My Unusual Story That Most People
Can’t Believe, but It’s 100% True!!!
! שלום
I don’t lack for stories. After all, I have led a very unusual life because I am also very unusual. Realize that I began life when I was born in Durham, North Carolina back in 1952. Durham was at that time a sort of oversized tobacco-and-textile town that was mostly southern redneck bigots. There was one island of academia there, Duke University, which is actually very highly rated and prestigious; my late brother attended Duke and after he completed, it was then he went to New York City in the hopes of getting a Master’s degree from Columbia, but when he and a roommate were mugged by some black guys, that experience traumatized him so badly that he stopped his studies, but he remained in New York City for the rest of his life. He was the one our parents loved; I was the one they hated and never had a good word to say about me, all that even though I was gifted and was outstanding in many things, but my parents never had a kind word to say to me or about me and if they could make me feel worse, they would do it without hesitation. Well, they’re dead now, and I’m told that I have to say something good about the dead, so I will do that now. They’re dead. GOOD!!!
Many people have a hard time believing that I was born to parents who were typical southern redneck bigots who had little education and who did everything possible to hold me back and often blocked me from doing things that could have given me a happier, more successful life. One story that I tell that is 100% but that is more than unusual was when I had been accepted to the Eastman School of Music as an oboe major, two months before I was to leave to go to Rochester, New York where Eastman is located and had received a very generous scholarship, they told me that they didn’t have the money to send me to college, so they said I would not go to college. They said I would continue to live with them, would get a job in one of the factories in the city, and would pay them rent to live with them. That would have torpedoed my entire future. I was hysterical and panicked. What could I do? I knew I had to get help from someone or some organization that was powerful enough and rich enough to give me help that was far more than just a few kind words. I decided to do something that most people think is outrageous: I wrote a letter to the President of the United States in which I explained the financial problems that my parents had but that I had been accepted to a very prestigious school and had been awarded a significant scholarship, but my parents still said they could not afford to send me, so they were going to block me from ever getting a higher education. The year was 1970; the president at the time was Richard Millhouse Nixon. The very thought of approaching a man with his reputation was beyond outrageous, but I was desperate and had to do it. I wrote the letter and mailed it by certified mail to the White House, just hoping that I could at least be referred to some organization that would give me help.
It was one summer day when friends of mine from high school took me on a trip to the mountains in North Carolina to a theme park that was rather ridiculous that no longer exists, but when I got home, my mother took me into a room where we would be alone and nobody could hear us. She told me that she had received a telephone call from Washington, DC. She said that it was a secretary at the White House. She spoke of my letter and that President Nixon had read it. He had instructed his staff to contact the Eastman School of Music and find the person there who controlled financial aid. It was the Business Manager, Raymond Schirmer was his name. They told him my problem and asked if there was any help that I could receive.
Mr. Schirmer was a very nice man; I did get to know him once I was there. He told them he would increase my scholarship considerably. He said he would give me a National Defense Student Loan, a loan for students that the federal government awarded to exceptional students who wanted to attend college. The loan charged a very low interest rate that would be calculated only when I finished college. That amount of financial aid was enough that made it cheaper for me to go to college than to remain at home the way my parents planned for me to remain. My mother said at the end, “The secretary wants you to know that President Nixon really enjoyed your letter.”
I know it sounds hard to believe, but years later when I was in Israel and was being denied housing, I did the same thing when I wrote to the Prime Minister in my very primitive Hebrew, and that letter was what forced the people who were denying me housing to assign immigrant housing to me and my first wife. A woman who was the counselor in my area with the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel heard my story with President Nixon and right away she said, “I know you did that. That’s the sort of thing that you do, and you really know how to do it!” So that was how I cried for help more than once in my life and it got me the results that I needed.
Needless to say, I would stop at nothing if I needed help. I came from parents with little education and who only showed me how much they hated me and were always cursing me and condemning me. It was only the outrageous thing that I did by writing that letter that enabled me to get a college education. Not that it was so simple, because every time I had a break in college, if I came back to my parents, my father threatened every time to stop me from continuing. He did that even when I had only one more semester to study in my senior year; that was the kind of treatment and the kind of relationship I had with my father. I have far more to tell about how he abused me in my life, but that’s another story to tell another time. This story is one that most people thought was a lie, but how did I succeed in going to college and getting an education when I had parents who were dead set against it and treated me like garbage for as long as I was alive? It does show that I don’t hesitate to do something really outrageous if I feel trapped or need help. It also shows that my writing has gotten me out of a jam more than once in my life.
Well, you wanted a story. That is definitely a story, and it is 100% true. Could anyone just make up a story like that? People who know me well know I am more than capable of doing such a thing. Just so you’ll know, I copied and pasted this whole story into a document in Word and will save it both as a Word document and as a PDF; I don’t tell this story every day, but now that I have written it all out, I will keep it for future use because let’s face it: there’s a lot to tell and it is very unusual, but it is something in my past, even if it’s hard to believe, but then again, I am very nonconformist and don’t hesitate to resort to desperate measures when I feel trapped.
