What Is… MILITARY COLLEGE?

I couldn’t afford college. I wasn’t earning enough in the summer months, and Dad didn’t have enough money to help. He had moved back to Sudbury after business had dried up at the restaurant in Temagami. So after I graduated from boarding school, I applied to the Regular Officer Training Program, or ROTP. This was a program administered by Canada’s armed forces. If you were accepted, they paid your college for four years and then you had to serve for two years.

I received a letter instructing me to come to the Royal Canadian Air Force base in London, Ontario, for a couple of days of testing. There were written tests and lectures. Then they gathered all of us applicants in the mess hall. They divided us into groups of six, walked us over to one of the hangars, and led each group to a specific area. The groups were widely separated. Each area had a pile of stuff on the floor. There was lumber, ropes, pulleys, tarps, all kinds of ordinary tools and construction-type equipment—you name it.

We were then presented with a scenario. We were to imagine that each group was made up of prisoners enclosed in a three-sided reinforced concrete building. The fourth side was completely open to a twenty-foot-wide chasm hundreds of feet deep. Our mission was to use the pile of tools to escape and get to freedom on the other side of the chasm. We had an hour in which to accomplish this task. Ready, set, go.

The six of us in our group came up with idea after idea. “Maybe if we tie the boards together with the rope it will stretch across.” It didn’t. “Maybe if we try to build a teeter-totter and spring across.” Nope, somebody’s gonna die. “Maybe if we assemble a hoist with the pulleys and swing across.” We worked and worked and worked. And agonized, really agonized over this. We didn’t succeed in escaping. Time’s up.

We went back to the mess hall to commiserate with the other teams and find out how many of them succeeded. None of them had. Not one. It turned out that the problem was unsolvable. So, what were they trying to accomplish? Simple. They wanted to see how the six members of each team interacted. They wanted to see if a natural leader would emerge—and if so, how would that leader treat the others in the group? Would he accept suggestions from them? Would he delegate authority? Would each person be given a specific task? How would the other members behave?

It would be nice for this book if I were to say I wound up being the leader of our group. I guess I could fudge it. There’s nobody around who could say sixty years later, “Oh, no, Trebek wasn’t the leader.” The truth is, I cannot recall if I or anyone else assumed that role.

The exercise taught me a valuable lesson though: knowing what the goals are in life is very important. Sometimes we can make mistakes. Robert Frost took the road less traveled, and it worked out well for him, but that isn’t true for everyone. And sometimes you have to understand what your true goal is in order to achieve it. And we don’t always understand that.

Three weeks later I got word: Congratulations, you have been accepted into the ROTP. You are hereby ordered to report to the Royal Canadian Air Force military academy college in Saint-Jean, Quebec. What? That wasn’t what I had signed up for. I wanted to attend college at the University of Ottawa. I had just fallen in love with Eleanor Mans, the cousin of one of my friends. I didn’t want to go six hundred miles away from Sudbury. But my government had instructed me to report, so I did.

We got off the buses and were met by the senior cadets, who were immediately a bunch of dicks. Intent on making life miserable for the new class, they demanded we form lines facing the sun and started ordering us about.

“You’re wearing sunglasses? Cuff links? Get rid of them. No jewelry should be visible.”

I had shown up wearing the current style of sport jacket. It had two buttons, but you never buttoned both.

“Fasten that other button,” they said.

It put a bulge in the jacket and made it look dorky. I soon realized that the individuality of one Alex Trebek was quickly disappearing.

After making us stand in the hot sun for a good forty-five minutes, they ordered us inside to get our room assignments and bedding. Then they taught us how to make the bed so that a silver dollar would bounce on it. I made mine.

“Who made this bed?” one of the seniors said. “Whose bed is this?”

“It’s mine, sir,” I said.

“It’s perfect.You did a very good job.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now tear it up.”

“Wait a minute, why do you want me to tear it up?”

“No back sass,” he said, tearing the bed up for me. “On the floor and give me ten.”

“But wait a minute, the other guys didn’t do as good of a job—”

“Make it twenty.”

I felt like saying, “You son of a bitch. I did it right the first time and you’re going to get me to do it again?” Instead, I got down on the floor, did my push-ups, then made the bed again.

None of this was what I had anticipated or bargained for. On the third day, they were giving haircuts, and that’s what put me over the edge. In those days hairdos were big. I had a good head of hair—a sort of pompadour with a ducktail in the back. I’d be damned if I was going to let them shave it off. I said, “I’ve had enough of this crap. I can’t deal with these yo-yos who are just throwing their weight around for whatever reason.”

I went to see the vice commandant. I told him I had never wanted to go to military college. I wanted to attend university. He was very soft-spoken, very kind, very understanding.

“It’s a big move,” he said.

“I’m not sure it’s for me,” I replied.

“I understand, but you scored very high in the testing, and you demonstrated leadership qualities we want in the air force. Why don’t you go back to your quarters, think on it overnight, then come back tomorrow and let me know your decision.”

No way was I going to let the military buzz this lush head of hair.

So I did. I slept on it, and in the morning I went back and told him I had made up my mind. I didn’t want to stay. That’s when I discovered the bad cop side of him.

“If you don’t have the guts to stick this out, you’re not the kind of person we want in our military. Get your gear together, see the sergeant outside, and get your passage back home.”

I called my dad.

“Dad, I’m leaving military college.”

“What happened? Did they throw you out?”

“Nope, I’m just leaving.”

That was around early morning. By the time I arrived home in Sudbury around eleven thirty at night, my dad had managed to consume a bottle of rye and greeted me at the train station a little under the weather. He gave me a big hug.

“Don’t worry, Sonny,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”

And it was.