From 1958 to 1962, I attended an all male Catholic military school in Atlanta. It was run by the Marist fathers, a missionary order that preached the Gospel primarily to the inhabitants of Micronesia, Melanesia, Fiji, Tonga and…Georgia. So the poor priests had a choice between ministering to primitive natives armed with spears and living in thatched huts or us. Looking back, if I had been one of my teachers, I would have opted for Pacific duty just to avoid having to have daily contact with the likes of me and my classmates.

Don’t get me wrong. Compared to today’s teen agers, we were Boy Scouts. But we were, after all, red-blooded American adolescent males with an excess of testosterone and an off-the-scale smart ass factor. Overall we were insufferable.

Thanks to the good fathers, our school drew students from all economic strata. What those of us from the “nice” side of town never knew was that our tuitions also paid for the kids from the so-called “wrong” side of town. It made for a culturally enriching experience and was really one of the best features of the school.

One of my classmates from the “wrong” side of town was a real character. Tom (not his real name) was unruly, disrespectful and side-splittingly funny. His uniform was an awe-inspiring  disaster. To borrow an old Army expression, it literally looked as if he shined his shoes with a Hershey bar. The brass buttons on his tunic were green and corroded. His uniform had that slept-in look. He flunked inspection every day and walked a record setting number of punishment tours.

Today he would be medicated, placed under the care of a clinical psychologist and allowed a support animal. But back then, he got what all of us non-compliant types got: repeated kicks in the ass.

Academically, Tom was at the bottom of the class for all four years. So, after graduation, when most of us left for college, we weren’t surprised when he stayed behind.

I lost track of Tom until a few years ago when he hosted my class for our fifty year reunion at his mansion in an exclusive gated community in the mountains of North Carolina. You see, while the rest of us were studying hard in college and learning how to be good employees, Tom had taken a different path. Shortly after graduation, he had purchased a backhoe and started doing excavating work. Then as now, Atlanta was in a building boom and Tom’s excavating business boomed with it. This led to his starting and running a construction company which built office buildings and hospitals throughout the South. In short, by the time of our reunion, Tom had become a very wealthy self made man.

His place in North Carolina was only one of his mansions, but it was impressive enough. It has room for 18 guests and requires a GPS system to find one’s way from one end to the other. The lower level has a glassed in room that overlooks a lake. Next to that is a wet bar. Hanging over the wet bar is Tom’s last report card from our high school. All of the grades are D’s and F’s. So much for formal education.

The best part is that, despite his enormous wealth and accomplishments, Tom is the same today as he was fifty years ago. His sense of humor is intact and, most impressive, he is unfailingly kind and polite to everyone including the caterers who provided the food, the folks standing guard at the entrance to the gated community and the grounds keepers who drove the golf carts ferrying guests from their cars to Tom’s front door. Tom invited all of them to join our celebration, and they did. This was not the first time he had extended hospitality to them.

I couldn’t help but think of Tom and his remarkable story when I read a  terrific recent opinion piece in the Spectator USA by Bridget Phetasy titled Stop wasting your money on college – The valedictory address high school seniors need to hear. Like my old classmate Tom, Ms. Phetasy by-passed higher education and has a terrific sense of humor. Her piece (linked here) begins as follows:

Hello graduates. I’ll keep it brief because I know your attention spans have been decimated by social media; I realize I’m not a meme or a  gif and I’ve got approximately four seconds to grab your attention, so here goes.

Don’t go to college. It’s a scam.

It gets even better from there and is well worth a read.

Ms. Pheatasy’s piece is particularly timely given the recent indictments of the college admissions scamsters. Speaking of which, shortly after I posted Does Georgetown Need an Exorcism?, additional information about my alma mater’s corruption became public which led to a rewrite of the post and its publication by my friends at The American Spectator. Here’s a link to the piece which is titled Secrets to Self-Promotion in the Post-Kennedy Age. 

The best reader comment so far is “So we have come to this…Yale and Georgetown have even more to answer for than Bill Clinton.”

Hope you enjoy it.