My career as a student got off a rousing start. Less than a year into school, my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Booth, didn’t mince words with my father during a parent-teacher conference at Anderson Elementary School.
“She wanted to hold you back. I’d never heard of anybody repeating kindergarten, but she didn’t think you were overly bright,” Dad said while laughing his distinctive laugh. “I told her, ‘No, you move him along with his friends. He’ll be just fine.’”
The old man loved that story. He told it — with glee — for decades. He usually paired it with another story, one that happened not long before Mrs. Booth tried to keep me in her class for another year.
“The day before you started school, you didn’t want to go,” Dad said. “You were just a little guy, and you were sitting in my lap in my old rocking chair. I told you, ‘Son, if you don’t go to school, they’re going to put me in jail.’ That wasn’t true, of course, but you puffed your chest out and said, ‘OK, I’ll go.’”
That first day of kindergarten must have gone well.
“You came skipping down the driveway, about as happy as you’ve ever been,” Dad said. “You couldn’t wait to go back.”
That made sense because my brother and I didn’t have much of a social life until we started school. During my first two years in a classroom, I have only one memory related to academics: Sitting at my desk and staring at a test that included circling which elephant was different among four elephants.
“This is stupid,” I thought to myself as I purposely circled an elephant that matched two of the others.
That was school for a while. Not until the third grade at Maplecrest Elementary in Lebanon, Missouri, when Mrs. Cook incentivized being a good student with a point system resulting in toys and trinkets did I put as much effort into making friends as I did good grades.
That year, I worked as tirelessly as an 8-year-old could academically to accumulate enough points to earn a George Brett 1983 Topps baseball card. Fortunately, we lived in St. Louis Cardinals territory, so nobody else in the class had any interest in it. At the end of the year, I strolled to the front of the class on “store” day and proudly pointed at the card, which I still own to this day.
The following year, in fourth grade, my father began to stress school more vigorously, giving my brother and I money for good report cards, which typically meant nothing below a B. A C+ in a Social Studies class during the second quarter cost me $5. By the time we were in high school, those small rewards became disciplinary action for “poor grades.”
“My boys are not average. You both were and are bright, and we all knew that,” the old man said. “C’s are average, and I knew how important an education was.”
Important enough that I was grounded from my car, a candy apple red 1971 Monte Carlo, for several months as a high school sophomore after an infamous report card with five C’s.
Dad’s standards might sound strict, but I knew he wanted more for his sons than what he had growing up. He wanted us to have a better life. Years later, I’m grateful he emphasized school as much as he did. I doubt I have two college degrees or 12 years working in higher education without him. And I doubt Mrs. Booth would believe it happened.