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AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, I attended an Ivy League college1 for less than one term. A year later, I was married and living in central Florida. This was 1958 and ’59. General Dwight Eisenhower was out President, and Dr Fidel Castro, hunkered down in the mountain passes southeast of Havana, was
AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, I attended an Ivy League college1 for less than one term. A year later, I was married and living in central Florida. This was 1958 and ’59. General Dwight Eisenhower was out President, and Dr Fidel Castro, hunkered down in the mountain passes southeast of Havana, was getting praised for his integrity and good looks by Time and Reader’s Digest. 5 I’d been a whiz kid in high school, rewarded for it with an academic scholarship as fat as the starting quarterback’s at a midwestern state university. In this Ivy League school, however, among the elegant, brutal sons of the captains of industry, I was only that year’s token poor kid, imported from a small New Hampshire mill town like an exotic herb. [ . . . ] It was a status that perplexed and intimidated and finally defeated me, so that, after nine weeks of it, I fled in the night. 10 Literally. On a snowy December night, alone in my dormitory room (they had not thought it appropriate for me to have a roommate, or no one’s profile matched mine), I packed my clothes and few books into a canvas duffel2, waited until nearly all the lights on campus were out and sneaked down the hallway, passed through the service entrance and walked straight down the hill from the eighteenth-century brick dormitories and classroom buildings to the wide boulevard below, where 15 huge, neoclassical fraternity houses lounged beneath high, ancient elms3. At the foot of the hill, I turned south and jogged through unplowed snow, shifting my heavy duffel from one shoulder to the other every twenty or thirty yards, until I passed out of the valley town into darkness and found myself walking through a heavy snowstorm on a winding, narrow road. A month later, with the holidays over and my distraught mother and bewildered younger 20 brother and sister, aunts, uncles and cousins, all my friends and neighbors and high school teachers, as well as the director of admissions at the Ivy League college, convinced that I not only had ruined my life but may have done something terrible to theirs, too, I turned up in St Petersburg, Florida, with seven dollars in my pocket, my duffel on my shoulder and my resolve to join Castro in the Sierra Maestra seriously weakening. 25 I’d spent Christmas and the New Year at home, working