Call Me Ted (2 page)
After all the moves and separation of my earlier years, this was a time of relative stability for me. But that didn’t mean that our home life was always smooth sailing. My dad was a complicated man. He was a perfectionist in every aspect of his life—from his dress and overall appearance to the way he conducted his business and raised his family. He was also a deep thinker. He wanted to do the right thing and he read a lot, including books about parenting. Putting into practice all the different approaches he learned about meant that his style was often unpredictable.
One constant in his parenting, however, was strict discipline and a firm belief in the value of hard work. I was only eight or nine years old when my father started making me work during summer vacation. I began at about four hours a day, and in those earlier years my chief responsibility was working in our yard. We had a man powered push mower and if you’ve ever used one you know how tough they can be. Every little stick or acorn you’d hit would jam the thing up. And all these ants and chiggers would get you while you were down on your hands and knees pulling weeds. I’d be bent over, sweating up a storm, and my friends would come skipping by and say, “Ted, you want to go fishing?” I hated having to tell them I still had three hours more work to do. It was such drudgery that to this day I don’t like to do yard work. I might have been out of school, but summertime for me was not a vacation.
My father was also an alcoholic and a heavy smoker. I don’t know how much of a problem he had with these addictions before the war but I’m sure his experiences in the Pacific had an impact on him. He told me that he loved his time in the Navy, but while he appreciated the opportunity to see places like Australia and the Philippines, he also saw combat. He told me that he once killed a Japanese sailor at close range with a pistol. My father and some other guys were looking for souvenirs on a Japanese ship that was half sunk in shallow water in Manila Bay. Out of nowhere, a starving, crazed man came running out at them. He was screaming and hollering in Japanese and continued to charge my father so Dad shot him in self-defense.
But regardless of the reasons, my dad was a volatile man with a quick temper. When he drank, his temper got worse, and when I acted up, he’d spank me. This upset my mother and I can remember times when I was getting a spanking and my mother stood outside my door, begging my father to stop. Dad would have me across his knee and say things like “I’m doing this to help you learn to do the right thing and to grow up to be someone we can both be proud of.” Oftentimes he’d use a razor strap and he would say that it hurt him more to beat me than it would if I were hitting him.
I had no way of knowing if this was true but one time when I was only about six or seven years old he decided he’d prove it to me. I’ll never forget it. He handed me the razor strap, lay face down on the bed, and told me to spank
him.
I tried to obey him but I couldn’t. I loved him so much that I dropped the strap and broke down and cried.
Looking back, some of the biggest arguments my parents had concerned his treatment of me, but my dad ran an old-fashioned household and he insisted that pretty much everything had to be his way.
A TED STORY
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
—Lucy Rooney
(LUCY ROONEY, TED’S AUNT, WAS MARRIED TO FLORENCE’S BROTHER GEORGE “BUD” ROONEY, WHO PASSED AWAY IN 1993. LUCY CONTINUES TO LIVE IN CINCINNATI, OHIO.)
During their courtship, Ed was very charming and he pursued Florence with everything he had. But their marriage ran into trouble early. His behavior was almost like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He told Florence they could raise their children Catholic, but after Ted was born he said he’d sooner jump off the roof than do that and he wanted Florence to stop attending church herself. My sister-in-law was elegant and strong but Ed dominated that household. He also seemed to favor his daughter, Mary Jean. He could be brutal to young Teddy and the abuse began early. I recall one occasion when Ted was sick with a cold or flu. He was still just a little boy but when the doctor paid his house call, he found bruises on Teddy’s body. Sometimes, when Ted was sitting in his high chair, Ed would come behind him and flick his ear with his fingers, hard. He said it would “toughen him up.” Perhaps it did but it was certainly a difficult environment for a young boy to grow up in.
My father was not an easy man but I knew that he loved me and that he took a strong interest in my education and development. By the time I finished the fourth grade, he and my mother were concerned about the quality of the education I was getting in public school. At this same time—the summer of 1947—my parents were preparing to leave Cincinnati to move to Georgia. By this time, my dad had decided to make his career in the outdoor advertising business and had acquired a small billboard company in Savannah. The opportunity was a good one and I’m sure he was pleased to be moving back south. Had the decision been left to my mother, I imagine she would have tried to find a Catholic school or some other private institution but my father insisted that he made the money, so he made the rules. He was a conservative man in every way. (At the height of the Cold War he used to tell me that “the commies” were going to defeat the United States and would shoot everyone who had more than $50. For years I never walked around with more than $49 in my wallet!) My dad also placed a high value on his experience in the Navy and he believed that a military-style education would be good for me. When we moved to Savannah in October of 1947 I attended fifth grade at Georgia Military Academy, or GMA, located just south of Atlanta (the school exists today as Woodward Academy).
As a nine-year-old with a November birthday I was one of the youngest kids in my grade and by arriving in October, I was joining my classmates a full month late. These factors alone would have been hard enough, but going to a southern military school as an Ohio transplant was a real recipe for disaster. It was now the late 1940s but I’d swear some of those kids thought they were still fighting the Civil War. They wanted nothing more than to make a little “Yankee” like me miserable. Some of the boarding students had been there since the first grade and these were some of the toughest kids I had ever seen in my life—it was like
Lord of the Flies
.
I decided I needed to show them that I was tough, too. I shared a bunk room with three other kids and on my first night there I announced to my roommates that I was going to be “the boss.” They seemed to be okay with my plan but what I didn’t consider was that there were four more kids on the other side of the bathroom that we shared. They were considered part of our group, and after sizing them up I figured I could handle them, too. When I let these guys know I would be their boss as well, they took the news a little differently. After looking at each other for an instant, all of a sudden they jumped me. Three of them held me down while the other one kicked me in the head. I thought they were going to kill me. My other three roommates stood by and watched, and my attempted dominance of the room group came to a swift, painful, and humiliating end.
It was a grim start and it was several months before things got any easier. One time, some kids spread a rumor that I had badmouthed General Robert E. Lee. It wasn’t true but the news was enough to send a group of my classmates after me like a lynch mob. They chased me yelling, “Kill the Yankee!” I ran like hell until I got to a row of lockers and managed to squeeze inside one and pull the door closed. They came around the corner and guessed I was in one of those lockers but I stayed really quiet while they milled around outside like a swarm of bees. There had to be fifty of them and although I was really scared and short of breath, I stayed still until they gradually lost interest and drifted away. They didn’t chase me much after that but they did make it a common practice to storm into my room and jump on top of me on my bed. Ten kids at a time would pile on and I’d nearly panic because I couldn’t barely breathe.
I stayed as tough as I could, though, and by the end of the first semester I had become one of the guys. Some of the military training rubbed off on me and I suppose there were benefits to the overall experience. But my parents took some pity on me and the following year I was enrolled in Savannah public school where I spent my happiest year so far. It was great for me to be out of that confined military school environment and I enjoyed being able to spend more of my free time outside and in nature.
My dad’s sporting magazines used to run ads for the Northwestern School of Taxidermy’s correspondence course. For 50 cents a month they would send you a different how-to booklet and I was probably the first eleven-year-old who ever signed up. I used to find dead birds and squirrels, or on occasion I’d shoot them with my BB gun. The house we were living in had a garage with a little office-room inside. My parents never used it so that’s where I did my taxidermy work. It was a pretty complicated process but I found it fascinating and I learned a lot about nature and biology.
Another bright spot during that time was the arrival of a twenty-one-year-old black man my father hired to take care of his new sailboat. His name was Jimmy Brown and little did I know that for the next fifty years Jimmy would be one of the most important men in my life.
Shortly after buying a fifty-foot schooner (which he renamed
Merry Jean,
a play on my sister’s name), my dad realized that the boat was going to be a lot of work. He hired Jimmy after several friends recommended him as a capable handyman. Jimmy was raised by his mother and spoke with an accent typical of the kind of rural fishing village he was raised in, on a small island off the coast of Savannah. He learned a lot about fishing and fixing boats before being drafted into the Army and served with a medic division in the final stages of World War II.
As soon as Jimmy arrived, he and I started spending a lot of time together. He was like an older brother but we behaved more like two good friends. Eventually, he became like a second father to me. With my dad away or at work so much and my mom spending time with my sister, Jimmy and I would hang out—we’d fish, sail, go cast netting for shrimp, or just explore together. A birth defect left him with a slightly withered arm but Jimmy remained physically active and loved being outdoors. He taught me a lot about nature and a lot about life. I loved every minute of the time I spent with him and he became one of my best friends ever. Because of my love for him, and my father’s color blindness, I grew up without a shred of prejudice. All in all it was great to be home, but consistent with the pattern of my childhood, that stability would be short-lived. Another change loomed.
McCallie
A
fter just one relatively uneventful year of living at home, my dad then decided that for seventh grade it was time to send me away again, this time to McCallie, a well-regarded Christian military academy in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In truth, I was disappointed and my mom wasn’t thrilled, either, but my father reminded her once again that he controlled the purse strings so he could make these decisions.
About half of McCallie’s students were boarders, the other half were day students. There might have been four or five eighth graders living in the dorms but I was the only seventh grader so I was clearly the youngest, and also the smallest kid living on campus. This made me an easy target and the older guys picked on me from the start. It was a really tough time for me. At that age I hadn’t gotten as much love as I would have liked and I was angry for having been sent away once again. I felt a need to create a stir and to draw attention to myself and I figured that if I couldn’t be loved, I might as well be a hell-raiser. So, from the very beginning I set out to be one of the worst cadets in my class.
One of my first nights there, it was well past lights out but I was in my bunk reading. I loved books and enjoyed reading well into the night, but at McCallie, this was strictly against the rules. They had professors take turns as hall monitors and I could hear this one’s footsteps approaching our door. With a lights-out violation, I knew I’d be up for demerits and that he would ask for my name to put it in the records. At military schools like McCallie they call you by your last name followed by your first initial. So, for example, with my formal name being “Robert,” I’d be “Turner, R.” It was too early in the year for him to know all our names, so I decided to have some fun with him. “Who’s responsible for the light on in this room?” the professor barked outside my door. “Edison, T.” was my wise-guy response.
Sure enough, when the demerits were posted the next morning on the bulletin board, my room had two demerits listed under “Edison, T”!
Bad as I was, I managed to make a few friends, mostly guys who were willing to join me doing all kinds of stupid things to pass the time and to stir up a little trouble. We’d put small containers of water on the top of an open door and leave it cracked so when someone came zipping in the water would fall on his head. We’d fold paper in a certain way so you could inflate it like a little balloon, fill it up with water, and throw it out a third story window at students heading home from the mess hall. By the time they figured out what had hit them you’d pull your head back in and run like the devil so they couldn’t find you when they came tearing up the stairs.
When I noticed that one of the trees on campus was jammed full with a family of squirrels, I got an idea for some mischief and found a willing accomplice in my roommate. I grabbed my laundry bag and shinnied up the side of the tree to a hole about twenty feet up. Several minutes before, I’d seen the squirrels enter the tree through that hole, so I knew they were in there. I covered the hole with the opening of the bag while below my buddy knelt down with a can of Kiwi shoe polish. We always had plenty of Kiwi on hand and through some previous foul play I’d discovered that it was not only good for shining shoes, it also burned well and put out thick black smoke in the process. My accomplice slid the lighted can into the hole toward the base of the tree, and our plan worked.