Jr High School Years

Each school year, Boy Scout and Girl Scout representatives would visit the schools and encourage the students to join. That was also true in elementary school. Dad gave us all a choice. We could join Scouts or the YMCA. He highly recommended the Y, explaining that he could get a family membership for about $12 a year. And if we chose Scouting, we probably wouldn’t be able to participate in most of their activities as it was an expensive program. So that’s what we did, we joined the Y. The Y was only a few blocks away on 28th St. next to the Steel Mill’s main entrance. That’s where we learned to swim and where I first encountered Judo. But when we first started going, I was too young according to the Y’s guidelines, which I later found out were BS if the instructor OK’d your participation. So, I spent any and all the time I could scrounge at the Y, playing bumper pool, ping pong, swimming, and eventually Judo, once I turned 16.

It was also during this time (seventh and eighth grades) that I started to get a little more serious about learning. I started to read books on Mom’s and Dad’s bookshelves, which they said were for all of us. I started with The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper (that one might actually have been sixth grade), then David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I was also working on Plato’s Republic and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius while reading and memorizing The Rubaiyat by Omar Kyyam. I struggled, especially with Plato and Aurelius; lived with an open dictionary, increasing my vocabulary and linguistic understanding exponentially. My parents always blamed the school system for my later hard left turn, not realizing that the real culprits were their own bookshelves, starting with the disgustingly black history of capitalism documented in David Copperfield. I didn’t get it initially, but it didn’t take long to see the similarities of what was happening in our society to that of Dickens’s day.

In school, they put me in a reading class to increase my reading speed, which was extremely slow. They put me on a machine to force my eyes along the pages of text. That did help quite a bit. I was also taught a few other strategies for increasing my speed as well. When they tested me at the end of eighth grade, my reading speed and comprehension were excellent. They said I was precocious, but I think it was just Plato and Marcus Aurelius… Soon after that, I read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and The Way Of Zen by Alan Watts. I was off and never looked back.. so to speak.

To be Continued

–LE