Call Me Ted Read Free Page A

was enrolled in Savannah public school where I spent my happiest year so far. It was great for me to be out of that confined military school environment and I enjoyed being able to spend more of my free time outside and in nature.
    My dad’s sporting magazines used to run ads for the Northwestern School of Taxidermy’s correspondence course. For 50 cents a month they would send you a different how-to booklet and I was probably the first eleven-year-old who ever signed up. I used to find dead birds and squirrels, or on occasion I’d shoot them with my BB gun. The house we were living in had a garage with a little office-room inside. My parents never used it so that’s where I did my taxidermy work. It was a pretty complicated process but I found it fascinating and I learned a lot about nature and biology.
    Another bright spot during that time was the arrival of a twenty-one-year-old black man my father hired to take care of his new sailboat. His name was Jimmy Brown and little did I know that for the next fifty years Jimmy would be one of the most important men in my life.
    Shortly after buying a fifty-foot schooner (which he renamed
Merry Jean,
a play on my sister’s name), my dad realized that the boat was going to be a lot of work. He hired Jimmy after several friends recommended him as a capable handyman. Jimmy was raised by his mother and spoke with an accent typical of the kind of rural fishing village he was raised in, on a small island off the coast of Savannah. He learned a lot about fishing and fixing boats before being drafted into the Army and served with a medic division in the final stages of World War II.
    As soon as Jimmy arrived, he and I started spending a lot of time together. He was like an older brother but we behaved more like two good friends. Eventually, he became like a second father to me. With my dad away or at work so much and my mom spending time with my sister, Jimmy and I would hang out—we’d fish, sail, go cast netting for shrimp, or just explore together. A birth defect left him with a slightly withered arm but Jimmy remained physically active and loved being outdoors. He taught me a lot about nature and a lot about life. I loved every minute of the time I spent with him and he became one of my best friends ever. Because of my love for him, and my father’s color blindness, I grew up without a shred of prejudice. All in all it was great to be home, but consistent with the pattern of my childhood, that stability would be short-lived. Another change loomed.

2
    McCallie
    A fter just one relatively uneventful year of living at home, my dad then decided that for seventh grade it was time to send me away again, this time to McCallie, a well-regarded Christian military academy in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In truth, I was disappointed and my mom wasn’t thrilled, either, but my father reminded her once again that he controlled the purse strings so he could make these decisions.
    About half of McCallie’s students were boarders, the other half were day students. There might have been four or five eighth graders living in the dorms but I was the only seventh grader so I was clearly the youngest, and also the smallest kid living on campus. This made me an easy target and the older guys picked on me from the start. It was a really tough time for me. At that age I hadn’t gotten as much love as I would have liked and I was angry for having been sent away once again. I felt a need to create a stir and to draw attention to myself and I figured that if I couldn’t be loved, I might as well be a hell-raiser. So, from the very beginning I set out to be one of the worst cadets in my class.
    One of my first nights there, it was well past lights out but I was in my bunk reading. I loved books and enjoyed reading well into the night, but at McCallie, this was strictly against the rules. They had professors take turns as hall monitors and I could hear this one’s footsteps approaching our door. With a