by Doug Merlino
By that time in his life, McClain regretted his earlier days on the streets. He regretted rioting in 1968, he regretted dropping out of community college and ending his sports career, and he regretted the years after that when he dabbled in drug dealing and whatever other hustle he could put over to get some money. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t in my heart,” McClain says. “But my disappointment of not being successful in athletics and coming to the realization that my athletic career was over, that there was nowhere else to go, all of a sudden—‘urk,’ stop, nothing. I tried to play some semipro football but all I got was a broken finger out of that. One thing led to another—I didn’t have that direction.”
In the end, none of it had gotten him anywhere. It was his aunt, the first member of the family to move out from Mississippi, who really gave him a break in 1976, when she sold him a house for only $5,000. McClain soon landed his first “straight” job, working as a trainee cashier at a Goodwill store. Although a lot of people would have seen thrift-store work as pretty far down, Willie was happy to have it. It was, in his words, a “humble beginning.” He’d worked his way up from there, including a job as a bank teller and another as a furniture salesman before landing at the African-American Christian elementary school in 1984. By then, McClain saw that he had wasted his athletic potential as well as his chance for higher education. He didn’t want his players to do the same thing.
A twenty-minute drive later, they arrived at Lakeside Middle School, just shy of the city’s northern boundary, and eleven miles north of McClain’s house. The ivy-covered brick building didn’t look like any school the kids had ever seen. Willie Jr. looked around and thought it was a college. His dad parked the van outside the gym, and they climbed out into the night. They walked through the door, a handful of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys in sweats, trying out their most affected struts. First thing, they were going to make it clear to these white kids who could play.
You’ll All Work for Us Someday
Four years before Willie McClain and his players rolled up in their van in 1986, I arrived at Lakeside, a chubby kid decked out in a bowl cut, no-brand clothes, a digital watch, and Velcro shoes. Where I came from, the convenience of Velcro was appreciated; at Lakeside, it singled you out as a moron who couldn’t tie your shoelaces.
I was nervous but happy to arrive at Lakeside, as public school had not been going that well. If not for my enthusiastic participation in baseball and basketball, I might have been totally ostracized. At the start of fourth grade, the year before I enrolled at Lakeside, my teacher, Mr. Coyle, a man who entered our class every day with the air of a suburban Sisyphus, introduced a scheme that was supposed to encourage us to read. Each kid got a piece of paper on the wall with a little pie chart. The twelve slices of the pie stood for a different reading subject area, such as history, classics, music, and sports. After you read a book and wrote a few bare details about it on a form, you got to color in one of the sections. Encouraged by my mom, who shuttled me back and forth from the public library, I completed the chart in about six weeks, plowing through books such as A Tale of Two Cities and a history of the Third Reich. With each book, Mr. Coyle resignedly removed my piece of paper from the wall and let me ink in another slice while my classmates rolled their eyes. It did not lead to great popularity.
I spent a lot of recesses in the library, holed up with books on great sports teams, the history of World War II, and Westerns. I read dozens of Louis L’Amour potboilers, which my mom bought for me from the rack near the checkout at the supermarket. I identified with his standard hero, a tight-lipped cowboy who camped out on the range next to a lonely fire and found love only after a strong and independent woman recognized the bravery behind his stoic demeanor, and the bad guys had pushed him so far that he was forced to teach them a lesson with his six-shooter.
My mom decided to look into Lakeside after she heard about it from a friend. The day she brought me to visit, we walked through the ivied entrance, climbed the stairs to the office to sign in, and, it seemed, entered another reality. I was paired with a student guide, who initiated me into the ways of this new world: teachers who dressed in tweed jackets like college professors; classes that ended after forty minutes, sending students into the halls to go to their next ones (at public school, Mr. Coyle taught every subject besides music and PE); kids who wore Oxford shirts, corduroy pants, Top-Sider boat shoes, and Vuarnet sunglasses that hung around their necks on nylon cords. There were no recesses, just “free” periods, where students would sit on the floors in the halls and study. The hipper seventh- and eighth-grade boys gathered on tattered couches in the “student lounge”—a stage along one side of the cafeteria—where they cranked bands like the Clash and the Kinks through a boom box. There were no decorations on the walls, like in public school—no big swaths of paper covered with student paintings or blandishments for school spaghetti night. It would have disrupted the seriousness of purpose.
At lunch, a group of teachers queried me about my interests. A few weeks later, my mom brought me down to take an all-day aptitude test. Before long, my parents received a letter welcoming my family to the “Lakeside Community.” In exchange for the $5,000 tuition, I would be one of thirty-two students in the incoming fifth-grade class.
Lakeside had been founded in 1923 by a group of Seattle businessmen who wanted to ensure that their sons received educations like those imparted in the best boarding schools back east. First housed in a building on the shores of Lake Washington (hence the name), the school moved in 1930 to a newly built campus on the northern boundary of Seattle, not far from the Highlands, a gated community that was an enclave for the city’s elite and a source of many of Lakeside’s students. Its aspirations were visible in its design, which featured a cluster of Colonial-style, redbrick buildings with white trim arranged around a grass quadrangle, modeled after New England boarding schools Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover. By 1950, it had a student body of two hundred. A school brochure from the Eisenhower era showcases photos of boys on the school rifle range, lifting weights to condition for skiing, and eating lunch in jackets and ties. It reported that graduates in the class of 1954 had gained admission to Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Yale, and Stanford.
The student who would do the most to secure the school’s future reputation enrolled in 1967. A skinny seventh-grader with size 13 feet, Bill Gates found that he loved Lakeside. During his first year, the administration decided it wanted to give students access to computers, something few schools in the country had. Because of the price and size of computers at the time, the school bought a teletype machine, on which students typed commands to be sent to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. Gates joined a group of boys who spent their free time writing programs. He became close with a fellow student, Paul Allen, and by the time I went to Lakeside the stories about how the pair spent nights sleeping in the computer room were school legend. Gates graduated in 1973 and dropped out of Harvard two years later to found Microsoft with Allen. Gates has said that if he had not gone to Lakeside, Microsoft would not exist.
Gates is only the most prominent in a network of alumni that is deeply rooted in Seattle’s elite. If you look anywhere where the wheels of power are turned in Seattle, you’ll find someone with a Lakeside connection—for example, four of the five men who were the principals in the private corporation that designed and built the Space Needle in 1962 were alums or parents of graduates. Craig McCaw, one of Gates’s classmates, went on to start what is now AT&T Wireless. Other graduates populate Seattle’s corporate boards and law firms. More than a few are property developers. Some are politicians. The scions of the Weyerhaeuser logging empire and Nordstrom’s department stores attended the school when I was there, as did the twin sons of a local billboard mogul who also owned the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team (when you watched Sonics’ games on TV, you could always spot the twins right behind the bench). In the early 1970s, Lakeside merged with an all-girls school to become co-ed. By the 1980s, it w
as recognized as the most elite place to educate your kids in the Northwest.
In a Seattle Weekly article titled “The Lakeside Mystique” published in January 1986—just a few months before we formed our team with Willie McClain’s players—a reporter who had been a Lakeside student in the 1960s came back to reevaluate the school, which he labeled “our Exeter, our Eton.”
Unsurprisingly, the writer found that students at Lakeside were “competitive, academically aggressive, and they keep their eyes on each other as much as they do on the bottom line of their lives: their grades.” But while the school had always been a place for the rich, and the trust funds of some students “could finance small island nations,” it was changing along with Seattle. Family name and money still had their place, but a new breed of students was coming from what a Lakeside board member called “the new middle class, the professional class of uninherited wealth.” This shift toward academic merit was resulting in an even more formidable kind of Lakeside graduate, according to the writer: “When they squeeze out of the opposite end of the Ivy League tube … and into the treasured career slots that lay waiting, they may make the current generation of yuppies look anemic.”
The article raised hackles at the school, mainly for a few assertions. One was the quote of a parent of a recent graduate, who said, “You can pick out a Lakeside student.… They have a sort of arrogance, a sort of power that other kids don’t have. They are aloof and snobby. They are not real gentle, kind people.”
Another was the one the reporter used to close the article: “These natural aristocrats are not above rubbing it in,” he wrote. “When the Lakeside Lions are losing a football game, which doesn’t happen all that often, Lakesiders chant, ‘It’s all right, it’s OK, you’ll all work for us someday.’ ”
When I read it, I knew the scene exactly. The chant, while I was at Lakeside, was always initiated by an upperclassman in the requisite uniform of baggy corduroys, an untucked Oxford shirt worn over a white T-shirt, and shaggy hair. Toward the end of a game we were losing, he would stand, motion to the rest of the class, and lead the mantra. After that he led the “key cheer,” in which students took their car keys out of their pockets and dangled them at the kids in the stands on the other side of the gym or the football field. This interlude always stunned me; the message so clearly seemed to be: No matter what the score of this game, you are the losers.
The feeling at the school after the article ran was that the cheer had been taken out of context. Parents and teachers pointed out that Lakeside students, through volunteer work, did a lot of good. They said that a chant given at a sporting event wasn’t a reflection of the student body as a whole. I never heard anyone refute or take up the actual content of the cheer. It took me years to realize that sometimes awkward jokes contain nuggets of truth that otherwise go unexpressed.
The first Lakeside-related function I attended after my admission was a welcome party for our incoming class, held at the home of one of my new classmates, a mansion overlooking Puget Sound. It was the beginning of a total-immersion course in the sociology of Seattle’s upper crust.
I quickly learned that a core group of kids all knew each other. Many had grown up in the Highlands or Broadmoor, a gated community near Lake Washington protected by a ten-foot-high hedge (it’s just northeast of William Grose’s East Madison section of the Central Area). Broadmoor borders the neighborhood of Madison Park, snug on Lake Washington. Kids who grew up in this area knew each other from daycare, kindergarten, soccer teams, the youth symphony, summer camp, piano lessons, ballroom dance classes, and summers at the Seattle Tennis Club, a short walk away on the lakeshore. Some families had condos in Sun Valley or memberships in the Seattle Yacht Club. The web of Lakesiders’ relationships mimicked those of their parents, businessmen and lawyers who saw each other after work at the golf club inside Broadmoor’s gated walls or downtown at the Washington Athletic Club, and moms who got acquainted through memberships in charitable organizations and private school parents’ associations.
After growing up in a suburban development built in the 1960s, I was suddenly aware of the gradations of wealth. In the suburbs, everything seemed the same—the houses were the same size; the kids all had the same toys; everyone played football or baseball in the cul-de-sac, and rode their dirt bikes on the tracks in the woods; everyone went to the public school a few blocks away except for a few kids in the Christian or Catholic schools.
We lived in a two-level, four-bedroom home that was painted a shade of green very close to the color of a lot of refrigerators from that era. Our front yard was landscaped with rhododendrons, ferns, beauty bark, and a narrow strip of sodded grass. Our neighbors included a veterinarian, two community college teachers, and a Boeing engineer. When we wanted an exotic meal, we got takeout from the Chinese restaurant. Some of my friends went to temple rather than church, but my mom explained that Jews were like us Catholics except for some slight differences, such as the fact that they went to a synagogue, and that they didn’t believe in Jesus.
I’d been an awkward, shy, and unpopular kid at public elementary school. I hoped that Lakeside would be a chance to get off on a new foot, but it took less than an hour at the welcome party to realize I wasn’t going to easily slide into things. I lacked the language, style, and common points of reference.
Though there were others in the class in the same position I was in, the group of interconnected kids quickly established themselves as the tastemakers. The rest of the kids, from disparate parts of Seattle and its suburbs, had a few choices: the more socially nimble adopted the preppie style and melded right in; a group of bookish kids banded together and formed their own nerdy subculture; a third group, which included me, fell outside the other two groups and so made up a separate lunchroom tribe: the misfits’ table.
Another regular at the table, Eric Hampton—the only black kid in our class—inarguably had the biggest social adjustment to make upon entering Lakeside. In the early 1980s, the school was actively trying to recruit more black students, though it had no real plan on how to go about it. Lakeside had started to admit blacks in 1965, launching a summer program for minority kids from the Central Area. The Lakeside Educational Enrichment Program, or LEEP, aimed to give eighth and ninth graders remedial instruction and to boost their academic confidence. Backed by federal funds, it was one of several similar programs across the country, all aiming to increase the enrollment of black students at private schools at a time when such schools were coming under attack as racist and elitist. At Lakeside, three of the sixty boys in the program were chosen to integrate the school and given scholarships.
Since then, a trickle of black students had entered the school. The first year Lakeside actually kept track of its enrollment by racial categories was 1980, when it tallied 21 African-American students out of a student body of 627. Recruitment consisted primarily of skimming the standout summer LEEP students. Ronnie Cunningham, for example, the first black student to make it through Lakeside from fifth grade all the way to graduation, started in 1979 after he had tagged along with his older sister to LEEP. Ronnie was asked to enroll after the counselors noticed him doing math problems faster than the kids actually in the program. It happened that Ronnie’s mother knew Eric Hampton’s dad, and she told him about the school.
Charlie Hampton was born in Lake Providence, Louisiana, right on the Mississippi River, the son of an army serviceman and a mother who worked as a domestic. The family moved around a lot, following Charlie’s father as he was posted to army bases in North Carolina, Texas, West Germany, south of Seattle in Tacoma, and finally back to Louisiana. Charlie studied engineering at Southern University in Baton Rouge and became the first in his family to graduate from college. In the late 1960s he took a job at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington, where he worked on a project to condense and solidify nuclear waste. When he figured out the job at Hanford wasn’t for him, he moved his family—Eric and his older brother had already been born—to Seatt
le. Charlie studied business at the University of Washington and ended up managing real estate for the city of Seattle.
The Hampton family lived in the “middle class” Madrona neighborhood in the Central Area, an area southeast of William Grose’s property. When he was nine years old, Eric started to play on Willie McClain’s CAYA basketball team. On days when they weren’t over at the McClain’s, it was more than likely that Damian and JT were at the Hamptons. “They spent almost as much time at my house as they did at their own, eating, sleeping, and everything else,” says Charlie Hampton, a compact, energetic man with a thick mustache and a boisterous laugh. “We were the quote ‘rich folks on the block.’ ”
Eric went to the public elementary school down the street, where he’d been tracked into the “gifted” program. After Charlie Hampton went out to have a look at Lakeside, he figured there was no reason not to try to get his son the best education Seattle had to offer, telling Eric, “These same snotty-nosed rich kids you see around here will be the same people running this country in thirty years. Maybe it’s your break in life, or maybe it’s not your break in life, but you’ll know how the rest of the world lives. You won’t have to fear anybody, you know what you got is as good as what they got, you know that you’re just as smart as anybody.”
Eric had other ideas. “In the morning, I used to cry, ‘I don’t want to go to this school!’ ” he says. “I remember just feeling isolated. I was the only little black kid. I didn’t know anybody, really. So I kind of isolated myself, just on the assumption that I didn’t know these people and they weren’t going to be nice to me.” Eric was a skinny kid who said very little. When he spoke, it was in a voice so subdued that it was hard to hear what he was saying. If a teacher called on him in class, he tended to look down at his desk and mumble his answers. One day not long after the school year started, he refused to return to Lakeside.