Call Me Ted

by Ted Turner

  As a nine-year-old with a November birthday I was one of the youngest kids in my grade and by arriving in October, I was joining my classmates a full month late. These factors alone would have been hard enough, but going to a southern military school as an Ohio transplant was a real recipe for disaster. It was now the late 1940s but I’d swear some of those kids thought they were still fighting the Civil War. They wanted nothing more than to make a little “Yankee” like me miserable. Some of the boarding students had been there since the first grade and these were some of the toughest kids I had ever seen in my life—it was like Lord of the Flies.

  I decided I needed to show them that I was tough, too. I shared a bunk room with three other kids and on my first night there I announced to my roommates that I was going to be “the boss.” They seemed to be okay with my plan but what I didn’t consider was that there were four more kids on the other side of the bathroom that we shared. They were considered part of our group, and after sizing them up I figured I could handle them, too. When I let these guys know I would be their boss as well, they took the news a little differently. After looking at each other for an instant, all of a sudden they jumped me. Three of them held me down while the other one kicked me in the head. I thought they were going to kill me. My other three roommates stood by and watched, and my attempted dominance of the room group came to a swift, painful, and humiliating end.

  It was a grim start and it was several months before things got any easier. One time, some kids spread a rumor that I had badmouthed General Robert E. Lee. It wasn’t true but the news was enough to send a group of my classmates after me like a lynch mob. They chased me yelling, “Kill the Yankee!” I ran like hell until I got to a row of lockers and managed to squeeze inside one and pull the door closed. They came around the corner and guessed I was in one of those lockers but I stayed really quiet while they milled around outside like a swarm of bees. There had to be fifty of them and although I was really scared and short of breath, I stayed still until they gradually lost interest and drifted away. They didn’t chase me much after that but they did make it a common practice to storm into my room and jump on top of me on my bed. Ten kids at a time would pile on and I’d nearly panic because I couldn’t barely breathe.

  I stayed as tough as I could, though, and by the end of the first semester I had become one of the guys. Some of the military training rubbed off on me and I suppose there were benefits to the overall experience. But my parents took some pity on me and the following year I 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

  After 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 lights-out violation, I knew I’d be up for demerits and that he would ask for my name to put it in the records. At military schools like McCallie they call you by your last name followed by your first initial. So, for example, with my formal name being “Robert,” I’d be “Turner, R.” It was too early in the year for him to know all our names, so I decided to have some fun with him. “Who’s responsible for the light on in this room?” the professor barked outside my door. “Edison, T.” was my wise-guy response.

  Sure enough, when the demerits were posted the next morning on the bulletin board, my room had two demerits listed under “Edison, T”!

  Bad as I was, I managed to make a few friends, mostly guys who were willing to join me doing all kinds of stupid things to pass the time and to stir up a little trouble. We’d put small containers of water on the top of an open door and leave it cracked so when someone came zipping in the water would fall on his head. We’d fold paper in a certain way so you could inflate it like a little balloon, fill it up with water, and throw it out a third story window at students heading home from the mess hall. By the time they figured out what had hit them you’d pull your head back in and run like the devil so they couldn’t find you when they came tearing up the stairs.

  When I noticed that one of the trees on campus was jammed full with a family of squirrels, I got an idea for some mischief and found a willing accomplice in my roommate. I grabbed my laundry bag and shinnied up the side of the tree to a hole about twenty feet up. Several minutes before, I’d seen the squirrels enter the tree through that hole, so I knew they were in there. I covered the hole with the opening of the bag while below my buddy knelt down with a can of Kiwi shoe polish. We always had plenty of Kiwi on hand and through some previous foul play I’d discovered that it was not only good for shining sho
es, it also burned well and put out thick black smoke in the process. My accomplice slid the lighted can into the hole toward the base of the tree, and our plan worked.

  Whiffs of smoke rose up the tree and BAM! BAM! BAM!—three squirrels shot into my bag at about ninety miles an hour—they almost knocked me off the tree. Somehow I was able to hang on and tighten the drawstring so I could lower it down to my roommate. The squirrels inside were going crazy and it was funny watching them try to punch their way out. We ran back to the dorm with the bag of squirrels and let them go on the third floor, where they took off and ran around like mad. It took about half an hour for our startled dorm-mates to get the windows open and shoo them out.

  The mischief making was fun, but McCallie was a tough school whose administrators were determined to make gentlemen out of us. Their disciplinary system was elaborate but the bottom line was you got demerits for different offenses and were only allowed up to ten per week. These were very public, and as with my lights out violation, were posted next to everybody’s name on the dormitory bulletin board. For anyone racking up more than ten, punishment was reserved for Saturdays. Students who steered clear of punishment were given four hours of freedom every Saturday afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00, and would often hitchhike downtown to hang out or go to the movies.

  But if you had more than ten demerits by 1:00 on Saturday, you had to walk laps around the “bullring,” our name for the track, and the punishment was one quarter mile lap for each demerit over ten. That doesn’t sound like much but I got into trouble so frequently that it wasn’t hard for me to rack up as many as fifty marks in a week. That’s forty laps, or ten miles! The laps took forever because you couldn’t run—they made you maintain a walk’s pace. Needless to say, ten-mile walks kept me away from the movies and all the fun the other guys were having. But they were all part of my program and the price I’d have to pay for being one of McCallie’s worst cadets.

  You might wonder how one kid managed to get all those demerits, but in truth, for me it really wasn’t very hard. First of all, they didn’t just give them out for big stuff like setting squirrels loose in the dorm. They also put a lot of weight on your general attitude, which they measured by things like military drills and personal inspections. They figured they could tell how much you believed in their system by how well your shoes were shined. So if you really wanted to get ahead and were with the system 100 percent you’d have the best spit shine on your shoes that you could muster. In my case, not only did I not shine my shoes, I used them to show my disdain for the system. Right before inspection I’d take the heel of one shoe and grind down the tops of the other so that they were the scruffiest-looking things you ever saw. Every day like clockwork I’d get demerits for my shoes and every weekend I’d wear them for laps around the bullring. I wanted all of McCallie to know I was a rebel; heading to the track while they left for the movies was my way of driving the point home.

  I was disruptive in class, too, and had to see the Discipline Committee about every two weeks. This group consisted of the headmaster and five or six professors. I’d have to walk in there and they’d tell me to grab my ankles and then they’d whack me hard on the backside with a paddle. It wasn’t pleasant, but I could take it. I’d endured worse from my dad and I was so eager for attention that even this humiliating punishment couldn’t deter me.

  My first year at McCallie I was in front of the Discipline Committee about fifteen times out of a possible eighteen. They grew so tired of seeing me there that they even overhauled the system for the following school year. Among other changes, they made a rule that if you faced the discipline committee more than three times you’d be suspended. This got my attention and I was always careful to avoid crossing that line. Getting in trouble was one thing, but getting kicked out and being sent back home was not an option.

  While my misbehavior continued, I never broke the school’s code of military honor. We were not to lie, cheat, or steal nor tolerate that behavior in others. As difficult as I may have been regarding my personal appearance and disruptions around the campus, I was raised to be honorable and took the code seriously, even to the point of turning in classmates who fell short of its standards. We were required to attend church and Sunday school in two separate buildings and one time I saw a kid steal a magazine from a drugstore on the walk between the two buildings. It was against the code so I turned him in. They didn’t throw you out for your first honor code violation, but you had to get up and apologize before the entire student body. After that, the Student Council tried your case. The council consisted of seniors elected by the student body. They took their jobs seriously and came up with some pretty severe punishments. For the first offense you’d get a lot of demerits and might be confined to campus for three weeks or so. The second time you might get suspended from school for three or four days and have to go home. It really was a very fair system. They believed in honor and I think it was good training for all of us to have to live up to those standards.

  McCallie was a tough place and my summers at home weren’t a whole lot easier. By the time I was twelve, during my summers my father had me working forty-two-and-a-half-hour weeks at his billboard company. Being the boss’s son didn’t get me special treatment—in fact, I did a lot of the toughest jobs. I spent a lot of the time with the construction crew, the bill posters, and the sign painters—the guys who had to go out in the Georgia summer sun to build the billboards and post the signs. The toughest assignments I got were cutting weeds in front of the billboards. They were planted right off the highway and the grass would grow high enough to hide rattlesnakes and all kinds of other critters. We’d have to slog through swampy water and we got bitten by mosquitoes and leeches.

  I was the only kid and the only white person in the group. The entire team was black and they were great big bruisers. They could have stomped me into the ground but I followed their orders and worked hard. My dad had hired good people and as long as everyone did their job, we got along great. In later years I spent more time with the salespeople and traveled around town with a briefcase full of presentations. But in those earlier summers I got a sense for how the tough, physical side of the business got done.

  The billboard work was always hard, but my toughest McCallie summer was the year my sister got sick. With big blue eyes and long brown curls, Mary Jean was a beautiful, sweet, charming girl. She made everyone smile and our family adored her. Her early schooling was all done from home and she attended local private schools in Cincinnati and Savannah. That meant most of the time I spent with her was during the summer. She loved horses and riding lessons were her favorite thing in the world. She idolized her big brother and I loved her dearly. She used to beg me to play chess with her, and I’d make her bet a quarter on every game. I almost always won, so soon she’d be broke, and I’d buy her whatever she would have spent her allowance on, mostly candy and ice cream. Her special place in our family made the news of her diagnosis particularly devastating.

  Mary Jean was just twelve years old when she developed lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease. While turning a body’s defenses against itself, the disease makes you vulnerable to other potential problems. In Mary Jean’s case, we knew from the beginning that it was serious. Her condition deteriorated quickly. Shortly after the initial diagnosis, she then developed encephalitis, a swelling of her brain that put her in a coma. She didn’t emerge for two months, and by the time she did she had experienced significant brain damage. My parents were also told that their precious twelve-year-old daughter might have as few as five years to live.

  Needless to say, this put a tremendous strain on everyone. For the next several years, my parents tried to provide the best care possible. My father was practical and solution-oriented and brought her to all the finest specialists he could find. My mother played more of a nurturing role, making sure that Mary Jean was as comfortable and loved as she could be throughout her ordeal. It was incredibly hard to watch such a wonderful girl go through such agony
and it was a situation that would have strained the strongest of marriages. For my mother and father, it was almost too much to bear.

  It was hard for me, too. Because of the severe mental damage caused by her encephalitis, it became very difficult to interact or to communicate with Mary Jean. I remember sitting on the floor with my little sister and rolling a beach ball back and forth between us. That was the most we could play with each other. There were days when I would walk up to her and she’d say the most simple, childish thing like, “Teddy, you’re my brother,” then walk away and bang her head against the wall. It was heartbreaking.

  Looking back, I don’t know for sure if these events were linked, but shortly after the summer of the onset of Mary Jean’s illness, my attitude at McCallie started to change. I was about halfway through the tenth grade and my mother had bought me new dress shoes (after I’d worn through the previous pair from laps around the bullring). Staring at those shoes, an idea struck me. Ted Turner was going to shock the daylights out of everyone by showing up at inspection with a spit shine. Not just any spit shine, but the very best I could muster. I’d spent three and a half years trying to be the worst cadet on campus, and now I was going to try a completely different approach.