High School V

My senior year of high school went quickly. I took the ACT tests in the fall and it was determined that I really wasn’t college material. Community College or vocational schools were options as well as enlisting in the armed forces. That latter meant most likely a tour of duty in Viet Nam so I wasn’t too excited about that. Failure to enroll in some kind of school meant the draft was inevitable. Undaunted I applied at the University of Iowa and Iowa Wesleyan and was rejected by both. My years of a casual school approach to learning were now narrowing my options.

Burlington Community College was my choice. (It was renamed as Southeastern Community College while I was there.) That settled, I continued my pattern of enjoying high school but not doing much work.

I did take an elective from Roger Williams that year. The sole purpose of the course was to speed up your reading. They used a machine called a tachistascope that projected the text on the wall and gradually did it faster and faster. It worked I got so I could read very fast. I have retained that skill at least to some degree to this day, however if you don’t use it much you lose a lot of it.

My senior year in my regular English class with Roger Williams was the first time someone suggested I might be colorblind. The assignment was that we were to find an interesting piece of text to read aloud to the class. We were to paste a copy of the piece on colored paper that reflected the mood. I picked a blue piece of paper because it was a sad story. When I said that to the class they burst out laughing because the colored paper I had chosen was purple. That was an embarrassing and even humiliating experience! Someone said, “You’re a senior in high school and you don’t know your colors!” Mr. Williams just said, “You must be colorblind!” and we went on.

My class tied its first football game that year and lost the last two games of the season. Up until that time we had won every game from 7th grade on. It wasn’t the way we had hoped to end our football careers. I suffered what I now know was a concussion in the tie game with Fairfield and remember little of it. It was surreal the day after the game to watch myself on the video and have the coach yell at me. I didn’t start the next game for the first time in my career but was back in the starting position before the game was over.

I did have an offer to play football at Iowa Wesleyan. That lasted only until they looked at my ACT scores and then it was quickly withdrawn. I was way too small anyway and would have been way out of my class. Eventually, I will get to my days at Iowa Wesleyan and my experiences as a collegiate athlete.