Growing Up Took 39 Years
04/29/2006
Thursday, as we flew back from Louisville to Baltimore, I closed my eyes and thought about what a lucky guy I am. At this point in my life I am happier than I have ever been, and I also realize how incredibly fortunate I have been. The gods have surely smiled upon this man in so many ways; I am truly blessed. Allow me to look back for just a minute or two?
As written earlier, I grew up in Baltimore during the ‘50s and ‘60s and life seemed much simpler then – at least looking back from this point in the “now.” I’ll set the stage by giving you a short biographical sketch and I think you will see where this is going. The guy sitting at this laptop struggling to find the keys with the correct letters on them barely made it through high school. It wasn’t because of the lack of learning skills, but moreover the lack of drive. I epitomized the term “under achiever,” in fact, I may have been the poster child for it. I was not into erudition in any form and I did not enjoy high school.
I attended high school at The Baltimore City College from February 1959 to February 1962, in the next to last February graduating class. Many of you may wonder about this, but it is a fact that prior to 1963 Baltimore City Public Schools had February graduating classes. Honest!
“City,” as it was affectionately known by those who attended classes there, is located at 33rd Street and the Alameda, just a couple of blocks from where Baltimore’s old Memorial Stadium was located. Memorial Stadium was the home field of the real NFL Colts. That team departed this earth in the 1970s when the devil moved them somewhere outside of Maryland into some backwater town. That slight deviation aside, grades at City were given numerically rather than by standards of A, B, C or D. In those days a passing grade was “60.” This brilliant dude, aka the “Under Achiever,” (and I haven’t verified this but believe it is very close to the actual) had an average throughout high school of somewhere in the neighborhood of “62.” I didn’t qualify for the college prep course, and I didn’t care about it. My senior year of high school, especially the last semester, consisted of four classes – English, chemistry, trigonometry and physical education. I flunked trig, but had passed the algebra course in the first semester of my senior year and the two grades averaged over 60 allowing me to graduate.
In our house all one needed to do was to maintain behavior consistent with the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments. Education was important, but being a good Christian was eminently more important. Shoot, that was a piece a cake, and it required very little effort on my part. Hell, any under achiever can be a good Christian.
Very fortunately for me, my parents passed along to their children a high level of innate intelligence. That is the only way I can explain how this guy managed to get where he is today. After high school I managed to obtain twenty-two college credits. Eleven of those college credits came to me by using the last year of my G.I. Bill eligibility and the money it provided me, and only because I needed the funds (my real estate career could be termed as less than stellar). My first college experience took place at the University of Baltimore in the fall of 1962. I was working as a full-time teller at the Equitable Trust Company in Baltimore. I enrolled at U of B in the pre-law program because it sounded upscale and cool. I took four courses – English, Speech, Comparative Religion, and a history course of some kind, I think? Anyway, within a month I was down to just the speech class and finished it with a grade of “C,” and then opted out of the scene. Six months later I did a really dumb thing, I enlisted in the Air Force.
Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas – it took me about an hour, having arrived there at about 4am, to realize the significance of the grievous error in judgment I had made concerning the decision to serve my country. I cannot tell you how many times during the early morning hours of September 17, 1963 I asked myself, “What the hell were you thinking?” If you get the idea I was an under achiever in high school, you should really get a kick out of my service career.
After basic training and a “technical school” at Lackland Air force Base, I was assigned to duty in Upstate New York at Griffiss AFB, just outside of the city of Rome. I got to the base on January 19, 1964. There was about three feet of snow on the ground, and it was piled so high cars had little red Styrofoam balls stuck on the tips of their antennas so you could see them coming up the road over the snow banks at intersections. My disgust for the weather only exacerbated my disdain for the military. I was dwelling in the land of “Woe-is-Me.” It was so cold that I used to keep bologna, bread and mayonnaise in the snow just outside the window near my barrack’s bunk, without any worry of it spoiling. Many mornings it was well below zero. Not long after arriving at Griffiss I found a four-year calendar that I could keep folded up in my wallet. I checked off the days as they passed – one by one, and did it for the remainder of the four years.
I had a varied career with the Air Force. I began as an Air Policeman (their idea, not mine). My police work consisted of directing traffic or standing guard in a weapons area. I loathed the Air Force. With some manipulation on my part, the Air Force accepted my lack of interest in performing police duties and assigned me to work as a recreation specialist at the Silver Wings Service Club. This duty was more to my kind of thinking, at the time, as to what work really should be.
As a recreation specialist I was trained to perform sensitive duties – those requiring a high level of intelligence, superior hand/eye coordination, public speaking skills (my one and only successfully completed college course came in handy), and a keen ability to converse with people – I got to supervise pool tournaments, pinochle tournaments and domino tournaments. My innate skills (defined by some as my ability to Bullshit) were almost immediately recognized when I called the numbers for the Bingo nights we had at least once every other week. Can’t you just hear my melodic voice speaking into the microphone and over the PA system…..”I-18,” “B-4,” “O-74?” I was damn good. So good, in fact, that I was promoted (much to the chagrin of my First Sergeant) to Airman 1st Class, or E-4 to those in the know. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that BS doesn’t get you anything. I know it works.
September 15, 1967, now here was a day. At about 7am on that beautiful day, I put on my “Dress Blues” and made my way to the “Separation Office,” signed the form declining to re-enlist for a second four-year commitment, along with a pile of other forms, collected my last check from my rich uncle, headed out to the Mohawk Valley Municipal Airport where I boarded the last plane I would fly on until the fall of 1978, and flew home to Friendship International Airport, now BWI, near Baltimore. What a great day that was. Out of the Air Force and ready to begin living for real.
Over the years I have had a couple of jobs. I worked for a finance company under my former wife’s uncle at a whopping salary of $325 per month, and hated it almost as much as the Air Force. A year later I began making the big bucks when I started to work for Crown Petroleum in Baltimore, where I was paid $106 per week, and loved it. Crown moved me to Richmond, Virginia in 1971 and then Crown fired me in 1973 – Friday, April 13th, to be exact. From Crown I went into the residential real estate business and stayed in it for seven years. Believe me when I tell you, the real estate business is not one for under achievers. In it one makes exactly what one is worth, and I did. It was the closest I have ever come to bankruptcy.
There were a couple of jobs beyond my real estate years (I did have pretty business cards) before I landed with my current company. I worked for Western Auto on two different occasions between June 1980 and January 1983. In between the two I had a mere thirty-day job opportunity/failure with a small gasoline retailer in Richmond. On the thirty-first day my new boss decided he had erred in hiring me, and on the flimsiest of trumped up reasons let me go…I was fired yet again and begged my former employer, Western Auto, to take me back. After being off for four months, November 1980 to March 1981, I began working for Western Auto. I really didn’t like working for Western Auto so when a friend put me on to a job opening with a furniture manufacturer out of Conway, Arkansas I applied. I interviewed for the job in December 1982, and not knowing exactly what I said or did to get a job offer, I started working for Virco Mfg. Corporation (now Virco Inc.) on January 17, 1983.
Virco was love at first sight. I had a job, a real job with a real company. I found myself loving every aspect of my job and my company. The employees became family. My customers became friends. I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and go to work. I thrived. Something had come over me. I became an “Achiever.” You must understand this was new ground for me. After three years as a sales rep I was made a region sales manager with my company and have held the position for twenty years. This guy with about a total of four cerebellum cells has been so very fortunate to have landed where he has. My income is far and away more than I ever thought I would or could earn. I still love what I do, and believe I do it well.
So, there it is in a nutshell. I enjoy a station in my life that most with my background could only have wished to attain. What a fortunate man I am and recognize it and am thankful for it. As for my present state of mind – how I view me and how happy I am to just “be” – I must thank my daughter and wife for getting me to the Millennium Workshops in Dallas. I owe so much to the people there who allowed me, vis-à-vis the workshop program, to explore me and to get to know me as I could not have on my own. We tend to fear what we don’t know. Millennium asks, “What are you pretending not to know?”
I found out what I didn’t know. Are you next? http://www.millennium3education.com