I didn't graduate from High School. Not really. I had a diploma from a tutoring school my father had found. The sole purpose of the school was to dramatically raise the grades of poor students so they'd have a shot at getting into a decent school. These students had to have the money to afford this "special" treatment. The classes were taught one on one and all of them covered material I already knew. If my work began to slip, the tutoring school simply ended the course then and there with my last quiz serving as my final exam.
This plan was, in my case, somewhat successful. My D's and C's became B's and, in the case of geometry an A. But my grades were still not nearly good enough to get into a school anyone would make his first or even second choice. I wound up at a place called Parson's College, in Fairfield Iowa. Parson's was the only college in the country to actually turn a profit. They had investors. And with all the money they had, they hired first class teaching talent to assist with public relations.
Parsons College hired professors away from Ivy League schools by paying them salaries they simply couldn't refuse. And yet, the lecture halls were almost empty when these talented men and women spun their magic. There was, it seemed, a reason why Parson's students had never had good grades in the first place. They were not used to actually attending classes or even school itself - especially in their junior and senior years of high school. I am not proud of how all this went down. But it's the truth and it matters because of what happened later.
I got into a bit of trouble in Iowa. Without realizing it, we transported women (they were nurses actually) across state lines for purposes that were deemed immoral and, in fact, against the law. This incident and another I'm too embarrassed to relate led to an appearance before student court at Parsons. These people were junior Nazi's, specializing in absurdly harsh punishments for what were, even in my circumstances, pretty minor offenses. I mean, I didn't threaten or kill anybody. Yet I received, for my crimes, 80 work hours on the commons. The weather on the commons reached a daytime high of 35 below zero. And the "work" involved walking around with a stick that had a nail sticking out of one end. The idea was to pick up trash. Were they kidding? I went back to my room, packed my trunk and took the next train to Chicago, where I transferred to another train to New York.
My folks, especially my dad, were neither enthralled by my adventures nor my very early return from school after only half a semester. "You have to get a job immediately," my dad told me in no-uncertain-terms. Somehow we knew somebody in management at the Kinney Brothers Parking System. I was asked to report to a lot which then existed at the corner of 35th and Park in New York. My salary, when I received it, was higher than they were paying the manager of the lot. It payed to have friends in high places. But I was not popular with the other attendants. For one thing, I had only been driving a very short time and parking was not something they really stressed in driver's education. So not only was I slow, I was a very poor parker all the way around. Then there was my attitude. The other attendants were not charmed by my obvious belief that the world owed me a living. John, the manager of the lot, would certainly have fired me if it were in his power to do so. Sadly for him, it was not. So they did the next best thing to feel better and get even with me. They transferred me to a gigantic lot on the corner of 42nd and 10th -- and gave me the night shift, midnight to eight in what was then one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world. There were killings every night of the year. They found bodies in alleyways every morning. i decided not to be one of them and resigned.
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