Palm Beach, where we live most of the year, is about a million miles away from Newburgh, New York. My gentle, mostly respectful joke about Palm Beach is that it’s a town of used-to-bes: used-to-be president of, used-to-be CEO of, used-to-be spouse of the used-to-be president or CEO.
We brought Jack up here and it was pretty idyllic for the three of us. Jack’s school friends were low-key and down-to-earth in spite of their parents’ wealth and, in some cases, fame.
The first bump in the road came when it was time for Jack to go to high school. Or, as it turned out, time to go to prep school. The concept of prep school had never entered my head as a kid growing up in upstate New York. Why would it? In those days nobody from Newburgh went to prep school. The same was true for Sue growing up in Rockford, Illinois.
But suddenly Jack was interested in prep school, partly because that’s what some of his best friends were doing, but mostly because Jack believed he would probably get a better education at a prep school in the East. Jack chose Hotchkiss—totally his choice—because he felt a more structured environment would be better for him at that stage of his life. He figured that out for himself.
Sue and I hated the idea of Jack going away to Hotchkiss. Hated it. But we weren’t going to stand in the way of his logical and well-thought-out decision.
I will never forget leaving our boy, fourteen years old, at his Hotchkiss dormitory in some far corner of Connecticut.
That day there was a hole in my heart. And a huge hole in Sue’s heart too.
If possible, it got worse once we were back in Florida. For weeks, I could not walk by Jack’s room without feeling hurt, and loss, and sorrow.
But I felt he’d made the right choice.
After Hotchkiss, Jack was accepted at Penn, Williams, Vanderbilt, and Brown. He chose Brown and he loved the school, made dozens of great friends, and never got a B during his four years.
I always told Jack that I wasn’t proud of him—I was happy for him. What I meant was that he had made his own choice—not my choice or Sue’s choice—and we were happy that he was doing so well and doing what he needed to do for himself.
You go, Jack.