Chapter Eighteen
Toomer and I went way back. We'd met at Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas when I was 14 and he was 16.
I got there by begging the a.m. to send me.
She used to threaten me when she was mad at me, "If you don't behave I'm going to send you to reform (or military –they were interchangeable) school!”
After a particularly viscious argument one evening I flat out begged her: "Alright! Send me to military school. I want to go. Anything, to get away from you!"
She made some inquiries and I was accepted by Allen Academy.
If you think being accepted there was any big deal -which headmaster Carrington led us to believe- you're wrong. Many of the student body had been given a choice –by the courts: either go to jail, reform school –as it was called in those days, or Allen.
I didn't learn that till I was there, but it didn't matter. I was away from her and I was getting guidance at a time I needed it. Such as it was.
Lesson: Every child should know how to field strip and clean an M-1 rifle before puberty.
I lived off campus in Howell House most of my first year. The day I moved in a dead serious upper-classman named Champion pointed a loaded sawed off shotgun at my face and told me he didn't like me and if I gave him any trouble he'd blow my head off.
His room was decorated with Nazi flags and paraphernalia and he played his Best-of-Hitler speeches on his record player after study hall at night, in the original German.
He was a killer and every kid in the school was scared to death of him.
Mr. Carrington didn’t tell us about the school’s Champions.
There was a story told that he'd gotten so mad at a kid the previous year he'd slugged the boy in the nose and jammed his septum up into his brain.
No one ever admitted knowing whether the kid lived or died. And no one ever denied it had happened.
Lesson: Keep you nose out of other people’s business.
A month or so into the school year another student, a guy named Brewer (we knew each other by our last names) was violently beaten by Champion. He'd made good, partially, on his threat. He thought he was beating me up!
No body told Brewer he was me for a day.
Why he never came after me after he learned of his mistake is one of the great mysteries of all time.
I actually met George my second year there; his first.
He was a joker; always drawing cartoons on anything he could find, mostly bed sheets. He was a couple of grades ahead of me but we shared a math class together taught by the basketball coach, Mr. Dyer –who had an incredibly beautiful daughter. Every cadet pined for her and all eyes lingerd on her as she and her family dined with the corps, as many of the faculty families did.
It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between George and me.
The lessons I learned at military school were: I wasn't cut out for the military lifestyle -"killing the enemy" was not my goal; and, more importantly, asthma is often a state of mind.
I learned the latter after coming down with a horrendous attack about two weeks into my second year. I could hardly breathe. I was so sick I requested, and was granted, leave to go home and recuperate.
The instant I stepped off the Greyhound Bus in Dallas I was breathing freer. I realized, there on the tarmac, it was under my control...to a certain degree.
I've never had as severe an attack again. I've had chronic bronchitis a few times. And I've had difficulty breathing, but asthma never put me in bed again, as it had throughout most of my pre-teen years.
Or was that the a.m.’s Munchausen By Proxy?
It was an interesting awakening. I was realizing I was in control. The a.m. wasn't going to ruin my life forever.
My stay at Allen Academy lasted till mid-term of my second year when I decided 1 wanted to be around girls again.
Marching and polishing brass and spit-shining boots was getting very boring.
There were a few women on campus: A very good looking French teacher, the matronly looking secretarial staff, the catatonic looking mess hall staff, and two junior college co-eds who looked like they could bench press Cleveland...plus the assorted wives and daughters of faculty members. The French teacher and the basketball coach's daughter were inspirational and being in close proximity to them made me want to be around girls my own age.
I informed the a.m. I wanted to come home and at mid-term I entered Highland Park High School in Dallas; Jayne Mansfield’s alma mater.
During the first weeks there I could pick out which girls were wearing perfume; and, for at least the first few days; I could tell which girls were wearing different scents. It was a nice change to be around people who weren't training you to "kill the enemy" all day long.
It was at the end of that year I was put in the Beverly Hills Sanitarium.
Lesson: Hormones and pheromones can be quite confusing.
While Julie and I were married I decided I wanted to be a great and famous Public Relations man. I had cards printed to prove I could do the job: “Impact Dallas, A Public Relations Publicity Firm”. I'd done pretty well getting press releases published for the Gallery Theatre, in Vegas, and my Showcase of Comedians and I thought I could do the same for people who might pay cash money for the effort.
I got the a.m. to loan me $5,000 to open an office.
As a business-builder I sent out promo packets to companies I'd picked at random which appealed to my promotional instincts.
I bought five packs of playing cards at the magic supply store...each pack was all the same card. I bought a pack each of 10's, Jacks, Queens, Kings, and Aces. I wrote 52 pitch letters saying the recipient had been picked to play a game of poker. Five cards would be "dealt" by mail, 1 a day for 5 days. The winner of the hand would receive a free consultation and a free ad in a publication, "The Spectator", a magazine I wanted to start about local entertainment events. The ad would be designed exclusively for their business and they could run it anywhere else they liked.
Frankly, I didn't know where I'd get an ad done for these people, but I figured I'd cross that bridge if anybody accepted the prize.
And "The Spectator" was just an idea I had, with no real groundwork laid, yet.
I "dealt" the cards each day with an updated letter. The letter never let on what the card was...as if it all were chance and even I didn't know. I dealt them in order starting with the 10 so the excitement would grow as the 5th day neared.
Everyone was going to end up with a royal flush... but would everyone claim their prize?
The 5th day came and went. I'd timed the arrival of the cards to coincide with the work week starting on Monday. By Saturday everyone had received their "hand" and by Saturday night I was jelly in anticipation of getting some work out of this...maybe as early as Monday.
Monday came and went. Tuesday: nothing. Wednesday a bookstore called and excitedly said they'd gotten a royal flush and what was the deal?
I laid it on thick with the congratulations about the royal flush and launched into a pitch from the top of my head explaining how I'd bring them all kinds of great business.
But I stalled a little bit. They’d called my bluff! Now I had to find an artist to draw up the ads.
Enter George Toomer.
My office was next to an employment agency and, out of the blue, I bumped into George coming out of their office. It took a minute for us to remember we'd been at Allen together some five years back. Once that was established we struck up the friendship again.
George agreed to do some mock up ads -on spec- and I went to see the bookstore people.
Meetings were held. Ideas were thrown around. Nothing happened. The book store never really liked the ideas I (George) was coming up with and the ball was left to sort of roll away, rather than actually being dropped.
George was a highly talented artist employed as a technical illustrator for Climatic Auto Air-Conditioners of Texas. In those days not many cars came with air conditioners as standard equipment.
His job was to draw the schematics for the components of the air-conditioner for their parts catalogue.
But George was an anarchist of sorts. Not only were his drawings exemplary renditions of the part, but they also were the repository of his sense of humor. He would include tiny little people having a picnic inside a pipe opening, or maybe a teeny little leaky faucet off the side of an electric switch.
The casual observer glancing through the catalogues might never in a million years spot these little additions, but they existed, and can still be found in old editions circa 1965/66.
Alas, I was neither becoming great nor famous in the public relations game.
I might have garnered a bit if infamy, though, when I put boxes of matchbooks on all the tables of the weekly Ad Club luncheon.
On one side were the words, “Impact Dallas”, and on the other a color photograph of a topless woman.
I thought it was a great idea at the time.
It did what it was supposed to do. It made an impact. Fellow agencies, however, neglected to beat a path to my door for free-lance advertising ideas or copy.
Lesson: Always give them your phone number.
Try as I might, advertising wasn't going to be my game, yet. So, in search of broader horizons and fertile pastures, Julie, our then 4 month old son David, and I packed up and moved to Tucson, where I would now try to become a great and famous real estate salesman.
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