experiences in my growing up. First, I played and played. And I got better. Some days I would play for twelve hours until my lips were so sore I could hardly move them. I also listened to and learned from older, better musicians.
Band camp also proved an ideal place for me to develop political and leadership skills. The whole time I was growing up, it was the only place being a “band boy” instead of a football player wasn’t a political liability. It was also the only place being a band boy wasn’t a disadvantage in the adolescent quest for pretty girls. We all had a grand time, from the minute we got up for breakfast at a university dining hall until we went to bed in one of the dorms, all the while feeling very important. I also loved the campus. The university is the oldest land-grant college west of the Mississippi. As a high school junior I wrote a paper on it and as governor I supported an appropriation to restore Old Main, the oldest building on campus. Built in 1871, it is a unique reminder of the Civil War, marked by two towers, with the northern one higher than its southern counterpart. The band also brought me my best friend in junior high, Joe Newman. He was a drummer, and a good one. His mother, Rae, was a teacher in our school, and she and her husband, Dub, always made me feel welcome in their big white wood-frame house on Ouachita Avenue, near where Uncle Roy and Aunt Janet lived. Joe was smart, skeptical, moody, funny, and loyal. I liked to play games or just talk with him. I still do—we’ve stayed close over the years.
My main academic interest in junior high was math. I was lucky enough to be among the first group in our town to take algebra in the eighth, not the ninth, grade, which meant I’d have a chance to take geometry, alge-bra II, trigonometry, and calculus by the time I finished high school. I loved math because it was problem-solving, which always got my juices flowing. Although I never took a math class in college, I always thought I was good at it until I had to give up helping Chelsea with her homework when she was in ninth grade. Another illusion bites the dust. Mary Matassarin taught me algebra and geometry. Her sister, Verna Dokey, taught history, and Verna’s husband, Vernon, a retired coach, taught eighth-grade science. I liked them all, but even though I was not particularly good at science, it was one of Mr. Dokey’s lessons that stayed with me. Though his wife and her sister were attractive women, Vernon Dokey, to put it charitably, was not a handsome man. He was burly, a bit heavy around the waist, wore thick glasses, and smoked cheap cigars in a cigar holder with a small mouthpiece, which gave his face a peculiar pinched look when he sucked on it. He generally affected a brusque manner, but he had a great smile, a good sense of humor, and a keen understanding of human nature. One day he looked out at us and said, “Kids, years from now you may not remember anything you learned about science in this class, so I’m going to teach you something about human nature you should remember. Every morning when I wake up, I go into my bathroom, splash water on my face, shave, wipe the shaving cream off, then look in the mirror and say, ‘Vernon, you’re beautiful.’ You remember that, kids. Everybody wants to feel like they’re beautiful.” And I have remembered, for more than forty years. It’s helped me understand things I would have missed if Vernon Dokey hadn’t told me he was beautiful, and I hadn’t come to see that, in fact, he was. I needed all the help I could get in understanding people in junior high school. It was there that I had to face the fact that I was not destined to be liked by everyone, usually for reasons I couldn’t figure out. Once when I was walking to school and was about a block away, an older student, one of the town “hoods,” who was standing in the gap between two buildings smoking a cigarette, flicked the burning weed at me, hitting the bridge of my nose and nearly burning my eye. I never did figure out why he did it, but after all, I was a fat band boy who didn’t wear cool jeans (Levi’s, preferably with the stitching on the back pockets removed).
Around that same time, I got into an argument about something or other with Clifton Bryant, a boy who was a year or so older, but smaller than I was. One day my friends and I decided to walk home from school, about three miles. Clifton lived in the same end of town, and he followed us home, taunting me and hitting me on the back and shoulders over and over. We walked like that all the way up Central Avenue to the fountain and the right turn to Park Avenue. For more than a mile I tried to ignore him. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned, took a big swing, and hit him. It was a good blow, but by the time it landed he had already turned to run away, so it caught him only in the back. As I said, I was slow. When Clifton ran away home, I yelled at him to come back and fight like a man. He kept on going. By the time I got home, I had calmed down and the “atta boys” I got from my buddies had worn off. I was afraid I might have hurt him, so I made Mother call his house to make sure he was okay. We never had any trouble after that. I had learned I could defend myself, but I hadn’t enjoyed hurting him and I was a little disturbed by my anger, the currents of which would prove deeper and stronger in the years ahead. I now know that my anger on that day was a normal and healthy response to the way I’d been treated. But because of the way Daddy behaved when he was angry and drunk, I associated anger with being out of control and I was determined not to lose control. Doing so could unleash the deeper, constant anger I kept locked away because I didn’t know where it came from.
Even when I was mad I had sense enough not to take on every challenge. Twice in those years, I took a pass, or, if you’re inclined to be critical, a dive. Once I went swimming with the Crane kids in the Caddo River, west of Hot Springs, near a little town called Caddo Gap. One of the local country boys came up to the riverbank near where I was swimming and shouted some insult at me. So I mouthed off back at him. Then he picked up a rock and threw it at me. He was twenty yards or so away, but he hit me right in the head, near the temple, and drew blood. I wanted to get out and fight, but I could see he was bigger, stronger, and tougher than I, so I swam away. Given my experiences with the ram, Tavia Perry’s BB gun, and similar mistakes I still had ahead of me, I guess I did the right thing. The second time I took a pass in junior high I know I did the right thing. On Friday nights there was always a dance in the gym of the local YMCA. I loved rock-and-roll music and dancing and went frequently, starting in eighth or ninth grade, even though I was fat, uncool, and hardly popular with the girls. Besides, I still wore the wrong jeans.
One night at the Y, I strolled into the poolroom next to the gym, where the Coke machine was, to get something to drink. Some older high school boys were shooting pool or standing around watching. One of them was Henry Hill, whose family owned the old bowling alley downtown, the Lucky Strike Lanes. Henry started in on me about my jeans, which, that night, were especially raunchy. They were carpenter’s jeans, with a right side loop to hang a hammer in. I was insecure enough without Henry grinding on me, so I sassed him back. He slugged me in the jaw as hard as he could. Now, I was big for my age, about five nine, 185 pounds. But Henry Hill was six foot six with an enormous reach. No way was I going to hit back. Besides, to my amazement, it didn’t hurt too badly. So I just stood my ground and stared at him. I think Henry was surprised I didn’t go down or run off, because he laughed, slapped me on the back, and said I was okay. We were always friendly after that. I had learned again that I could take a hit and that there’s more than one way to stand against aggression. By the time I started ninth grade, in September 1960, the presidential campaign was in full swing. My homeroom and English teacher, Ruth Atkins, was also from Hope and, like me, a stomp-down Democrat. She had us read and discuss Dickens’s
The Arkansas Democrats were an even more diverse group. Those in the Civil War tradition were Democrats because their forebears had supported secession and slavery. A larger group swelled the ranks of the party in the Depression, when so many unemployed workers and poor farmers saw FDR as a savior and later loved our neighbor from Missouri, Harry Truman. A smaller group were immigrant Democrats, mostly from Europe. Most blacks were Democrats because of Roosevelt, and Truman’s stand for civil rights, and their sense that Kennedy would be more aggressive than Nixon on the issue. A small group of whites felt that way too. I was one of them.
In Miss Atkins’s class most of the kids were for Nixon. I remember David Leopoulos defending him on the grounds that he had far more experience than Kennedy, especially in foreign affairs, and that his civil rights record was pretty good, which was true. I didn’t really have anything against Nixon at this point. I didn’t know then about his Red-baiting campaigns for the House and Senate in California against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas, respectively. I liked the way he stood up to Nikita Khrushchev. In 1956, I had admired both Eisenhower and Stevenson, but by 1960, I was a partisan. I had been for LBJ in the primaries because of his Senate leadership, especially in passing a civil rights bill in 1957, and his poor southern roots. I also liked Hubert Humphrey, because he was the most passionate advocate for civil rights, and Kennedy, because of his youth, strength, and commitment to getting the country moving again. With Kennedy the nominee, I made the best case I could to my classmates. I badly wanted him to win, especially after he called Coretta King to express his concern when her husband was jailed, and after he spoke to the Southern Baptists in Houston, defending his faith and the right of Catholic
