I spent three years, high school sophomore through senior, at McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I joined Charles who was there for his junior and returned for his senior year.
It was a rather rude awakening. Fellow student, Johnie Jones from Charlotte, NC, and I made a bet tas to who could study the least for the first six-week exams. As a result, neither of us studied a bit. He flunked all of his testa and i flunked three out of four. In the mean-time, Joe Hamilton caught me altering English test results . I will always be indebted to Joe for not turning me in, according to the McCallie honor System. But he surely got my attention.
I knuckled down after that and started studying for real. My grades climbed. I finished the year in the upper third of my class. As I recall, I was sixth in my class at graduation.
My roommates at McCallie my first year were Billy Fisch and Joe Hamilton from Atlanta and Sylvester Woodward from Quincy, Florida. I had known Billy and Joe since childhood. Both were fine guys. Billy was a superb swimmer, Joe an ordinary Joe!
Sylvester decided early on that he would be my protector and he was more than up to the job; tough, interior guard on the football team though not large. He always remained a great friend throughout my life.
Another football player in our dorm was Buster (George) Humphries. Buster was a slashing halfback on the varsity team and good enough to get a scholarship at GA Tech. He was initially sponsored by the wealthy Hutchinson family, whose son played tackle: big but clumsy.
One activity I remember was senior raids on our room in Jernigan Hall. This and one other room were located at the end of Jernigan Hall, primarily a classroom building. On some weekends the seniors would be bored and several came down and beat up those little sophomores in our room. It was total chaos. We gave it our all but alway slot in the end. one night, I go flipped over a guy and my nose came down on the back of a metal chair. It has been a bit bent since.
During my junior year in across-the-campus Jernigan hall, Major Lee Burns caught several of us playing poker after taps. We all served time being restricted to campus afterwards.
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