Here Comes Trouble (30 page)

“Well,” I said. “I’m an adult, too. And I feel great.”

“Well, congratulations,” the reporter said, “you’re the youngest person ever elected to public office in the State of Michigan.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes, it is. You beat the previous record by three years.”

Across the gymnasium where the votes had been counted, I could see the disappointed looks on the faces of the realtors, the insurance salesmen, the country club wives. The following day, a reporter from Detroit called to tell me I was the youngest elected official in the entire country (there was no one under the age of eighteen who held public office). Did I have a comment about that?

“Wow.”

What else was I gonna say? I was too deep in my own whirlwind about what had just happened to my life. Now I was going to be one of the seven people in charge of the school district, and the boss of both the principal and, most important, the assistant principal, Ryan. I was now in a position to take that fucking bat out of his hand.

The next morning, I went to school as I had for the previous twelve years. Walking down the hall on my way to Mr. Hardy’s creative writing class, I saw Assistant Principal Dennis Ryan coming toward me. Funny, there was nothing in his hand.

“Good day, Mr. Moore.”

Mr.
Moore? That was a first. But hey, after all, how else would you address your new boss? Yet I was still a student under him. Weird. He kept walking and so did I.

It became a week of high fives and black power handshakes (I know, I know—this
was
Davison) among the students, many of them relishing what havoc I could wreak. I was given a number of suggestions from my constituents: make the jocks take real classes; put a cigarette machine in the cafeteria; institute the “four-hour school day”; drop the white milk and have only chocolate; find out what’s in the “Thursday Surprise” at lunch and kill the person who makes it.

Five nights later on June 17, 1972 (non sequitur alert: at the same time, burglars five hundred miles away were breaking into a place called the Watergate), I lined up inside Davison High School with my nearly four hundred fellow graduates, all of us in our maroon-and-gold caps and gowns. Dress code rules were still in effect, but a number of students chose to secretly wear no pants or skirts. They
did
make sure that the area at the top of the gown had the requisite blouse and shirt and tie, because that could be seen by the authorities. Flashing the nether regions would take place later on the football field at the end of the ceremonies. Water balloons were also well hidden.

Mr. Ryan walked down the line five minutes before the ceremony inspecting each of the students, mostly to make sure that there were no projectile devices in people’s hands and to be certain that every boy was wearing a tie.

And it was then that Ryan came upon Billy Spitz. Billy was a kid from a family of simple means. His idea of a tie was what was called a “bolo tie”—two long strings hanging from a knot or a clamp at the neck. For many who came from the South to work in the factories of Flint, putting on a bolo tie was called “dressing up.” It was what you wore to a dance or to church. It was a tie.

Not to Ryan.

“Step out of line!” he barked at Billy. “What is this?” he continued, as he pulled the bolo tie out from under Billy’s gown.

“It’s my tie, sir,” Billy responded sheepishly.

“This is not a tie!”
Ryan retorted for all to hear. “You’re outta here. Go on.
Git!
You’re not graduating.”

“But, Mr. Ryan—”

“Did you hear me?” Ryan snapped, as he grabbed him and physically pulled him away from the rest of us, showing him the door. It sent a shock wave through the line of graduates. Even in the final
minute
of high school, we had to witness one last act of cruelty.

And not one of us said anything. Not the tough guy in back of Billy, not the Christian girl in front of him. And not me. Even though I was now officially one of the seven in charge of the schools, I remained silent. Maybe I was just too stunned to speak. Maybe I didn’t want to cause trouble before we got out to the football field, as I was planning to cause a heap of it out there (I had been chosen by the students to give the class speech). Maybe I was still cowed by Mr. Ryan and it would take more than an election for me to stand up to him. Maybe I was just happy it wasn’t me. I really didn’t know Billy, and so, like the other four hundred, I minded my own business.

When it was my time to speak on the graduation stage, I got through the only three sentences I had written. I had seven pages from a yellow legal pad rolled up in my hands to make it look like I had prepared a typical graduation speech. In fact, I had something else on my mind that I was going to say.

I had learned that one of our classmates, Gene Ford, was not to receive the gold honor cords of the National Honor Society because, due to a serious disability, he had to be mostly home-schooled. Even though his grades were high, no one made any provisions for counting his home grades, which would have definitely qualified him for the Honor Society.

Less than a minute into my speech, I came to an abrupt halt and told the crowd that the student sitting in the wheelchair in the front row was denied his honor cords because he wasn’t “normal” like the rest of us. What if, I suggested,
we
were the abnormal ones? Some of us seniors, I pointed out, had chosen not to wear our honor cords because we did not want to separate ourselves from those who, for whatever reason, didn’t have the same grades we had. I went into an extemporaneous rant about the oppressive nature of being in school and not having rights or a say in your own education. I then said I’d like to present my honor cords to Gene.

And so I left the stage and did just that. And the school board members who were present? Well, they just got a coming attractions trailer to the movie they were about to star in with me for the next four years.

The following day the phone rang and my mother said it was Billy Spitz’s mom. I took the phone. She was fighting back tears.

“My husband and I and Billy’s grandmother were all sitting in the stands waiting for Billy to walk across the stage, waiting for his name to be called. They called the entire class and never called Billy’s name. We couldn’t see him sitting with the rest of you. We didn’t understand. We were confused. And then we got worried.
Where was he?
We got up and looked everywhere for him. We went out to the parking lot and to our car. And that’s where we found him.”

She began to cry.

“There, in the backseat, was Billy, all curled up in a ball, and crying. He told us what Mr. Ryan had done.

“We can’t believe this happened.
He was wearing a tie!
Why did this happen?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Spitz,” I said quietly.

“Were you there?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“Did you see Mr. Ryan do this?”

“Yes.”

“And you did nothing?”

“I was still a student.” And a coward.

“You were also a school board member! Isn’t there anything you can do about this?”

Of course, there was nothing I could do. They weren’t going to hold graduation over to correct this injustice. I had a chance, maybe, to do something about it the night before. But I didn’t. I would never forget this small but powerful moment of my silence and looking the other way. I promised her I would not let this rest and that, as I said when I ran for election, I would work toward Mr. Ryan’s removal.

Two days later I was told to go to the home of the school board secretary and be sworn in. I rode my bicycle over to her house in my bare feet and was sworn in without my shoes on. She said, “Where are your shoes?”

“I’m not wearing any,” I said. She just glared at my feet.

I raised my right hand, and when it came time to say the words about “defending the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” I added,
“especially domestic.”
She looked at me and rolled her eyes. She had taught my mother in high school. “She was maybe the worst teacher I had,” my mother told me later. Mom also told me I should have worn some shoes.

The honeymoon period in my first year on the board of education was longer than any of us had expected. Most of the motions I made to improve the schools—including establishing some student rights—were passed. The board listened to what I had to say about how the high school was being run, and how the assistant principal might do better being on the police force (in Chile). I said that the principal was not a forward thinker; he stifled dissent and created a climate where new ideas were not encouraged. In my first year I became a conduit to the board for students, teachers, and parents so that their voices could be heard.

One Monday night about eight months into my term, the superintendent presented “letters of resignation” from the high school principal—and Assistant Principal for Discipline, Dennis Ryan. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that, just ten months after I was beaten with a high-velocity wooden board, the mission I went on by running for the school board had actually been accomplished. It caught me by surprise, as I did not think they were really going to do anything about this problem. True, they were not going to publicly fire them. They let them resign, to save face. Saving face was not yet something I was interested in, as I was not yet old enough to have the necessary compassion and mercy for two men who were just in the wrong job—and had a right to be treated with dignity and respect, even if one of them had not accorded the same to me and Billy Spitz and others. So to twist the knife in deeper, I asked the superintendent at the public meeting if the principal and assistant principal had made this decision on their own or did he, the superintendent, ask for these letters? He nodded his head quietly and said simply, “The latter.”

The next day, the students in the high school couldn’t believe that one of their own actually got to say “You’re fired!” to the principal and assistant principal. We started thinking—what
else
can we do?

That
was a dangerous thought.

Milhous, in Three Acts

ACT I: Nixon’s the One

Every good Catholic blamed Lyndon Johnson for Kennedy’s death. Not that he had anything to do with the actual assassination (though there were those who believed he did). But we all knew he hated Kennedy, and Kennedy didn’t care much for him. Kennedy was forced to put Johnson on the ticket in order to get the racist Southern states to vote for him, states that were too dumb to figure out that Johnson shared none of their hatred for black people and would, in fact, ram the most important civil rights legislation since the Civil War down their throats the instant he became president.

What we couldn’t accept was that Kennedy was murdered in
Johnson’s state,
and if anyone should have been on their toes preventing such a tragedy it should’ve been Lyndon Baines Johnson. If there was one mental note all Catholics made after November 1963, it was that we would never, ever vacation in Dallas.

Johnson, within nine months of JFK’s death, escalated the Vietnam War by telling a lie. On August 4, 1964, he announced that earlier in the day, the North Vietnamese attacked a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. This did not happen. Johnson then presided over a slaughter of epic proportion, and any other good he might have been remembered for, like the civil rights laws or his war on poverty, was out the window.

In March 1968, Johnson gave up and declared he would not seek reelection. Even though I was only fourteen, I followed all of this and pinned my hopes on either Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy to win the Democratic nomination. What was unacceptable to me was the accession of the vice president, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, to the White House. He had loyally backed Johnson in the war, and so for me that was that, done and done, Humphrey was out.

I was up late watching
The Joey Bishop Show
when Joey was handed a note that made him choke. He announced that Robert F. Kennedy, who the night before had been shot after winning the California presidential primary, had just died. I screamed, and my parents, who were already in bed, came out in the living room.