JULY 24 2023 – (Cont.) Thus, in study hall the day after Uncle Bruce had surprised me with his phone call, I addressed my letter to him, the primary purpose of which was to answer his generous question, “What can I bring you on Parents’ Weekend?”
There were two things that had been on my mind for a while. One was a Nixon sign that I could display in my dorm window, which faced the lightly traveled country road leading right through Craftsbury Common. Grandpa Holman, of course, was the member of the family who was most directly involved in politics[1], but Mother and Dad, Uncle Bruce, and my oldest sister Nina, were all philosophically Republican, and political theory and opinions had long occupied family conversations in our household.
It shocks me now to think I had absorbed and adopted their support for Nixon, but I think the larger influence was a sense of loyalty and fealty toward the family. I also remember that already at age 14, I associated Republican with “wealth,” and the vast majority of kids at Sterling seemed to have come from great “East Coast wealth,” and I operated self-consciously under the dubious logic that my peers would assume that since I was from Minnesota, my family would be supporters of Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s Democratic opponent, and that supporters of Humphrey were more likely than not to be middle class or below, certainly not wealthy, and if in reality, my own parents weren’t wealthy, at least my uncle and grandparents were, and by showing my support for Nixon, I ran a better chance that kids wouldn’t mistake my Minnesota background for a less distinctive, Democratic one. Other kids could freely express liberal political opinions without doing harm to their pedigrees—everyone knew that they came from great, “Republican” wealth. But in my own case, being silent or worse—allowing even the implication of Democratic leanings—would likely have confirmed the middle class status that had afflicted my upbringing in Anoka, Minnesota, half a continent away from my wealthy relatives in New Jersey.
The second item that I requested in my letter to Uncle Bruce was an alarm clock. To get us started each day, the people who ran Sterling School had arranged for fire alarm bells to go off each weekday morning at 6:45. In my dorm, one of the bells was mounted on the thin wall right outside my room. It was probably no more than 18 inches from my slumbering head, and when it rang, it was loud enough to wake a dead, ancient Egyptian. I hated the alarm, and I wanted some way of defending my ears. I figured that if I had a less offensive alarm clock, I could set it for a minute or two before the fire alarm went off and thereby be fully prepared for the intrusion. Thus my request to Uncle Bruce.
On the Saturday of Parents’ Weekend, as other parents started arriving in their fancy cars (including one set of parents who arrived in a Rolls Royce), I periodically looked out my window for Uncle Bruce’s Mustang. It pulled up at around lunchtime. Before going out to greet him, I watched him get out, stick a pork-pie hat on, take it off, put it back on and check for something in the pockets of his trousers, then of his oversized corduroy sport jacket. He looked like a policeman conducting a search of his own clothes.
I then saw him reach back into the car, pull out some papers, fold them and stuff them into the inside pocket of the sport jacket. Then he went around to the trunk, patted his pockets again, sank his hand into one, then another, fiddled with a set of keys and finally, opened the lid. I saw him pull out a burgundy box about the size of a large shoebox. As he pulled the trunk lid back down, a long black cord dropped from the box. He let go of the trunk lid, gathered up the cord, then reached for the lid again and slammed it shut. Oh boy, I thought. It’s going to be interesting having Uncle Bruce around for the weekend.
I went outside to greet him, and we exchanged pleasantries. As he handed me the box, I could see that it was an old clock radio.
“Here’s a radio with an alarm,” he said. “Gaga said there was one in the closet of the guest room and said you could have it. I plugged it in to see if it worked, and it did.” Little did I know as I tucked it under my arm that the sorry old clock radio was a magical box; one that would help transform my life, or more accurately, help bring me to my senses.
“And here’s the Nixon sign you requested.” He then gave me a large roll of plastic. I unrolled it to see that it was a banner a foot high and two feet and a half feet long and it read in big, bold, blue letters, “N-I-X-O-N.” I thanked him, showed him my room, where I left the radio and the banner, then suggested that we head to the dining hall while the buffet lunch was still being served.
The rest of the day was consumed with activities designed to keep the parents happy and occupied. Lunch was followed by junior varsity and varsity soccer games, then a campus tour for parents, a session with the headmaster and members of the faculty, followed by a dinner and coffee hour in the lounge. I don’t remember a lot of the details of that day, except that at every turn, I was worried that Uncle Bruce would make me wish that Mother hadn’t told him about Parents’ Weekend. As things turned out, he did okay. There were no major embarrassments, except on the sideline of the varsity soccer field after the game and again in the coffee lounge after dinner.
The Sterling soccer fields were just down the road from the principal buildings that made up what one could loosely call the school campus. Just beyond the end of the varsity field, the ground sloped precipitously down into a small valley, the bottom of which was hidden from view if you were standing at midfield. On the opposite side of the valley was a high, dark, majestic ridge far off in the distance. That view alone told you that you were in the Green Mountain State. It seemed that if you kicked the ball hard enough, it would land somewhere on the side of that ridge, two or three miles as the crow flew. Sometimes, a dense fog would fill the valley, creating the perception that the soccer fields were on an island in the sky above the clouds, and that if you hauled off and kicked the ball, it would just keep going into oblivion.
That’s what I thought, anyway, and so did Uncle Bruce. The only difference was, I had never said anything about it to anyone, whereas Uncle Bruce just blurted it out to a couple of varsity players after the game. The two athletes happened to be standing there along the sidelines, talking about certain plays of the game, when Uncle Bruce walked right up to them and said, “I want to know how you decide who has to go find the ball if I kick the ball off the edge of the soccer field. Am I going to have to find it myself or is it going to be a team effort?”
The only problem was, Uncle Bruce had chosen to ask two of the coolest, richest kids at the whole darn school and seniors to boot. I was desperate, first to address Uncle Bruce as Uncle Bruce to signal that he was not my dad, and second, to get out of sight of these two guys as fast as I could. What business did Uncle Bruce have making a total fool of himself at my expense?
Almost simultaneously, the two coolest, richest scholars that Sterling had to offer, said, “Huh?” and then one said, with what I thought was definitely a smirk, “Yeah, you’re probably on your own if the ball goes that far.” Then the other guy spat to the side, just ignored Uncle Bruce’s inane comment and kept on talking to the teammate. I felt as though I’d just been permanently branded as “not cool.” I didn’t care if Uncle Bruce was quite possibly richer than their families put together and that he had been to Europe (chances were that they had been there too—half the kids at Sterling, it seemed, had been to Europe). I was simply upset that Uncle Bruce had said anything to these guys, let alone something silly.
But for the rest of the soccer season, I couldn’t stop thinking about Uncle Bruce’s facetious question. Things really did look as though if you kicked the ball hard enough, it would go right on sailing off the edge of the world, so who would help you if you kicked the ball off the edge of the world—the world that nature had sculpted so perfectly in this place called Vermont?
I survived the rest of the day, but after dinner, all parents and their kids were invited to join the Headmaster and faculty in the coffee lounge for tea and coffee and conversation. We were in close quarters, and I was worried. I had reason to be. Before long, Uncle Bruce was introducing himself as a “parent by proxy.” It was my first exposure to the word proxy, and he used it on every single person he met. He usually laughed after he said it, and I noticed that many parents looked puzzled at first and often asked exactly what his connection with me was. Each time he had to answer, I felt more embarrassed.
Eventually, we ran into the parents of my roommate. Their English wasn’t even as good as Jean-Marie’s, and his had been nearly non-existent at the outset of the school year. The mother spoke slightly better than the father, and when Uncle Bruce stepped aside to refill his coffee cup, she asked me, “So, heez your fahzehr?” Apparently she hadn’t grasped the meaning of “proxy.”
“Non,” I said, preparing to speak what little French I’d learned over the previous month. “Il est mon oncle.”
“Anh-honh!” No one else was speaking to the only French-speaking parents in the room, so Uncle Bruce, who spoke some French, took them on, much to my relief, because that pretty well took him out of circulation, and if Uncle Bruce, with his relatively short stature and in his over-sized corduroy sport jacket, appeared a little odd and with his “proxy” talk sounded odd, Jean-Marie’s parents, in their nice but decidedly foreign-looking attire and with their definitely foreign language, were just as odd as Uncle Bruce in the crowd of Brahman parents from Boston and the blue-blooded parents from Westchester.
The next day, at Uncle Bruce’s suggestion, we skipped the rest of whatever remained of Parents’ Weekend and drove all the way down to Wilmington and Wee Moran’s ski shop. Uncle Bruce had generously offered to see to it that I was fully out-fitted with equipment for the upcoming ski season. Since he was paying, I felt obliged to select the skis, boots and bindings that Uncle Bruce recommended. That included Cubco bindings, which created a bit of a quandary. The fact that Uncle Bruce had offered to drive all the way to Wilmington and buy me ski equipment was, well, quite simply, fantastic. I myself had insufficient savings, and Mother and Dad wouldn’t have dreamed of shelling out that kind of money on ski equipment, so I didn’t dare ask. Uncle Bruce was quite insistent, however, about the Cubco bindings.
“Cubco is the safest binding you can buy,” he said. “We visited their factory in Nutley, New Jersey. We met the owner of the company, the guy who invented the binding, and there is no other ski binding on the market that will release in all directions. And that’s what you want—you want a binding that will release no matter which way you fall.” There was the “we” again. Did he really mean “Wee and I”? Somehow I found it difficult to picture the elf leaving Vermont to visit a factory in Nutley, New Jersey. I hadn’t yet noticed that Uncle Bruce and Mother habitually used the “royal we” when they meant, “I.”
But for the very reason Uncle Bruce was pushing Cubco bindings—safety—was the very reason they were considered a “sissy” binding at Sterling. The real skiers, the slalom racers, the kids who had basically grown up on skis, had Look or Marker, maybe Salomon bindings, tightened to the limit so their skis would never come off, but no one had Cubco bindings. I decided to float a trial balloon. “I think most kids at Sterling are going with Look or Marker, with the turntable heel,” I said.
Uncle Bruce let out big “Ha!” and asked, “Do those bindings come with a do-it-yourself cast?” Down went the trial balloon. I looked at Wee, the equipment meister, for a sign of support, but none was forthcoming.
“I think you’ve got to listen to the man who is buying,” said Wee, as he coughed a long phlegmatic cough, then took a long drag on his Camel. It was clear that I had no reasonable choice other than Cubco. So Wee went to work, and in less than 20 minutes, I had a brand new pair of K2 “Holiday” skis, sporting a shiny set of Cubco bindings. Wee also supplied me with downhill poles and boots and a complete set of top-of-the-line cross-country ski equipment, which I needed in anticipation of joining the Sterling cross-country ski team. Uncle Bruce showed no interest in the cross-country equipment, but when Wee presented the whole bill (at cost), Uncle Bruce covered the cross-country as well as the downhill skis, boots, and poles.
Back at Sterling, it was de rigueur to show off your equipment by tying your skis to the four-by-four post at the outside corner of the foot of the bunk beds. That’s how I knew that Look, Marker and Salomon bindings were the “cool” ones. When I got back to Sterling, my skis were stored safely away under the lower bunk.
After saying good-bye to Wee and his ski shop in Wilmington, Uncle Bruce and I headed north back to Craftsbury Common. We stopped in Montpelier for a nice dinner at a hotel restaurant near the capitol. I don’t remember just what we discussed, but I do remember that seated there at a table, just the two of us, a safe distance from Sterling and anyone who would know me, I enjoyed Uncle Bruce’s company, and not just because he had generously provided me with full sets of downhill and cross-country ski equipment. We must have talked politics, because the 1968 general election was right around the corner, and we were both very interested in politics.
On the way back to Craftsbury Common, Uncle Bruce pulled up to a store to give me a chance to stock up on snacks. Our meals at Sterling were generally delectable and plentiful, but snack food was hard to come by. Unless you got a weekend pass to hike down to the old general store in the slightly larger village of Craftsbury at the foot of the hill where Craftsfbury Common and Sterling School were perched, there was virtually no accessible place where a kid could buy anything besides a one-off candy bar or a can of Tab. Thus, I was quite pleased when Uncle Bruce offered to stop to allow me to buy some extra food.
It’s funny what details our brains choose to retain over a lifetime. I don’t know why, but I remember selecting about a dozen single-serving cans of V-8 Juice, two boxes of Ritz crackers, and two cans of Cheez-Whiz. Uncle Bruce asked if that was going to be enough, and of course, he paid. The food would be gone within a couple of days.
We arrived back at Adams Hall at around 9:00 that evening, long after all the parents had left Sterling. After unloading the groceries, I thanked Uncle Bruce, said good-bye, and watched the tail-lights of the blue-green Mustang convertible disappear over the crest of the hill, heading down to Craftsbury and onward back to New Jersey. As I turned and walked slowly back to the entrance to the dorm, I felt guilty that I had felt any kind of embarrassment over having Uncle Bruce around. He had been extraordinarily generous to me and so cheerful, if a little odd, toward other people. Why should I hold that against him? I vowed to write him a nice long thank you letter during evening study hall the next day. (Cont.)
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Since the beginning of time, an active member of the Bergen County, NJ Republican Party; a delegate or alternate to every Republican National Convention since 1940; and a donor to the Nixon Presidential Campaign—for which he was rewarded with a handshake and photo op with the candidate himself. When the Watergate scandal blew up Nixon’s career, Grandpa offered no defense and made no apologies for the disgraced president but said little about what he really thought of Nixon other than “He should resign.”
