PERKY TALES

Cappy Jack ©2002

 Volume One – A Pyramid Scheme

            Boarding school can make bonds between people that are strong in a way that transcends even our familial bonds. To build a trust in another person so strong that secrets are kept for thirty-six years is an accomplishment I claim but now am willing to expose. I think the benefit of acknowledging that trust for the next generation to appreciate outweighs the exposure of the secret. Besides I am proud of the camaraderie I helped develop between us and that allowed us to succeed as a team.

In the school year 1964 I was a junior living in the Annex of Kehs Hall. My Proctor was a senior named Jud Starr. His father was a professor at NYU and Jud related how his Dad relaxed at night by reading a book cover to cover. The whole book in one night? Yup and just about every night, too. Well, I had to try this form of unwinding for myself.

            Mr. Boehme, my Yeomen chorus director, owned a bookstore in East Greenville. He ran it like a library, too and encouraged me to rent, at fifteen cents a day, I believe, the new Ian Fleming novels about James Bond. Perfect for me. But how was I to read until the book was done? With lights out at ten every night and homework to do, I didn’t see how it was possible at first. I think I had study hall at the time, which meant I couldn’t read the novels with Mr. Figlear watching.

            For some reason, my roommate, Smooth (or Peter Childs as he liked to be known) had a key to the storeroom across the hall from our room. I discovered that I could carefully use that closet for a reading room, provided I blocked the light from escaping under the door. There was a single bulb hanging from the ceiling and a stool that brought me within reading luminescence of it. So I would sit on that stool and read a wonderful spy novel, cover to cover, keeping the page turning and gasps of excitement to a dormouse minimum. I read every Ian Fleming novel this way although the toll of staying up so late so many nights was telling. Eventually the thrill was gone, the relaxation missing and I stopped. Never got caught even by Mr. Hrisko, who patrolled the Annex with a hawk’s eye for suspicious anomalies.

            Within the placid, well groomed, exterior I presented to the faculty lived a spy whose sense of adventure was stimulated by Mr. Sell. Between the boring history lessons he taught to our class he gave us a side of life worth living in his real adventures in the summer. Outrageous tales of working as a roustabout in the oil fields of Texas emboldened us to think outside of our coat and tied existence at Perkiomen. What could our double life do, where risk was proportionate to reward, and we would still graduate?

            A prank of outlandish size and scope became my goal during my senior year living in South Cottage. Living with Nick Fisher and next to Joe Steger, I realized that we could produce an effect to surprise the whole school with daring and deception. Breaking the law, the rules and risking all with no harm done at the end defined the pyramid scheme. And Parents Hall would be the place for all to see our handiwork. I masterminded the task with the Bondian thoroughness I learned in the last year.

            The campus was patrolled by a night watchman. We had to learn his routine and time his movements. That part was easy. Much harder was to predict where the Dean might be. T. Fenner Lytle patrolled the grounds as well and for a big man, he was very sneaky. Downwind you could smell his Camel smoke and we learned to seek his cigarette’s glow in the shadows where he would hide. For a big man he could move quickly and quietly, too, so the task became one of patient watching for any tell tale patterns he might assume.

            Gaining entrance to the locked dining hall was another obstacle that required a spy’s knowledge of everything. There was a hatch on the roof, unlocked and ladder less but the only way in that was harmless to those with no tools. A waiter could arrange a cart to drop down on so the fall from the roof was possible. Getting a boy onto the roof was another difficulty we overcame and the night we successfully tested the entry scheme made us all the more confident of our plan.

            When I think of the time spent setting up this prank and the sleep I lost because of it, I am sure I could have used that same time to keep myself from the bottom of my class. But that was where I ended up, academically speaking. I was at the top of my class, however, with the successful prank of stacking all of the tables in Parents Hall into a giant pyramid. Yes, we moved every one of the tables, chairs, waiter’s trays, etc. in the darkness of night almost reaching the ceiling and leaving nowhere to sit for breakfast. I believe we dropped one table…so we weren’t perfect, but the look on everyone’s face when they came into the dining hall the next morning was. It stood there for a long time as the students and teachers marveled at the symmetry, the attention to detail, the wonderment of ‘Who’?  Fenner broke the spell and we high tailed it out of there before he could assign us to the task of taking it down. We were exhausted from putting it up! No one knew, we couldn’t take credit, but the satisfaction from accomplishment was enough.