My grandfather Joe was the patriarch of the Cohan family. Tall, patrician, and handsome, Joseph B. Cohan changed the family’s name from Cohen to Cohan. My grandfather had started an accounting firm in Worcester, where both my father, Paul, and my uncle Herbert would work their entire professional lives. Joe thought the firm would blend better into the Worcester business community if people thought we were Irish, not Jewish. There was no need to call attention to our immigrant roots in Germany and Russia, even though we’d been in town since the 1880s. Cohan—as in George M. Cohan of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” fame—was an Irish name; Cohen was the ultimate Jewish name, the tribe of the great rabbis.
My extended family on my father’s side all lived in Worcester’s small but prosperous Jewish shtetl. My father’s sister and her family lived next door; Herbert and his family—including Bobby—lived less than a mile away. (My mother’s family lived in St. Louis, where they immigrated from Hungary.) Slowly but surely Assumption College, a nearby Catholic school, took control of most of the real estate on our street. There was a monastery at the top of the road and a paved pathway from our road down to the school’s chapel. Eventually, a group of nuns affiliated with Assumption College bought our house and we moved to a new one on the hill above Herbert’s house, in the more prosperous part of Worcester’s shtetl.
Andover fit in perfectly with our family’s aspiration for assimilation. By then, Fuess’s ill-tempered plan to keep Jews out of Andover had been overcome—although meaningful change happened slowly, and there still weren’t many Jews in the school. Still, among them were four Cohan sons from Worcester. (Maybe the spelling threw the admissions office off the scent?)
My cousin Bobby was the first person in our family to go to Andover. Bobby went to the Shepherd Knapp School through eighth grade, as did I, a small, private day school ten miles or so outside of Worcester founded in 1953 by Neil and Mary Halkyard and named after Neil’s foster parent. It had once been a farm. Each grade had about ten students in it. The school’s curriculum mirrored the times: It was traditional and then, in the late 1960s, it was progressive. After eighth grade, there weren’t many good options in Worcester. The kids in the classes ahead of Bobby at Shepherd Knapp had applied to prep schools such as Deerfield and Choate. He had never even heard of Andover. He had no idea what it was or where it was. But the Halkyards thought he should apply there, and elsewhere. As best as he can remember, he got into two high schools: the nearby Worcester Academy and Andover. “They took me on a chance,” he said. “They weren’t sure I was going to make it.”
He didn’t know what it meant to have been admitted to Andover. But he clued in quickly. A few weeks later, he and his family went on vacation to the Diplomat Hotel, in Hollywood, Florida. There were a bunch of kids standing around, and one of them started talking about how he had just gotten into Andover. “He was trying to show off to some girls,” Bobby said. So he asked him what dorm he was going to be in at Andover because he was going to be there, too. But the guy ignored Bobby’s question and then later pulled him aside and told him that he wasn’t really going to go to Andover. He had only said that to try to impress the girls. “Then I knew this was a big deal,” Bobby recalled.
One thing Bobby Cohan had in common with the Bushes was that he found the adjustment to Andover pretty tough. “I was little,” he said. “I wasn’t a good athlete. I wasn’t a cool guy.” In his first year, he and his buddies formed the Rising Storm, a garage rock band. “I can’t separate the band from my experience at Andover,” he said. In the end, he mostly loved Andover, and described it as one of the best experiences of his life: “I made the closest friends.” My older brother Peter—Class of 1975—seemed to mostly enjoy Andover, too, so it was no surprise that when Shepherd Knapp ran out of grades, I would follow in the footsteps of my brother and first cousin. (My younger brother, Jamie, followed me to Andover.)
I was always younger than my classmates because I skipped kindergarten and went directly to the first grade at Shepherd Knapp. By the time eighth grade rolled around, I had proven my academic skills. I was Andover-worthy. I had been on the “Plus List” for the two prior school years, which meant that I had been on the honor roll for the entire year. (When I was in sixth grade and Peter was in eighth, we both made the Plus List, the only two siblings in the school to do so. Accordingly, my parents were given the actual wood plaque with our names painted on it in gold-leaf lettering. They still have it stashed in a closet in their Florida condominium.)
I applied only to Andover and Exeter. It was time to move beyond our privileged, sheltered life in Worcester to a privileged, sheltered life at one or the other of the nation’s most prestigious private high schools. On March 10, 1973, came the news that I had been accepted at both. There was no real decision to be made. Exeter seemed cold, austere, and rigid, as if the Calvinists were still running the place. Andover, by contrast, seemed laid-back, liberal-minded, and open. Besides, it was closer to Worcester, and my older brother was there to provide cover, and protection, as needed.
In my first year at Andover—ninth grade, a Junior in Andover parlance—at the time I was the youngest person in my class of about 125 students. And it showed in pretty much every way, every day. I was unable to compete athletically at Andover and twice failed a so-called Physical Aptitude Test, or PAT, and had to spend two trimesters running laps, lifting weights, and doing push-ups and pull-ups in a misguided attempt to whip me into shape. I was only a marginally better student, but I was a fun dorm mate, always eager for a laugh in my large room on the west side of Nathan Hale House, a new dorm set in the woods on the edge of Rabbit Pond. It housed ninth graders, all new to the school but at varying degrees of maturity. There was the fast New York crowd, from which I felt light-years removed. There were the athletes, from whom I also felt light-years removed. There were a few guys like me who had grown up here and there, and were nothing special except for a modicum of wit.
I was a young thirteen-year-old. John Cushing lived across the hall from me. From outside of Boston—there was always some vague sense that he was related to Cardinal Cushing—he was rambunctious, big, and strong. As a ninth-grader, he was the goalie on the varsity soccer team. He thought nothing of downing three cheesesteak subs, from a local delivery place, after dinner. He used to call me “fat turkey.” Next door to me lived Eliot “Buzz” Tarlow, the senior proctor and an Andover legacy, whose chief attributes seemed to be an Amazonian athletic ability—he was on the varsity crew team—and a penchant for sadism, especially when it came to me. He also had glorious stereo equipment and was exacting about cleaning the vinyl before playing his Jim Morrison records at high volume. I always marveled how Tarlow got into Harvard but figured Harvard always needed new blood for its crew team.
In my first weeks at Andover, someone stole my bicycle, never to be seen again. I had lent it to Will Iselin, my dorm mate from New York City whose lineage dated back to the aforementioned John Jay, a Founding Father, the second governor of New York State, and the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court. Somehow the bike got stolen under Will’s auspices. Will was “rather chastened and taken aback by the whole situation,” our housemaster Fred Pease, the school’s chaplain, wrote my parents, “and at a brief house meeting last night the situation brought home to the whole dormitory the point of my strictures”—Pease was a reverend, after all—“to them about being very careful with their own and other people’s belongings.” Pease was apologetic, on Will’s and on Andover’s behalf, as if to say, Don’t get the wrong first impression here. More important, Pease continued, was the fact that I seemed to be “off to a good start” at Andover, that I seemed to be “enjoying the place and the routines and the people,” and that I had “plenty of friends in the broader campus community.” In any event, Pease concluded, he hoped that the theft of the bike did not “sour things too much” for me.
It did not.
At the end of the first trimester, somehow my housemates elected me their represent
ative to the Rabbit Pond cluster council. I can no longer recall how it happened, or why, but it was a lovely honor just the same. “It is nice to see someone get deserved recognition,” Pease wrote my parents, “and I think the dorm showed very good judgment.” Along with summarizing my mediocre academic performance for them, Pease wrote my parents that I had “emerged” as a “very considerable person” at Andover—“honest, straight-forward and outspoken, friends, thoughtful and considerate of others and with a considerable sense of humor.” I was thirteen, but would still gladly have that be my epitaph.
* * *
YOU DON’T NEED TO HEAR it from me, but high school is a difficult time for everyone, both academically and socially. That fact was as true at Andover as it was at Doherty Memorial High School (or at North Shore High School, of mythical Mean Girls fame). The adjustment was hard for Oliver Wendell Holmes, it was hard for both Bushes, and it was hard for me. (It was hard for my two brothers, too.)
Then, as now, Andover had around eleven hundred students spread out over four classes: The Junior, or freshman, class had around two hundred students, or about a hundred fewer than the others. On one hand, the school could seem big and impersonal: It was a beehive of activity, where more than a thousand students were darting around the large campus that was bifurcated by Massachussetts Route 28. On the far end of campus, toward Boston, were the playing fields, and on the other end, down the hill, was the old Abbot campus. The cluster system did an effective job of breaking the school into small living communities, and in short order, between the clusters and the classes and the camaraderie on the playing field, it was rare that you would be walking on the campus and not see a friend.
The hub of the campus, both geographically (more or less) and emotionally, was the dining hall, or Commons as it was known. If you think of Andover’s campus as a bicycle wheel, Commons would be its hub, figuratively and metaphorically. The building was divided in four dining rooms—Lower Right, Upper Right, Lower Left, and Upper Left. Day after day, these dining rooms came to stand for the distinctly different types of students who would flock to them at each meal. Lower Right was where the jocks ate. Upper Right was where the nerds ate. Lower Left was where the student leaders, along with artistic, scholarly, and intellectual types, or those who thought they were, hung out. Upper Left was for the stoners and partiers. The only things that unified the four dining halls were their similarity in appearance, the poor quality of the food, and the fact that everyone—whether on scholarship or not—had to participate in “Commons duty,” the charitable way of referring to spending a week working behind the scenes cleaning up after everyone else at each meal. The highlight of this unpaid service was getting to watch the whole milk and orange juice coagulate after half-consumed beverages were dumped.
* * *
LOWER YEAR AT ANDOVER (known to most of the world as sophomore year, or tenth grade) ratcheted up the academic intensity. Frank Bellizia, my English Competence teacher, was blunt. “Bill has problems,” he wrote, “but he’s working very hard.” And then he added, “He’ll be all right, but his writing will probably never be outstanding.” Thank goodness for math. According to my math teacher Frank Eccles, although “quiet” and “modest,” I was the “top student” in his class and “a very nice lad.” He noted that I was a “good problem solver,” had taken a high degree of interest in working with the new (late-1970s model) computers (such as they were), and was “perceptive, clear thinking and learns quickly.” Again, though, it was the good Reverend Pease who appreciated me most. He wrote my parents that he saw me as “an influence for sanity and humanity” among my “fellow students” and as a result, the Peases “rejoice” in my “triumphs” and “commiserate” in my “agonies” and “enjoy him greatly.”
In his final note home about me, at the end of my second year at Andover, Fred Pease could not possibly have been kinder. He managed to spin a bunch of mediocre observations about my academic performance into a view that I had had my best term of the year, which may technically have been true. But that was beside the point. You would have thought I was heaven-sent by Him to him. “I want to commend him as strongly as possible in every respect,” he wrote my parents, “for his job at Phillips Academy this year and over two years. Bill has been a somewhat unofficial but very important student leader in the dormitory community for two years, and his quiet strength—his patience, tolerance and sense of humor and his high personal standards and expectations of himself as well as others—all these have been very important.” In retrospect, I think his praise for me derived from the fact that I was one of the few people in the dorm who never gave him a moment’s worry: I didn’t drink or smoke, didn’t play my music loudly, rarely had guests in my room, didn’t break any rules, and always gave it my best shot academically even though that often was lacking. On the margins, I looked pretty good.
My last two years at Andover represented a different phase of my high school career. My time in Nathan Hale West had come to an end, and I moved to Stearns House West, on the side of Rabbit Pond. That’s where the upperclassmen lived. I had a tiny single room on the first floor, and plenty of good friends. I was growing up, fast. By then, I had also become heavily involved in the school newspaper, the Phillipian, but not as a writer. I was focused on the business side of things.
Upper year at Andover was for all the marbles, the moment when one’s academic performance and extracurricular activities needed to be alchemized into a transcript of da Vinci–esque proportions if there were to be any chance of admission to one of the Holy Trinity of Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Fully half of our senior class of three hundred students would be admitted to one or more of these three universities. We just didn’t know which half. Most of those spots were in play when the school year began in September 1975. Not surprisingly, given my own DNA and that of the school, I fully expected to get into one of them. Nobody wanted to be among the “losers” who didn’t. But my academic record was only mediocre at best, as were my test scores. So gaining admission to one of them was a long shot for me, except in my own mind.
In January 1976 came an inevitable “little disciplinary difficulty,” in the immortal words of cluster Dean Jack Dick in a letter home to my parents. On a whim and at around eleven o’clock on a wintry Friday night, three of us in my dorm—Alan Cantor, my dear friend and the cluster president; Chris Randolph, my dear friend and classmate; and I—went over to Stevens House, an all-girl dorm next door, to visit with Corky Harold in the television room of her dorm. Then (as now) Corky was an ebullient, effervescent woman with abundant charm and smarts. She was a quintessential preppy from tony Guilford, Connecticut, with a cool older brother who was also at Andover until he got kicked out. Not only did the risk seem minimal but it also seemed more than worth it, to spend some clandestine time with her. “Feeling somewhat bored and restless,” Richards wrote, “they knocked on the girl’s window and asked her to let them into her dorm, which she did. The quartet was sitting, engaged in innocent conversation, when they were apprehended by a member of our campus security police on a routine patrol, whereupon they were sent back to Stearns House and their names turned into me.” Rules are rules, and it was against the rules to be out of the dorm past ten at night and against the rules to be in a girls’ dorm to boot. “A bit of a lark it was,” Richards continued, “and I ascribe no malicious intentions to any of the four, but the fact is that the three boys succeeded in breaking a major rule by being out of their dormitory without permission at such an hour, and perhaps more important, showed very poor judgment in entering a girls’ dormitory. Technically, the three boys were eligible for dismissal from the Academy.” I was petrified. Who knew where this seemingly minor infraction could lead, in Upper year no less? I was also fearful of the inevitable parental admonishment. We were not raised to break the rules. But cooler heads prevailed “because of the innocence of the circumstances and the previously clean records of all three boys.” We were “awarded,” according to Richards, “a Censure�
�� and “placed in two weeks of Restriction”—limited mobility around campus or off-campus—for our “illegal bit of nocturnal activity.” My parents took it in stride.
Suddenly it was crunch time, spring of Upper year. The set of grades that would likely determine whether any of Cambridge, New Haven, or exurban New Jersey were in my future. If any were, I would be considered a statistically “successful” Andover graduate; otherwise I would be considered a “failure” by Andover’s exacting standards. I was the business manager of the Phillipian, Andover’s independent, student newspaper. Not only did independent mean editorially independent, but it also meant financially independent. Other than getting some free space in the basement of the science building for our offices, the paper got no financial support whatsoever from the school, although our finances were monitored on a regular basis by a school administrator. All the revenue we generated came from selling subscriptions and advertising. I was in charge of both, as well as of the weekly task of getting the paper printed in Cambridge, at the offices of the Harvard Crimson. It was a major responsibility, and a major sinkhole of time on a daily basis. I took it seriously, and loved it. It was my choice, of course, to take the job, and I had worked hard to get it in the previous few years. I had also run for cluster president, hoping to succeed Alan Cantor. (I lost to the aforementioned Bruce MacWilliams.) But, a little like Bruce, I often fantasized about being in public office, perhaps as a US senator. That dream quickly faded, though.
Four Friends Page 5
