Once upon a time… a true story for other fools
“Our tests indicate that Harold is simply not college material.
be frustrating and ultimately unproductive to fight your
just average grades and test scores. I should be a plumber
maybe work in a printing shop. Nothing academic.”
My mom took this rejection very personally. i guess she expected
the guidance counselor to say that Harvard was courting me, and his son
he would be a future occupant of the White House.
She told my grandmother the catastrophic news and added: The school teacher (counselor) was blind in one eye and had BO (body odor). It is a gift I have to observe such things.
Granma replied, his Harold would be a genius in the making with the right help. She added: Look me in the eye. Albert Einstein hides there. I swear to you that he will be a great lawyer. It’s written in his eyes. You don’t write a person off at 13. It is the teacher who is condemned to a small role in life.
My father, on the other hand, instinctively believed in the people at school:
You should come work with me at the factory. School-school, I will teach
he the candy business and always earns a good living. People love chocolate and always will. Give it to me.
He had never been an advocate for higher education; he believed in being his own boss, finding his niche and working long and hard to exploit his competitive advantage. He was the richest in his extended family, so he better listen.
He appreciated the apprentice system: good enough for George Washington, who had a town named after him near Philadelphia. And what about Ben Franklin, the printer, who has $1000 bills with his image decorating them?
Quit spoiling him with this college talk. Let him invent a new Hershey Bar like George Eastman, if he’s that smart. His place is in the factory learning the family business from me.
I could have told him that Eastman invented the Kodak, not the candy bar. He would have simply said that his camera was as sweet as any milk chocolate. Y
if I corrected him that Benny was in the $100 range, he would say, a hundred, a thousand, money is money.
My mother turned red as a beet. Her ears rang with maternal rage. Imagine starting with a lioness protecting her cubs from her.
For starters, he got me an in-home tutor three days a week in math and science. Not long enough, he made me take an advanced reading preparatory course and a memory improvement course.
He found Dale Carnegie to speak publicly in the yellow pages. She turned it down outright because I wasn’t 18, her minimum age to start.
In a few years they will regret it, when my Harold is a great lawyer and then
Governor of New York, like Herbert Lehman. That Carnegie secretary might say she has body odor; even on the phone my nose can tell. She is
a gift from above you know.
She never asked me what I wanted, knowing that her beloved son was chronically lazy and undisciplined.
In the United States alone, one person asked a 13-year-old brat for an opinion. Would you like an opinion from someone who dreams of playing with a broken ball and hitting it with a short roller all day? a curse on
Colon; I still love this America of ours.
The time goes by
I graduated in the 90th percentile (rhymes with Gentile), first from Long Island
University, next to the New York Law School. He passed the bar exam in the first
fissure. Yes really.
What does everything prove?
How do you stop a charging bull elephant?
Sure, you take away the credit card, but there’s nothing stopping a
carrying the mother defending her own little stupid. She never said it but
Mom never wanted to be confused with the facts, as others saw them.
She said: A mother always knows her own. She has a different view.
Go find out how he did it.
See you,
copyright 2007
H. Bernard Wechsler
http://www.speedlearning.org [email protected]