You can’t climb a mountain without some rough spots to hold on to.
—Roberta Mae Walden
ALL THOSE HELPING HANDS could smooth the path, but none could do the work for me. Soon I would discover the difference between those who loved and supported me just the way I was and those who could lead me to who I needed to become. To this point, my coaches and friends and the like had taught me valuable life lessons. They were encouraging and kept my spirits up, never allowing me to dwell in self-pity. But I reached an age when I needed to learn specific skills. In many ways, I was still a very young child trapped in an adolescent’s body. What I needed now was structure and academic discipline, because it was still a struggle for me to keep up in school, especially when it came to reading.
Think of all the books you had read by the time you were fourteen or fifteen. Perhaps an adventure series like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or a classic like To Kill a Mockingbird or one of Michael Crichton’s great science-fiction thrillers. Poetry by Langston Hughes or the sweeping romance of Zora Neale Hurston. Then imagine if you had never read for enjoyment until you were nearly fourteen or fifteen. It would stunt your reading experience and deny you the rich experiences that all those books would have brought you.
That was me. Playing catch-up. Not a natural reader, but with the years I had invested in my reading machine, I was now a careful and deliberate but slow reader. I could quote Scripture, but I was unfamiliar with the flow of the written word. Not only did it take me longer to read, but since I hadn’t read as much, I didn’t have the same starting point as my classmates. I read a book for the first time cover to cover, simply for pleasure, when I was about fourteen. It was Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. Can’t be certain why I chose it. It might simply have been because I liked Hemingway’s beard. Nonetheless, when I told my mother of my plans, she advised me against it.
“Son, why don’t you read a simpler book first,” she said. Here was the woman who had been my number-one champion showing some doubt.
“What’s wrong ?” I asked her.
“I don’t want you to get discouraged if the book gets too hard. Why don’t you read something else and work your way up to Hemingway.”
More than disappointed, I was startled by her reaction. Fortunately for us both, another one of my core qualities kicked in: stubbornness. “I’ll read this book because I can read anything,” I proclaimed.
Right away I could relate to the old man’s struggles against the marlin and the predatory sharks, as well as the expectations of others. But I would eventually learn there is a dramatic difference between reading and comprehension. I read Hemingway’s words at fourteen, but it would actually take years for me to grasp his meaning. Santiago’s triumph over adversity, and his struggle with his pride, has certainly resonated with me and my life.
My struggle, along with the shame and embarrassment, has made me angry most of my life. In fact, seething with anger. Jealous, competitive, and sensitive to the slightest insult, I hated anyone who was smarter than I was, which, by the time I got to Archbishop Curley High School, meant almost everybody. Freshman year at Curley I was ranked 310 out of 330 students. More than making me feel inferior to most of my classmates, it made them the enemy. When I wasn’t working to improve my grades to please my mother, I was working harder to prove something to the kids around me. Besides Joe Stumbroski, I had very few friends for the first couple of years of high school. Perhaps Joe and I were close because we were never in the same classes. He was never an adversary. I chose to dislike most of my classmates. In an odd way, it made it easier to function. If a classmate got an A and I got a C, it meant that he was better than me, smarter than me, probably laughed at me and therefore could not be trusted. I avoided study groups. I never wanted anyone to know how slowly I read and how slow I was to comprehend. The same whispers and looks of pity or disgust that followed me into the basement at St. Katherine’s tagged along in high school. I was in remedial reading. The class for dummies was how it was commonly referred to. Another familiar insult. A class full of adolescent boys, working through their learning disabilities, while, outside, the cool boys preened and teased.
But I managed to keep all my rage inside (or express it on the football field). The best way for me to cope and live within my mother’s rules was to “kill them with kindness.” It became my motto. A bad student. A good kid. A poor reader. The most polite boy in class. Slow to comprehend. He’s the hardest worker we’ve ever seen. It’s been the same approach most of my professional life. Always the underdog, but unfailingly polite and disciplined. One of the coaches at Curley described our football team this way: agile, mobile, and hostile. That was the attitude I took into class. Every slight was noted. I kept score on everything, ready to settle up in due time. Unlike many of the classmates in remedial reading who displayed their anger by becoming discipline problems or mentally punching out of class, mine forced me to emphasize my strengths as I built on my weaknesses.
However, hard work did not guarantee success. I got a D in reading first term and was placed on academic probation. My mother’s finesse may have gotten me into Curley, but in order to stay, I’d have to improve my grades. I was ordered to stay after school to work with a reading specialist and meet with my guidance counselor. Once again, disappointment created an opportunity.
Father Bartholomew was a sturdy-looking man, who wore glasses and had thinning blond hair. Though he rarely smiled, he had a pleasant expression on his face. He was my image of what Christ might look like, not his color but his character and gait. He walked with a purpose. He wasn’t athletic, but he always looked fit. He wore sandals almost year-round. Father Bart was both practical and encouraging.
He asked a life-changing question: “What’s your plan?”
“I want to play pro football,” I said with a smile.
He laughed. “That’s a nice dream, but what is your plan? What about college? How do you plan on getting there? Your current grades won’t get you there. Trade school or community college but not a four-year college.” He could see from my expression that this news was saddening to me, so he added, “That’s not good news or bad news. That’s just where you are.”
It was a powerful reality check. It’s nice to dream, but you need a way to get there. Father Bart and I first mapped out my four-year plan for high school, and then he said, “Now let’s make the plan within the plan. Planning your education, like planning your life, is like building a house one brick at a time. So let’s talk about what you have to do today to prepare for college.”
That first forty-five-minute session lasted a few hours. Since Father Bart lived only a hallway away in the rectory and I would walk home to an empty house, neither of us was in a hurry. Like an architect at his drafting table, Father Bart laid out everything I’d need to build a “plan within the plan.” From his shelf, he pulled out a college directory, which detailed all the entrance requirements. He opened it and pointed at random to the first college he came across and said, “These are the requirements to get in.
“You see,” he said, “based on your current schedule, you can’t get into this school. We could keep going, but we’d find the same thing almost everywhere.” My shoulders rounded with disappointment. “Chin up,” he said with confidence, “we’ve got four years to get you ready.”
For the remainder of the session, we pored over my current schedule and coordinated it with the classes I’d need to get into college. It’s worth noting he never set boundaries on what kind of college. So at fourteen, still reading below grade level, I was allowed to hold on to the notion of endless possibilities. We went over my syllabus for the remedial reading and math classes, and he described how I would have to progress to get into a so-called good school. Then he went deeper, explaining the kind of time I’d have to put in studying. There were formulas he said for how long good students study.
“You’ll have to study even longer and harder,” he said. By this point, his tone was more like a football coach. He wasn’t quite yelling with excitement, but he was forceful.
We made a schedule for every half hour of my day, from the time I woke up in the morning until bedtime. He arranged for a tutor. He also got me a job mopping the halls after school so that I’d have a reason to be on campus, other than the extra academic help I needed. It remained unspoken, but Father Bart was aware how sensitive I was to being seen as different. The job after school gave me great cover when friends asked, “Why are you hanging around?” Added to that was the fact that my family could use the extra money. I wasn’t the only kid whose parent(s) scraped to send their son to Curley. The school had its own work/study program of sorts. After school, boys worked mopping the halls and cleaning classrooms.
The routine suited my mother just fine. Clarice Pitts made sure I did every extra-credit activity and kept to a strict regimen of school, work, sports practice, homework, and church. My mother didn’t allow friends in the house unless she was home. I wasn’t allowed to go to anyone else’s house other than the Stumbroskis’. House parties were forbidden. I could go to a dance at school or to a church event, but teenage hangouts and the mall were not allowed. I was permitted to go out on Friday nights and was always home by 11:00 P.M. Later in life, my own children and their peers have always found such boundaries barbaric. “Nothing good ever happens after midnight,” Clarice often said when I would plead for an extended curfew. Once I gave a well-thought-out rebuttal, “Is that when you and Daddy got married, after midnight?” I thought it was brilliant. She playfully but with an edge punched me in the shoulder. “Don’t say that again.”
Despite where I was academically, Father Bart never discouraged me. He taught me to know where you are and where you want to go. I wanted to go to college, and Father Bart assured me he would help me get there. In many ways he helped put my reading deficiencies in perspective. I was in remedial reading, but I didn’t have to stay there. I could go farther with a plan. It also helped that we always started and finished our meetings with prayer. How wonderful it was for me to be in an environment where prayer was not simply encouraged but expected. All the distance I had traveled to this point came on whispered prayers. Now I was in an environment that affirmed that prayer can take you as far in life as you’re willing to plan and work. Who knew Franciscans also believed in the African proverb: When you pray, move your feet.
Gradually I began to improve. There was growing comprehension. I was gaining confidence, though I was still very quiet because of the snickers over my speaking deficiencies. By my sophomore year I had moved out of remedial math and reading. Although I was still closer to the basement than the top of the academic curriculum at Curley, my spirits were buoyed by a sense of accomplishment. Because teachers knew that I was a hard worker, they were willing to spend extra time with me after class. Most were encouraging and supportive. Sports remained the center of my universe, but I was no longer simply surviving in class. I was beginning to thrive. I eventually found a subject I loved—history. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, the stories of conflict and courage appealed to me. I could relate to figures like Crispus Attucks, the first black man reported to have died in the American Revolution. The people around him underestimated his talents, but when the time came, he proved his worth. History had a beginning, middle, and end. That’s how I began to see my life. I enjoyed it without prodding from my mother. The more I learned about a given topic, the more I wanted to learn. I was finally reading. And there was a reward. History was the first class in which I ever received an A.
Until this time I was still very much a loner and was afraid to engage in an academic conversation with a classmate or really speak up in a class discussion. But by junior year, especially in history class, there was a gradual recognition by my peers that I excelled in this subject, and they sought my opinion and even my help. This was a new experience for me. I was not accustomed to having a reputation as one of the “smart” students. Around the same time, my other grades began to improve, and I liked being recognized for something other than athletics.
It was also in my junior year that Curley started a school newspaper and I signed up to be a sports writer. I loved sports, and I was beginning to love words. It seemed like a natural fit. It was the first time someone other than a teacher or relative would read my work. I would sit in the cafeteria and watch classmates read an article I had written. It would make me think back to the days when people thought I was stupid. Now people were reading my stories. Sometimes they would laugh, sometimes they would look surprised, and sometimes they would look pleased or at the very least interested. The fact that I could provide people with critical information gave me the sense that I mattered. I served a purpose.
Along with the academic improvements, I was gradually gaining ground on a normal teenage life. Pickle was growing up. I still stuttered, but I was more comfortable, and confident enough to speak up when I had to and didn’t even mind friends who finished my sentences. By senior year, I experienced a respite from my struggles. I was a solid B student, ranked 30 out of a class of 240. Four years earlier I’d been ranked 20 from the bottom. My body had finally caught up with the size of my head. I had a steady girlfriend. Kim Taylor lived at home with her parents and three sisters in a suburban neighborhood. Kim was the perfect high school girlfriend. We had known each other since junior high school, when we sang in the church choir together. We shared similar values, neither of us drank or did drugs, and we could dream aloud about college. In my world outside of Curley, there were not many people who had such dreams.
And getting into college was a priority. For years my mother had warned me, actually threatened me, about what life would be like without an education. I learned exactly what she meant after graduation, when I spent the summer working on a maintenance crew for the Maryland State Department of Transportation. At the time, the law required all summer employees to be at least eighteen years old. It was a good paying job, and our family needed the income, so I lied about my age. I got a job cutting grass along Interstate 95 near the Baltimore Harbor tunnel and cleaning the toll-booths and inside the tunnel tube. It was dirty and somewhat dangerous work. The large self-propelled lawn mowers could cut a three-foot-wide swath of grass, a pile of garbage, or a person’s leg. I loved the work. Walking up and down the grassy median of the interstate behind my industrial-strength lawn mower, often under the hot sun, was almost therapeutic. The walking would strengthen my legs for football, and pushing around the lawn mower and lifting debris was as good as lifting weights. It may have been the most instructive job I’ve ever had.
Every day, twice a day, employees would punch a clock. We could arrive early if we wanted to, but the paycheck would only reflect a change (a deduction) if we were late. I don’t remember the names of any of the men I worked with, but I can still see their faces. The foreman was a small, tightly wound white man in his midfifties. His dark pants and orange work shirt were always neatly pressed. Even his black work boots had a nice shine. If not the orange shirt, then the white socks always gave him away. One of the workers in our crew was always responsible for keeping his government-issued white pickup truck clean and the tire rims polished. He had an awful habit of calling all the black crew members Skip. The first time he called me Skip, I walked past him. He pulled my arm and said, “Didn’t you hear me, boy?”
“You said Skip, sir. My name is Byron Pitts,” I answered.
He looked confused and walked away in a huff. From then on I’d always respond appropriately if he yelled Skip. I took it to mean whichever one of you colored boys is close, come do such and such. There were three other men assigned to our crew full-time (there were several other crews). Two of my crew mates were black and one was white. The white guy had a distinct accent, pure Dundalk (only people from Baltimore have heard it or at least would recognize it), a beer belly, and a perpetual three o’clock shadow. He was always pleasant and, for the most part, minded his own business.
Whenever our day was interrupted by rain and the boss would pick us up, the white guys rode up-front and the brothers back in the flat. There was a constant barrage of harsh language, lots of cigarettes without filter tips, and the frequent liquid lunch if the boss man wasn’t around. Since they thought I was older, I had talked about my plans to go to college soon. One payday the white member of our crew yelled at me, “Why are you going to college? You oughta just get a job. I gotta job. And every two weeks my paycheck speaks to me.”
Before I could answer, the eldest and quietest member of our crew did something he rarely did when we were in a group; he spoke up. “Leave the boy alone,” he said in my defense. He went on to say, “Son, stay in school. Someday your paycheck is gonna scream at you.”
We all chuckled. I had a smile on my face the remainder of our shift. I wish I could remember his name. I would work with him for three summers of my life; he was more like a favorite uncle than a co-worker. I never knew if he could read. On those rare occasions when we had to read instructions on a piece of equipment, he’d always ask me to read for him, explaining he’d forgotten his reading glasses. There’s no doubt the fourth member of our crew could not read. He had a stutter far worse than mine, and the boss often treated him more like an animal than a man. He never objected. He and I would exchange greetings only in the morning and at the end of the day.
We may have been an odd collection of men, but five days a week, eight and half hours per day, we were together. Thirty minutes for lunch was usually spent under a bridge or on the side of the truck. Ten minutes to eat (I usually carried my familiar bologna sandwich with mustard on white bread) and twenty minutes to nap, either in the shade beneath the bridge or on the ground beneath the truck. Learning to sleep on the side of Interstate 95 (with your back to traffic, of course) would be great training for one of the vital skills of being an international journalist: the ability to sleep anywhere at any time.
There were also tremendous role models for the value of hard, honest work. For some of the men I toiled with that summer, cutting grass on the interstate was the pinnacle of their working lives. It’s what they were good at and where they found satisfaction. They maximized the talents God gave them. That may be hard for many people to understand. My mother was clear about such things. Do your very best at whatever God has given you to do. Push past what you think is possible. If that’s a perfect shrub in landscaping, so be it. She saw a different potential in me. Today I work in a profession with people who are well compensated and well respected for what they do. Yet many complain about being overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. Many of those men in orange shirts whom I had the honor to work beside never complained about jobs that paid barely north of minimum wage. They were decent men who saw dignity in their work. They didn’t make excuses.
I don’t look back on those days through rose-colored glasses. At the end of the workday, my hands and limbs were sore. I smelled. I was sweaty for hours. Yet there was structure and simplicity to the tasks. Gas the mowers in the morning. Walk north or south behind the mower until it ran out of gas or it was lunchtime. Fill the tank, and then walk until the workday was done. In a few days or a few weeks, we’d reach the end of our section of highway, then we’d simply turn around and head the other way. It was the Forrest Gump approach to work. On bad weather days we’d get to clear trash near the toll plaza, and at least once per summer paint the booths.
For me, that summer was like a year at prep school. It crystallized the reasons why I wanted to go to college and what the alternative would be if I failed. Earlier that spring, I had been accepted to a few schools—I received average SAT scores, but I had strong extracurricular activities, which included football, and glowing recommendations. All those who wrote letters said pretty much the same thing, “Give this kid a chance.”
My mother and I had decided on Ohio Wesleyan University for some of the same reasons she chose Curley, a small school with good academics in a safe, supportive environment. And by safe, I mean middle of nowhere. Delaware, Ohio, is about as far from East Baltimore as one can imagine. One is overwhelmingly black. The other is overwhelmingly white. My mother and I flew to Columbus and took a shuttle van to campus. I wondered to myself, “Am I going to college or a farm?” Nothing looked familiar. East Baltimore is a world of row houses, parked cars, blacktop streets, mixed-breed dogs, and lots of black people. That first day in Ohio I saw more cows than people who looked like me. It took about ten minutes to drive the entire length of the town. The college campus is compact, easy to walk from end to end, with a population of about 2,400 students. About 500 were brand-new, just like me.
My brief taste of college life had been when I was a high school senior on a recruiting trip (not to Ohio). The football players took me to a fraternity party. During the course of the evening, they began to pass a marijuana-filled bong around the room. When my turn came, never having seen a bong before, I did what I thought all the others had done. I blew as hard as I could. Pot sprayed everywhere. All over the floor, the walls, books, even on one of my hosts. To say the least, I made a poor impression. I think the guys would have jumped on me if not for having to explain why a fight broke out on a recruiting trip. Needless to say, I bypassed that school and was never tempted to try pot again, or any other drug, for that matter. I had never heard the term recreational drug use until I got to college. In my world back in Baltimore, junkies did drugs and drunks drank alcohol. Their shocked reaction always surprised me when classmates found out I didn’t do either.
Since my mother and I arrived before my roommate and his family, I got to stake out the best spot for my belongings. The time alone in the room also helped calm my nerves a bit about meeting him and about living with a stranger for the very first time in my life. I was a football recruit, a full-fledged jock. Usually, those are the most confident characters on campus. I, on the other hand, was a bit of a geek. Not a book-smart geek. But an unworldly young man who thought church choir rehearsal was a great night out.
I had spent weeks thinking about whether or not I would fit in at Ohio Wesleyan University, facing the academic challenges I anticipated and the social pressure I dreaded. I was relieved that Mother had made the trip with me. She helped me unpack. It didn’t take long: I had one suitcase and one box. Inside the box was the same stereo my sister had taken to college ten years earlier and my mother’s childhood pencil holder. It was just a tin can wrapped in brown paper, but as far as I was concerned, it was a family heirloom. My sister had taken it to college. It was mine now. God willing, someday I’d pass it on to my children. The only other item of value was my Bible. Actually, it was my grandmother’s pocket Bible. Most of the pages were dog-eared and worn.
Mom and I said a prayer before she sent me off to football practice that afternoon. Eventually I walked back to my dorm room, where my mother would be waiting, so we could go to dinner and talk about my first day of college. Much to my surprise, Mom was gone. In her place, a letter and a single dollar bill.
Dated August 21, 1978, it read:
Dear Son,
I pray your first team meeting went well. I know how excited and nervous you are to be playing college football. I wish I could have been there. My heart reflects back to your days in Little League in East Point. I was so proud of you then. I am even prouder of you now. Please know I’m sorry I couldn’t be here when you returned to your dormitory.
I didn’t want you to worry or lose your focus, but I only had enough money for us and your stuff to get to Ohio Wesleyan and then get my butt back to the airport (smile). As you see, I’ve left you a dollar. I wish I had more to give, but I only have two dollars left in my purse. Like we always have done, we share. So I gave you half of what I had and kept the other half. I know a dollar won’t get you much, but God has always met our needs. So know that God will meet your needs today, tonight, and in the years to come.
Byron, you’ve always been a good boy. Please continue to be that. Be the polite young man I raised you to be. Work hard. Pray hard. Study hard. This is a good school. You will do great things here.
Son, always remember I love you, your sister Saundra loves you, your brother Mac loves you, your grandmother loves you, all your aunts and uncles love you. Not a day will pass when we won’t be praying for you and believing in you.
Do your best and God will do the rest.
Love,
Momma
Mom headed home with a buck . . . and I started college with my sister’s old stereo, my mom’s pencil holder, my grandmother’s pocket Bible, a dollar, and a tractor-trailer full of love and prayers. I would need all of it because college was about to kick my behind in new and unfamiliar ways. In all honesty, my freshman year in college was the scariest year of my life. My course load included freshman English, geology (which I hated), philosophy, introduction to journalism, and Spanish. Each class required more reading than all of my classes in high school combined. Nothing unnerved me more than the daily torture of that pile of books I faced every day. And there was the realization that my mother was not there to schedule my day and yell threats or encouragement in my ear. It was up to me.
But it wasn’t just the academic pressure. I was beginning to feel alone and isolated, in part because of the economic gap between me and many of my classmates. Even when I had issues at Curley, we were all blue-collar kids. At OWU I had a classmate with a BMW. I had never seen one before. A few messy students whined about missing their housekeepers. I couldn’t tell anyone that my grandmother was a housekeeper. I had classmates who had traveled the world, spent semesters abroad. At Curley we considered Ocean City, Maryland, a big excursion. I began to feel resentful, deficient, and overwhelmed. The loner was returning.
But out of the agony of this experience came a friendship forged in battle. For every person who’s ever told me, “No, you can’t, you’re not ready, you’re not good enough,” God has always brought people like Peter Holthe into my life. Pete lived down the hall from me in our dormitory. Our floor was divided into social groups: the farm boys, the frat boys, and the others. Pete wasn’t associated with any group, and as a committed bookworm, he often found himself eating alone in the cafeteria. I was usually alone too. We “others” gradually found our way together. Pete is one of the smartest people I have ever known. He arrived at OWU intent on majoring in the sciences. His parents had hoped he would go to an Ivy league school or one of the nation’s top business schools. Pete’s dad was a partner in a major accounting firm back in their hometown of Minnetonka, Minnesota. Pete decided to study business and zoology, with advanced degrees in decency and friendship.
“My dad may have thought I was rebelling by going to OWU, and perhaps I was. But I was determined to go my own way. I barely paid attention my senior year in high school but aced my SATs, and that’s what got me into OWU.”
I remember when Pete told me about his journey to college. I was struck by the notion that his attending Ohio Wesleyan was seen as disappointing by his parents, whereas, for my mom, getting me to OWU was a miracle.
I’ve always described Pete as the whitest white guy I’ve ever met. Not just pale white (Nordic white), with reddish hair, but he wore thick glasses and had a formality to him that made him seem more like thirty-eight than eighteen. We hit it off right away. Pete thought I was equally weird.
“Why do you play football?” he asked me one day. “You’re not going to play professionally, and you must not be very good at it because every time I see you, you’re limping or have a limb in a sling. It doesn’t make sense why you’d punish your body for no good reason.”
That was Pete—everything needed to make sense to him. He’s always been analytical. There’s an answer to every problem if only one takes the time and puts in the effort to figure it out. He became a dominant voice in the nightly discussions about politics and world affairs that would take place in our dorm, often in his room. Pete and the other guys would exchange ideas, but I rarely said a word. My verbal contribution would be laughter, a grunt, or an occasional one word assent. Mostly, I just listened. Pete knew I had a problem and had the courage to point it out. Actually, at the time, I thought he was incredibly rude.
“Byron, your vocabulary sucks. Sometimes you talk like you’re in grade school. And sometimes you use big words that make no sense. What’s your problem?”
By then, I thought I was pretty good at masking my remaining shortcomings. I was an incredibly slow reader, but I studied alone so no one really knew how long it took me to read and comprehend my schoolwork. In a new environment, without the comfort of people who knew me well, I slipped back into my pattern of silence to avoid the shame of stammering and stuttering. I generally limited myself to one-or two-word answers. I was never comfortable speaking outside my very limited range. Hiding my deficiencies was a very comfortable state for me. And now, in a matter of weeks, this wise guy from Minnetonka had penetrated my carefully crafted façade.
When Pete was done verbally undressing me, I wanted to punch him in the mouth.
“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” I barked.
Pete’s reply. “I’m talking to you, my friend. Clearly you have a problem communicating, and I want to help.”
I was embarrassed and angry. “What gives you the right to t-t-talk down to me?” I sputtered again.
“I’m not talking down to you. I’m sitting, you’re standing, so I can’t be talking down to you,” Pete said with a smile and the clipped laugh I came to appreciate. “Look,” he went on, “I’m your friend, and if I didn’t care about you, I wouldn’t say anything. I know you’re not stupid, though sometimes you sound like it. Be honest, what’s wrong? You can trust me.”
I had spent so many years hiding behind a curtain of lies and secrecy, it wasn’t easy for me to tell the truth. But I did. I confided in Pete, told him how long it had taken me to learn to read, told him about the fear I faced every day in class. How overwhelmed I felt before the mountain of reading that was required. Any freshman year in college is tough, but I felt as if I was starting a race and everyone else had already run the first few laps. Being a slow reader was not my only issue. My inability to communicate in class and speak with my professors in a meaningful way was really slowing me down. I rarely spoke in my classes because I didn’t have the confidence to express myself.
Pete was not judgmental; nor did he express any shock or surprise. His response was simple. “If I can help, I will. If I can’t, I’ll help you find someone who will.” And he did help. “Here’s what we’ll do,” Pete said with confidence. “Every day I will give you a new word from the dictionary. I want you to study it. Then, the next day, say it, spell it, define it, and use it in a sentence—deal?”
“What do you want in return?” I asked.
“Nothing. You’ll be my first great college experiment. Let’s see how we do.” That’s pure Pete. He was helping me but wanted it to seem as if I was helping him (though I convinced myself that being friends with a football player probably wasn’t the worst thing for Pete’s social life). That was our secret. We kept the arrangement to ourselves through a few years of different roommates and a few different girlfriends.
Before long, I was coming up with words, and that always made Pete laugh. Like so many of the wonderful people God brought into my life, Pete taught me more by his actions than he did by his words.
When I struggled in a class, Pete devised a study routine for me. It was his idea for me to take all my notes from class and type them out at night in a separate notebook. “Redundancy is good for you,” he said. “Plus, your handwriting sucks.”
For the remainder of college, I kept two notebooks for every class. One I took with me to the classroom; the other I kept with its neatly typed pages in my dorm room over my desk, and that’s the one I would use for studying. As hard as I worked, though, I couldn’t match his ferocious and disciplined study habits. Pete studied every night except Fridays. That was his drinking night. Pete knew his way around a chemistry lab and a beer bottle. It was the one area I could keep him in check.
“Pete, what’s our limit on beer tonight?” As a nondrinker, by “our” I actually meant “his.” Always loyal and always honest, whatever number of beers we’d agree to, that’s how many Pete would drink. By Saturday he was back to his books, and on Sundays he read the Sunday New York Times from cover to cover. (The only time I ever saw Pete angry was when someone touched the Times before he got through reading it.) I just marveled at this guy, my age, taking such enjoyment out of reading everything from textbooks to magazines and newspapers. Not to mention the effort. Since The New York Times wasn’t delivered on campus, Pete had to walk at least a mile to the store and buy it. Though he was never a fan of exercise, Pete’s devotion to making that walk in rain, sleet, or snow on Sundays was impressive. I was never able to convince him to go with me to church on Sunday, and he never got me to read the Sunday New York Times either.
Our freshman year in college he was already talking about graduate school and his career, and not in broad terms. He already knew the best schools in the country for his particular discipline, the grades required to get in, and the names of the department heads. Grad school was still three or more years away, but Pete already had a plan. Perhaps Pete was actually Catholic and had a Father Bart back in Minnesota, I often thought to myself. I was already considering my career, too—journalism, believe it or not. Having written for my high school newspaper, I somehow had fooled myself into thinking I might be a pretty good writer. Despite my limited vocabulary, I enjoyed words and expressing myself. So much had been bottled up inside me for the years I couldn’t read that I welcomed any chance to read and write. My English teacher in freshman year was Dr. Paul Lucas, who had been at OWU for decades. He was both a brilliant English professor and an unforgiving taskmaster. A tall, thin, balding, pipe smoker, who seemed fond of sweater vests in and out of season, he carried himself like a man who got lost on his way to teach class at Harvard. I had heard Dr. Lucas was tough. I was on a first-name basis with tough, but I still wasn’t ready for him. Perhaps he had his favorites, but I seemed to play the role of his whipping post.
He kept his classroom as he carried himself, neat and orderly. He had us working out of small blue notebooks. He didn’t want black or gray or brown. He wanted blue. He was meticulous about grammar and proper punctuation. My classmates and I were told early on how he wanted assignments written; the details included which side of the page for our names and the date. No exceptions. I was used to order. Many of my teachers back at Curley insisted a student stand up before giving an answer. We walked on the right side of the hallway and the staircase. I understood order. College was far different from high school. More reading. More freedom. More was expected. I got all that. Dr. Lucas I never got.
“Fine work, Mr. Pitts,” he’d say as he handed me an assignment in class marked with a D, if I was lucky, or an F, quite often. Visits to his office were humiliating and often painful. Dr. Lucas pulling on his pipe, puffing smoke as he critiqued my work: lousy grammar, terrible spelling, poor sentence structure, and poor composition. I was befuddled by little things. Because I didn’t know how to type and couldn’t afford to pay anyone to type my papers, it would take a painstaking amount of time to finish my work. That sometimes meant the essays were not well thought out or corrected. Sometimes papers were simply turned in late. There was no extra credit, and unlike high school, there was no acknowledgment for effort. The sessions went quickly. Dr. Lucas never offered suggestions on how to improve, only criticism. It was clear that he expected my baseline of understanding to be higher than it was. Because I wasn’t very verbal, I wasn’t equipped to say what I needed. My only response was that “I’m doing the best I can.” It got so bad Clarice tried to intervene, eight hundred miles away, from back in Baltimore. Tired of my tearful phone calls home, she called Dr. Lucas directly. I don’t think he was accustomed to getting phone calls from parents. Certainly not someone like Clarice Pitts. Her counsel to me, just keep praying and working hard, didn’t seem to work. Despite my mother’s encouraging words and prayers and Pete’s study tips, I failed Dr. Lucas’s class and did poorly in several others.
At the end of my first semester in college, I was on academic probation. Another poor showing next semester and I might be kicked out of school. Perhaps as testament to my stubbornness or stupidity, I signed up for Dr. Lucas again. I thought if I was more disciplined with my time and worked harder, I could pass the class. There was no guarantee that another professor was going to be any easier. I believed that the problem was my effort, not his teaching.
After a wonderful Christmas break of home-cooked meals, visits to my church, and time with Kim Taylor, I came back to OWU refueled and ready to conquer the world. I had been down before, but Dr. Lucas seemed to be waiting to take me down another notch every day. So I prayed harder, typed longer, and studied more notes.
When a crucial midterm exam was approaching, Pete worked with me, and my mother made more than her routine phone calls. More nerve-wracking than the actual exam was the day when Dr. Lucas would pass out the results. Nervously waiting near the back of class, my palms sweating, my academic future on the line, I watched and listened as Dr. Lucas passed out papers and puffed on his pipe. Finally, he came to me. Instead of continuing on with the rhythm of passing out papers and moving along, Dr. Lucas stopped at my desk. With a big smile, he placed my test results on my desk and announced to the class, “Congratulations, Mr. Pitts, your best work thus far. D plus. Bravo!”
He proceeded to pass out the remaining few papers to my other classmates. As for me, I was back in my father’s car: silent, warm, staring straight ahead, expressionless. I put my hands under my chin and refused to cry or get angry. I never heard another sound the rest of the class. I didn’t even realize class was over until my classmates started to leave.
On my way out, Dr. Lucas asked me to follow him to his office. Raised to always respect authority, I gave the only response I knew to give, “Yes, sir.” Once I was in his office, Dr. Lucas said what he had to say quickly. At the time it seemed almost kind.
“Mr. Pitts, I’ll make this quick. No need to sit down.” Rarely did Dr. Lucas ever look directly at me when he spoke, but this time he made an exception. “Mr. Pitts, you are wasting my time and the government’s money. You are not Ohio Wesleyan University material. I think you should leave.” I had no reaction. He continued. “You’re excused. Nothing further. Please tell your mother what I said. Good luck to both of you. Now excuse me.”
That’s it. Game over. I was done. Hard work and prayer had taken me as far as it could. This professor in a position to know had declared my fate.
What did he mean by “the government’s money”? I had received a few grants and scholarships, but he made it sound as if I was on some college welfare program. More than anything else, I wanted to simply be able to walk out of his office with my head still up. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry. But, at that moment, in the mind of an eighteen-year-old kid, my pursuit of a college education was over. My dreams, my family’s dreams, were just that. Perhaps I wasn’t retarded or mentally ill, but I was far from college material.
All of our work—the village that pulled me through—those who cheered for me and mentored me and tutored me, for whom I was the hope of a college success story. I had failed them all. This man said I wasn’t good enough, and I had to believe that he was right.
At this moment, I was alone and frightened. To this point in life, through every hardship and obstacle, I had had someone who cared about me close by to pick me up, dust me off, and lead me on my way. Always in the past, my mother was in the next room, or there would be an inspiring sermon from Reverend Carter at New Shiloh or an encouraging word from Coach Mack or Father Bart that would lighten my burden and I could push through. This time none of them was in sight. The shame inside me grew. All those demons of insecurity and uncertainty waiting just below the surface of my life were pushing their way to the top. I was ashamed that I had failed, ashamed even more that I was thinking about giving up, quitting.