We drove out toward the airport and set up in an uprooted tree in the middle of a field of tall grass, using it as a makeshift blind. It was warm, so I wore only a thin jacket over my T-shirt. It was a sunny afternoon, and my brother and I decided to go crow hunting. I was home for Christmas break, looking forward to a drunken party up on Lookout Mountain.
#BEFIT EASTHAMPTON MA FULL#
I found it more than once, truth be known, at summer revivals and tent meetings full of girls wearing cotton dresses with tight bodices. It was during this period that I found religion. I left Auburn the next year because of financial issues and went home to attend the University of Chattanooga, from which I graduated in 1962.
I went to Auburn University in Alabama, the only southern school at the time that had a department of industrial design. I was eighteen and they were still paying the bills, so I was pretty much obligated to do their bidding. The testosterone quotient inherent in working with cars was sufficient to satisfy my family-a male-dominated clan who judged men and boys by how well they played ball and how big their gun collections were. Designing automobiles was fine-so long as I didn’t do it in Detroit. They were, however, satisfied with my studying industrial design. Though they knew no artists, they were quite certain that all artists were “queer” and incapable of making a living. And my being an artist was simply not in their cards. For my family that was out of the question-it was too far north. My family wanted me to go to West Point but I wanted to apply to the Rhode Island School of Design. I offered to buy it from him, but he declined. He was the headmaster of a private school in Jackson, Mississippi, and still has my notebook from 1956. Not long ago I ran into my old biology teacher. The only place my drawing skills ever came in handy was in biology class. He sent me to the commandant’s office, where the commandant applied his “board of education” to my backside. When I was caught drawing I was punished, as on the morning my Spanish teacher caught me drawing a naked woman on a blank verso in my textbook. Art was not considered a manly endeavor for young southern lords such as we. I read books in order to pass algebra (which I failed once) and history (which I failed twice), and had it not been for Classics Illustrated comic books I’m certain I would have failed English too.
#BEFIT EASTHAMPTON MA HOW TO#
And I learned how to throw a javelin and put the shot, though not very well.īut I did not read. I also learned how to wrestle, though I never won a match. Thirteen of my teammates went to college on football scholarships and three of those made All-American. I learned how to play football as a T-formation center and linebacker.
#BEFIT EASTHAMPTON MA MANUAL#
I spent six years there, learning the general orders, the school of the soldier, the manual of arms, and when as a senior I became a cadet lieutenant, the manual of the saber.
In 1952 I was given an anonymous grant that allowed me to attend the Baylor School, which at that time was an elite, all-boys military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I grew up. Music has always been an important part of my life. We did have a small, eclectic, and impressive music collection: Fats Waller, Ted Lewis, Eddie Duchin, George Gershwin, Enrico Caruso, Grace Moore, John Charles Thomas, and so on. My childhood was not entirely bereft of the fine arts. I studied the drawings and let the images tell me the story. I read comic books-or looked at them, I should say. Copying and tracing the illustrations abetted my drawing skills, but the text did nothing for my reading. When I was ten my aunt and uncle gave us the 1950 World Book Encyclopedia. My mother read condensed novels and my daddy read the local papers. When I was a boy we might have had a dozen books in the house. I was never diagnosed with dyslexia, but I raised a daughter who was, and as I watched her struggle with reading I came to the conclusion that this probably had been my problem, too. Reading was painful for me and I avoided it. I drew on anything near at hand: stationery, tissue paper, wax paper, brown paper bags, cardboard, walls, and anything else I could find, including dirt.īut I did not read.
I drew naked women (lots of them), gladiators, cowboys and Indians, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He was right, however, when he said that I sat around drawing. In a letter he wrote to me shortly before he died he said that all I did was sit around drawing pictures and reading books while he cut the grass, cleaned out the gutters, and painted the trim on the house.
MY BROTHER SAID that I was a lazy dreamer when I was a kid.
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