The tour guide was wonderful. Dressed in period costume – blue waistcoat, wide-brimmed hat, long stockings, leather shoes with gleaming French buckles, a powder bag slung over his right shoulder – he was full of fascinating tales. They set out across the gorgeous green Boston Common toward the Massachusetts State House. All along the walk, he told them how this was where the colonists in America first rose up against British rule and British taxes and where American independence was born.
He took them to the Granary Burying Ground nearby and showed them the graves of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams (“I thought he was a beer,” Nish hissed behind Travis’s ear), and John Hancock, whose flowery signature was on the Declaration of Independence.
Travis blushed to recall his own efforts to create a fancy signature. At the back of the little scrapbook he kept for newspaper stories about the Owls that he clipped from the Tamarack Weekly he had reserved several pages for practicing autographs. He must have tried forty or fifty different styles before he settled on one that included a long loop in the Y, the last letter of his name, and tucked inside the loop was a carefully drawn 7 – his number, and the number once worn by his father’s distant cousin, “Terrible” Ted Lindsay, when Ted Lindsay was a star with Gordie Howe and the Detroit Red Wings.
The Owls took pictures of the various graves and monuments. Wilson asked Travis to take a photo of him standing beside a tiny little gravestone off to the side of the huge monument to John Hancock. The simple marker said “Frank – Servant to John Hancock.” The guide had explained that Frank was a slave who was owned by the Hancock family. Frank was so beloved by the Hancocks that they got special permission to bury him here, beside his master, rather than in the burial ground designated for slaves.
“They didn’t even give him a last name,” said Wilson, his eyes tearing up for someone he’d never known. “Just Frank. Like he was the family dog or something.”
Travis said nothing. He took the photo for Wilson and handed the camera back. What could he say? The world was sometimes such a mystifying place.
The group moved down a side street to Boston Latin School, which the guide said was “the first public school in the United States. It dates from 1635. It was a school nearly four hundred years ago – and it remains a school today.”
The guide named a long list of people who had gone to the school, most of them unfamiliar to Travis. Presidents of Harvard University had gone here. Several state governors had gone to school here. And Ben Franklin had once been a student here.
“Benjamin Franklin,” the guide said, “may have been the smartest American ever. He was a great writer and a newspaper editor and publisher. He was an accomplished musician. He signed the Declaration of Independence. He served as United States ambassador to France. He was a chess master and spoke fluent French and Italian as well as English. He studied electricity. He invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses. He was an absolute genius, no doubt, but there is something even more unusual about Ben Franklin. It has to do with his statue standing here at this very school. Can anyone tell me what it is?”
The Owls mumbled among themselves and guessed. Fahd thought Franklin had “invented” electricity and several of the players agreed, but the guide said no, he didn’t invent electricity, but it was true that Ben Franklin flew a kite in a lightning storm to study the behavior of electricity. Sam thought maybe he had invented the camera, but the guide shook his head and smiled.
“No,” he said. “It’s got something to do with this school.”
Muck could hold his answer in no longer. “He dropped out.”
The guide raised an eyebrow in appreciation. “You knew!” he said to Muck, who appeared to blush. “You’re right!
“Benjamin Franklin, the smartest man in America, despised school,” the guide said to the delighted Owls. “His family was poor. His father was a candle-maker.”
“What did his mother do?” Sarah asked.
The guide laughed. “She survived. Mrs. Franklin had seventeen children. Little Ben was her fifteenth. But the family recognized that he was brilliant beyond his years, and somehow they got the money together to enroll him here. It was then called the South Grammar School. But he hated it.”
“How old was he when he quit?” Fahd asked.
“Ten,” the guide said. “When he was ten years old, he dropped out and never again attended a single day of school.”
“I’m twelve,” Nish said. “That means I’ve already wasted two years of my life.”
The guide laughed and moved on. Nearby was a life-size statue of a donkey, symbol of the Democratic Party.
Nish climbed onto its back and asked Fahd to take his picture.
“Perfect,” Sam pronounced. “A total ass sitting on an ass.”
But the idea had lodged in Nish’s brain. They spent the rest of the afternoon visiting the various sites along the Freedom Trail: Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere’s house, the Bunker Hill monument, and, all the way out along the harbor, the USS Constitution, the famous three-masted warship that had won so many battles during the War of 1812.
The Owls had never seen Muck so happy. After the tour, their coach took them to a nearby souvenir store and told them all to pick out postcards and he would pay for them.
The Owls all thought the cards were just for themselves, small souvenirs of the afternoon, but Muck had other ideas.
“We’re going back to the hotel, and you are all going to send your card home with a message for the parents who couldn’t come on the trip. I want them to know you’re not just wasting your time and their money while you’re here in Boston. We want them to know you might be learning something as well.”
Some of the Owls groaned. They didn’t want to write postcards. They wanted to try the hotel pool.
“No one sends postcards,” Nish said. “Why can’t we just text them to let them know we’re okay?”
Muck sent a withering stare at the mouthy defenseman.
An hour later, Nish had his postcard written, addressed, and stamped. And before Travis could stop it, the message was in the mail and on its way to poor, suffering Mrs. Nishikawa, who was about to find out that her only son had decided to quit school.