The Leishmans lived at 8801 Fairway, which was directly across the street from our house.
During each of the four years that I was an undergraduate at Michigan I came home for the Christmas holiday. A very unusual event occurred in one of those holidays. I think that it was the first one, 1966, but it might have been 1967. During the fall I had been alerted by my parents that my cousin and my classmate at Rockhurst High School, Terry Cernech, was getting married. The bride, Debbie Leishman, lived directly across the street from my family’s house in Leawood. They wanted me to be an usher at their wedding.
Terry, who lived nearly twenty miles away in Sugar Creek, had met Debbie during the production of a musical that featured performers and crew from Rockhurst High School, which both Terry and I attended, and Debbie’s high school, Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic preparatory school for girls. Strange as it might seem, I had absolutely nothing to do with them getting together.
Terry and I were seniors when the play was staged. Debbie was a year or two younger. I am therefore pretty sure that she was still in high school at the time of the wedding. Terry was in college. His Facebook page says that he “studied at University of Notre Dame.”
The ceremony might have been held here at St. Ann’s church in Independence.
If there was a bachelor’s party, I was not invited, or maybe my parents neglected to tell me about it. I am pretty sure that the wedding ceremony was at a Catholic Church. Since the Leishmans were not Catholics, I am quite sure that the ceremony was not at our parish, Curé of Ars. So, I figure that it must have been held at the Cerneches’ church, St. Ann’s in Independence, MO, Harry Truman’s home town. I am almost certain that Terry went to grade school at St. Ann’s school.
So, why did the happy couple choose December for this occasion? Well, it probably wasn’t for tax reasons—both the bride and groom were full-time students. Everyone knew the answer, of course. In the language of the day, they had to get married.
Terry’s brother John was the best man. Before the ceremony he talked for a while with my parents. He said that he had been up all night talking with Terry. According to John, his brother had ingested a large amount of “Dutch courage” to prepare himself for the big event. John was dubious about the whole situation.
My job as usher was trivial. People sat where they wanted. I don’t recall that I had to wear a tuxedo or any other kind of costume. My real responsibilities began at the reception where I discovered that no one in the Leishman household was talking to anyone on the Cernech side. My dad did not get along particularly well with either Terry’s father, my Uncle Dean, or Mr. Leishman. So, I was drafted to pass messages between the two patriarchs. I do not precisely recall any particular message, but the flavor of most of them was something like the following:
“Tell that son of a bitch that if he thinks that he is going to …”
“He said what? Tell that worthless sack of shit that that will never happen until hell freezes over.”
“That’s NOT what we agreed on! You tell that two-faced bastard …”
“That’s it. I’ve had enough of that asshole. Just tell him to shove it.”
Needless to say, I sanitized the messages a bit before I delivered them. For a while I found this farce slightly amusing, but eventually it wore me down.
The marriage did not last very long. I don’t know what became of any of the Leishmans. Terry remarried; in 2021 he lives in Springfield, MO.
I did not die from it.
During the exam period right before Christmas, in December of 1967 (I think) I came down with influenza. When I have recounted this story, I called what I had the Russian flu. However, apparently the disease, which started in November in Michigan and Florida, was actually popularly known as the Hong Kong Flu. I somehow got through my exams, but I was completely wiped out. I slept through the entire plane ride to KC, and then I spent another day or so in bed at my parents’ house. This was my last real illness until my tuxedo-wearing cat Jake gave me cat-scratch disease in the mid-eighties.
A different member of my high school class, John Williams, also got married and had a son while he was going to college. He invited me to attend a play that his younger brother was in. This must have happened either over the Christmas break in my senior year or during one of the summers. John was driving, and for some reason his wife was not there.
At some point John was talking about the toddler. When I asked him a question, I mistakenly called the kid “your brother”. At least three of my acquaintances fathered children while I was in college, but I never actually saw any of them. I was so immature and aloof that I could not internalize the fact that people my age were reproducing.
One baby that I did see was Dr. Colburn’s youngest daughter. When the child, whose name escapes me, was baptized, I stood in for the real godfather, who could not make the trip to Ann Arbor. The event occurred in September of either 1968 or 1969. This was the last baptism that I ever attended.
In 2020 I discovered evidence of two events that I am quite certain that I never attended. I found these two football tickets among my dad’s possessions after he died in 2011.
They did not even call it the Super Bowl.
I have no recollection at all that he had attended one of the most famous football games of all time, the 1969 Super Bowl. This was the game between the New York Jets, quarterbacked by Joe Namath, and the Baltimore Colts, led by Johnny Unitas. The Colts, who had defeated the Cleveland Browns 34-0 in the NFL1 championship game, were heavily favored, but the brash Namath guaranteed that the Jets would win, and they did.
In fact, it was not a close game. The defense of the Jets completely stymied Unitas and the Colts, who were held to a field goal in the fourth quarter. The final score was 16-3.
The game was played in the Orange Bowl in Miami, FL, on Sunday, January 12, 1969. I would have been back in Ann Arbor by then. I have no recollection that my dad went to this game. Of course, it had no effect on me; I was probably either at a debate tournament, returning from one, or busily preparing for one.
I wonder if my mom also attended this game. My dad often traveled on business, and some of those events included entertainment for the local salesmen. If this was part of the company’s annual convention, then my mom also probably came. In that case, they would have probably needed to get someone to stay at the house with Jamie, who had been a teenager for eight days when the game was played. Surely this would have been a topic of discussion over the holidays, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.
I definitely do remember the other game.
Michigan played against Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl in my senior year. I watched this frustrating nail-biter at home in Leawood. I am pretty sure that both of my parents attended, but I don’t remember if they left Jamie with me (I was twenty-one, and she was almost fourteen), or if someone stayed with us.
Southern Cal was undefeated. Michigan was coming off of its best game ever, the upset of undefeated Ohio State in Ann Arbor. I had missed that game because of a debate tournament in Chicago.
Both teams in the Rose Bowl had very stout defenses and unimaginative offenses. The game was tied 3-3 at the half. The only touchdown was a thirty-three yard pass from Jimmy Jones to Bob Chandler. Southern Cal won 10-3..
The backs of both of these tickets have diagrams of the seating in the stadiums. In both cases the tickets are on about the twenty-five-yard line, a little less than halfway up. Those are very good seats! Note that the price of the Rose Bowl ticket was only $8.
My two fondest memories of Jamie occurred, I think, during one of the breaks from college. The first one was in 1966, the year that Barry Sadler’s song, “Ballad of the Green Berets”2 topped the charts. We invented a dance to accompany this song. It involved standing at attention next to one another. Then one of us would stand on tip-toes for a beat while the other squatted. Then we returned to attention. On the following beats we reversed roles, and so on until we could not keep straight faces any longer.
At some point when I was not paying attention Jamie learned to play the guitar. She had a Bob Dylan songbook that contained the words and music for a dozen or two of his early songs. A few times we made music together; she would play the chords and I would sing. I can carry a tune, the songs were in a key that stayed in my range, and I could do a passable imitation of Dylan’s voice. We should have recorded one of these songs—I had a tape recorder. It would be fun to hear what we sounded like.
1. The NFL and the AFL had not yet merged. The first four Super Bowl featured the champions of each league.
2. This horribly unimaginative song tied “California Dreamin'” as Billboard’s top song of 1966. Surely this was the worst song ever to become so popular. Sadler was a medic in Vietnam. His one hit made him a lot of money, but his life subsequently went quickly downhill. In 1979 he was charged with second-degree murder and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Nashville. He went to prison for thirty days. In September of 1988 he was shot in the head in a taxicab in Guatemala City. He died early the following year.
A primer explaining the format and other details of intercollegiate debate can be found here.
Fall 1967: When I returned to school after the summer of 1967, I discovered some very important changes in the debate program at U-M. Dr. Colburn was still the Director of Forensics, and Jeff Sampson was still coaching. Juddi (pronounced “Judy”) Tappan, a high school coach from Belleville, had been added to the staff. My recollection is that in her last year at Belleville two girls from her team had won the state championship.
Juddi’s assignment at U-M that year was to coach the novices. She had a very good crop. I think that both of those girls from Belleville came to U-M. One might have participated in debate for a short while, but by the time that the tournament season started, neither was involved. The four principal players were Bill Davey, an exceptionally smart guy1 from Albion, MI, Ann Stueve from Kentucky, Jim Fellows, whom I never got to know very well, and Alexa Canady from Lansing. All four of them were almost certainly better debaters than I was when I first set foot in the Frieze Building a year earlier. They all definitely had more experience than I did.
I think that there was one other coach, but he spent little time with any debaters and none with me.
For me the debate season began bizarrely. Jeff Sampson escorted me and either Bob Hirshon or Lee Hess to Expo ’67 in Montreal to debate against two guys from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh about abortion. The whole debate only lasted for a little over thirty minutes and was attended by the coach/escorts of both teams and three ladies who had years earlier passed the age for which family planning is much of an issue. The guys from Duquesne had done quite a bit of research and presented a lot of serious arguments. We mostly told jokes.
Surely this was an appropriate metaphor for the age: four young guys debating about the circumstances in which women should be allowed to have abortions. Moreover, two of us were not even taking it seriously.
I don’t remember that we took an airplane to Montreal, but neither do I recall a long car trip with a border crossing. I retain a rather vivid memory of a rude cab driver who pretended that he did not understand English. If we had a car, why would we take a cab? Maybe parking was an issue.
This trip was undeniably a waste of time and money; perhaps some other organization paid for it. The plus side was that we did have time to wander around the Expo for a day or so. My strongest memory of the fair itself is eating a reindeer sandwich at one of the Scandinavian pavilions. It tasted a little funny, but it was not awful.
I also remember that we attended a performance of Laterna Magika, a multi-media theater troop from Prague, which at the time was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Jeff chided me for trying to figure out what message was being conveyed.
Years later my wife Sue told me that she was also in Montreal during that period, had heard about the debate in which we participated, and almost went to it. This was five years before I even met her. So, this was almost a great story.
I considered the national debate resolution for that year, “that the federal government should guarantee a minimum annual cash income to all citizens”, uninspired. I cannot remember much about the individual arguments. Of course, debaters argued whether the states were “closer to the people” or whether in-kind payments were better than cash, but I cannot imagine that there would be enough meat there for a year’s worth of debates.
I think that I had three partners during the year:
I remember debating with Larry Rogers, a junior, at the tournament at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle (UICC). I remember that he performed brilliantly in one debate, but overall we did not do well together, and I did not enjoy the experience at all. I also remember that one morning he took what he called “a Polish shower” with Right Guard before he dressed for the debates that day. By the way, all the male debaters wore suits Larry quit the team before the end of the year.
I am sure that I debated in at least one tournament with Lee Hess, another junior, who was my partner during the whirlwind spring 1967 season. I have a vague recollection that we debated together at Ohio State, but details have escaped from my memory. Lee had a motorcycle. I think that he might have had an accident with it that semester.
My third partner was Gary Black, a senior. I think that we did well together at one tournament, but I don’t remember the details. The main thing that sticks out in my mind is that I did “outsides” on the affirmative, which meant that I delivered the first affirmative constructive and the second affirmative rebuttal. Usually, this is only done when one debater is much better than the other, but my speaker ratings were generally equal to or better than Gary’s. He designed the affirmative case; I could not have defended it with much enthusiasm.
I might have debated with Bob Hirshon at one unmemorable tournament.
Spring 1988: Just before finals for the fall semester Jeff took me, Lee, and Gary aside, and had us write down on a sheet of paper the name of the other member of the trio that we would prefer to debate with. They both chose me. Although I chose Lee, Jeff decided to pair me with Gary for the important tournaments in the second semester (January-March 1968).
Here is what I remember of that time.
Both Lee and Bob quit debating before the semester began.
Gary and I had a practice debate against Bill and Ann in which we performed badly. Juddi remarked that it was a classic case of the novices showing up the varsity. I was too arrogant to get upset by this.
Gary and I made the elimination rounds at a few tournaments, but we did not have any exceptionally good performances.
We went 2-6 at Northwestern, which was an improvement over what I had done as a freshman.
Gary and I flew unaccompanied to a tournament at Loyola of Baltimore. The field was weak. I think that we qualified for the elim rounds, but then we lost. I lost my overcoat on this trip. Another passenger evidently took mine from the overhead rack by mistake when the plane stopped in Pittsburgh.
Throughout the year ballots from several judges remarked that I should tone it down. I would start out at a reasonable volume, but after a while I got excited and started shouting. I worked on this.
Jeff did not work with Gary and me as much as he had helped Lee and me the previous year.
At the District 5 qualifying tournament for the NDT Gary and I were 4-4 with twelve ballots out of twenty-four, exactly average and exactly the same as Lee and I did the previous year.
Both freshman teams did quite well throughout the year. I don’t remember the details.
I think that this is a recent picture of Gary Black.
Jim Fellows decided that he did not want to debate any more.
My roommate in Allen Rumsey House, Charlie Delos, remarked that if he looked like Gary, he would kill himself.
The summer of 1968 was definitely unique. Assassinations led to destructive and bloody riots. The suburbs of KC, where I was, were not affected, but Detroit, one of the centers of the protest, is less than an hour from Ann Arbor. The police also rioted outside of the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago. Then Nixon disclosed the existence of his secret plan to end the War in Vietnam.
I had my first real job in the actuarial department of the insurance company that my dad worked for. My summer adventures are described here.
Fall 1968: Jeff Sampson moved on. Juddi made all the decisions about partnerships. She also did whatever coaching was done.
The team had one very talented freshman, Mike Hartmann. He had a pretty good partner, Dean Mellor.
After the election the “executive” was this guy.
The resolution was “that executive control of United States foreign policy should be significantly curtailed.”
I was paired with Alexa. We ran a case that banned deployment of troops to fight without a congressional declaration of war. I was first negative and second affirmative. Bill and Ann were the other varsity team.
Here is what I remember of the first semester.
I enjoyed debating with Alexa. I had never had a female partner before. She was a talented debater and a good partner, but the thing that really impressed me was that she carried her own evidence boxes.
A small percentage of varsity debaters were female. Black debaters were very rare. Alexa was the only Black female debater whom I ever saw at a varsity tournament in my four years as an undergraduate debater. This could not have been easy for her.
In one round we faced a good team that presented a a plan to use American food to feed starving people around the world. I had heard of this and done a little research, but I had never discussed it with Alexa. I decided to argue topicality and to present a counterplan that included all aspects of the affirmative plan, but no reduction in executive control. Alexa did not know what to argue in the second negative, but she soldiered on and did not complain, even when we ended up losing the round.
Our best tournament was Ohio State. We made it to the semifinals, which qualified us for the Tournament of Champions. We might have been the first U-M team ever to accomplish this.
For some reason Juddi drove us to Oshkosh, WI, to a second-rate six-round tournament at the state university there. In the first round we debated a really obnoxious team from Ripon College on our affirmative. The second round was allegedly power-matched, but we were scheduled to meet the same team on the same side! I immediately complained to the staff. I was told that we should just switch sides. I really did not want to debate that team again, but we had no choice. The teams that we faced after that were a little better, but I was depressed after the last round. Then they announced the results. I was astounded when they announced that Alexa was the second-place speaker. I never had lower points than she did, and, sure enough, I won the award for top speaker, which, as I recall was a hearty handclasp. Alexa and I had won all six debates and qualified for the quarterfinals, where we were quickly eliminated on a 2-1 decision that no one in the audience could believe.
Juddi smoked. She expected one of the males to light her cigarettes for her.
We stopped for gas once when Juddi was driving her own car. She purchased $.50 worth of regular.
Juddi wore a LOT of makeup. Alexa, who roomed with her on trips, said that it was frightening to see her when she first got out of bed. One of the other grad students said that Juddi always looked like a million dollars, but you had to suspect that at least half of it was counterfeit.
Before final exams both Ann and Alexa quit the team. So, Bill and I were the only varsity debaters left.
We could not take the shortcut through Ontario because of the stop in Oberlin.
Spring 1969: The first tournaments that Bill and I attended together were at Harvard and Dartmouth in January. Juddi made the arrangements. We drove to Oberlin College in Ohio to pick up their team, Roger Conner2 and Mark Arnold, and their coach, Dan Rohrer. We then proceeded to Buffalo to pick up a team from Canisius College. I never heard of teams car-pooling to debate tournaments, and this was uncomfortable, at least for me. Mark Arnold disliked me intensely. Also, the Oberlin and Canisius teams had much better records than we did.
We definitely attended the tournament at Northwestern. I think that we were 4-4, which continued my trend of improvement over the previous year with three different partners.
The only other tournament that semester that I clearly recall was the very long drive to Minneapolis to attend a tournament at St. Thomas College, now known as St. Thomas University. I think that this was the first time that Jimmie Trent, a famous debate coach and a professor in the speech department at Wayne State, accompanied us. We attended a peculiar set of tournaments for the next year and a half. It was not until considerably later that I began to suspect that Juddi tried to schedule tournaments that she was reasonably certain that she and Jimmie would not run into anyone from Wayne State.
Jimmie definitely was very knowledgeable about debate, and he was also great fun to be with on tournaments. He specialized in my favorite kind of humor, the shaggy dog story, which was ideal for a long drive. His presence almost counterbalanced having to deal with Juddi. At some point they got married, but, as far as I could tell, that did not change the political implications of a Wayne State speech professor helping U-M debaters.
The tournament at St. Tom’s was at best second-rate. It did not even supply standard ballots for the judges. They had to fill in these yellow cards that rated speakers on a twenty-point scale instead of the thirty point version. There was also very little space for the judge to express the reasoning, if any, behind the decision.
When we were on the St. Tom’s campus, all this was covered with several feet of snow.
The three feet of snow on the ground made traipsing between buildings carrying our evidence a real pain and led everyone to question the motivation for the trip.
Bill and I went 7-1 in the prelims. That made us the top seed in the elimination rounds, which, as I recall, began with quarterfinals. Almost all tournaments used seeded brackets for the elimination rounds, but not this one. Instead, for some reason, they drew the pairings at random. In the quarterfinals we ended up debating against a team from Augustana College in Illinois that we had already defeated on our negative. We were “locked in” on the affirmative because tournaments generally guarantee that no team will debate another team twice on the same side.
This was the worst possible draw for us. I had a much better record on the negative throughout my career, especially with Bill. It was a tough round. I will always think that I won this round with a joke. I started my last affirmative rebuttal with this remark: “I have been wondering why Mr. ______ (the second negative) wore galoshes to the debate. Now that I see all the snow that they tried to bury the plan under, I understand. Let’s start digging.”
Everybody in the audience laughed. We won the room and two of the three judges.
In the semifinals we faced the team that gave us our only loss in the prelims. However, this time we were locked in on the negative and won easily.
In the finals we faced two guys from Iowa whom I had debated several times over the years. We were locked in on the affirmative. As it turned out, in the elimination rounds we faced the second, third, and fourth seeds, in that order. All were teams that we had already debated.
At this point in the year we had a pretty strong non-intervention case, but we also had a food case that we had pulled out (successfully) a few times that year. The northern plains was a very conservative part of the debate world, and so we decided to stick with the non-intervention case.
Just before the debate started, they introduced the five judges. Two were debate coaches with whom both teams knew pretty well. Three of them were local luminaries. Of course, we did not get to interview them, and so we had no way of know how familiar they were with debates at this level.
Debate coaches have a lot of practice at following arguments. The best tactics for dealing with inexperienced judges are not at all as clear as they are for dealing with debate coaches. The thought occurred to me that we should perhaps run the food case. Any yokel can relate to starving millions. However, it was only a flickering thought; we went with our original plan.
The trip back to Ann Arbor seemed longer.
We won both debate coaches, but lost the three civilians. I will always think that if we had used the food case, we would have won the outsiders and maybe lost the coaches. I had plenty of time to think about this on the long drive home. Winning this (or any) tournament would have been a feather in our cap. Finishing second in such a sorry gathering made us just an “also ran”.
Bill and I went 4-4 at the district qualifier in March. We only won eleven ballots. So, I appeared to be regressing a little.
During the summer I worked in a the actuarial department of Kansas City Life, not my dad’s employer. Two other guys, Todd and Tom worked there. One day someone asked if they had gone to lunch, and I was able to use a line I had been saving for weeks: “Tom and Todd wait for no man.”
Man also landed on the moon.
Fall 1969: I learned that two strong additions had been made to the debate staff, Roger Conner1, who had an exemplary record debating at Oberlin, and Cheryn Heinen, a very good debater from another strong debate school, Butler. Roger and Cheryn could probably have been a big help, but they were seldom allowed to go to big tournaments, and neither planned a career as a debate coach. Because the program had very few debaters, we hardly ever had practice rounds, and when we did, Juddi ran them.
Since Bill and I were the only debaters on the team with experience at the varsity level, I had assumed that we would be paired up from day 1. Partner-switching is uncommon at most schools.
I was therefore unpleasantly surprised and disgruntled to find myself paired with Dean Mellor at the beginning of the year. Bill and Mike must have also been debating together.
Cheryn did not work with us much. Still, the most memorable event of the semester occurred when she was driving us in a car from the university’s motor pool westbound on I-94. There were three other debaters in the car. One was certainly Bill. The other two must have been Dean and Mike.
The car was proceeding at the speed limit when all of a sudden the front hood came unlatched and was flung backwards by air pressure into the windshield. It also made a dent of at least six inches in the roof of the passenger compartment, but it remained attached to the hinges. The glass on the windshield shattered, but it stayed together. This video is what it felt like from the inside. However, we were going much faster, and both the windshield and hood were obviously beyond repair.
Cheryn screamed in terror, but she quickly regained composure. We were very fortunate to be quite close to an exit. Bill and I rolled down windows and gave Cheryn driving instructions to get the car onto the exit ramp and then into a service station.
Cheryn called the university and reported the problem. The people at the motor pool insisted that one of us had opened the hood for some reason and failed to latch it. We all insisted that no such event had occurred. After a few hours someone brought us a different car to use, and we continued on to the tournament without further incident.
The resolution for 1969-70 was that the federal government should grant annually a specific percentage of its income tax revenue to the state governments. I think that we ran the same case all year. It called for granting 50 percent of the income tax revenue to the states through existing grant-in-aid programs. We claimed that Congress would never finance the programs to that extent because of the power of the Military-Industrial Complex.
I do not remember details from too many tournament. I remember attending the Ohio State with Dean. We had been doing pretty well for the first seven rounds. In the eighth round, however, Dean got all flustered in the 1AR, and totally made a mess of things. His speech was so bad that there was no chance of winning after that. It was too bad, because we would have qualified for the elimination rounds if we had won.
DJT likes his steaks the same way.
I am not sure where we were, but at one tournament Juddi arranged for us to eat supper with the debaters from Emory University in Atlanta. She liked their southern charm. At dinner she ordered a steak well done. The waiter brought it. Juddi cut it and sent it back for more cooking. She judged that the substitute was sufficiently dead. She smothered it in red sauce. Before she could take a bite one of the Emory debaters asked her very politely why she didn’t just order a piece of bread and cover it with ketchup.
By the middle of November Juddi had changed the pairings so that I was again with Bill. On Thursday November 22 we drove to Chicago for a tournament at UICC. It was a fairly important tournament for us, but it meant that we would miss the last game of the football season.
Students at U-M were allotted one reduced-price season ticket on the south and west sides of Michigan stadium. I had a superb ticket on the 50-yard line. How I managed to get such a good seat is described here. On this occasion I gave my seat away to someone. I don’t remember who received it.
We only got to read about it.
We missed the best game in the storied history of Michigan football. Ohio State was rated #1 in both polls. Michigan was 7-2. OSU had never been behind at any point in any of their previous games. Nevertheless, Michigan prevailed 24-12 that Saturday and won a ticket to the Rose Bowl for the only time in my undergraduate career.
Meanwhile, Bill and I had our worst tournament ever. For me the worst aspect was our loss to my old friend and high school debate partner, John Williams, who represented UMKC. I was more depressed about this than about any previous result. Still, I only had one semester left, and I resolved to make the most of it.
Where are my U-M debate partners in 2020?
On Twitter I follow Bill Black, who is rather famous for finding fraudulent activity in corporate and political America. He currently teaches law and economics at UMKC. His Wikipedia page is here.
I have not been in touch with Gary Black. I was quite surprised to find this web page on the Internet. I am not positive that this is the Gary Black that I knew, but the age and colleges match. I wonder what Charlie Delos would think of Gary’s new career.
Alexa Canady is a famous neurosurgeon who is now retired and living in Pensacola, FL. I emailed her because I noticed that she was a member of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). She responded to the email, but we have not had any further correspondence. Her Wikipedia page is here.
I have seen Bill Davey twice since I graduated in 1970. When I came to Ann Arbor after being discharged from the army, he let me crash in his apartment for a week or so. I also saw him at a debate tournament at Georgetown in the mid-seventies. He was then clerking for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Later Bill was a big player in the development of the World Trade Organization. He is now retired from his teaching position at the University of Illinois. His biographical information is here.
Mike Hartmann is an attorney at the international law firm, Miller-Canfield. He was the CEO from 2007 to 2013. His bio page is here. I have been in touch with him by email.
Lee Hess is the Chairman of Cairngorm Capital and lives in Columbus, OH. I have communicated with him by email a few times. His bio page at his company is here.
Bob Hirshon is a professor at the U-M Law School.
I have not been in touch with Dean Mellor. Apparently he is doing something in sales in the L.A. area. His LinkedIn profile is here.
I have not been in touch with Larry Rogers.
Roger Conner.
1. Bill was a Presidential Scholar in his senior year of high school (1967), which indicates that he had one of the two highest scores in the state of Michigan on the National Merit exams.
2. I asked Roger why Mark Arnold hated me. He told me that I was right about that, but he did not know why. Roger was an interesting guy. He sold bibles in his youth. He tried to teach us to yodel, which he insisted was the best way to prepare for debates. He spent thirty years as lobbyist, mostly on immigration issues. I almost went to see him when he was leading a seminar in Hartford. In 2020 he is an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt.
From the front 8800 Fairway looks pretty much the same as in 1962, but two bedrooms and a bathroom were added to the back. My parents paid $35,000 in 1962. It is now worth $894,000.
We moved from Prairie Village to Leawood at some point during the summer of 1962. This allowed me to walk to and from Rockhurst High School. My sister Jamie went to first grade at Curé of Ars1 school, a brand new parish and school that was about 1.3 miles southwest of our house.
Boy Scouts: I was still in my original troop (#295) during the summer of 1962. I went to Camp Nash with that troop during the summer. By the end of the summer I needed only one merit badge to attain the rank of eagle.
I learned from the weekly bulletin at church that a new troop would be forming at Curé of Ars, #395. I signed up as one of the founding members. Most of the fathers running the new troop were former members of St. Ann’s parish in Prairie Village.
One scout in particular, Rob Runnels, was very disappointed to learn that he would not be the first eagle scout in the new troop. He was at least a year behind me.
I finished the requirements at some point in my freshman year. I needed only to go before a Board of Review of three officials from other troops. I don’t know why, but they did not like my attitude. They dressed me down for being, I guess, too flippant. Eventually they approved me after I promised to help someone else achieve the rank. Many guys quit immediately after becoming eagles, but that was never my intention.
I went to Camp Nash in 1963 with Troop 395. I was either Senior Patrol Leader or Junior Assistant Scoutmaster. Rob was the other one.
The neighborhood: Our new house was (and still is) in a very nice neighborhood. All the bedrooms were a little larger than those of our previous dwelling, and we also had a family room, a dining room, a fireplace, a double garage, a basement, a patio, central air conditioning, a patio, and a huge backyard. Oh, yes, it also had an attic fan that my dad insisted on running instead of the air conditioner all night all summer.
My sister quickly made friends with a girl her age name Trudy Shirley, who lived a block south of us. For some reason when Fairway crossed 89th St., the name of the road changed to Meadow Lane, which is the street that Trudy lived on.
Two boys who were one year my junior lived on Fairway. Sal Dasta was, I think, the nephew of Vincent Dasta, who had a construction company in KC and donated a lot of money to Rockhurst High School. He donated so much money that the football stadium was named after him.
Sal did not go to Rockkhurst. He went to Bishop Miege, the same school that my sister attended seven years later. The Dasta family moved at some point while I was in high school. I never spent much time with Sal.
The Cipollas lived in the house on the far right. They also owned the lot that now has a big house with large trees on it.
I spent a lot of time at John Cipolla’s house for all four years that I was in high school. His parents owned the house on the east side of the street on the corner of 89th St. They also owned the vacant lot next door. They had a daughter who was a year or two older (and a decade or two more mature) than I was. Everyone called her Sugar; I don’t know if that was her name or a term of endearment. Here are some of the reasons that I spent a lot of time at John’s house, and he spent virtually none at mine:
A regulation basketball goal on a large driveway with a powerful set of spotlights.
A swimming pool.
An entire vacant lot large enough to play touch football or softball on. It included a backstop.
High-quality balls of all kinds.
An arcade-quality pinball machine.
A set of weights and barbells.
Tumbling mats.
Like this, but more room.
A 9′ perfectly balanced pool table with leather pockets, overhead lighting, a set of excellent cues, and enough room on all sides. It supposedly came from a pool hall.
A half bath in the basement with a sign that said “We don’t swim in your toilet; please don’t pee in our pool.”
A sister with huge gazoingies, but she was seldom around.
A subscription to Playboy. I might have forgotten to mention this one to my parents.
There was also a beautiful set of golf clubs in the garage. They were there the first time that I visited him, and they had not moved a millimeter by my last visit.
John was adopted (and he knew it), but his parents treated him like the Dauphin. He had had polio as a child, but it did not affect him much when I knew him. He was not a great athlete, but he was OK at pretty much everything except sprinting. His parents had put in the swimming pool to help his therapy, and he was a good swimmer.
John’s was very similar to the one featured here. He did not play by sense of smell, but he was unbeatable.
Guys were always gathered at the Cipolla house. In bad weather we usually shot pool or played pinball. John was quite good at both of these activities. A guy whose last name was Joyce lived on 89th St. He was the first non-adult I had met who smoked. He was a pretty good shot at pool, almost as good as John. I was not nearly as accurate as they were, but I taught myself how to control the cue ball. I was competitive in everything except nine-ball, and I was quite good at a game that we called “table billiards” that was played with a cue ball and three colored balls.
One of my proudest moments was when some guys whom John knew from school showed up to play touch football. I was one of the last guys chosen, but I scored several touchdowns because I was much better than I looked. As usual, no one guarded me when I went out for a pass.
John and I occasionally went to the mall together. I remember that once he deliberately cut himself on the hand. He then walked into the Christian Science Reading Room and asked the lady at the desk for some MercuroChrome. I don’t know what she said, but he was giggling when he returned.
On another occasion we were going up an escalator together. On his left was another escalator going down—like an X. At the crossing point he reached over to a unsuspecting lady on the down escalator and mussed up her hair. I could not believe he did that. I don’t deny that I probably laughed. There was not much she could do.
John’s dad’s name was Frank “Chips” Cipolla. The family pronounced the last name sih POE lah.I later learned that cipolla means onion in Italian, and it is pronounced chee POE lah. Chips owned Monarch Electric Co. My dad told me that his business was sketchy. Actually, he did not use the word “sketchy”, but I don’t want a severed horse’s head to appear in my bed.
While I was away at college I learned that John had put a loaded shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I had never seen that shotgun. I wonder what other goodies he had that I never learned about.
During the last year or two of high school another guy my age moved in next door. He went to the other major prep school in the KC area, Pembroke Country Day. Their students were called the Daisies by guys at Rockhurst. I don’t remember the fellow’s name, but he was allergic to grass, and so he stayed inside almost all the time. He was an avid chess player, and he subscribed to chess magazines. Whenever I was around he cajoled me into playing chess with him. He was not very good. Any of the guys in Rockhurst’s chess club would have destroyed him.
Music: I began to become interested in popular music around the eighth grade. By the time that the Beatles arrived in 1964 I had become somewhat obsessed. Like most of my classmates, I listened to Don Armstrong (“DA the DJ”) on WHB nearly every evening.
Unlike my classmates I created my own list, which I called WAVE’s Prime 29, every week. I typed it out and saved them all for years. It was good typing practice, and it paid off any time anyone played “Name it and claim it” and a few decades later when Trivial Pursuit became the rage.
At some point my parents bought me a pool table for Christmas. It was not in the same league as John Cipolla’s. It was only a six-footer, and the top was warped in one corner. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time in the basement shooting pool and listening to my records. I must have listened to Highway 61 Revisited at least one hundred times.
I listened to some of my mother’s records, too. I liked the French music and the Russian music, but I had no use for her Broadway show tunes. My dad, by the way, had no records. He was tone deaf. The only music he liked was monks chanting.
Sports: I followed all sports. My favorite was football, but it was obvious that my two touchdowns in the eighth grade would probably be the apex of my football career. My parents bought me a backboard and basketball hoop. My granddad helped mount it on the roof over the garage. It wasn’t quite high enough, and the rim broke fairly soon. So, practicing on it was probably counterproductive.
I spent a lot of time in the backyard trying to improve my golf swing. my dad had a copy of Ben Hogan’s book, and I modeled my swing on his. I did not follow his advice on the waggle, which had fallen out of fashion since he retired. I still have the book fifty-five years later.
I never got to be very good at golf. My swing was pretty good, but with my puny build I had to swing very hard to get reasonable distance. Moreover, my pitching and putting were not reliable, to say the least.
For a handful of years I spent a week during the summer at my uncle’s house in Kelly, KS. Those adventures, including some golf outings on a rather unique course, are described in Part 3.
Vacations: My dad liked to spend his allotted vacation time in, of all places, Cass Lake, MN. I am not sure why. We went there three or four times, and we always stayed in a cabin at the same place. The name of the place was Journey’s End or something like that. We had access to the lake, but we seldom used it. We rented a boat a couple of times, but my dad was not a fisherman, and he did not know how to swim.
Maybe the idea was to escape the heat of Kansas City. My recollection is that the weather was quite good on these trips. Nevertheless, I remember that in Iowa we once stayed in a motel that did not have air conditioning. The manager brought a tiny fan into the room. It did not help. The heat did not bother me; it seldom does. However, the rest of the family suffered.
Instead of water sports my dad and I played golf almost every day. The local course had sand greens like the one in Seneca, KS, that we played on when we visited Fr. Joe in Kelly. We played there a few times, but mostly we drove to other places in the area that had traditional courses.
Perhaps I should mention that my dad was not a good golfer. For one thing he was left handed, but he played golf right-handed, the opposite of Phil Mickelson. He had no power, and his ball always sliced. He was not a bit scientific. It annoyed me when he asked me what he was doing wrong. I wanted to say, “Well, your grip keeps you from snapping your wrist properly. Your stance prevents you from twisting your hips, and you always swing outside-in. You should fix all of those things first.” Instead, I just mumbled “I don’t know.”
His short game was much better than mine, however. So, we kept on playing for years. I don’t know if he enjoyed it. I enjoyed being on a golf course, but I usually ended the round in a bad mood.
Usually we drove up through the center of Iowa to Minnesota, but once we must have taken the western route through Nebraska and South Dakota. At my insistence we stopped at Wall Drug, the biggest tourist trap ever. I wonder what Wall Drug would have done if someone asked a clerk where they kept the aspirin.
We stayed overnight in Rapid City, which I thought was a pretty nice place, mostly because I found a radio station that played rock and roll music. The next day we went to Mount Rushmore. I think that we then drove up to North Dakota before we turned east to my dad’s favorite spot.
More than once we also drove up to Bemidji, where Jamie and I gaped at the huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox and the singularly unimpressive source of the Mississippi River. Bemidji also had a rather nice golf course.
For the life of me I cannot remember what else Jamie did on these trips.
They take education seriously in the Shawnee Mission school district.
Driving: During the summer of 1964 I took the drivers’ education course at Shawnee Mission East High School.2 I walked to the classes. It was the first time since kindergarten that I attended a public school. The rest of the students all knew one another.
At least one of the instructors was a (football, I think) coach at SME. On our first practice drive I was in a car with him and two girls. One of the girls went first. After driving very slowly and carefully for five or ten minutes she came to an abandoned railroad track and proceeded to cross it. The instructor was in the passenger’s seat in front with the window rolled down and his arm hanging out. As we crossed the track he smashed his fist down on the top of the car and announced “We just got hit by a train.”
The girl driving the car was paralyzed with terror. The other girl had to take over the driving while we were still on the track.
I passed the driving test without too much difficulty, and I received the highest score on the written test. It was fun to listen to the other students asking one another who was Wuh-VAH-duh.
I got my driver’s license on my sixteenth birthday. That fall I had a very minor accident in the parking lot of my dentist’s office. I did not do the right thing, and, for the first time in my life I could have (probably should have) gotten in a lot of trouble. However, by that time I had attended mass a truly incredible number of times and I had amassed a large number of prayers and indulgences. My guardian angel looked after me.
Amusements: At some point I learned how to play bridge. I don’t think that they taught me. Who would have been the fourth? I think that I must have read Charles Goren’s book on bridge that was on the bookshelf in the living room. Then I must have played with three of my high school friends a few time, although I have no memory of the specifics. It would be easy to get a foursome at Dan Waters’ house, and I went there several times.
I remember that once John Williams and I went to Worlds of Fun to hear the Shadows of Knight, the group that scored with Gloria. They were awful.
I went to a few movies with other guys from school. The school showed The Mouse that Roared, which was pretty good. I was very impressed by Peter Sellers, and the board game Diplomacy that the diplomats played in Grand Fenwick intrigued me. I discovered that there was a real Diplomacy game and brought it with me to Ann Arbor.
Twice I went to movies by myself. On the yearly Jesuit holiday one year I walked up to the Ward Parkway Mall to watch West Side Story. That was weird; I was the only person in the theater. The other occasion was to see Dr. Strangelove, my favorite move of all time. For some reason I could not persuade anyone to go with me.
The most memorable time of all of these years was when a bunch of us went to the American Royal auditorium in KC KS to see the greatest wrestling card in the recent history of KC. A few preliminary matches (one with midgets!) preceded the two headliners.
Bob Geigle and Bob Brown
In the second-to-last match the North American Tag-Team Champions Bob Geigel and Bob Brown (two local wrestlers) against Dick the Bruiser, the heel of all heels, and Cowboy Bob Ellis, the all-American good guy complete with white cowboy hat. Heels never paired up with pretty boys, and Geigel and Brown always cheated. So, for one night Dick the Bruiser became the world’s ugliest pretty boy. This may have been the only time ever that the Bruiser and the Cowboy teamed up.
Since it was a title match, it was best two falls out of three. The NATTC was a local belt, and so Geigel and Brown had to win the third fall, which they did through some illegal tactic that I don’t remember. They couldn’t let this belt leave the KC area unless Bruiser and Ellis were scheduled to return soon, which was highly unlikely.
What I vividly remember was that during the second fall Bruiser was lying helpless on his back with his head lifted a few inches off the mat. Brown went over to him and tried to push the head down with one foot. It did not budge. Then—I swear this actually happened!—Brown stood on his forehead for a few seconds while Bruiser used his massive shoulder muscles to keep his head off the canvas. Then, of course, Cowboy Bob came to the rescue.
The final match between WWA World Champion Gene Kiniski and local hero the Mongolian stomper was easily the best wrestling match I have ever scene. Kiniski wiped the floor with the Stomper in the first fall. The second fall started the same way, but then the support of the local crowd revived the Stomper, and he pinned the champ. Nobody got too excited. Everyone knew that each guy would
In the third fall the Stomper again overcame early difficulties to gain control. He had Kiniski in an airplane spin, which was the prelude to his finishing moves. The crowd got very excited, but somehow Kiniski’s boot hooked on the top rope causing the Stomper to fall on his back, and Kiniski landed right across his shoulders.
It was the most beautifully choreographed maneuver that I ever saw. 1-2-3 the match was over. Kiniski won, and the crowd was in an uproar.
Food: My mother was a great cook. Her meals were nutritious and delicious. We had my favorite, fried chicken, nearly every week. Dessert was not always provided, but sometimes my mother would bake apple or cherry pies that were to die for. I also admit to consuming a substantial amount of potato chips and cokes.
We seldom went to restaurants. Instead, my dad decided that we would enjoy steak dinners every Saturday nights. If the weather was decent, he would grill them, and I certainly cannot complain about the results.
My parents really provided a wonderful environment for my sister and me. It met or exceeded the lifestyle of wholesome suburban kids on TV.
1. The curé of Ars is better known as St. John Vianney. Curé just means “parish priest”. It always struck me as very strange that whoever came up with the name of the parish in Kansas used the French word for priest but the English word “of”. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that during the last ten years of his life (which ended in 1859) he heard confessions for sixteen to eighteen hours per day. I doubt that many of the twenty thousand who flocked to Ars every year were dancers. J.V. refused absolution to all who engaged in “paganic dancing.”
2. There is a town named Shawnee and a town named Mission. Shawnee Mission is the name of the postal district and educational district that includes those towns, Overland Park, Prairie Village, Leawood, and others. As of 2018 27,648 students attended classes at the district’s five high schools, five middle schools, thirty-four elementary schools, and six instructional centers. Over 400,000 people now live in the district, more than in Wichita, the largest city in Kansas.
Discipline at Rockhurst when I was there was strict. The principal was Fr. Kloster, SJ, who ran a very tight ship in every way. Everything always seemed to run smoothly. The vice-principal was in my recollection was the vice-principal. The path to success for students to avoid contact with any of them: Fr. Bauman, Fr. McGuire, and Brother Winmueller.
With one exception I never heard of anyone skipping school for any reason. Vic Panus once decided to skip. He had his girlfriend call the school and pose as his mother asking to excuse him for illness. The lady in the office agreed that he should not attend if he was ill and then hung up. She then called Vic’s house to verify the situation. Whoops.
The next day Vic was summoned to Fr. McGuire’s office. We did not see him all day. I know no more than this, except for the fact that neither Vic nor anyone else in our class ever tried to skip class. As I said, nearly everyone really wanted to be there, and they avoided anything that would put their enrollment at risk.
At Rockhurst a large area called the lounge was directly beneath the cafeteria and adjoined the gym. It contained dozens of padded benches. On the side opposite the gym was an open-air area in which guys were allowed to smoke. This astounded me at the time, and I would wager that it was eliminated at some point.
Before classes guys congregated in the lounge with their friends and quizzed each other about the day’s lessons. At least that is what the guys that I hung around with often did.
Rockhurst had no recess periods, but the lunch break lasted for one hour and twenty minutes. During these breaks students could study, just mess around, participate in a club activity, or play intramurals. I seldom studied during the lunch break, but I did all of the others.
If you fell for this twice, you really were foolish.
In freshman year I often played chess in the classroom of Mr. Stehno, who supervised the chess club. We played give-away chess as often as we played the regular game. You could play more games in less time.
During my chess-playing period it never occurred to me to read a book on chess, and Mr. Stehno never encouraged the idea. I wonder if any of my opponents did.
I quit when I I could not sleep at night because as soon as I closed my eyes sixty-four red and black squares appeared on the inside of my eyelids. Seriously.
I also was in the Sodality, the precise purpose of which I do not remember. It had some kind of religious orientation. I think that the faculty rep was Mr. Apel,1 but I might be wrong. I vaguely remember that we visited a nursing home or a food kitchen.
I went on a “retreat” for a couple of days. That might have been with the Sodality. The idea was to remain silent for a couple of days, and try to get in touch with … whatever you were looking for. I had always been taught that those who were made to be priests would be called. I figured that if was going to be called, this would be it. I didn’t hear anything.
I played on some very bad intramural teams with some of my friends. When five-on-five soccer (with much smaller nets and no goalies) was introduced in my senior year, a group of us geeks gave it a try. One time our opponents showed up with only four players. This was the only game that our team won, and I scored all five of our goals. This was the highlight of my intramural career, and I could not name what ranked second.
For some reason our class was spared the typing class. One of the smartest things that I did, not just in the high school years, but in my life was to teach myself how to type. At the time my dad was working on public relations for Maur Hill with Fr. Edwin Watson and Fr. Roger Rumery. Fr. Roger brought me a typing instruction text, and my parents let me have the old Royal portable that had been sitting around the house. I think that this occurred before the start of my sophomore year.
I wanted to learn how to type in order to prepare for debates more efficiently. Debate preparation involves recording and organizes pieces of evidence and the writing of arguments and the first affirmative speech. Typing helped me with all of those, but it also allowed me to do hundreds of things more efficiently, AND it got me much better jobs during my stint in the army. In college I was able to type my own papers efficiently. This became much more important when I was in grad school.
Nearly everyone at Rockhurst went to as many basketball and football games as possible. Attendance was vigorously encouraged by the faculty. We had frequent pep rallies, and the school supplied buses to nearby away games.
If we were on the road for a speech tournament, John Williams would call his younger brother person-to-person. Whoever answered the phone would provide a number at which the brother could allegedly be reached. It was actually a code. The exchange identified whether Rockhurst had won or lost. The last four digits were the score.
The two best athletic performances that I witnessed were both from students in the class of 1965, one year ahead of us. In the 1963 football season, when I was a sophomore, Joe Spinello was among the best very best running backs in the KC area. However, he was much less effective his senior year. I don’t know why.
Ken Mayer was elected to the Rockhurst Hall of Fame in 2009.
Ken Mayer was by far the best basketball player that I saw in a Rockhurst uniform. However, the team my senior year actually did better when Kent Northcraft, the center, turned himself from just a tall guy into a force to be reckoned with. Credit is probably also do to the coaches.
We usually won, but occasionally it was excruciating. I vividly remember a game at Bishop Miege. We were ahead by more than twenty points. Then, all of a sudden we could do nothing right. With a few seconds left the lead was down to only one point. One of our players just hurled the ball in the air as high as he could. It almost hit the ceiling. One of the Miege players caught it and tried a very long shot. Thank goodness it was way short.
1. Fr. John Apel celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination as a priest in 2019. His description of his career is here.
Before my senior year at Rockhurst I had paid little attention to the NFL (National Forensics League, renamed in 2014 as the National Speech and Debate Association). The school had long sponsored a chapter of the league, and our results from tournaments were always sent to the NFL headquarters. Debaters all had NFL pins, and most guys wore them to competitions. The inlaid gem(s) indicated ranking in terms of points accumulated. The highest rank at the time was double-ruby, which indicated 500 points earned. Points were awarded for debates, rounds in speech events, and miscellaneous speaking events, including the state’s annual student congress. The maximum number of points in each category was limited.
This method of scoring suited my style perfectly. I participated more and in more varied events than anyone else on the team. My results had not been stellar, but early in the year I calculated that I could possibly amass 500 points by the end of senior year. It seemed like a reasonable goal, but it meant going to a lot of tournaments and other events. I decided to go for it.
Our NFL chapter elected a president and vice-president every year. My recollection is that Bill Locke was elected president, and I was vice-president. Since Bill was playing football during the tournament that Rockhurst sponsored each fall, it was my responsibility to “run it”. I don’t remember that I actually did much. Mr. Marchlewski and Mr. Rothermich did most of the preparation and tabulation of results. I might have arranged for timekeepers or something like that. At any rate, everything seemed to go pretty smoothly.
The NFL at that time awarded trophies to schools that had amassed a large number of points over the years. It just happened that Rockhurst won the trophy my senior year. Bruno Jacob himself, the founder and patriarch of the NFL, paid us a visit. All of the students assembled in the gym for his presentation of the award. I was chosen as master of ceremonies.
Bruno E. Jacob died in 1979.
The students were seated in the bleachers on either side. A lectern with a microphone was placed halfway between one of the basketball goals and midcourt. A wire ran from the lectern back to a corner of the gym. Mr. Jacob, myself, and some faculty members were seated in folding chairs behind the lectern. I have no idea who was responsible for the setup. I had never been involved with one of the assemblies.
The microphone did not work, and no one seemed available to fix it. I went on without it, and I think that I did a pretty good job of projecting my voice. However, I could hardly hear Mr. Jacob’s presentation at all, and I was only a few yards away from him. So, most of the students probably had no idea what he said. It was not memorable enough to last for in my brain for fifty-five years either.
Since Bill Locke was busy on the gridiron, I got to debate with John Williams for the first few months. We did exceptionally well together, winning almost all our debates. However, when Bill came back, he was paired with John again, as he should have been.
I am pretty sure that I had participated in the annual student congress event in my junior year at the RLDS headquarters in Independence. I had been very active and won a lot of NFL points.
I think that the congress in my senior year was held at the state capital in Jefferson City. I was somehow chosen to give the prayer to open the session. For a second my mind went blank (for the first and only time ever in a public speech), but I recovered and said what I intended. I did not take the advice of a student from St. Louis University High (another Jesuit school) to start the prayer with “Almighty God, if you exist, …”
I worked pretty hard preparing for all of the bills, and I received high marks from the judges in the first session. I was selected to chair the second session. I was surprised to discover that the first chairman had not made a seating map. I made one for myself so that I could fairly allow people to participate. Even so, the coach from (I think) Fort Osage High School interrupted the session and humiliated me by insisting that I call on people whom he designated. That soured the experience for me, but I still won quite a few NFL points.
John Lindsay.
My best moment almost occurred in the finals of the extemp event at a tournament in senior year. I don’t remember which one. In extemp you draw three topics, select one, and then spend 30-45 minutes crafting a speech on the topic. I think that the time limit was 5-7 minutes. My topic was whether the Republican Party was doomed after the Goldwater fiasco of 1964. I argued that the party would bounce back because of some younger people like John Lindsay, Chuck Percy, and a couple of others whom I can’t remember. Two of the three judges ranked me first, but the other judge, who said that he was a Republican himself, claimed that my speech was too obviously biased in favor of the GOP. So, I lost out to a guy who got a first, a second, and a third.
Incidentally, both of my parents were Democrats. My dad told me that in 1948 he went into the voting booth intending to vote for Dewey, but he couldn’t do it. I have never even considered voting for a Republican, and I had several chances to vote for Lowell Weicker, who was very popular in Connecticut.
He might have said it.
I started doing better in extemp because of some advice from a fellow extemper from Parkview High in Springfield. I noticed that he spent no time researching his speeches and little time writing or rehearsing. He explained that he mostly made up the facts that he cited and that he usually started his speeches with “Wasn’t it Coleridge who said …?” He insisted that this was kosher. “I didn’t say that Coleridge said that; I merely posed the question.”
I was too much of a Boy Scout to do that. However, I did lighten up a little. Once, in a tournament at St. Paul’s in Concordia, MO, I was in a bind. The guy who selected the topics wanted to make life miserable for extempers. The three that I chose included one on fashion, one on a relaxation technique, and one on the effect of the Papal Line of Demarcation of 1493 on Latin American politics.
Actually, there were two lines.
I had heard of the last one—the pope ceded the east to Portugal and the west to Spain. However, at that point in my life I did not know the pope’s name. I knew a few pope’s names that were fairly common; so I just called him Pope Urban.1 I argued that Portugal was too weak to control its properties for very long, and Spain was likewise unable to control its more distant properties. So, in the end all of South America was susceptible to foreign influences. In the sixties that opened the door to Communism. I had no evidence whatever to make that claim, but at the time it seemed like something that Time or Newsweek might say.
I finished second in the round, which earned some NFL points. That was a lot better than I would have done talking about fashion.
In the NFL state tournament I got to the semifinals in extemp. I didn’t expect to win, but my goal was to make the finals. I did make the finals of another unusual event, oratorical declamation. The idea was to deliver a speech that someone else had given. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but it gave me a chance to compete in another event. I picked a translation of a speech from the French revolution.
I made the finals, and so did Tom Mulhern. They announced me as finishing third, for which I won a trophy. When I looked over the results I realized that the tabulation room had gotten confused. Actually, Mulhern was third. I mentioned this to Mr. Rothermich on the ride back to KC, and he sternly told me to shut up about it. I did, but I would have preferred to let Tom know that his work was appreciated.
It was a near thing, but I won enough points to get the double-ruby pin. Pat Dobel, John Immele, John Williams, and Bill Locke repeated as champions of the state debate tournament.
1. The line was actually drawn by Pope Alexander VI, the notorious second Borgia pope, in 1493. It was redrawn in a peace treaty the next year. You can read about this and Papa Borgia’s other tricks here. That thing on his head is a tiara, which was the official headgear of popes up until Paul VI set it aside in the twentieth century.
2. This horribly unimaginative song tied “California Dreamin'” as Billboard’s top song of 1966. Surely this was the worst song ever to become so popular. Sadler was a medic in Vietnam. His one hit made him a lot of money, but his life subsequently went quickly downhill. In 1979 he was charged with second-degree murder and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Nashville. He went to prison for thirty days. In September of 1988 he was shot in the head in a taxicab in Guatemala City. He died early the following year.
