The Lasting Value of Being a Gentleman

Found out I had a 149 I.Q. (Frank insists this is simply not possible.) Won a poetry contest with a really juvenile poem about a clock. Won the Senior Fine Arts Award for Art. Was in 6 plays. Graduated just 21 days after my seventeenth birthday. Managed not to get arrested. Pretended I was a “Hood.” (Bought a pretty long switchblade knife.) Did a lot of stuff Mom and Dad would have killed me for if they’d known I did it. Graduated Honor Society in top 10 of my class of 300. Wrote a comedy review for the ADC Fellowship show. I was never aware of social class until high school. I learned there were kids much richer but also many much poorer than we were. I was aware of the Korean War and happy to be too young for the draft. I was terrible in PE (though I tried hard) but truly excelled in art.

I sometimes regret not having gone to college right after high school, only because I’m curious if I might not have become an architect. A subtle lesson I learned going through school is that you can make people like you by being nice to them. I worked hard to make my teachers like me which paid off in more attention and better scholastic achievement for me. As Mom so often said, “It doesn’t cost you a dime to be a gentleman.”