MEMOIR

When George W. Bush was the stickball king

By Sam Allis, Globe Staff, June 20, 1999<

George couldn't make it because he was playing presidential pied piper to a few hundred media in Iowa. It turns out that citizens of the most powerful nation on earth are seriously considering him to be their next leader, prompting many of us who graduated with him in the Class of 1964 to ask: Are you kidding me?

It all depends, really, when you start rolling the videotape. While he has ably acquitted himself as governor of Texas, our collective Andover memory of him, and ourselves, is arrested at the slob stage of development -- somewhere between crustacean and amphibian. That's why the mere thought of him in the Oval Office is appalling.

Life at Andover during the early '60s was defined by sports, academic stress, and gamey attire, usually in that order. The place was not yet coed, which meant that students had no better idea how to talk to a woman than a Ford Falcon. It was a time of cigarette smoke, pool, hall hockey, and the bullying of the weak. The hallmark was a coruscating sarcasm that led Life to focus on Andover in an article on prep school negativism. For most of us, it was great fun.

The salient point about George at Andover is that he was neither distinguished nor a disaster in the classroom or on the playing field. He was neither weird nor particularly creative. Like Trent Lott and Chad Cochran at Ol' Miss, he was a cheerleader -- an activity that often precedes a career in marketing. He cruised the surface like a water bug. But at the end of the day, his uncommon social skills made him a major player without excelling in anything.

Still, George was a creature of the intellectual middle. It is precisely this specter of the average elevated to the extraordinary in the White House that some find so terrifying. If George has a serious shot at it, why not the guy cradling a Mount Gay and tonic over by the shrimp?

"I always thought that, to be president, you've got to be brighter than me," says class secretary Tom Seligson. George doesn't appear to be. This would not be an issue if he remained with the Texas Rangers organization, or even governor of the Lone Star state. But the White House, one hopes, requires something more. So his Andover performance makes us wonder: Has it really come to this?

And yet some of the most successful leaders in later life underachieve with brio as youths. Years ago, one Harvard dean gave this group a name: the happy bottom quarter. They knew instinctively that one's early years should not be ruined by too serious an approach to life. There is, after all, plenty of time for that later. This logic is not without merit. And these people go on to run brokerage houses, law firms, governments. Henry L. Stimson did not graduate with his class from Andover. (Neither did Humphery Bogart who, legend has it, was canned for throwing a master in Rabbit's Pond.)

What's more, George walked a tightrope at Andover with dexterity, melding echt preppieness with Texas roots. He came from Houston, not Greenwich, but favored exquisitely ratty tweeds. He fused two wildly different cultures and made a hard act look easy. Another thing: George was unembarrassable.

As the booze left the starting gate last weekend, the talk among the Class of 1964 was actually not about George. The hottest no-show was Dick Wolf, whom few remembered but who now earns large money as the creator of "Law and Order," the hit television drama. Wolf is mysterious. George is not.

Much has been made about George's tenure as High Commissioner of Stickball. It probably should. Besides being an urban street game, stickball was a classic prep school ritual, arcane and insular. The game was retro chic -- played with a broomstick and a tennis ball. Every dormitory had a team. Every swath of lawn where the games were played on spring evenings had a name. Stickball had nothing to do with the rest of life, but it occupied a special place within the school. It was a system within a system, and George ran it, accompanied by another student in a white medical coat with the title of league psychiatrist.

About half of George's classmates raised their hands when polled at dinner Saturday night if they had been contacted by the media. Some, like Seligson, have been called half a dozen times or more. Most harbor no love for reporters and would probably not divulge anything yeasty, even if they despise George, because they feel it's no one's damned business what he was like at Andover. There exists within this class an intimacy that will not be violated lightly. Then, too, there's not that much to say about George anyway.

So the media should weigh carefully what they get from this group about George. Caveat emptor. To wit: One classmate told a reporter that George tried to persuade everyone in the spring term of senior year to pour out the contraband from their liquor bottles after Headmaster John Mason Kemper warned that college dreams would be dashed for anyone caught with alcohol. Everyone else remembered no such thing and concluded the classmate fried too many brain cells or else wants a job.

At the other extreme, another classmate passed out cassettes of a telephone interview he gave last April to a reporter from The Washington Post extolling George's virtues. (He taped it without her knowledge. Take that, media.) The man wants in the worst way to run the CIA for George and is not shy about saying so. George does have his supporters.

At dinner Saturday night, Tom Seligson read the list of positions that George has meted out to those classmates who showed up for the reunion. Seligson purportedly got it from Clay Johnson, Bush's appointments secretary and another classmate. Everyone got something, from ambassador to Kosovo to director of the Bureau of Prisons and, of course, drug czar. The idea was a hit. If nothing else, George was great reunion glue.

As the evening wore on and couples lurched to Martha and the Vandellas Motown classics and the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds," some classmates vowed to attend his inaugural. There was talk of renting rooms, a bus, a ballroom.

Someone said that the Torques should play at one of George's inaugural balls. The Torques was a rock band of stunningly modest talents that subsisted during senior year. It had its own subspecies called clappers, who were supposed to clap to their music, and screamers who, surprise, were supposed to scream. There is no evidence that either group did anything.

Never mind. George was remembered last weekend as a screamer. So forget his position on East Timor, the only question that matters is this: Will he scream at his own inauguration?