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Tom Gallagher's avatar

The Princeton comments resonate with me. Just down the road I attended an old distinguished all-boys boarding school. A full scholarship paid my way. I was a ragamuffin kid from a family that had no connections with other students. Most of the boys there resembled the photos that accompany your sketch. They wore fabulous shirts of pastel colors like the Gatsby’s closet in the movie scene with Redford and Farrow. They looked down on anyone who wasn’t like them. Or dressed like them. Or summered with them.

I remember looking at my roommate’s closet and comparing it with mine: containing four pairs of K-Mart kaiki slacks, five blue button down shirts, two white button down shirts, one pair of WeeJun loafers, and my late uncle’s Jermyn-street tweed blazer, which I inherited and while threadbare, fit me like a glove. I didn’t have a suit for Sunday chapel— a requirement—so I wore a sunny blue blazer and dark gray slacks. In the New Jersey gloom nobody spotted me. I can’t imagine how many lunches my father took to work to pay for acquiring all the rest of that clothing at once. “No thanks, I’m eating at my desk today—I’ve fallen behind.” He brought mayonnaise sandwiches on white and a thermos of tea.

My roommate always forgot to put out his laundry. When he ran out of clean shirts he walked across the street and purchased new shirts. By Thanksgiving there must have been fifty shirts of all colors and styles at the closet’s bottom. Each worn once or twice.

We had classes six days each week. Since I had five blue shirts I had to wash, hang dry and borrow my housemaster’s wife’s iron on Thursdays so the shirt would be dry enough to press on Friday night. To wear Saturday. But I learned how to press a shirt.

When I went home one weekend per term, one of the masters (fabulously wealthy) would put a $10 bill in my mailbox for the return train fare. An anonymous act of generosity.

[To avoid the reader misconstruing all of this: my experiences there did not incite class hatred, turn me into a Communist or a Socialist. It made me want to resemble them. Not become them but resemble them. In fact I’m immeasurably grateful for the free education. And the privileges that came with it.in fact I sent my sons there—paid the full freight]

So several decades down the road I had the pleasure of launching unrequited takeovers of their fathers’ companies, their fathers having become too lazy, jaded, complacent and sloppy to manage them properly. I don’t think they even recognized my face in the final board meeting.

Isn’t America a great country?

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Austin Ruse's avatar

I was at Rolling Stone roughly at the same time. We hung out at Jean Lafitte on 56th near 6th. Peter O’Toole used to come in, and walk around in his socks peering at the paintings on the walls.

This is a great piece.

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