Death Be Not Proud by John J. Gunther

Author:John J. Gunther
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

I wish to go to college primarily to complete a sound general education and to prepare myself for the years to come. Also, I wish to prepare myself for research work in physical chemistry. I have chosen Harvard to atain (sic) these ends because I have been advised that it is the institution where I may most fruitfully attain these aims.

On April 12 he took the college board exams. It had been arranged, through the courtesy of Dean Gummere of Harvard, that he could split these into two sessions, taking the Aptitude tests at this time and the Achievement tests later. Johnny said he preferred to do both together, and who were we to say no to him? He announced, “ I never felt better in my life.” But it was a grueling day. We drove him down to a school near Gramercy Park early in the morning, and he had to wait almost an hour, standing mostly, in a huge milling crowd of tough, husky youngsters—many of them G.I.’s who had seen combat abroad—and then squeeze his way inch by inch into elevators packed and jammed, and run down long confusing corridors. A couple of the other boys laughed at him, and he flinched. Johnny looked so pitiably frail. His gait was lopsided, and his bandage made his pallor even more striking than it would have been otherwise. Frances kept close by. The exams lasted six and a half hours. We didn’t get home till dinnertime, and Johnny flung himself on the couch, exclaiming, “Boy am I tired!” Then he eagerly snapped to the phone to compare notes with other boys who had taken the same exams.

That morning Frances had picked up a benzedrine tablet from Traeger and she asked Johnny to take it, thinking it would stimulate him during the ordeal. He had never had benzedrine and he refused, couching the refusal in a quotation from Shakespeare to the effect that he preferred the terrors of the known to those unknown.

There were other activities, too. The day he enrolled at the Tutoring School I took him to The Best Years of Our Lives as a kind of celebration, my sister took him to Brigadoon, and with Frances and me he saw matinees of Joan of Lorraine and Finian’s Rainbow (wearing glasses for the first time which made him look like a juvenile professor). He kept up his acute interest in politics and he still read the news of the day with great care. I took him to shop for a lot of clothes—he had grown at least three inches during all this time—and our friends dropped in and once or twice we played chess and of course he beat me. So that I might improve my game he wrote out a series of hints and precepts; any chess enthusiast will realize how sound they are, and at the risk of boring the non-chess-playing reader I will print them:

Always try to maintain control of as many center squares as possible with pawns.

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