(Original recording made in 2002)
Many years ago I attended a boarding school in Delaware. St. Andrew's school is a rigorous place with high academic standards and a huge emphasis on sports. When I arrived on campus at the age of 13, I was essentially lost. I had no idea what was ahead of me. They installed the new kids in a massive dormitory. It was actually a huge room with what they called "alcoves." Each of us had our own little alcove with a bed, a closet, and a chest of drawers. You could stand on the bed and peer out over the top at all the other alcoves. We had curtains that we would pull closed for privacy and for when we went to sleep. Our dorm supervisors, Bobo Olson and Robert "Birdie" Claggett had a watchtower room to surveil the entrance area. At 10pm they would shut off the lights. We had to remain in our alcoves until 10:30 when it became permissible again to stroll past their doorway to visit the bathroom. We were closed up in that dorm all night every night.
During the evenings we had study hall. They made us sit in a big room for a couple of hours almost every night to do our homework. The proctor, a teacher with low seniority, sat at an elevated desk and looked out over us. No talking was allowed in study hall.
Each class had a common room with a TV set. Our room was down in the basement near the mail room and the school store. The nearby corridor had wooden walls that featured extensive wood carvings left behind by former inmates of the facility. You know, "Kilroy was Here-Class of '35" and that sort of thing.I never carved my initials because that seemed so old fashioned. There was also a phone booth. I would call home on Saturdays just to let my family know I still existed. Saturdays were great because they always had a movie instead of study hall. I'll never forget when they showed Hitchcock's "Psycho." We had seen it before so we laughed through most of it.
We wore coats and ties to classes, meals, chapel, etc. If we violated any of the rules we could be punished with what they called "marks." If you got too many marks in any given week you had to walk them off. Seniors and teachers had the wherewithal to dispense any punitive marks. There was a bulletin board in the main hallway where they would post the marks. If you received a "ringer" they would post a sheet of paper with your name and a check mark that was circled and that represented three marks. A "double ringer" was six marks. Some of the more domineering seniors loved handing out double ringers for the slightest infractions. One time Birdie our dorm supervisor was checking the alcoves for dust. He had on white gloves. When he checked mine he got some dust on his glove: boom-double ringer.I seem to recall that if you got eight marks or more in any given week then on Saturday mornings you would "walk off the marks" along the front drive. It was a half mile long each way. Each mark got you a half mile so if you had the minimum of eight marks to walk off you had to walk back and forth for four miles before you could do anything else, go to town, play sports, etc. There was a teacher (they called them "masters") who had the job of watching us walk by to make sure we walked all the way in each direction.
Middletown, the closest town, was a couple of miles away. Only seniors were allowed to have bicycles. The rest of us had to walk to town if we wanted to go there and of course we did, they had junk food there, and new record albums.
Since we lived there on campus we got to know one another fairly well and thought up many nicknames for the faculty members; monikers like Hunch, Uncle Bummer, Ferdie, Ducky, Scoobie, Bull, Nursie, Rat, and the most unfortunate; Dueshay.
Suffice it to say that it was quite an experience. I was there on scholarship and after two years I left and went back to Des Moines to attend a public school.
One of my classmates in the South Dorm that first year was a guy named Phil Sczubelek. The following year when we finally got our own rooms Phil was there too. I didn't know Phil that well, but he was a nice guy and quite studious, a Delaware kid-he was also there on a scholarship as so many of us were. The school was and is very generous with their financial aid to kids like us.
Many years later I discovered that Phil had become a writer. He founded a creative writing program at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. In 2002 he published the book "Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II's Heroic Army of Deception" under his pen name of Philip Gerard. By an odd happenstance our news director at WYSO at the time, Aileen LeBlanc, had come to Yellow Springs from Wilmington, N.C. and she knew Phil very well. At that point I contacted his publicist and arranged this interview.
Phil died last year. This past weekend some of our former classmates were gathered together at St. Andrew's for a big reunion. I could not attend. But I decided that I might be able to participate in a different way by honoring Phil's memory with a re-broadcast of this interview. I mentioned to our former classmates that I was planning to do this and some of them listened to this interview on-line as we ran it that
morning during their reunion. I'm positive that none of those guys had ever heard the show before. I got some wonderful emails from them afterwards telling me how much they had enjoyed hearing what Phil and I had talked about 21 years ago.
And now that we are posting the show in podcast form all the other guys can listen too, like Glenn in Seattle. Thanks, guys! It meant a lot to me that you took the time to listen and to remember our fallen classmate.
The Book Nook on WYSO is presented by the Greene County Public Library with additional support from Washington-Centerville Public Library, Clark County Public Library, Dayton Metro Library, Wright Memorial Public Library, and Tipp City Public.
