School Story:
I knew about Millard from a neighbor, whose son had attended and had then gone on to the Naval Academy. Since I didn't know what to do about college, my parents decided for me (my dad was winding down on a 26-year AF career and he wanted one of his 4 sons to attend the AF Academy. Being the youngest, I was his last gasp.) So, I went to Millard not on a Skelly or Falcon Foundation scholarship, but what I like to say a prestigious Van Epps foundation scholarship! My SAT scores were no where close to what was needed to get nominated for the Academy, so to Millard I went. I must say that the school did a superb job of preparing me to take the civil sevice test. I came in feeling somewhat confident of my abilities in English, but I knew I needed a lot of help with math and the school succeeded in making me much better at solving math problems...I had help from my roommate too, but I'll explain that a little later. There are a couple of incidences that I can recall during those halcyon days at Millard. One not so funny story was when I caused my whole class to run laps around the front area of the school late at night because I had accused someone of taking my bed board. Now, I caught all kinds of grief from my classmates, but they didn't realize that that board kept me from sinking into my bed so that I could actually get out of it when I got up. Without that board, when I was in bed, I sunk about six inches into it! Mr Wohleb got everyone up around midnight and had us run around. Then he stopped us and allowed us time to rest and said whoever took the bed board could return it, no questions asked. Miraculously, my bedboard somehow was put back and all was good...except for the dirty looks I got from nearly all my classmates! Another not so funny at the time story was that I was the only guy who had to keep his dirty gym stuff in the gym. My feet really sweated profusely, and consequently, my athletic socks stunk; so much so that after I came back to my room from a workout, I could wring them out, wash them and they still smelled awful. My first roommate moved out it was so bad. As I was in a 2-man room, I had to have a roommate, so it was decided that my new roommate would be Ric Lewallen, a really smart guy who had the best stereo set up I had ever seen. I explained my problem and he didn't seem to mind. I played a lot of basketball while at Millard and after a good game, my socks were wet and reeked! It got so bad that Mr Wohleb (sp?) decided the best way to solve the problem was to banish my dirty gym clothes to the gym. So I was the only guy who took all of his dirty gym clothes outside of his room until they were laundered. Now as I said, Ric had a great stereo set up, a reel-to-reel playback system with headphones and he played it loud...and that was with his earphones on. I am surprised he didn't suffer some sort of hearing loss...Besides being an audiophile, he was also really smart; so I was constantly getting help with math problems. I'm not sure what I would have done had I not had such a good roommate--to put up with odiferous socks and lack of math skills in his roommate.
