I chose Xavier. I loved being a Cadet and made it to second year. But I had a little problem with my studies. After I flunked Latin and French, I was asked to leave.
The Jesuits did not appear to be very concerned. After they announced those students who got honors and those who passed to third year, they then got to me. They told me I was not going forward or repeating the year. I was out.
I spent the day riding the subway wondering what to tell my father. I finally went home and told him. I’ll never forget the disappointment in his face. He then asked me what I was going to do. I didn’t know. Sometime over the summer, Father John Quinn arranged to get me back into Xavier. From then on, I paid attention to my studies and started to receive honors. Copies of those awards are in my scrapbook. I was never good at languages but I managed to get by.
I used to ride the subway to school, and my Dad rode it with me when he went to work. I never had tuberculosis, but if you rode the subway in my day everyone had a positive titer, even if you did not get the disease clinically. I may have gotten it from my mother. I never had lung lesions, but I still had to go over it with them at Yale Hospital from time to time.
The X Squad
In my third year, I became part of the X squad, which was the precision drill team and I wore the white rope on my sleeve. I also came in second place in the individual drill-team competition. I was good on the debating team and was the partner of Ted McCarrick and we won the city championship. He went on to be a Cardinal in the Catholic Church.
I also worked on the school newspaper and had a humor column. You can see all of these things in my scrapbook and yearbook. You will also see in my yearbook a picture of Antonin Scalia, who was in my company and later became a justice on the Supreme Court.
In my final year, I was made an officer. This time, on the debating team I partnered with John Countryman and we won the championship again. He ended his career as an ambassador. We got together again many years later, and it was him that set up my visit to Oman.
A friend of mine from my original class at Xavier was Billy Mitchell. He lived in Woodlawn and his father was chief of detectives in New York. I used to get a ride to school with him frequently. We also got free New York Rangers hockey tickets for Saturdays at Madison Square Garden.
There were many other notable classmates. Tom McGouhy was a member of my original class. His father was the district attorney for the Southern District of New York and was the first one to put the Communists in prison.
Another one of my classmates was Paul Curran, whose father was Secretary of State for New York. Then there was Charles Norman Schaffer. He went to Fordham Law School and then to the Attorney General office in Washington, D.C. He was one of the lawyers that put Jimmy Hoffa away. That was enough to get you a pair of cement boots.
Charlie later became the lawyer for John Dean, the former White House counsel who helped cause the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. I once jokingly asked Charlie whom was he taking on next, the Pope or God?
The regimental colonel my senior year was Freddie Schumacher of the fabric family. Reginald Stanton became chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. We had lots of lawyers and doctors. We also had a mafia family, the Mastrangelos, who allegedly ran all the garbage trucks in Jersey City.
Making Mischief
We also had our fun and mischief. We would go over to Union Square, where all the speakers would make speeches just like they do at Hyde Park in England. We would heckle them. Sometimes we would get in to trouble since our school uniforms gave us away.
There was a Lexington Avenue subway stop at Union Square, so I could get a train home from there. Next to our school building was Communist Party headquarters. The ROTC lecture hall was next to it. When we would have a lecture to learn how to take a machine gun apart, we would hang one out the window and point it into their window, just inches away. If there was somebody new we would scare them to hell. We walked punishment tours for that, but it was fun.
The Rev. Frederick Frohnhoefer, S.J., was our physics teacher. I did not learn until later from the head of the Physics Department at Yale, who later was my patient, just how famous Father Frohnhoefer was. When I was his student, his interest was fire-fighting. The "Fire Buff'' was the chaplain for the NYC Fire Department and had a bell system in his lab to tell him when there was a fire. If it were nearby, he would leave class to go to it.
One day, when he was giving us a surprise quiz, we tried to get out of it by telling him the telegraph bells had rung. We pointed that out to him and told him it might be our building that was on fire. All he did was tell us to put our hands on the wall. If it were not hot, then shut up, sit down and take the quiz.
We took the quiz.
Self-reliance
In my senior year, I wrote, directed and starred in the Senior Minstrel Show. All of those programs and pictures are in my scrapbook. Back then, they took pictures of cadets who were outstanding. They were posted in frames near the chapel. The last time I was at Xavier, pictures of me and some of the Minstrel Show were still up.
This is where I learned a valuable lesson from the Jesuits. My mentor for the show told me about the importance of self-reliance. He told me you can't always depend on some to make your deadlines. The show went on and was well-received, but I never missed a deadline of for a project again in my life because of anyone else.
My jobs those summers were varied. By 1950, Dad had remarried. Her name was Jo. Her brother was one of the members of the Port Authority Board. They were thinking about turning Newark Airport into a passenger terminal and not just for freight. They were going to run a survey of people who used the few passenger flights out of Newark.
I got the job with TWA and made many trips to Paris. As I told Kelly and Sara many years later when we all went to Paris, I did not go to the Louvre museum or Notre Dame cathedral when I was with TWA. My pilot friends looked after me.
Another summer, I was with a group of Xavier students and we were at Bear Mountain and ran the concession stands at the lakes in the park. Our football coach was Leo Paquin, who was one of the Seven Blocks of Granite at Fordham, along with Vince Lombardi. Coach Paquin ran it, so we played football every night. The log house we slept in was called the monkey house.
Another job was during Christmas break. I worked at two post offices, the big one on 31st Street and another on 42nd Street. Sometimes there was so much mail they would put it in trucks and just drove it around town. I rode sometimes in it to be sure they did not get lost.
St. Patrick's Day
Every St. Patrick's Day, I took part in some great parades. At Xavier, we had over a thousand students marching up Fifth Avenue in our school uniforms. Girls loved our uniforms. We started going to tea dances at all-girls schools like Marymount and the Dominican Academy. I met a girl from the Dominican Academy named Diane Farrell and we began to date.
My best friend was Tom Paprocki. His father was a big-time sportswriter and cartoonist for the New York Sun. Tom was a year older than us, so he had a car, which was a Jeep. We used to travel all over in it to go to parties in Long Island, particularly Jackson Heights.
To keep warm, we used to fill a medical bag with water and run it over the engine to make coffee.
Heading to West Point
Tom and I wanted to go to West Point. I was worried that I might not pass the physical because of a subluxation of my kneecap. It never bothered me, but I worried it might when I went for the PT part of my physical. Tom’s father knew Red Blaik, the legendary head football coach at West Point, so we both were put on his football list. It turned out that I didn’t need it since I had no problem with the tests. It turned out my going to the Academy was a great break. I graduated early in June. On June 20, 1950, war broke out in Korea.
As I mentioned before, I had it bad for Diane Farrell. I wanted to impress her so badly, I decided to not tell her I was going to West Point. Instead, I would write her when I got there. As it turned out, it was not my best move and our relationship took a turn for the worst.
I previously mentioned that I was busy being a cadet at Xavier that I had flunked two subjects and was thrown out of school. Many years later, when Meg and Kelly visited my step-mother at spring break, the girls mentioned at a party that I was thrown out of that school. Jo, who didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of her friends, told them I was not thrown out. She said I just didn't like the teachers. She was covering up my ineptitude.
Still, I learned a lot of stuff at Xavier that I used throughout my life. The main things are that loyalty comes from the top down and not from the bottom up. Also, people fail you and you must be prepared. I didn’t know that then, but I learned that again at West Point. As a result, I have never missed a deadline on a project.
On July 1, 1950, I went to Hoboken to get the train to West Point.