As I think back now, my senior year became a turning point. Losing football forced me to discover strengths I did not know I possessed.
As soon as school started in September 1963, three senior football player friends called me to join them at one of their houses. They said they wanted me to run for senior class president because they liked me and felt I was a leader. The most likely winner was then a snobbish bookworm and I was a friend, a letterman athlete and they thought with jock support I could win. There were 350 in my class. I was good at sports but an introvert socially. I agreed but then just watched my buddies promote me to my classmates. I lost the election in a close race with me coming in second out of 4 candidates but learned there had been a malfunction in the voting machine. The next day my civics teacher encouraged me to request another vote. I got energized and involved, bringing the vote irregularity to an emergency student council meeting, and arguing persuasively, based on the teacher's support, for a revote, which was scheduled for the next day. That night at a local frozen custard high school hangout my long-time childhood friend and the candidate who finished third talked to me. He told me he would tell his supporters to vote for me since he would lose anyway. I agreed and won the election the next day. The lesson learned is that the game (whether politics or sports) is played away from the ball.
One of the football players named Mark Surface who talked me into running for class president came up to me mid-semester and asked if I could help him prepare for an American history test. He was failing history, and was challenged in other subjects. I had refocused from football to student leadership and academics. He came to my house and I showed him how I took class notes and regularly rewrote the notes including key points from assigned readings. He thanked me as he told me he never took notes and only studied the night before tests. After graduating from high school I met Mark while he was working as an electrician apprentice in the basement of building at Purdue University and mentioned he ought to consider college.
I never recalled these incidents again until our class’s 50th-year class reunion. I was praising Mark for his induction into the Indiana High School Football Hall of Fame for coaching wins in over 250 games. He looked at me, put his arm around me, and said that our high school and other conversations were worth more than I will ever know in his life. That is one of the best memories I now have of my senior year.
I was a member of a high school church group my senior year and once a year three of us were asked to give testimonies or Christian experiences in place of the Sunday sermon. The minister asked me to do it so for my time I read a story I wrote about God’s hand in saving my dad’s life from life-threatening injuries in an auto accident a few years earlier. Many people came up after the church service and praised me. When I met my mom later, however, she was angry. A lady had come up to her after the service and made a point of telling her a word I had mispronounced and the correct pronunciation. Life lesson learned- praise and criticism often arrive together.
A few weeks later I submitted my church talk in my very exacting English composition class. I got the paper back with a comment that it was very sincere and touching but had two grammatical errors so a grade of C. The teacher told me that he was preparing me for college and I needed to focus on grammar and punctuation now so it would be second nature in college.
To help pay for my college expenses I took a part-time job in the Purdue University Agronomy Department watering plants on weekends and holidays in the research greenhouse and in the 6 climate-controlled incubators. My supervisor said he hired me instead of a university student because I always showed up and they didn’t. I wasn't a university student so he really shouldn’t have hired me.
As the second semester came around, my parents asked me where I wanted to apply for college. They never told me I needed to go to college but it was just always assumed in our house we would all go to college as both my parents had and we had grown up near college campuses. My oldest brother Steve was attending Indiana University and I applied there and nowhere else, never visiting before I enrolled. I looked up to him and was trying to follow in his footsteps- he was president of the IU student body, Phi Beta Kappa, and had been selected for a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England. Plus I enjoyed history a lot and in those days IU was the liberal arts university and Purdue, in my hometown which I wanted to leave, was the agricultural and engineering school in Indiana.
As spring baseball season rolled around, I was slotted as a pitcher, not an every-game player. The starting left fielder suddenly announced his girlfriend was pregnant and the school administration prohibited him from playing. My other older brother Warren had been a starting second baseman and I looked up to him too and wanted to follow in his footsteps. I decided to take daily batting practice, work on fielding, and eventually won the starting left-field position. Our team won our conference title.
By the end of my senior year, I no longer defined myself primarily as an athlete. Leadership, academics, friendships, and service to others had begun to replace football as the center of my life. Looking back, those changes prepared me far better for the future than any touchdown pass ever could have.
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