. You will address me as Sir. Second, shut up and listen, (here he used my last name). In all the years I have been in the Navy, I have never heard Roast Beef Of Old England played on fife. That is the way it should be done. Thank you, Sailor. I will see to it that a note is placed in your service record. Oh, and tell your dad I said Hi. I’ll give him a call about the nukes next week sometime.” (My dad was in the nuclear instrumentation division of Westinghouse at that time.) He had been on speaker phone, so that kind of took the wind out of Chief Richardson’s sails. But, in general, I kept a low profile, and did my job. In due course, I was released from active duty.

Upon my return to civilian life, I enrolled in college. Having learned how to follow directions, and how to keep a low profile, I easily obtained grades to get me on the Dean’s list, and keep me there for all four semesters of Catonsville Community College. I transferred to Western Maryland College, and with exactly the same application, and exactly the same attitude as I had at Catonsville, flunked out flat in two semesters. It seems they had a different standard of how to play the game; not only did you have to stay pounded down; either you had to be a very studious person (and good at memorization) or you had to be a member of one of the fraternities on campus. I remember in particular, a class in Economics in which every student except me was a member of the same fraternity. They all got an A on the final examination. I got a D.

The following summer, armed with the knowledge that small private colleges are really very exclusive clubs, I took several courses at Towson State College. I earned an A in each of them, and applied for admission as a full time student. So far as they were concerned, I was an A student, and they were pleased to have me pour my money into their coffers. Always remember, regardless of how charitable their rhetoric, all institutes of higher education in the United States’ have, as their primary interest, making money. That they do it by educating people is simply an accident of history. That is not to say, or even to imply, the faculty of those institutions have money as their primary outcome; but rest assured it is management’s (in Ed-speak, “administration’s”) goal. If you doubt that, ask any professor what is required by the administration of his or her college to gain “tenure”. But I digress …

In due course, in June of 1975, I was graduated from Towson State College with a bachelor’s degree in Geography. My final overall quality point average, including all the failing grades from Western Maryland College, was 3.20; just shy of being sufficient to place me on the Dean’s list.

Post Script: In September of 1975, Towson State College changed its name to Towson University, because universities attract higher funding and more students than colleges. About twenty years later, Western Maryland College changed their name to McDaniel College, because it was easier to sell an institution named after a person than one named after a railroad, particularly one that is long since defunct. I see both moves as additional proof that higher education in this country is not interested in some lofty goal of “improving mankind”; it’s just business. And that is unfortunate.

April, 2013