As I was watching the news the other day, the feature story was about a boy genius, who lived in Chicago. I was only half listening to the television up until that point, but now it had my full attention. The boy was quite remarkable, even to someone such as me. It was a very riveting story, until the newscaster made a personal comment that made my blood boil. He referred to the boy as a freak of nature. It brought back bad memories from my own childhood.
Suddenly, my head was filled with flashbacks of my own youth, some good, and some bad. You see, I was a boy genius myself, many years ago.
My name is Richard Martin Jones. I was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the only child of two wonderful parents. My father and mother were both teachers. My father was a high school mathematics teacher and my mother taught English at one of the city’s middle schools. They began to notice that I was different, by the time I was nine months old. I was fascinated by everything that I saw and heard. By the age of thirteen months, I began to talk in complete sentences, and I began to read books.
When I was two years old, my parents had me tested, and my IQ was off the charts. My mother used to call me a sponge, because I absorbed knowledge so fast, and retained everything I learned. About that time, my mother put her teaching career on hold so that she could home school me fulltime. I could not get enough to read. By the age of six, I was reading at a college level and I was doing eighth grade school work.
My parents tried to keep the world from learning about me, so that I could have some normalcy in my life, for as long as possible. Very few people outside my immediate family knew about my gift. One of them was my piano teacher. At the age of three, I became fascinated with the piano, but since my parents felt inadequate teaching me to play, they hired a private tutor. By the time I was six, I was playing some of the most difficult works of classical music.
My piano teacher; Mrs. Fitzgerald convinced my parents to let me perform at Harvard University. My parents insisted that my last name and address not be disclosed. When I walked out on stage, I was suddenly stricken with stage fright. I had never seen so many people in one place before. They were mostly university students and professors. Once I sat down at the piano, however, the audience and my fears disappeared. The room became very quiet, as I began playing. When I was finished, I received a standing ovation. I played four more pieces, and after the last one, I received a standing ovation that lasted for several minutes.
I was feeling very proud of myself, as I walked out of the auditorium with my parents, until I heard a comment from a student. As he walked past me, I heard him tell his friend; “That boy is a freak with a capital ‘F’. Then, both of them started laughing. I was so upset, that I ran the rest of the way to the car. When my mother asked me why I was so upset, I repeated the comment that I had heard. Then, I started to cry. Intellectually, I was fourteen, but physically and emotionally, I was only six years old. That was my first experience of people thinking of me as a freak, but definitely, not the last.
My parents realized that they could not protect me all of the time, and they decided to continue home schooling me through high school. Both of my parents were taking more classes, just so they could stay one step ahead of me. I graduated from high school at the age of nine. Because of my perfect SAT scores, I was offered scholarships to several Ivy League schools. I chose Harvard University. My parents were supportive and they immediately applied for teaching positions in Boston. By that time, my mother had earned her Master’s degree in English and Communications, and was hired to teach high school English. My father had earned his Doctorate in Mathematics, and was hired to teach at Harvard. My parents sacrificed so much for me to give me the best education, yet they never once complained.
Since I could not drive yet, my father drove me to the campus when he went to work, and either he or my mother would pick me up at the end of the day. Between classes, I usually spent most of my time in the university library. I had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and books were my comfort.
At Harvard, I became the center of attention everywhere I went. Being nine years younger than the typical freshman, will often cause that. However, after a while, most of the students accepted me as their intellectual equals and they looked out for me and protected me. Occasionally, I still heard the F word, but, by that time, I learned to ignore those people. However, it still hurt my feelings.
I took as many classes as the university would allow and I took tests in other classes for credit. I was able to complete four years of college in two years, receiving my Bachelor of Science degree in Physics, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics. I had just turned eleven. A year later, I had earned Master’s degrees in Physics and Mathematics.
My parents had tried hard to keep me out of the news and the students at Harvard had also protected me from the outside world, but then puberty hit. I wanted to experience the normal life of a pre-teenager. As I was finishing my work for my Master’s degrees, I proposed a plan to my parents. I knew that it was a lot to ask of them, but by the next day, they both agreed to my plan. By the time I received my Master’s degrees at Harvard, I had been accepted into the graduate program at UCLA, to work on my Doctorate degrees.
I never loved or respected anyone as much as I did my parents. They dropped everything, to move three thousand miles across the country, just so that I could attempt to have a normal adolescence. We moved to a very nice, family friendly suburb of Los Angeles. The plan was for me to live a double life. While I attended classes at UCLA, I would be known as Richard M. Jones, but in my neighborhood, and at home, I would use my middle name and be known as just; ‘Marty Jones’. My mom got a job at a community college, teaching English as a second language, and my dad got a job at the mathematics department of UCLA. My dad would drive me to UCLA every day, but my neighbors would think that I was attending a private middle school.
We moved into our house in June, and as soon as my bike was unpacked, I was riding it around the neighborhood. I discovered a park not too far from our house and as I was riding through it, I saw a girl about my age riding her bike towards me. She slowed down, and so did I. I introduced myself as Marty and she introduced herself. Her name was Alice Emerson, and she was twelve. We parked our bikes, and we sat on the swings and talked. It turned out that she lived six houses down from me. She had a fourteen-year-old sister named Maggie and a sixteen-year-old brother named Jason.