by Ted Turner
My mom moved back to Cincinnati to care for Mary Jean with the help of her extended family. They built a special room for my sister above the garage and had it specially padded and soundproofed. Taking care of Mary Jean was heartbreaking work but my mom was strong and stoic, and would have it no other way.
Up until this time I had been a religious person and I prayed for Mary Jean’s recovery almost every day. In addition to its military structure, McCallie was a Christian academy and I absorbed this part of their teaching as much as any other. By the time I graduated I had been “saved” four times—once by Billy Graham himself when I attended one of his crusades—and I even considered becoming a missionary. But seeing my kid sister ravaged by this disease challenged my beliefs. How could a just and loving God do this to someone so young and so innocent? To me it didn’t make any sense and my faith was badly shaken.
By all accounts the terms of my parents’ divorce settlement were fair but the custody arrangement was a little unusual. While Mary Jean would be in my mother’s care, my dad insisted that he retain custody of me. I was eighteen years old and in college so this stipulation didn’t make much practical difference, but it was further evidence of my father’s intention to mold me to follow in his footsteps at the billboard company. All summer, I dutifully put in my forty-two-and-a-half-hour weeks at Turner Advertising.
After that tumultuous summer I was relieved to get back to Brown. As a sophomore, I was now in the second year of a bet my father had made with me before sending me off to college. If I didn’t drink or smoke before turning twenty-one he’d give me $5,000. My dad was an alcoholic and smoked two packs a day and he didn’t want his son to make the same mistakes. Seeing what the booze and tobacco were doing to his health provided incentive enough, and $5,000 was a ton of money—probably more than a year’s room and board back then—and I decided to go for it. He also agreed to send me a weekly allowance of $5 as long as I wrote a letter home every week. This was a woefully small stipend even then and being surrounded by guys with so much more money was tough. They’d go off on ski weekends and other adventures while I’d be stuck back at the dorm. Still, I counted on that $5 and never missed a week of letter writing my entire freshman year, but a month or so into my sophomore year I became distracted with academic and social commitments and missed one or two weeks. Always one to hold up his end of a bargain, my father let me know that my allowance was suspended. I was really upset. I felt like I’d been working so hard—on my schoolwork, my sailing, the billboard company in the summer, everything—and now he was cutting off my measly $5.
Making matters worse I was surrounded at Brown by guys who were constantly after me to drink. As best I can remember I was the only guy in my entire fraternity who didn’t drink and, as a result, if guys wanted to put a bottle somewhere for safekeeping they’d leave it with me, knowing I wouldn’t touch it. It so happened that right after I got the letter cutting off my allowance, somebody dropped a bottle off in my room. To the guy’s surprise, I asked him if he minded if I had a drink and he said no. I had just turned nineteen and on that night I got drunk for the first time and I smoked my first cigar. I’d lost the bet with my dad.
I’m sure there were plenty of guys in my class who assured their parents that they were little angels and they wouldn’t have dreamed of telling them the truth about their social activities. I, too, probably could have gone on with my new lifestyle and my father would have been none the wiser, but withholding that information from him would have been a breach of trust. I’d spent my formative school years following strict honor codes and I didn’t think twice about what I needed to do.
The very next day, nursing my very first hangover, I let my dad know what I had done. He was already disappointed by my letter writing lapse but now he kicked into a higher gear and got really mad. Not only could I forget the $5 allowance, I could kiss the $5,000 goodbye, too. I was disappointed by his response but not at all surprised.
During summers at the company my father had taught me basic principles of amortization and I decided to apply them here, doing some quick calculations. I figured that the first drink I took cost me $5,000. The second one brought my per drink cost down to $2,500. Applying that logic some more, five drinks would be $1,000, fifty drinks $100, but if I had five thousand drinks over the next couple of years they would only cost me $1 a drink. I could afford that, allowance or not!
My experience at Brown was just like it was at McCallie but in reverse order. Instead of going from bad to good, at Brown I went from good to bad, from being Mr. Straight Arrow to being a wild man. I fell in with the heaviest drinking crowd on campus and we’d stay up late and get into all sorts of trouble. Right before Christmas break and about a month into my new mode of behavior I went with a bunch of guys over to Wheaton, a women’s college in nearby Massachusetts. We’d been drinking and we wound up throwing chairs out the windows of one of the dormitories there. After someone called the police and we got caught, I was suspended from Brown for the rest of that school year.
While stirring up trouble at Georgia Military Academy and McCallie, I’d been careful to stop short of suspension. Having crossed that line at Brown I dreaded my father’s reaction as I headed home for Christmas. He was indeed upset—every bit as angry as I thought he’d be—but his response was tempered by the fact that there was a new woman in his life. Her name was Jane Dillard, and she was the divorced daughter of a prominent Savannah family (her father was president of the Central Georgia Railroad). After a whirlwind courtship they were already engaged to be married. I was pleased to see my father happy with a new woman, but like a lot of kids with divorced parents, I think I’d always hoped Mom and Dad would get back together. My dad’s quick engagement was a surprise and while I would never share these feelings with my father, deep down I was really disappointed.
After sorting through his own wedding and honeymoon plans, my father finally discussed with me what I would do for the next nine months before the following school year. His inclination was to have me work for him full-time but I didn’t like that idea. My peers were all in college and while it was one thing to be around home during the summer, it was quite another when school was in session. The draft was on, too, and as a suspended student there was an outside chance I’d receive notice. I decided to join the Coast Guard for six months as a reservist, figuring I could work hard, fulfill my military obligation, and head back to Brown in the fall. My father liked the idea of getting me back into a military environment and while he might have preferred that I stay home, he supported my decision to enlist in the Coast Guard.
After signing up at the recruiting station I headed to Cape May, New Jersey, for thirteen weeks of training. Most people consider boot camp to be a pain, but I loved it. It was just like being back at McCallie. I embraced the discipline and structure and went right back to being Mr. Good Guy. I became company commander and led our team through Honor Company—a weekly competition I was determined to win. We were judged on military drill, cleanest barracks, and so on—all the disciplines I was used to from high school. Insisting that we were going to outwork every other company there, I put my leadership abilities to the test. As coxswain of our surfboat team, I decided we needed to hit the water for practice an hour before everybody else. This meant we’d have to get up at 5:30 A.M. every day instead of 6:30 like the others. There was some grumbling but the extra hours paid off and we started winning.
I organized our competition like a business, delegating responsibilities to maximize our performance. For example, while the rest of us headed out early, I had one of our top guys hang back and supervise the cleaning of the barracks. He didn’t like being out on the water anyway so it worked out best for everyone.
While we were beating the thirteen other companies in most areas of the competition, we were still weak in military drill. We had thirty minutes off every night after dinner—our only free time of the day—and I decided that was a perfect chance for us to get in some extra practice. N
ot everyone in our company shared my enthusiasm for this idea, and things got so contentious that a big Italian guy from New York City even took a swing at me. Our fight was broken up quickly and when things settled down I sat everyone down as a group. I said, “Listen, if we’re going to win Honor Company every week, we’ve got to do better on military drill. The only way we’re going to do better is through extra practice, and the only time we have for extra practice is after dinner.” I told them we’d vote on this plan as a team and the majority would rule.
Fortunately, morale was high and I managed to talk the majority into voting for the additional practice. As I led our team through after-hour drills, the guys from the other companies hooted and hollered at us while they relaxed in front of their barracks. By this point our guys were so gung ho that the taunting only made us work harder, and the extra training paid off. Against thirteen companies we won four different times and each week we won, we got the weekend off. The team’s enthusiasm grew to the point where our final week of competition we came out on top in every single one of the ten events.
Coast Guard training in New Jersey was one of the best times of my life and I loved the opportunity to lead such a quality group of guys. The rest of my commitment was advanced training in Groton, Connecticut. We did well there, but it was a less competitive environment and couldn’t match the fun we all had at Cape May.
In August, I was released from the Guard and was reaccepted to Brown for the fall semester. My father was fine with me going back to school but shortly after my return as a midterm sophomore, my original fears started coming true. He began to make negative comments about Brown and said he wasn’t sure he wanted me to stay there. Things reached a head about six months later when I declared Classics as my major.
My most inspiring professor at Brown taught in the Classics Department. His name was John Workman and my first class with him consisted of a discussion format—much different from a big lecture as we’d deal in great depth with a single subject and really kick around ideas. We read classic writers like Thucydides and Virgil and we went deep into ancient Greek history. Workman was the first professor who really challenged me to think and I absolutely loved it—I couldn’t wait for his class to come around. And it was largely because of Workman that I declared Classics as my major. Problem was, my father wanted me to study practical subjects that would prepare me for a career in business. But Brown didn’t offer business courses, and even the economics classes were mostly theoretical. Regardless, my dad was furious and described his feelings to me in a long, rambling letter.
I reproduce my dad’s letter here to provide insight into the kind of person he was and how he thought about me, and life, at that time:
My dear son,
I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today. I suppose that I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the purpose of an education is to enable one to develop a community of interest with his fellow men, to learn to know them, and to learn how to get along with them. In order to do this, of course, he must learn what motivates them, and how to impel them to be pleased with his objectives and desires.
I am a practical man, and for the life of me I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek. With whom will you communicate in Greek? I have read, in recent years, the deliberations of Plato and Aristotle, and was interested to learn that the old bastards had minds which worked very similarly to the way our minds work today. I was amazed that they had so much time for deliberating and thinking, and was interested in the kind of civilization that would permit such useless deliberation. Then I got to thinking that it wasn’t so amazing—after all they thought like we did because my Hereford cows today are very similar to those ten or twenty generations ago. I am amazed that you would adopt Plato and Aristotle as a vocation for several months when it might make pleasant and enjoyable reading to you in your leisure time as relaxation at a later date. For the life of me I cannot understand why you should be vitally interested in informing yourself about the influence of the Classics on English literature. It is not necessary for you to know how to make a gun in order to know how to use it. It would seem to me that it would be enough to learn English literature without going into what influence this or that ancient mythology might have upon it. As for Greek literature, the history of Roman and Greek churches, and the art of those eras, it would seem to me that you would be much better off by learning something of contemporary literature and writings and things that might have some meaning to you with people with whom you are to associate.
These subjects might give you a community of interest with an isolated few impractical dreamers, and a select group of college professors. God forbid!
It would seem to me that what you wish to do is to establish a community of interest with as many people as you possibly can. With people who are moving, who are doing things, and who have an interesting, not a decadent, outlook.
I suppose everybody has to be a snob of some sort, and I suppose you will feel you are distinguishing yourself from the herd by becoming a Classical snob. I can see you drifting into a bar, belting down a few, turning around to the guy on the stool next to you—a contemporary billboard baron from Podunk, Iowa—and saying, “Well what do you think about old Leonidas?” Your friend, the billboard baron, will turn to you and say, “Leonidas who?” You will turn to him and say, “Why, Leonidas, the prominent Greek of the twelfth century.” He will, in turn, say to you, “Well, who in the hell was he?” You will say, “Oh, you don’t know about Leonidas?” and dismiss him, and not discuss anything else with him the rest of the evening. He will feel that you are a stupid snob and a flop; you will feel that he is a clodhopper from Podunk, Iowa. I suppose this will make you both happy, and as a result of it, you will wind up buying his billboard plant.
There is no question but this type of useless information will distinguish you, set you apart from the doers of the world. If I leave you enough money, you can retire to an ivory tower, and contemplate for the rest of your days the influence that the hieroglyphics of prehistoric man had upon the writings of William Faulkner. Incidentally, he was a contemporary of mine in Mississippi. We speak the same language—whores, sluts, strong words and strong deeds.
It isn’t really important what I think. It’s important what you wish to do with your life. I just wish I could feel that the influence of those oddball professors and the ivory towers were developing you into the kind of a man we can both be proud of. I am quite sure that we both will be pleased and delighted when I introduce you to some friend of mine and say, “This is my son. He speaks Greek.”
I had dinner during the Christmas holidays with an efficiency expert, an economic adviser to the nation of India, on the Board of Directors of Regents at Harvard University, who owns some 80,000 acres of valuable timber land down here, among his other assets. His son and his family were visiting him. He introduced me to his son, and then apologetically said, “He is a theoretical mathematician. I don’t even know what he is talking about. He lives in a different world.” After a little while I got talking to his son, and the only thing he would talk to me about was his work. I didn’t know what he was talking about either so I left early.
If you are going to stay on at Brown, and be a professor of Classics, the courses you have adopted will suit you for a lifetime association with Gale Noyes. Perhaps he will teach you to make jelly. In my opinion, it won’t do much to help you learn to get along with people in this world. I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me.
Oh, I know that everybody says that a college education is a must. Well, I console myself by saying that everybody said the world was square, except Columbus. You go ahead and go with the world, and I’ll go it alone.
I hope I am right. You are in the hands of the Philistines, and dammit, I sent you there. I am sorry.
Devotedly,
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Dad
We were really feuding now and this correspondence set me off. I decided that the best retaliation was to send the letter to the college paper, which reprinted it in full. The letter soon became the talk of the school. In subsequent days, to get a rise out of his students, Professor Noyes—whom my father knew to be an epicurean chef—ended class by telling students he was off “to make jelly.” The room erupted in laughter.
My father described my move as “dirty pool” and his anger over the letter’s publicity drove a further wedge between us.
I was in a bad place at this point. I sensed that my college days were numbered and I was really upset with my father. I could have gotten a commission to the Naval Academy but he didn’t want me to go. When we settled on Brown he promised to support me for four years. His business was successful and he had more than enough money to pay my way. I don’t know if any of his negative feelings about college had anything to do with the fact that he never finished a full four years himself but regardless, it didn’t seem fair. Whenever I tried to talk to him about it, he’d only say that it was his right to do “whatever I damn well please,” and the case was closed.
I worked for my dad’s company again that summer, saving as much as I could to pay for another year at Brown. I was living with my father and new stepmother at their plantation home in South Carolina but since most of my friends were back in Savannah, that’s where I’d go on weekends and evenings to enjoy some nightlife. Despite the strains on our relationship, my father let me borrow his car for these trips, only because he felt it was important for me to maintain a place in those social circles.