Chapter Twelve:

Back East...

IT HAD BEEN ARRANGED BEFOREHAND, however, (my parents always managed to arrange things "beforehand" but for some reason, I am hard put to arrange things even "after the fact" (Grin!) and I just don't understand why...) that we were to move to ... Riverside, Connecticut!.... a suburb of famed Greenwich. (Lest someone point out that another "famous" Texan (no less than George Doubleyah hisself also has ties to the "Gateway to Southern New England," let me hasten to add that all similarity ends right there! Grin!). My folks had GMAC friends out of the "New York Office" who lived there in suburban Fairfield County, and so this was instrumental in their thinking. The war couldn't last forever ('twas said...) and Pop had decided to commute back weekly from Foggy Bottom. Some of the logistics have escaped me at this time, but somehow Mom went on ahead herself someway and she and Pop first took quarters down on Gramercy Park in NYC. Ceily and I followed alone, being met eventually by both of them at Grand Central Station. We were both older now, of course, and traveling with little sister was not nearly the embarrassment it once was - as when she regularly drank the finger bowl in the dining cars on the old "FW&DC" railroad (Ft. Worth and Denver City) as we fled the broiling summers of Texas, and the 12-foot high sunflowers were sucked down flat to the ground astern of us as we sat on the Observation Car Porch and watched them slowly rise again at our passing, mile after tedious mile. (Ever ride an Observation Car Porch? Traveling salesmen with their valises, smoking big cigars, telling tales, cinders and smoke flying about - and the waving sunflowers across those endless miles. Not something you likely ever to forget).

The train trip East lasted several days - and the country was big revelation for us both. I remember crossing the Mississippi - at St. Louis, I guess it was. Wow! Some river! Then the towns - how they grew in size and number and then strangely began to "blend" one into another - really to one from the "wide open spaces" just sort of one big town in fact! And the trees! And the streams and the lakes! Forested Colorado with its streams and pines is by no means barren - but the big trees - oaks, maples, poplars streaming past our windows were a revelation to me! Not even the woods around Beaumont had trees like this!

But my one and biggest and lasting impression of my first sight of "back East" - was .... the cemeteries! Everyone back here was apparently dead, for the tracks ran past endless cemeteries it seemed - acres and acres of stone monuments and tombstones! There were cemeteries in the West, of course, don't misunderstand me. But the size and number of them east of the Mississippi was striking to one only then issuing forth from the Wilderness!

We took a cab from Grand Central down to Gramercy Park. But not before Pop, good naturedly got off the old saw (with real justification this time!) to me, that if I didn't shut my mouth, and stop gawking up at sight of my first big buildings, I would surely sunburn my tonsils!

Over the next few days, Mom gave us a whirlwind tour of the Big Apple: we touched bases all the way from the Radio City Rockettes to the Statue of Liberty - even Horn & Hardart's Automat and Nedick's (was it?) where people stood up to eat at raised benches instead of sitting down at table - a first for me, and a foretaste of the "lack of elbow room" that most Easterners just take as a matter of course. Then a few weeks later we moved into Owenoke Way in Riverside. And since I was now a Senior in High School (and shaving at last!), I went down to Greenwich (on the old electric New York, New Haven and Hartford 'local" - a 'train' back here in the East - but which looked like nothing so much as strung together trolley cars to me - and sadly in want of a big "eight wheeler" up front, huffing and chuffing...) to enroll myself. But if a move from El Paso to Beaumont (with "tums tables" thrown in) took some adjustment - a move from Amarillo to Greenwich, Connecticut in 1943 was culture shock writ large!

For one thing, bikes were a minority means of transport to get to school here: everyone had a car! The parking lot was huge! (The only thing I had ever driven was an ancient Hupmobile (I swear it!) - the throttle was on the steering wheel post - on my Grandad's farm back in Colorado - and I managed to hang the front wheels over a sheer drop-off one time, so my hours behind the wheel were quite limited...). Here were shiny roadsters, flivers and junkers, too - but many , sleek up-to-date cars, row after row! There were more wonders in store, too.

There was no ROTC! (I have mentioned previously). My Home Room teacher was highly popular Mr. George Smith - a onetime Big League Ball player - who, so went the legend - was the pitcher that Babe Ruth got his longest home run hit off of one time. But now George taught something called "Solid Geometry." for which the requirement was first, mastery of "Plane Geometry" - in which I had only the sketchiest attainment. Shades of "tums tables"! My assigned seat was near the window, from which I could espy the Girl's Gym Team down below running around playing soccer in gym shorts. This proved a most attractive diversion from the platitudes up front of all those dead Greeks and their infernal concern with angles! ("Get a Life!" was my advice to them). I didn't know girls wore gym shorts. In fact I didn't know girls took gym. I don't think they did down in Texas. I think they mostly learned to cook, and bake and sew and stuff like that . Called Home Ec - something. Girls - women: they did not play too large a role down in macho Texas. "The Waxahatchee was too thin to plow, and too thick to drink, and Texas was hell on wimmin' and horses," said the oldtimers. But here in the land of the Liberal Yankees, girls obviously had a role to play! Up front! (Maybe my new found interest had to do with my new concern with shaving...). What I know anyway?

Anyhow I was sitting there watching the passing parade (as they say) and blissfully unaware of the silence that had fallen on the room behind me. Suddenly there was Mr. Smith at my side - and he had a surveyor's transit in his hand! (Part of the solid geometry lecture involved how to survey and look through survey instruments). Nothing would do as with a big smile, he set it up on the window sill - "So our new student from down Texas way can enjoy our beautiful Connecticut countryside" - and I was perforce enjoined thereafter to look through the telescope only at the Gym Class (no turning head now, to peep back at the class or look at the blackboard) throughout his Geometry lectures. This provided much merriment for all, and further greased the skids on my precipitous descent I knew not where to what depths. Sigh.

Most embarrassing of all was the way every class roared out loud whenever I was asked to speak! I had a heavy Texas drawl (no affectation in this case), plus the colorful "sayings" with which Texans salt-and-pepper their talk, and this was a source of never-ending wonderment to my associates. Obviously, I was immediately dubbed "Tex" as a nickname - which name was how many knew me for so many years. And friends of that era still do - though later both the drawl and the nickname went by the boards - as will be explained. Suffice to say, however, that my Pop liked to have had a conniption when my new friends began calling for me at our new home, asking if "Tex" were there!

"Great God, Berna!," he would intone to my Mom. "Are we never to be rid of that ungodly land down there! And now, here to think we have managed to get back East at last, and my own son - my own flesh and blood - and here they are calling up asking for "Tex!"

For a while, he tried to "stiff it" when asked on the phone for Tex: he would reply starchily, "No one lives here by that name!" LOL! Eventually he bowed to the inevitable.

The East was an enigma more ways than one. We lived in much more "settled" surroundings than out in Texas. But our immediate surround was much more "countryfied" than Texas. "Woods" grew everywhere and were dense and more or less untrodden and impenetrable. This suited me to a tee, since I have always been an outdoorsman. The endless stone walls running off in every direction, attracted me, and I became adept at lugging stones and repairing and shoring up rock walls on my dad's place. And I cut and hauled in all the firewood - free for the collecting - for the fireplace... two habits that stood by me the whole time of my long sojurn in that clime.

   






AND THEN THERE WAS THE WATER! The saltwater, I mean! More water than I had ever seen in one place at one time! LOL! Long Island Sound became my home-away-from-home and I virtually lived upon it. Coming from the Plains of Texas, I went nuts for sailing and sailboats, and bought and repaired a series of day sailers and sloops trading-up to my final centerboard, cabin sloop - the Black Gull (Seen here at left, a "bone in her teeth," outward bound on the port tack 'neath the grey skies of a long-ago "Smok'y Sou-wester" - the signature weather of High Summer on the seas of that latitude so long ago...). I fished endlessly for "flats", and tommy-cods, and eels; I "toe-clammed" in the mud on hot days and cold days. There were even oysters to be had for the taking! Pollution was all but unknown back then, and the Sound was a veritable watery version of my grandfather's distant emporium... The state of the tide became my main way to tell time. I was always checking the wind: long summer afternoons running "wung out" back downwind to the Riverside Yacht Club in those Sou'westers are some of my fondest memories of those times. I learned dead-reckoning, and rigs, and how to splice... and ultimately how to "...hand, reef, and steer." In time, I became first, crewman and then later, general factotum and "First Mate" to "Cap'n" Tom Floyd-Jones, a neighbor and friend of my parents. The Cap'n owned the famous ocean-racing yawl, Tamerlane....

... which actually won the first Bermuda Race, in 1906, and we see her there in the foreground... tubby old 38-footer, gaff-headed and close-hauled on the port tack.... as she fights it out to windward with her fellow competitors. I found this picture of her on the Web: she is very famous. The Cap'n was the last owner I believe; she disintegrated during prolonged lay-up at a yard up in Stamford so far as I know - long years later - I do not know the details - maybe the Cap'n had died - or something...

I cannot tell you what a major influence LIS played in my life. With my pals, we sailed everywhere in the Western Sound. West out into Great Captain's Bay and up the Mianus Harbor all the way to the Boston Post Road where it used to cross the Mianus River. Down to Tweed Island and Calf Island toward New York. Over to the North Shore and Glen Cove and Oyster Bay on Long Island, and Northport. East up the Connecticut shore to the Norwalk Islands, and all the "gunk holes" in between... There was Hen-and-Chickens Reef, and the "groaner" buoy (Red Nun 43, was it?) marking Mid-Sound (I could lie in my bed at night and hear its far-off moan in the dark...). There was the wreck of the old "sugarboat" (City of Gloucester), an early Sound boating disaster, and at low tide her rusted boilers and plates still stuck above the shoal waters west of Tod's Point...

Often we "took off" for the weekend and sailed across the Sound to "explore" the North Shore (Long Island). There were many lonely points of land, and dense woods and cliffs back then - anbd we would build big driftwood fires on the beaches and sleep in the sand all night. Daytimes we would hitch-hike across the Island (Farmington was about the mid spot at 20 miles)... to Jones Beach and swim then in the surf of the open Atlantic. We were a beach-bum lot and brown as berries.... Anton Nowak was my "First Mate" - the "Polack" - and his mother would make up a big gallon jar of "galumpkies"... sort of a cabbage leaf roll around ground meat and peppers... and this would last us a whole weekend...

I graduated that summer at the age of 16 (I was 17 two weeks later) - about two years younger on average than most of my classmates. A reason being, 'twas said back then, that Texas where I had most of my schooling, was on an "11-year system" whereas "the North" was on a "12-year system", the whole occasioned by longer school years in Texas, etc. Whatever the reason, I was certainly not an exemplary scholar and I know a most painful disappointment to my parents. Actually, I had made few friends, and those mainly the quirky, oddball types and loners who have always more or less made up my list of friends wherever I go. (They are inherently 'more interesting' than the herd... and "new boys on the block" get tired of everlastingly having to "crash" their way into cliques...). Beneath my picture in the Yearbook it said simply: "The Essence of Inertia."

Says it all.

But the "War" and the "Draft" were sucking up young males bigtime, and so parents sought to get their sons enrolled in colleges and universities where they could at least delay arrival of the cheery "Greetings!" letters from the Government - as they were known in those days. But the Halls of Learning were filled to bursting as result thereof - especially if they were covered with Ivy - a forlorn hope (considering my academic record) of Pop's that he would get me into an "Eastern School," one way or another and so get the rough edges filed off me at last. For some reason, Dartmouth became the rallying point: my parents determined to get me into Dartmouth. I think Cap'n Floyd-Jones was instrumental here, as he was a died-in-the-wool Easterner (from old-line Eastern family – his ancestors had settled in Quogue, Long Island – if memory serves – in the 1600's) and had graduated from Dartmouth himself. He was sort of my mentor anyhow you see, as I worked on his yawl.

"Dartmouth," he informed my parents, "would be just the ticket for Bernard. Dartmouth, unlike its more 'citified' partners Yale and Harvard and Columbia and so on, was way up in the cold boonies of the New Hampshire woods - and the activities there stressed hiking and canoing and rock-climbing and other manly sports. Just the ticket for one with his interests."

There was just one hitch: my academic record. It was decided after much family conversation, that I was to go to High School "post-grad" in a local "prep school" for one year with the express purpose of "bringing up my grades" and thus winning my way into the hearts and minds of the Dartmouth Admissions Board and thus escape the all-consuming Draft - and go on to excel at winter sports and making snowmen and all that sort of thing, and build lifelong contacts with my social peers and betters (presumably of the business world) and so live happily ever after.

Thus, I was enrolled in King School, in neighboring Stamford. This place was right out of Dickens. It was even housed in a spooky old Victorian onetime mansion out Strawberry Hill Avenue. The Headmaster (he called himself that) was Mr. Vernon Dwelle, who would have been as one with Mr. Micawber and "The Beadle." He even wore a pinz nez on a black ribbon, and spoke with a strange nasal twang and when surprised, or to startle you in turn, he could wrinkle that proboscis and drop the pinz nez where it swung idly to and fro across his vest while he fixed you with piercing eyes beneath beatling, bushy eyebrows. Needless to say his clothes were tweedy and in the manner of cut favored in the last century. Classes were referred to as "Forms," and the big kids as well as the youngest ones mingled daily in the downstairs "Foyer" at lunch hour and during class changes. (A rather overlooked failing, for this gave opportunity for the older boys to induce the smaller ones under all manner of threats and cajolings, into performing the most outlandish and outrageous highjinks and breaches of decorum). At such times Mr. Dwelle would appear on the landing of the old creaking stairway, and lecture one and all about "...how here in New England we maintain yet a cultural handshake across the Atlantic" (he was a shameless Anglophile), and he heaped Shakespeare and the Classic authors and Latin and Greek roots upon one and all with a passion. (He was crazier than a loon, and I learned more from him in that one year than all my previous schooling put together). Still, I had been entered under the specific promise to my father that Dwelle could "get me into" Dartmouth and as the report periods edged by, "marks" still hung in the balance. To "hedge" his commitment, Dwelle was fond of referring with despair to my "sketchy Southwestern education." LOL! He even carried this so far as to doubt to my father directly, that "...the boy had ever been properly exposed to any cultural benefits of higher learning" - or something like that. To which my father retorted at once that both he and my Mother both were graduates of the University of Denver. To which this really at times atrocious, old, insular snob quickly responded, "Well, Mr. Powell, here in the East we don't really consider those "diplomas" you got out there you know ("out there" being anywhere west of the Raritan in his view! LOL!)... they are more what we consider as... 'certificates of achievement'".

Jeezul! I thought my old man was going to deck him! He fumed over this "certificate of achievement" remark for a long time...

(Grin!)

Unlike the hulks who played with the Golden Sandies, here I was back up near the front ranks in size again and so my pals induced me to go out for football. Which I did and since the Prep Schools thereabouts were highly competitive and we had a schedule filled to over-flowing, this became a new passion. And we surged ahead in our league: beating Brunswick (some snooty school down Greenwich way), "Cherry Lawn" from somewhere, New Canaan Boys School and some "favored" military school from somewhere nearby. I played tackle and the constant weariness and aches and pains from "practice" and scrimmage and actual games every few days did nothing to improve my homework. I dozed nightly over my books - and with fellow team members - daily and openly in class. (It was sort of a badge of honor). We stuck together. Dwelle tolerated us because we were winning, but he would have substituted soccer and rowing on the Henley at a moment's notice for the crudities of football.

There was Josiah Bridge (the other Tackle). He was one of the free-est spirits of our little band - so naturally he became my best pal. Joe could think up more mischievous things to do in five minutes than most boys can in a day. He was actually a descendant of Josiah Bridges, THE founder of Harvard, I think he was. Old New England ancestry. But Joe's record was as blemished as mine, and Dwelle - whose mind was everywhere at once - would sometimes stop in the middle of a lecture up at the front of the class, the pinz nez would fetch up at the end of its black ribbon and he would turn and point at Joe and say: "Josiah Bridges! Great Gad A'Mighty, Boy! You are a descendant of the founder of one of New England's greatest universities! But I am here to tell you now, that if you do not change, you are going to be known as the Bridge that burned in the chain of Bridges that lead from Harvard!"

At this we would all snicker and exchange knowing glances. Later, when Dwelle was engrossed with "the young tads of the Lower Forms," Joe and I would sneak out the basement window of the old building and make our way down the long hill into Springfield (or was it still Glenbrook down there?) - anyhow - to the Colonial Pool Hall - where Joe introduced me to a new past-time and we were sure to meet others of the "team" practicing their reverse spins, bank shots and other tricks of the trade.

Funny - I remember their names still: there was George Sarvinias (a Greek, whose father was a furrier down on the old original Stamford Town Center). George was one of our "running backs" and high scorers. I remember how Pop, who was interested you understand, in his "investment" here, often checked me at dinner nights: "Did Greek play today, son?", as I dozed over my dinner. Between Dwelle and The Greek, he was going to get me into Dartmouth one way or another. George Skink played Center. Solid guy, not much talk. Andrew Gruber and I think a little guy named Harvey Parmetter something like that, played Ends. We won our pennant that year and our sweater Letters. I guess they still do that, don't they? I contributed some High Camp of course, to the "playoff" game: during one hotly contested action down on the "three yard line" - my pants came off! (They weren't really mine - I had borrowed them earlier for the game during some mixup in the locker room). This later was immortalized in the Yearbook (under my picture) as "Tex Powell Signalled a New Round-End Play During the Final Game". Beats a paen to Inertia anyhow (doesn't it?).

But alas, 'twas all in vain. Graduation came (again) and I matriculated, of course. But the applicants for Dartmouth and all else were now legion and the waiting lists very long. And naturally the "high achievers" were getting preference. June wound down: I got my "Greetings!" letter in the end - maybe week or so later. July passed in a blur.

On August 1st, I was inducted into the Army of the United States at New Haven, Connecticut and left on a troop train for Fort Devins in Massachusetts.

Reader Note: Since I have previously chronicled my time in Service, and posted same to my Website here, it seems natural at this juncture to refer readers to it, if they are interested in the "continuity" of this ongoing relation. Visit then, http://bwpowell.com/barrel/barrelindex.html , under title: "Bottom of the Barrel." This literary achievement shall stand in its entirity as Book Two of these Relations...).