33

Blue and White

Citation stands in the middle of a reflecting pool with lily pads at Hialeah. This statue inspired me. Getting Mom to drive me there on nonracing days utilized all my persuasive powers, since she only wanted to go where horses were running. I’d lure her by saying there was a daughter of Swaps or Needles in the shedrow. The great horses at that time were Nashua, Needles, Swaps, Native Dancer and Bold Ruler. There were other fine horses but those caught the public’s attention.

She’d prowl the shedrow while I scampered off to the part of Hialeah forbidden me.

For those of you interested in horses, let me recount Citation’s lineage. Foaled in 1945, he was by Bull Lea out of Hydroplane II. On the top line, the sire line, his great-grandfather was Teddy. Tom Fool, foaled in 1949, another fine horse, also carried Teddy blood but on the dam side.

Citation could run in anything at any distance, which is the mark of the highest level of equine athlete. He could sprint. He could go the distance. He started racing as a two-year-old and lost twice, once in 1947 and once in 1948. He ran and ran and ran.

He missed his fourth year, usually a Thoroughbred’s best year, because of injury, then came back in 1950. I was five and a half going on six. I remember he had to carry heavier weights than other horses, who, of course, didn’t have his injury; though it had healed, it still affected him. He gave us thrilling races, even the ones he lost. What a courageous horse.

Mom loved Seabiscuit, a grandson of Man o’ War, Man o’ War himself, Whirlaway and Count Fleet. I loved Citation. I wanted to be as courageous as he was.

Young people search for heroes. The world is full of them but for whatever reason I found few historical figures that inspired me: Shakespeare, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Hannibal, Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth I. What united them was their courage under fire. Shakespeare’s courage wasn’t as obvious, but I knew enough about writing to see the chances he took, especially with material. If he tipped over the line, Elizabeth might have shut him down or, worse, shut him up.

Movie stars left me cold—a bunch of people flouncing around with makeup on. The women especially seemed irrelevant. They were. The films of the fifties were like one long homoerotic song. The women were caricatures. I might not have put it in those terms at that time. My term was “yuk.”

The films from the thirties and forties captured my attention. Those women seemed a little more real. We could watch these films early on Saturdays, when the Gateway Theater had a kids’ feature, an old movie and then the main feature for twenty-five cents. The junior-high set hung out there. Lots of the kids made out. The boys accompanying me found out I watched the movies and wanted to talk about them.

But this left me with not much in the way of heroes. Citation it was.

By now I have had ample opportunity to observe the courage of certain cats, dogs, horses and wildlife too. People think animals don’t know they can die. They know. I’ve seen them risk their lives for another animal, their babies or even a human. Love goes beyond species.

The fall of 1959, I entered Fort Lauderdale High. Both excited and wary, I wondered how I would fit in. The lordly seniors appeared beyond reach. The juniors were a bit more approachable, and we lowly sophomores scurried about doing the upperclassmen’s bidding.

Batista, brought down by Fidel Castro, changed our high school forever. The brightest and best of Cuba fled to south Florida. Cuba’s loss was America’s gain. In the span of a year, our high school welcomed many of these refugees, who were better-educated than we were, spoke better English than we did and nine times out of ten were better-looking.

At that age your deepest desire is to belong to the “in group.” The Cuban kids, picked for the service clubs, landed in the center of everything.

The service clubs were Anchor, Juniorettes and Sinawik for the girls; Key, Wheel and Civitan for the boys. One had to be tapped for membership. Few sophomores were tapped unless a big sister or brother happened to be in the club. Usually you cooled your heels until your junior year, hoping you’d make it.

The tapping ceremony, noisy and fun, involved cars, decorated with streamers, greasepaint and funny horns, careening around the town, stopping at the homes of those who would be asked to join. Few kids left home that one Saturday out of each year.

I did. I knew I didn’t have a prayer my sophomore year. I walked to the tennis courts.

No small amount of snobbery went into those damn service clubs, which were, as the name implies, expected to provide service to the community outside the high school and were pretty effective in doing so. How many broken hearts and dashed dreams they left in their wake I don’t know. But they prepared us for life. You either make it or you don’t, and the real world judges you by the standards of the day, no matter how superficial.

I didn’t expect much socially since we had little money and Fort Lauderdale High overflowed with wealthy kids, kids who drove to school in brand-new Corvettes, MGs, Austin Healys, Triumphs and Spyders. Convertibles were the thing. Of course, old cars reposed in the parking lot, too.

I walked. It would be a cold day in hell before we had enough money to buy me a car. Even Mom didn’t have a car.

Sometimes I’d catch rides with friends. The names of those people seem as familiar to me as the names of my closest friends today, and some of them still are my closest friends: Patrick Butterfield, Jerry Pfeiffer (deceased), Betty Pierce, Connie Coyne, Bill Wilson, Willis Fugate and Judy Bass. Other people like Judy Allen, Jeri Starr, Bonnie Baltier, John and Jeff Barker, Carlos Ullola, Armando Valdez (deceased), Noel Howlett, Tommy Van Allen, Hans Johnson, Sandy Annis and Larry Centers crowd into my mind because they were great fun and because they were kind to me.

My life centered around my studies, tennis and the horses. Overnight the boys became bigger, stronger and obsessed with sex. Astonished by the change in them, I stayed friendly but not romantic. I remember the girls thought Bob McCarty sexy; his younger brother, David, also was very good-looking. Jerry Pfeiffer trailed girls behind him even though he wasn’t good-looking then.

Girls whom I thought I knew suddenly turned into simps in the face of these deeper-voiced buddies of mine. Jeri Starr was chased by boys from half the schools in Florida, although she never acted like a ninny.

I liked the Sumwalt sisters, Nancy and Carol, because they acted the same when talking to boys as when talking to girls. It didn’t hurt their popularity. I used to giggle watching Noel Doepke restrain a budding Romeo with an icy smile. Nancy Meadows kept her cool. That was about it. The other girls went haywire. They were as bad as the boys, with the major exception that while the boys directly expressed their interest in sex, the girls were covert. The girls had more to lose. I knew this thanks to the endless lessons concerning Juliann Young.

My sophomore year found me busy, loving Latin II and trying to steer clear of this romance stuff. My hormones hadn’t reached a fever pitch. At this point it was easy to sidestep the whole issue.

Also, I am not a romantic person. If the world divides into romanticists and classicists, or Apollonian and Dionysian personalities, thank you Nietzsche, I’m a classicist, an Apollonian, a head-before-heart person.

I feel and I feel deeply, but I rarely act spontaneously and didn’t even when I was a teenager. I think first, then act. Only animals cause this process in me to short-circuit, and sometimes I have to think first when it comes to them, too. I can’t feed every abandoned animal in the world although God knows I’m trying.

Girls fell in love every other day. The boys, too. People sat in class and made eyes at one another. I couldn’t believe it.

If I couldn’t believe it, it must have been a razor-blade ride for those boys maturing slowly. There we’d be sitting in a class with a kid who was physically mature, like Clark Blake, next to a boy whose voice hadn’t changed. The slow maturers caught rat week in gym class.

There they’d be, exposed to the world in their gym shorts, skinny arms hanging out of a T-shirt, getting the stuffing knocked out of them by a bruiser like Ron Harnett.

Emotionally we roughed one another up too, male and female. Sarcastic comments flew back and forth. If you lost your temper, you lost face. Ideally, you had to top the person attacking you. If you couldn’t, it was better to shut up. Thanks to Juts and Aunt Mimi, I excelled. After a time, people realized I could hurt them more than they could hurt me.

More than one kid slunk out of the lunchroom in tears. High school, the great American leveling experience, unites each generation that experiences it: your first football game when your team loses, your first football game when your team wins, first love, first A, first D or F (some of us avoided this one), first inkling that this really was a rite of passage, first understanding of how people behave in groups and first taste of power or lack of it in a group.

My generation, the biggest in America—and it will be as long as we are on the earth—was forced to be ruthlessly competitive. There were so many of us that school times were staggered to fit us in. We competed for grades, for places on sports teams, for one another’s attention and affection. Two thousand kids attended Fort Lauderdale High School. My class was over five hundred kids. Sink or swim. I swam for all I was worth.

Unlike most of my peers, I had to excel. I was going to go to college and, I hoped, to graduate school as well. Determined to amount to something, I wouldn’t be sidetracked. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t fool around. Nobody was using drugs then.

My friends had no idea how determined I was. On the surface I was fun-loving and the best female athlete in the school, better than most of the boys. Only the tanks among them could overpower me. I held my own with the rest and my arm grew stronger and stronger. It wasn’t just distance I was capable of, it was accuracy. In tennis I had fast hands and a bomber serve. I was too short to come down over the ball, so I had to rely on muscle.

I confided in no one. That, for better or for worse, remains part of my character. I’ll happily tell you what I’m thinking. I won’t tell you what I’m feeling until I’ve known you for about five years and seldom then.

The result of this was that I was reasonably popular, I got along, my teachers liked me and I liked most of them. I pulled a few pranks, the worst being when I dumped a dead fish into the ventilation system, which freed us from study hall and the tyranny of Miss Ida Mae Bryant, pound for pound as vicious as a piranha.

If my sophomore year bolstered me, my junior year was sensational. I aced most of my classes. I was number one on the tennis team. A little girl called Chris Evert used to follow me around the Holiday Park courts because she liked my blue satin Flying L jacket. All those Evert kids were incredibly cute, combining the best of their mother and father. Since she was ten years younger I barely noticed her.

My circle of friends grew. I was invited to the “good parties” although I often couldn’t attend because on weekends I worked mowing lawns. Jimmy Evert helped out Pat Butterfield and me by allowing us to roll the courts and sweep lines in exchange for our dues.

The best thing about Jimmy was that he never let you know he was helping you. He had a gift for fixing a problem in your game. I learned a lot from that man and from Colette, too. Everyone loved them.

Jerry, class of 1960, was now attending the University of Florida at Gainesville. He wrote me regularly. I felt grown-up to be receiving letters from a college man.

I hot-walked ponies on Sundays during polo season. Mom flourished at the track that year, and I was becoming a regular on the shedrows. I had crossed the line between energetic girl and young woman. Men looked at me differently. Not once, not for a second, did I hear anything resembling dirty talk on the shedrow. The grooms and trainers respected women. Men acted with courtesy then. No one swore in the presence of a lady unless it was another lady—Mother, usually.

What a golden year, from the fall of 1960 to the summer of 1961; to July 13, 1961, to be exact.