COSMIC NEURAL
Parents often hear more than one career ambition from an adolescent. In my case, training for the ministry came between wanting to become an architect and to become a physician. The inspiration struck in junior high school, just the right moment to learn about and apply to a Lutheran boarding school in a nearby suburb of New York City. In retrospect, I think I wanted to get away from home and feel grown up, serious, even superior.
Concordia was not even remotely in the same ballpark as the famous prep schools that fed into the Ivy League. But it had several advantages for me. A compared with the local high school, I got a chance to be a little independent at age 15 instead of having to wait until 18. The school was close enough to home that I could keep up with my junior high friends on weekends and talk with Dad on the drives back and forth. And the school had excellent teachers, insofar as I could judge.
In the dorm, four of us shared a suite composed of a bedroom with closets and a study with desks. A proctor lived in the dorm and would lurk in the evening halls in rubber-soled shoes. We were told to study not talk or listen to the radio, but the junior in my suite kept the “Top 40” playing softly in his drawer and had the skill to detect the rubber-soled shoes and hit the off switch when the proctor was about to open the door. He tuned his radio to a show called “Alan Freed and His Crystal Ballroom.” In this way I was introduced, for example, to Bill, Haley & His Comets, and to many pop songs, including “Earth Angel” (“will you be mine?).
The dorm included many secrets, including a trick to which I was never subjected but which I heard about from a victim. It was called “circle jerk.” The mark would be told it was a great honor to join a group of boys who would turn off the lights and masturbate individually while standing in a circle. I suppose this gave a new meaning to the concept of “fellowship.” At a crucial point, the light was turned on, to reveal that only the mark was going at it. To cover his intense embarrassment, the event was then described as an initiation that almost everyone has gone through.
Classes, sports, dining hall. Food fights were forbidden, but that didn't stop boys from flinging sticks of butter wildly.
As editor of the student paper, a prelude to a role thst I also played in college, I devoted one front page to a parody of the 23rd psalm, the one that begins with a declaration that “the Lord is my shepherd…” (I never liked being portrayed as a sheep, having learned during a farm holiday that, while pigs show a certain intelligence, sheep are notably stupid.) This parody of sacred scripture did not amuse the principal, especially because the issue of the paper had already, by the time he read it, been mailed to parents.
Apart from the classes, my favorite aspect of the school was helping to make a promotional film directed by an alumnus. Consulting on the script and running the camera, I learned a lot from the director, who seemed mainly concerned that people in front of the camera “act natural.”
In order to become “well rounded,” I went out for soccer, but my foray into sports was soon cut short when the school sent me as its representative to the Mirror Youth Forum in Manhattan. There I had to compete with stars from the Bronx High School of Science and other elite institutions in the big city. (On the way to the train station I would treat myself to such exotic delicacies as a “rollmop,” made from a fillet of herring.)
During the three years at the boarding school, I progressed through several more prospective careers, including the first instance of wanting to be a writer. Despite his own profession of electrical engineer and inventor, Dad encouraged me. A while later, I realized how uncertain is the income of a writer.
Going to Concordia probably helped me get into a good college, at least one accustomed to giving preference to grads of boarding schools. Typically, Dad put on my shoulders the whole rigmarole of learning what colleges were good and applying. Among the things I neglected was including a “safety school.” By some miracle, I was admitted where I most wanted to go.