Bob O. Berger

The Lawrenceville Alumni Association announced that Bob Berger, '70 passed away on March 4th. He was a friend of mine, quite a character, honest, direct, an athlete and a scholar and an iconoclast. He shared a room at Upper with others where I used to hang out with his acquiescence (leave my books, etc.) because I was off-campus in the Belknap House my senior year and Upper Home was right on the Circle.

I first noticed Bob in Spanish class where he was new to the school as a sophomore, hailing from Cleveland. We didn't have a whole lot of rough and tumble Ohio guys at this New Jersey prep school. The Spanish 2 class was was droning on about the round table when Bob suddenly broke out his comb, like a modern day Kookie from 77 Sunset Strip, and just stated combing his longish jet black hair using both hands to get the forehead back sweep right.  Mr. Walker let him have it in Spanish while the rest of us boys snickered at this uncouth display of manners, not really comprehending everything the teacher was saying but getting it's import, but it didn't bother Bob a bit and he just stared at the Master as he was berated loudly (I liked Mr. Walker, as I think Bob came to, that was just Mr. Walker's acerbic, loud style). Mr. Walker made us all aware that Bob's middle name began with O, which spelled out Bob O. Berger, or Bob, which Mr. Walker often emphasized about Bob in his inimitable way, but it never seemed to bother Bob in the least. Bob's first name was actually Robert, but he was no Rob or Robert, he was Bob, or rather Bob Berger, always.

I remember watching Bob from the stands on the football field, a tough competitor who delivered hard hits that belied his smaller size compared to the older PG athletes surrounding him.

I have a mental image to this day of the chaos that typically surrounded him which didn't bother him a bit, it kind of signified him. I was sitting in his room during a break (he was at class I guess) surveying the hurricane aftermath disorder of articles strewn about his floor, clothes, books, papers, wrappers, when I noticed a bare spot on the floor, free of clutter. In the middle of it was one shoe, upright, Bob's shoe. It was easy to spot as his shoe because Bob always wore pointy black shoes with white socks, quite contrary to the prevailing style on campus of Bass Weejun loafers with dark, or no, socks. Bob was not a penny loafer guy.  Nowhere in sight was the refugee shoe's mate. To me that was Bob, maybe he was in class with only one shoe on for all I knew, that wouldn't have surprised me one bit. Bob always made do.

 He came home with me to Staten Island one weekend in the last spring term because he wanted to go to law school and he knew my dad was a lawyer. He meant to chat him up about it and get his advice. I still remember him catching my dad in our kitchen after dinner and saying, "Sir, I want to go to law school and I wanted your opinion." As any good lawyer would, my dad tried to dissuade him but Bob went to law school anyway after he finished his undergraduate studies at Harvard. At least we had a good time that weekend crawling around Stapleton (Bob had a license, which I didn't have yet, so my dad let him borrow his car) before we headed back to Port Authority on Sunday afternoon to return to school on the bus in time for Sunday night check-in. I don't remember if we were even had permission to officially leave campus that weekend.

When I was considering going to law school myself in the late 80s after spending almost a decade as a peace officer, I sought Bob's advice as I knew he was already established in a practice in Boston. His advice to me was about as short and sweet and to the point as my dad's was to him a decade and a half earlier. He wasn't encouraging of it, telling me that I would have to read a hundred pages a night every night just to keep up. Bob believed that life was a battle, always. He didn't dissuade me, just as my dad didn't dissuade him, and that's why I always thought we were a little bit alike. 

We kept in touch for several years after we graduated, but Lawrentians were from all over and most connections went silent after many years. I should be getting ready to go to England and France tomorrow but instead I sit here at the keyboard saddened, thinking about my friend Bob. This brash character had the ability to become  friends with extremely different types of people, he was incongruous in that regard. Bob was a great guy, an original. I already miss him even though I hadn't spoken to him in decades. That doesn't mean I didn't occasionally think of him during those decades, unbidden.

Feelin' Sorry on Easter

Easter Sunday falls on April 1st this year.  I remember another year when it also fell on April 1st, and am keenly aware of yet another year when it did so.

The last time I remember Easter Sunday being on the first day of April, I was a senior in boarding school, run down from my scholastic workload and speaking on the phone with my Dad.  I was feeling sorry for myself, going on and on about the several rejections I had received from colleges I'd applied to, and I bitterly noted that it was Easter Sunday, supposedly a time for hopeful change but here I was in the throes of rejection and feeling hopeless after four hard years away at this school.

My Dad was trying to be encouraging, saying that it was Harvard's, Antioch's and Colorado College's loss and the University of Colorado was a fine school, and since I had noted the date, perhaps I should reflect that Easter was traditionally a time of renewal and rebirth.  "Yeah," I said cynically, "what a joke, April 1st, Easter Sunday, so full of hope and don't you know it's also April Fools Day."

My Dad said quietly to his complaining 17-year old son, "The last Easter Sunday I spent that was also April Fools Day, as you note, was when I was put ashore on Okinawa in 1945 with the rest of the First Marine Division."  It was a teaching moment, a reference to the opening day of one of the worst battles of World War II, which produced 50,000 American casualties and that he participated in at the tender age of 20, and I was never so embarrassed by the juxtaposition of such a stark contrast of things young men are faced with.

The circular red taillights.

I received my quarterly alumni magazine from my high school, Lawrenceville Preparatory School in New Jersey.  I casually opened it and started in on Class Notes.

I discovered that my Second Form roommate had died, "prematurely from a brain tumor."  I remember Art as an 18 year-old athletic giant, young, fast, a top high jumper for the track team, running down the field on an 80-yard touchdown jaunt as I watched from the sidelines and urged him on at the top of my lungs.  That's the last year I saw him, so in my memory he never aged.

I also read that my science teacher had died.  Mr. Loux wasn't that much older than us, in his twenties I'd say when he taught us chemistry.

I remember he was a dry personality, brilliant but understated, who revealed a hidden wild streak in the form of his Camaro convertible.  One night I watched out the window as he drove around the campus Circle and out the Alumni Gate at an elevated but not reckless speed, off on some late night bachelor's  adventure while us students finished study hall in our rooms.  In my mind's eye I can still see the red lights of the Camaro's circular tail lamps winking out as the young teacher made the turn onto the main highway and sped off, symbolizing what was then but what is not now.

The Laughing Man

I just finished reading The Laughing Man by J.D. Salinger for about the seventh time in my life. It's in Nine Stories.

Many short stories come close to it in impact but none can claim primacy. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce is compelling, with its alternate, mind-bending ending. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is excellent, an uncomfortable depiction of you and me. The Lady, or the Tiger by Frank Stockton is tantalizing, with its portrayal of power colliding with an irreconcilable conflict.

The Laughing Man can be read over and over with no diminishment of its heart-wrenching effect. Chief, Mary Hudson and the boy Comanches, all of them are headily won over in their playground on the upper East side by the burgeoning love between a man and a woman.

When that love is extinguished, for whatever timeless reason, a heart-wrenching, indeed numbing, feeling of the loss of love oppresses the reader. Where does Chief go from here, and why did he let her go?

It’s a beautifully written story. The story is told from the vantage point of a nine-year old member of the Comanche Club, a group of schoolboys who are picked up after school every day by Chief, a New York University Law School Student, in his dilapidated school bus.

Chief takes care of the boys til dinnertime, by splitting the larger club into the Braves and the Warriors. He fills their time with baseball or football games in Central Park or, if it’s raining, trips through the New York City museums.

How would these kids otherwise ever roam those halls? During down times, and as a reward, he swings around in his broken-down driver's chair and tells them, in hair-raising installments, The Laughing Man story.

Chief is a wicked story-teller, and his account of the escapades of the Laughing Man traces a parallel tale about love through the short story. His face horribly disfigured in a childhood incident, the Laughing Man wanders through the heartless wilderness communing with exotic wild creatures, the beasts being the only ones who can bear to look upon him as he truly is.

Laughing Man foils the evil plots of bandits and villains and promotes goodness throughout the land. Chief is from Staten Island; do you know that's where I grew up?

"Once [Chief] started narrating, our interest never flagged. ‘The Laughing Man’ was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub."

When you were a kid, did you ever watch the water whirl out of the bathtub as the hot water got tepid? Did you ever buy those 25c turtles at the dime store; I'll bet they resided in your bathroom before they expired.

When the Chief’s love interest shows up, the beautiful and ebullient Wesley graduate Mary Hudson, the young captain of the Warriors’ team is shocked at the transformation that occurs in the normally self-assured and naturally graceful club director.

"The Chief was very nervous. He didn’t just fail to contribute any talk of his own; he could hardly listen to any of hers. The gearshift knob came off in his hand [as he drove the bus with amateur-like lurches], I remember."

When the captain gets smitten by Mary because she smiles at him as he tries to keep her off his team, he acts as any boy would to hide his embarrassment. "For poise, I picked up a stone and threw it at a tree."

Mary turns out to be a naturally gifted ball player and quickly earns a permanent spot in the Warriors outfield. The boys view her as a sort of auxiliary club member whenever she comes on their outings, and her presence, indeed her participation, is accepted and not resented by the boys (after all, she is a girl).

But Indian summer gives way to winter and cold winds blow in. The boys notice Mary’s absence, as well as the effect it has on Chief.

The captain of the Warriors spots her watching their baseball game from a bench a hundred yards away, and points her out to Chief. He goes to talk to her.

Mary walks back with him, but it is the end. "They didn’t talk as they walked, or look at each other."

Have you ever been there? Man or woman, oh yeah.

Mary declines the captain’s entreaties for her to take the field and sits on a bench, lighting a cigarette and crossing her legs instead. The young boy tries to alleviate the tension by buffoonery.

"I tossed my first-baseman’s mitt up in the air and tried to have it land on my head, but it fell in a mud puddle. I wiped it off on my trousers and asked Mary Hudson if she wanted to come up to my house for dinner sometime. I told her the Chief came up a lot. ‘Leave me alone,’ she said. 'Just leave me alone.'"

This is a dagger in your heart, right?

The boy captain "had no idea what was going on between the Chief and Mary Hudson, but nonetheless, I couldn’t have been more certain that Mary Hudson had permanently dropped out of the Comanche lineup." Shortly thereafter she ran off, crying.

"The Chief didn’t go after her. He just stood watching her disappear."

A man. Then, as was his custom after games, he directed the boys into the bus to hear another installment of The Laughing Man.

Within five minutes, he had irrevocably killed off the Laughing Man. The youngest Comanche burst into tears, and no one told him to shut up.

The captain’s knees were shaking as the bus took him home. There, his teeth chattering uncontrollably, he was told to go straight to bed.

I read this story to my 12-year old charges in my cabin when I was 16. They were economically depressed kids from Harlem attending the Lawrenceville Preparatory School Camp in the summer of 1968 in New Jersey, thanks to dedicated donations from the school's collection at the non-denominational mandatory Sunday chapel.

I love this heartbreaking love story. It’s a masterpiece.

My first marathon

In 1970, I was a high school senior at an all-male boarding school, full of vim and vinegar, and I thought it would be cool to finish the Boston Marathon. I always looked for challenges that were different.

I was a wrestler in high school, but otherwise I had abandoned two years of running JV cross-country in order to play house (recreational), and then Fifth Form (club), football. You'd have to be a preppie to know what I'm talkin' about.

I think that high school cross country meets back in the 60s were 2.6 miles. The Boston Marathon had been in the news because that's where a male accosted a woman athlete and tried to drag her off the marathon course to ensure the "purity" of the sport of long-distance running, which hardly anyone even cared about back then. You see, women's constitutions were considered to be delicate, a myth I knew to be ridiculous, even in my youth. (Right: The way it was in 1967.)

I would be over 18 on the day of the race. I thought that I could do 26.2 miles, thanks to the energy of youth, even though my longest runs up until then (other than 5 mile training workouts which consisted of twenty quarter mile laps interspersed with 220 yards of walking) were those 2.6 mile cross country meets. I think a couple of meets might have been 5Ks. All I had to do was run the distance I was accustomed to, times ten. If I had to walk a bit in the latter stages, what was the big deal? Such is the brain of a teenager.

My guidance counselor at the school turned me down flat. Maybe he was wise and knew that I couldn't make 26 miles, no way no how, without a base.

I was irked because otherwise I was doing whatever I wanted on weekends. Meaning I'd sneak away from school for weekends in NYC while my stodgy stay-at-school roommate "checked" me in with the housemaster on Saturday nights. ("Oh Peter's here too. He's asleep.") Those were the late Vietnam years, when authority sort of adhered to "don't ask, don't tell" when it came to youth.

The problem was that the Boston Marathon was run on a Monday (Patriot's Day in MA) and I couldn't finagle being absent from school on a Monday in NJ without securing permission from a responsible school official. Permission was not forthcoming.

Sh*t, since I was already 1-A (that's draft lingo, I was draft-eligible because I refused to take a student-deferment as being an unfair entitlement), I thought, How could anyone refuse a request of mine?

I always regretted that missed opportunity to participate in the Boston Marathon before the advent of qualifying times.