Of steps (and mis-steps) climbing the educational ladder
Fleeting Moments Book 1
By
Walter Gordon Fischer
Stop-overs at St Paul’s School, Yale, Harvard Business School and at the Johns Hopkins School for International Studies in Bologna, Italy, and Washington, DC (my favourites). Finally, I had even learned how to brush my teeth properly.
Copyright 2011 by Walter Gordon Fischer.
Walter Gordon Fischer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
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Table of Contents
How I got off on the wrong foot at haughty, hockey-playing St Paul’s School
Snowflakes and spitballs in an exam room
Fox-trotting with Elizabeth Taylor was less than spellbinding
‘Senator Lehman, you must leave the Bath & Tennis Club’ – Palm Beach’s response to social integration: Jews not allowed!
Coca-Cola heiress Mrs Woodruff foils sleazy Veasey Rainwater IV’s takeover bid
After the taxidermist, a big fish is sent to Yale for a proper education
Looking nine months pregnant didn’t help me to survive at Harvard Business School
My mentor at Yale, Professor Hajo Holborn and his wife were humiliated in Salzkammergut
How I got off on the wrong foot at haughty, hockey-playing St Paul’s School
I was 13 years old when my parents sent away to board at St Paul’s School, which is located amidst wooded hills, ponds, streams, and playing fields to the west of New Hampshire’s state capital, Concord. Founded in 1856 as a church school (read: Episcopalian), over the years it has adapted with glacial rapidity to a fast-changing world.
When I studied at St Paul’s (1944 –1948), a stolid atmosphere prevailed that was entrenched in the school’s cloistered tyrannies and traditions. St Paul’s was for Protestant boys. Jews, blacks, Asians and other infidels were excluded, though a token sprinkling of Catholics, like John Kerry, who later became a senator and the Democratic candidate for president, were admitted. The bulk of the one hundred boys who graduated from each form (read: class) entered Ivy League colleges, of which Yale, Harvard and Princeton were the most popular. During my days at St Paul’s, it was known for its hockey playing, for its unbridled snobbery, and for its pervasive use of sarcasm. Recently, St Paul’s was twinned with Eton College, whose English roots go back a few centuries earlier, to 1460.
On my first day at the school, my father and stepmother had dropped me off at my dormitory, and set off in their car for Old Westbury, where we lived on the north shore of Long Island. I felt desperately alone and sorry for myself. I even wanted to cry, but realised that would send the wrong signal to my new form mates. I didn’t want them to regard me as a sissy. One of them, Leighton Coleman, instinctively took a dislike for me. I was big and strong for my age, so he was taking a risk when he taunted me and called me unflattering names. The inevitable happened, almost like the rutting of reindeer. We got into a fistfight and blows were exchanged. Luckily, I managed to throw him to the ground with a thud and to pin him down. After he said that he had enough, he never tried to bully me again. But for me, the outcome was a Pyrrhic victory. I had made an enemy of one of the school’s best athletes. That was not at all the way I wanted to begin my first term. He would later be elected captain of the hockey team, perhaps the ultimate accolade.
Ten days later, I made my second mistake. This time it was far worse, because it was to cast a dark shadow over my entire four years at St Paul’s. I became the bête noir of Gerald Chittenden, my English master (read: teacher). Looking back, it seems like a tale of the absurd. But at the time, it was all very real to me. Mr Chittenden was a small, frail, tweedy man in his fifties. The persistent rumour was that he had been gassed in the trenches while serving in the American expeditionary forces in France during the First World War. At least that was the explanation for his pockmarked, desiccated face, for which he was awarded the unflattering nickname, the ‘Prune.’ At the end of each class, he used to give out daily assignments to each of the ten boys in his class. We were expected to write a very short essay (not more than 150 words) about something or other. Unfortunately, to my great chagrin, I wasn’t paying very much attention to his instructions. My thoughts were focused on football practice after the class. We had been reading Aesop’s fables in class. I had the impression that the Prune had expected us to write something about the fable.
I did. The next day, when I turned in my homework, the Prune’s reaction was mixed with fury and indignation. He glared at me with a fierce, steely look and said, ‘Don’t you know what you’ve done?’
I looked at the Prune and wondered why he was so upset. I asked, ‘What? Have I something wrong, sir?’
He shouted, ‘This is a flagrant example of plagiarism. This is outrageous! How could you possibly think that you could fool me? I suppose you must think I’m stupid and blind?’
I said, ‘Plagiarism? I’m not sure I understand what you mean, sir.’ I had never even heard of the word before, and didn’t have a clue what he was rattling on about. But I could certainly appreciate that he was very, very upset about something.
‘You obviously don’t even know what plagiarism is. How extraordinary!’ he harrumphed. After making an exaggerated and painful sigh, he looked at me quizzically, as if he were talking to the village idiot. In fact, he belittled me to such an extent that I felt worse than the village idiot.
Then, he spoke to me very slowly, so that even an imbecile like me could understand. He pronounced each word distinctly, with emphasized pomposity, as though he were President Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address to a rambunctious audience of four-year-olds: ‘Gordon, you have stolen, word for word, two lines from a famous author, without proper attribution. What you have done is very serious. I shall report you to the vice-rector (read: assistant top dog). You must be severely punished!’
OK, I was guilty. But at the time, I wondered whether the punishment fit the heinous crime that I had committed. My parents were immediately notified, in writing, of my atrocious behaviour. I was banished from Tuck shop, where non-alcoholic cider and other soft drinks, as well as doughnuts and cookies, were served. Worst of all, I was also placed on the blue list. For the next three months I had to report during the afternoons to Calvin Chapin every hour on the hour. I was not alone, however. Dickie Cowell, the son of an oil baron, had been caught cheating on an exam. He was also put on the blue list. Being on the blue list was the greatest stigma that I could have received, short of expulsion. For my ignominious status, I was awarded the nickname, ‘Every-hour-on-the-hour-Fischer.’
Mr Chapin was the school clerk, known as the ‘Toad.’ His main job, as far as I could fathom, was to keep track of the demerits of troubled students like me, who had flagrantly broken the rules and needed to be straightened out. Although his title was insignificant, he was like the secretary of the communist party, and acted like a little Stalin. He made St Paul’s his entire life since leaving the school in 1936. Forty years later, he was still entrenched in more or less the same job. He was prematurely bald with black hair preening down the two sides and the back. Every year he bought a new Pontiac to impress whoever might be impressed. He had never gone to college, never married, was never seen with a woman, and liked to play favourites. I perceived that he went out of his way to give Leighton Coleman and his ilk preferential treatment. He shamelessly sucked up to the richest boys of the school, whose families he cultivated assiduously on the north shore of Long Island. The Toad was snobbish, petty-minded and conceited. In retrospect, I suspect he was trying to conceal an inferiority complex. I remember one of the first questions the Toad ever asked me:
‘Gordon, exactly where do you live in Old Westbury?’
I told him.
‘Ahh. So your father bought the Earl estate? Did he really! Isn’t that very interesting...’
‘Yes, Mr Chapin,’ I nodded, though I didn’t know why my father’s purchase of a huge white elephant was particularly interesting to anybody.
‘Ahh, now I know exactly where you live. Yes. Diagonally opposite the W R Grace estate, next to the de Forrest Manice estate. The Mills estate is to the back. I know them all. The Earle estate has forty or so acres, with an oversized, dilapidated manor house with a large atrium, a swimming pool and tennis courts that are virtually unusable.’
I was at loss for words, so I just mumbled something inane, which the Toad ignored. He had his own agenda.
‘But I suppose it’s really small, compared to Jock Whitney’s estate nearby, isn’t it? He must have thousands of acres.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know Mr Whitney or his estate.’
‘Well, I didn’t think you would.’
At the time, I didn’t mention to the Toad that my father was in the process of subdividing the forty acres into two-acre plots, on which he would build houses. My father had already demolished about 80 of the 120 rooms in the manor house and was about to put the chopped-up, mini-version of the now much more habitable house on the market. His was probably the first development that was to transform forever the bucolic atmosphere of Old Westbury into modern suburbia. Later the Toad would find out the truth about the Fischers. His low estimation of me inevitably dropped another notch or so. He concluded that my non-illustrious family was not a robber baron. Almost as an egregious historical mistake, the Fischers had not made an enormous fortune in steel, railroads, copper mines, or oil. Thus I must be an impecunious nobody.
My hard-working father was rich in fixed assets, but poor in cash. He had to struggle just to pay for his various children and ex-wives. Compared to the parents of many of my form mates, whose fathers basked in inherited wealth (some were super rich, like the Havemeyers, the sugar barons, who had donated old master paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art), my father was an insignificant nobody. He ranked far down in the social pecking order, though even his career had been given a kick-start when his mother died and left him a little nest egg. With the Toad, my father’s sketchy credentials could never have counted in my favour. In retrospect, to borrow a phrase that Prime Minister Edward Heath used to describe Tiny Rowland (you see, thanks to the Prune, I don’t want ever again to be accused of plagiarism!), I have always considered the Toad to be the ugly, unacceptable face of snobbery at St Paul’s School.