Two Autobiographical Pieces

Both deal with my junior high and high school years at Gilman School, a small private suit-coat-and-tie chapel-in-the-morning “country day school” serving Baltimore’s wealthy elite, of which I was not one, at least by their standards.

I. A Letter to Anton Vishio Upon His Retirement

Dear Mr. Vishio,

Gilman sent me a letter, saying you have survived the Gilman experience long enough to successfully retire. Congratulations! The letter also asked for stories from students, to bless your retirement with our memories of your time at Gilman.

I was a bit of an odd duck at Gilman, a mechanically inclined, if not gifted, child of a family that had lost everything but their pretentions to the Depression. I was in your first Latin I class at Gilman, Second Form, an eighth-grader.

I was actually branded with the name I carried throughout Gilman, in your classroom on the first day of school: “Tippett, Tippett J. R. First Form, Section D.” That quote, repeated endlessly in derision, still echoes in my mind, a defiant statement I had made to two upperclassmen the year before, after they demanded my seat at lunch and threatened me with demerits for refusing to give it up. I had not yet learned that, in privileged company, standing up for yourself is a lonely business.

You correctly perceived that I was mechanically inclined, and actually suggested that I leave Gilman for Poly [Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a public school], which my parents absolutely refused to consider. They thought I was too fragile or weak for the public school environment, or something like that.

In any case, now that I have identified myself, my memory of you:

In Latin II, you decided to have a Latin Day, and assigned me the job of creating a motorized chariot. I designed it like a rail dragster, with the front wheels way out front, built it out of plywood and 2-by-4’s, and powered it with the rear half of an old Cushman scooter. It had aluminum sheeting for sides, and the steering was accomplished with a simple lever linkage.

The plan was to fire this beast up behind the old “Cage” building and for you to ride on the back into the event, for a grand entrance. Unfortunately, the laws of physics failed to cooperate. With a passenger on the back, the chariot did magnificent “wheelies.” It also became totally unsteerable. How we managed to get there, I am not sure, but I have a vague memory of heading diagonally across the soccer field after dropping you off.

The punch line of the story, however, did not come until after the event. Faced with the dilemma of how engineer this morphadite mechanical marvel’s exit from the Gilman campus, I considered a number of alternatives before deciding that the simplest solution was to drive it home, down Roland Avenue.

I think you spotted me leaving campus and caught up at the light at Roland and Deepdean. Blinded by your commitment to your students, or terror at what you had spawned in this bizarre scene, one of the two, you decided to follow me home in your car.

Knowing the area, I immediately cut for the alleys to avoid scrutiny, you in close pursuit. As we closed in on Windhurst, I remember watching a police cruiser slowly pass the end of the alley, and thinking that this could be embarrassing.

I stopped in the shadows, but when you pulled in behind me, your car’s headlights lit up the chariot like a spotlight. I still laugh thinking about the terrified look on your face when I ran back and told you to turn your lights off. You knew you were in way too deep and your only choice was to go along.

Thankfully, you did, which, in one of those paradoxes of supervision, shifted your participation in the caper from being a concerned teacher to being a willing co-conspirator, putting your job on the line and everything else with it. I am not sure you ever forgave me for that.

Needless to say, we arrived safely at my parents’ garage and you headed home, I suppose breathing sighs of relief. By now, I hope you have survived enough other near misses to laugh at this one as well.

Just to catch you up: After Gilman, I jettisoned the “J.R.” and five years later graduated from Cornell. For the next ten years or so, I rattled around the country, mostly on the West Coast, living very close to the street. In November of 1985, I cleaned up, became a father, and eventually a teacher myself. For the past twelve years, I have been at Ukiah High School in rural Northern California, teaching computer applications and algebra, and before that, a self-contained program for high-risk kids much like myself at that age.

I am not sure what I have to thank you for. One good comical memory, certainly. More important perhaps, is the influence that translating Caesar and Cicero had on my subsequent writing style. I still find myself using that three-part list structure with the last part longer than the rest.

Enjoy your retirement. God knows, you have earned it. And thanks for the occasional smile while meandering down the alleys of my memory.

Sincerely,

Jade Tippett,

Formerly James Royall Tippett III

II. A “Note” for the Gilman Alumni Bulletin…Which, Amazingly, They Published…

Emails circulating about the 50th Year Reunion of Gilman School Class of 1970 awaken memories long shuttered. Some may wonder at the name, Jade, I now use. A few memories and a little history, by way of catching up.

“Tippett, Tippett, J. R., First Form, Section D,” echoed off the high ceilinged hallways: my First Form reality, a daily gauntlet of bullying and derision. Day one the following year in Mr. Vischio’s Latin class, several of our number hung that moniker around my neck like a scarlet letter that remained for the balance of my time at Gilman. The experience left me with a lifelong loathing for the tyranny of affluence and entitlement and the cowardly silence that assents to it, as well as a deep compassion for the bullied and victimized.

By Fifth Form, college became a looming question. Sufficiently dispirited, between Gilman and a difficult home life, I wasn’t interested in college. I knew the Vietnam War was morally and legally wrong, but if the government was going to suck young men of our age up and spit them out in body bags, I would volunteer for combat duty, replacing someone who had more to look forward to in their life. Fortunately, a couple of our number took me to the New Mobe against the war in Washington D.C., and got me thoroughly wasted on some really quality Lebanese hashish. Patterns, colors, the experience of joy in beauty that had long escaped me, all of a sudden made my mind an interesting place to hang out, and my life worth living. I guess you could say drugs saved my life.

It took five years and seven semesters to graduate from Cornell. My major, a hybrid social sciences program, allowed me to write research papers applying second wave feminist analysis to the sociology and psychology of being male, long before the term “patriarchy” entered common parlance. Sometime in my sophomore year, a compassionate friend lifted “JR” from my heart and shoulders, renaming me “Jim,” during a moment of emotional catharsis.

I wore “Jim” for a couple of years until I put the East Coast in the rear view mirror, vowing never to return. I needed a hard break from my past. Green had been my favorite color for as long as I could remember. I had a Tibetan jade ring that spoke to me somehow, so I took “Jade” as a road name, making up a different last name for anyone that asked. Made the UPS guy nuts! Spent the balance of the winter in a three-sided barn on a gay men’s commune in Southern Oregon before heading to Seattle, joining a wholesale organic produce collective — a revolutionary thing to do at the time — and organizing on the side against nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

In the process of getting a drivers license for work, I discovered the State of Washington had a “Miracle on 34th Street” law: if the US Postal Service delivered mail to you in a name, that was considered a legal alias. A couple pieces of mail delivered to me as simply “Jade” convinced the DMV clerk lose the “Royall” and “III,” put “Jade” in the middle, et voila! That worked for almost 40 years. A few months ago, I had to pay $600 and go to court and get my name legally changed to…my same name, for the new “Real ID” drivers’ license. Homeland Insecurity!!

Seattle lasted a couple of years. Itching for adventure, I set out in mid-winter for Missoula Montana to take in the last total solar eclipse to cross the U.S. in the 20th Century, and wound up being seduced by a blond goddess on the front bunk of a converted 1947 Greyhound bus called the Asp and belonging to a venerable old counterculture assemblage known as the Hog Farm. The blond goddess didn’t last long, but that led to growing organic grapes in the Southern California desert, answering phones for the family business, an answering service in Berkeley called Babylon (“An elephant’s memory for peanuts a day”) , promoting outlaw music events in People’s Park, selling t-shirts and doing child care for the Grateful Dead, and organizing to halt the removal of 10,000 elderly Navajo Indians from their ancestral lands to make way for Peabody Coal’s mine expansion… I think I did a video interview with Harry S*** for another reunion, recounting some of these adventures.

Somewhere in the early 80’s, the Hog Farm acquired a patch of land in Laytonville, a one gas station town (three then) on US 101, and I moved to Mendocino County where I have been ever since. Ironically, Laytonville is one of the towns Bob T****** and I drove through in 1970, tripping on peyote tea we’d accidentally imbibed in San Francisco that morning. “If the highway is going in the windshield and out the rear view mirror, we’re fine.” Ask Bob.

Mid 80’s with my first child on the way, I made the decision one Halloween night to clean up my act, pack up the dope, get a job and do the father-provider thing. Starting out cleaning up a gas station at night. After a year or two as a line mechanic, I hired on with the Laytonville school district as their diesel mechanic. Six years later, tired of the grease, iron and cold concrete, and finding I liked working with students more than machinery, I shifted gears and spent a year getting a teaching credential.

People ask me what I taught. There were subjects, but it was never about the subjects. It was who I taught. I specialized in wounded kids. One of the gifts of my time at Gilman, my time on the street, the way I had lived my life was that I knew pain, could see pain and was not intimidated by it. This let me create a safe space in my classroom where kids in pain could heal. This was never easy. Even in California, schools are much more interested in getting affluent entitled kids into college than they are in helping wounded kids recover enough to live happy, successful lives.

Twenty or so years later, with the settlement from my Mother’s estate, I was able to put the down payment on a run-down 92 year-old house in the old lumber mill town of Fort Bragg on the Mendocino Coast. I retired in June of 2016, spent the summer and fall rehabbing my house, ran out of money and moved in.

So here, I sit and write, the evening sun twinkling through the slatted blinds and the spring winds out of the north gusting at the windows. Life is basically good. My pension provides modest comfort, provided I don’t spend too much on dental care or some other extravagance, like traveling cross-country for a reunion. I am living my one real “bucket list” item: owning my own home, so I’m satisfied.

If you all are considering doing something different for the 50th Reunion, consider putting on a benefit of some kind for kids who will never cross the threshold of schools like Gilman, kids who have been victimized by life, by the people who they should have been able to trust. Gilman is more than well endowed. Wounded kids are the ones in real need, and with the current administration in Washington, money to help them is in short supply.

And if you’re still reading, thanks for the few minutes of your time. If you ever get to the Northern California coast, look me up.