My Twice Lived Life

Ch. 2

My generation, the children of the Depression, had an understandable addiction to expectedness. (16)

When Father's pay would be garnished I would have to go to whatever department store kept him on the payroll and say he was sick and beg an illegal advance. To my shame, they knew--and knew I knew they knew--and gave me some folded bills. I hated their kindness and swore my children would never have to do this--and they haven't. (18)

I will always be the boy hired at Miller's Market, the butcher apron, man-sized, triple-folded around my waist, seeing my mother's name on the bad-debt, give-no-credit list by the wall phone where housewives called in their delivery orders. When i went to get my first fifty-cent pay for a twelve-hour day, I found my mother had charged against it, and I had to persuade Mr. Miller not to let my mother do that. (21)

...when we came to Durham in 1963. (23)

Some people are blessed with an acceptance of themselves that astounds me; they are what they are, the world be damned. Minnie Mae is Minnie Mae...I have been the twentieth-century American moving across the frontiers of class, social status, geography, ethnicity, and religion, trying on masks and costumes, finding that I do fool most of the people most of the time, but not myself. (23)

Each year of school, from first grade until sixth, I played the role of victim or Christian martyr, if you want to dramatize it. I was the bully's delight, first a chubby butterball, then suddenly a string bean, but always an entertainment for my classmates, usually led by a far smaller, far tougher kid named, I believe, Tommy McDonald. He would swagger up before school, after school, or at recess and give me a punch, then another, and another. He particularly liked to get me backed up to the huge pipe flagpole so my head caused the metal to ring as the back of my skull connected with it. I never retaliated. Mother had told me that if I truly believe in Jesus Christ, the bully's hand would be stayed. I didn't believe hard enough; the bully's knuckles connected. (24-25)

After the war I made myself into an A student in college, the high school flunk-out becoming cum laude... (27)

Ch. 3

All my years before I left for college and for war we lived with my grandmother. She really raised me and was my closest playmate during many of my early years. Later, after her "shock," which was what we called a stroke, she lay paralyzed. I became her nurse. (29)

...taking summer school courses to do three years of college in two... (30)

...the reporter's ability to focus on the revealing detail, was prepared to live the experience twice--in the moment and, as is the writer's habit, in the greater reality of reflection afterwards. (31)

Most survivors of the Great Depression and World War II were the first in their families to go to college, thanks to the G.I. Bill. We did not live a life of reflection but a life of promotion, focused on the next step on the ladder--and the next, and the next, and the next. We were survivors and continued to live the survivor's life long after it was necessary. (32)

I have, however, published hundreds of articles, more than six hundred columns, more than twenty books, and by writing textbooks on the teaching of writing, won my revenge on the teachers who inspired me to drop out of high school twice before flunking out. (32)

I am twenty-nine years old and have been told I was the youngest [Pulitzer Prize] winner at the time. (35)

...strong enough to get a football scholarship to a junior college after not graduating from high school (38)

Ch. 4

I have done stupid things (almost nothing but stupid things from grades one through twelve), made unwise choices, disappointed others and myself, but if I had to do it over again, I would probably make the same decisions (39).

"Donald. You. Do. Not. Have. To. Be. Like. Your. Parents." (41)

I am fascinated by those moments such as the one in Dr. Bartlett's office on which my life turned. (42)

I was never angry at those ministers, then or now, just sorry for the lives of unresolved doubts they were living, and when I became a teacher, I promised myself I would never brush aside a student's question no matter how uncomfortable the answer, in conference or class, might make me feel. (44)

Miss Chapman, a tall, imperious, and very proper woman, knew something I didn't know when she pointed down at me in the fourth grade and commanded, "Donald, you are the class editor." Gleefully I took over and turned out a purple-inked class newspaper on the sickly yellow gelatin of what I believe was called a hectograph. I am still following her command... (46)

Small first steps are often turning points but we do not know it at the time. Minnie Mae sent out a magazine article of mine to Rotarian Magazine and a river of magazine and book publishing flowed from her belief that what I had written should not be thrown away. (48)

Although we lived in a working-class neighborhood, [my mother] believed we belonged across the tracks, up on the hill. We were Republicans. We admired management. We feared unions. I should respect authority. It was not proper to strike. (49)

Ch. 5

Grew up "in a double-decker behind an Amoco station on the trolley line." (55)

Ch. 6

At school I hated the classroom and feared the playground, but liked an excuse to walk the quiet empty corridors alone. When Minnie Mae and I last moved I found a cache of high school corridor passes I finagled as school newspaper editor, stored against the terror that I might be returned to high school and made to stay in class. (65-66)

...all my best memories are of being by myself. (65)

The public Don Murray must be a natural me at some level, but that person was cultivated, and I was never quite comfortable in his skin... I became confident as a teacher, workshop leader, speaker, and even, for a time, a television host, but the greater my public acceptance, the more my discomfort increased. I was both proud of my abilities in public and suspicious of them. I did not particularly like the public self. (67)

Ch. 7

Each morning I come to my writing desk with the same contradictory feelings: I am fearful I will not be able to write well enough; I am also confident that I will be able to write well enough. Without the real terror, it would not be worth the effort; without the confidence, it would not be possible. ( 76)

I consider myself, after sixty years of publishing, an apprentice to my craft. (77)

Ch. 8

Ch. 9

The grandmother with whom I lived was bedridden much of my life, and I was closer to her than to my parents... (89)

Ch. 10 (this is a great chapter for gender & class observations)

School sports were pretty much out for me. I did play goalie on the North Quincy High School soccer team in ninth grade, but most of the time I worked after school and weekends. I didn't even try out for teams. A dream did come true when I was given a football scholarship as well as money as a dormitory floor director at Tilton Junior College. (94)

...when I came home (from serving in the military) I did was most men, especially those of the lower classes, did in those days: I gave up exercise. No games for me, I was grown up; no golf in silly plus fours, no tennis in white underpants. We were men and we behaved like men, growing pear shaped as proud evidence of our ability to put red beef and mashed potatoes on the supper table. (95)

When the exercise fad began I thought that anyone who had time to play tennis or golf or sail or swim or hike or jog or bike clearly was not doing their job...With lower-middle-class snobbery I would have seen them as Ivy League aristocrats, playboys and playgirls, not to be taken seriously in their sporting outfits. (95)

I said I'd never teach--and became a professor. (96)

My father, born in 1890, did not even have a childhood, which was typical at his socioeconomic level. He was the eldest son of five children, a little man from birth, born in this country of immigrant parents who left the farmland they could never own in Scotland and indentured themselves to factory work so they could exchange an economic slavery without hope for an economic slavery in the factory that had hope. It worked. (100)

I start on the FitLinxx machines that are my substitute for honest physical labor. (100)

Ch. 11

In my generation, boys did not cry. If we did, we got whacked and ridiculed because we couldn't take it. We were tested at home with shaving strap, belt, open-handed slap and in backyard, playground, or alley by fist. We were expected to stand and fight, not turn tail or be yellow. Not one teacher attempted to stop the six years of recess beatings I was given because of my religious beliefs. Not one. Not in six years. They joined the ridicule of my classmates. (103)

Writing about it makes it sound worse than it was. I learned to take it, but I also learned, as boys of my generation learned, never to show your feelings, not at home, not in school, not on the street. We were trained to silence. When I faced the harshest in-your-face drill sergeant training in the paratroops, I found it easy to accept. I was already trained not to reveal my feelings, trained perhaps not to have feelings. (104)

Ch. 12

I am a storyteller. It is my nature and my responsibility. (109)

Ch. 13

Ch. 14: The Not-So-Good Old School Days

I thought I was stupid in school. I cannot remember when I could not read and did not spend part of every day reading. My curiosity took me through the children's shelves of the Wollaston branch library to the adult sections, where I was not supposed to read but did, and on to the huge main Thomas Crane Library in Quincy, Massachusetts, where I started making notes for one of the books I published a lifetime later. I was learning all the time--on the street, at work, at home and church and summer camp--but not in school. (129)

My English teacher in high school punished me in the eleventh and twelfth grades when she found out I had read ahead of the daily assignment, as I always did, usually reading the whole book the first night. My music teacher argued that Rimsky-Korsakov was a team like Gilbert and Sullivan. My art teacher made me use crosses for eyes. My guidance teacher game me a B+ for a course in the eleventh grade I never attended. A history teacher jumped me between floors because I was a Scot and therefore on England's side. He as Irish and on Hitler's side. When I had the same chemistry and physics teacher in the last two years of high school, he never told me that a kid from my part of town could buy a slide rule. I got D's on five-question daily quizzes when I answered one or two questions with hand-scrawled arithmetic, while the kids with slide rules clicked their way to A's. When I did get a slide rule in twelfth grade I was so far behind, I never figured it out--and there was no one at home who had ever seen such a contraption. (132)

I accepted the documented fact that I was stupid, although now I realize I was placed in the highest levels of a thirteen track system because of my IQ tests, but no one explained that to me. My father hadn't gone to high school. My mother had gone to the equivalent of high school in Scotland and had been an honor student, but when I did badly she and my father blamed the teachers. They never were very interested in whether I did my homework or not, and I did nothing to change that. (132)

Of course, I was learning on my own at a mad pace, gulping down a half dozen books or more every week, but I didn't think that was learning. It was too much fun. (132-133)

Most of my teachers were bored with their subjects and with us. Classes consisted of forty-five to sixty students. In the tenth and eleventh grades I went to the office and officially dropped out before the end of each year. Nobody cared. In the twelfth grade John Devine and I skipped school every Thursday. Nobody noticed. (133)

School was like home, something to escape. I didn't expect much from either, but I had a strange calm confidence that I couldn't articulate. If I could survive home and school, I would find a way to survive life. (133-134)

I was a secret scholar. In the ninth grade I found my way into the open stacks at the library. I still dream of those stacks of books. A section, Dewey decimal 808 or 810, in the huge main library had a book by a Chicago newspaperman, Burton Rascoe, about writing. Near his book on the shelves were others on writing. I started a commonplace book decades before I knew that literary term, writing down quotes about writing by writers, beginning my lifelong study of how writers write. (134)

In school I expected failure and achieved it. (134)

The story of the "Scholarship Boy" (135-136)

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That's most of the basic narrative. Here are some additional gems:

In the summer before I began to teach, I read a stack of "rhetorics" and felt simultaneously stupid and angered. I was a professional writer, but some of what they said I couldn't understand, and most of what I did understand I thought was wrong. The books' instructions, if followed, would produce bad writing. It is one thing to write clearly--I could do that--something else to articulate what I was doing as a professional writer so that a beginner could understand and make use of it. (138)

And here we have a concise explanation of Murray's purpose in all his research but also the beginning story of where his research all came from...

The teachers these days are far better educated than my teachers were, far more dedicated to teaching, far more willing to try new methods of teaching, and determined to reach out to the students ignored in the days of my youth, the students who come from disadvantaged homes, students with learning disabilities, students from different ethnic or language backgrounds, students with emotional, mental, or physical limitations. (141)

Generosity of spirit...

In a lifetime I had moved from being one of the dumb kids sitting in the back row, to standing behind the teacher's desk, to teaching teachers. I have, indeed, lived an unexpected life. (141)

Ch. 15

My sense of being a failure is more complicated. It was reinforced by school, where I did fail again and again and again, finally flunking out of high school. (148)

I lived by this belief: I was a person of limited talent and intelligence who would, by hard work and discipline, overcome my limitations and compete with those who were brighter and more talented than I. I still hold to that truth. (149)