Not long after that incident, I was on the radio with a local talk show host. He was badgering me about a certain player, and not wanting to appear uninformed, I got the statistics and the details of a game wrong. My error was fodder for a media critic in New York City, giving him another reason to write that women don’t know anything about sports and shouldn’t be on the air. A friend of mine said, “Oh, forget it. You just made a mistake!”
WHAT I LEARNED
I wasn’t prepared. I promised myself that would never happen again. “Be prepared” was a life lesson I should have learned from Dave Winfield in the Yankees clubhouse, but didn’t. This time, instead of saying to myself that everyone makes mistakes, I focused on why it happened. From that day forward, I never went on the air unprepared. And if I don’t know the answer to a question now, I am not afraid to say a simple “I don’t know. I’ll find out!”
PETE HAMILL
Author
Looking back, the dumbest thing I ever did was also the most crucial thing to the man I later became.
In the summer of 1951, when I was sixteen, I dropped out of high school at the end of my sophomore year. The reasons were complicated. I was the oldest son of Irish immigrants, living in a blue-collar neighborhood of Brooklyn. My parents worked very hard, but there was never enough money for a family that would soon include seven children. As the oldest son, I wanted desperately to help ease their burden through the only possible way known to people like us: work.
At the time, I was a scholarship student at a splendidly rigorous school called Regis, run by the Jesuits on Eighty-fourth Street off Park Avenue. Each morning, I rose in our Brooklyn tenement and took three subway lines to my destination on the Upper East Side. Then (and now), that part of the world was as different from mine as any two places could be under the same American flag. That world of imperious apartment houses (guarded by uniformed doormen), of aloof white sandstone mansions, of nannies wheeling small children, of the heavy thump of limousine doors during morning pickups, of trees that blossomed each spring, seemed to a Brooklyn boy to be held together by one pervasive attitude. That attitude was about certainty. They were the city’s winners, owners of the metropolis, and they would rule forever. They were absolutely free of uncertainty or doubt. Or so I then thought.
At the same time, my own doubts and uncertainties were seething in my brain. What was to become of me? What could I ever do in this life? At Regis, I labored over Caesar’s Gallic War, but nobody I ever met could speak Latin, not even priests (who merely recited it at mass). At the same time, like most teenagers, I was in hormone overload and wanted desperately to commit sins of the flesh. But how could I ever use Latin to achieve that goal? What Brooklyn girl would ever know Latin? And I wanted many other things I could never get. For example, to have my father hug me (a human gesture, I learned later, that was very rare among the Irish). I wanted to see the world that I’d read about in books: the cities of North Africa, the glories of Rome and Paris and Dublin, the islands of the Pacific, the coasts of Asia. I wanted everything out there, beyond the streets of Brooklyn.
I could draw and began to imagine a life as a cartoonist. My heroes were Milton Caniff, who wrote and drew Terry and the Pirates and later Steve Canyon; Roy Crane, who did Buz Sawyer; Will Eisner of The Spirit; and Hal Foster, the master of Prince Valiant. I kept reading the comics in the daily newspapers (there were eight New York papers then) and admiring other cartoonists, above all the work of Willard Mullin, the sports cartoonist for the World-Telegram and Sun. Of what use was Latin to do such work? Or worse, algebra?
I was also a boy of my times. I didn’t know a single person in my neighborhood who had gone to a university. The young men from the neighborhood who had fought (and survived) World War II came home to the immense gift of the GI Bill of Rights. As far as I know, none of them used the educational benefits. They married the girls they’d left behind and took advantage of low-interest VA mortgages to move to the green glades of the suburbs. I thought, without much conviction, If I drop out, I can always go on to art school. But I must put high school behind me.
And so I did.
Almost immediately I felt stabs of anguish. My mother, who had accomplished the impossible back in Belfast by graduating from high school, tried to persuade me to change my mind. She failed, and seemed to sag with her failure—and mine. My father, who had gone only to the eighth grade, was more a prisoner of what I later called “the green ceiling.” That state of mind was pervasive among Irish people (and other immigrants, of course) who had come through the rigors of immigration and the Great Depression. To such people, certain ambitions were evidence of the sin of pride. And if not seen as sin, vaulting ambition was viewed as absolutely unrealistic. They felt the deck was stacked against the Irish, and they did not want their children to desire things that would only end up in rejection or hurt. Better to take the test for the cops or the fire department. Even better, they should look for a federal civil service job. That would be the best defense against another depression.
That summer of 1951, I found what seemed to be a perfect job: I took the test for an opening at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as an apprentice sheet metal worker. I passed. By September, I was working as a young “tin knocker” at the yard, in the company of men, including at least one cousin. I was set, my father said, for the next thirty years. Depression or no depression. I was part of the federal civil service.
But the anguish did not go away. Distant shores kept whispering to me. If I could not see them, perhaps I could draw them. I started taking a drawing course at night in the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in Manhattan, under the direction of Burne Hogarth, the artist of Tarzan. I would arrive at the school around six, exhausted by work at the Navy Yard, nap in the lobby, start class at seven, and begin working on my emerging vision of a possible life. For the first time, I was among young people who had a sense of the future. They would go on to study in Paris or Rome. Or they would work for Will Eisner and then create their own strips. They listened to Hogarth, who told us: “The stages of an artist’s development are simple: imitate, emulate, equal, and surpass.” They were all certain that they would surpass.
I started forming a new plan. Things were getting slightly better at home, thanks to my father’s union. So I would join the navy itself, get a high school equivalency diploma, then use the GI Bill to go on to art school. I would sail across the Pacific and go to Korea, where a bitter war was being fought. I would escape Brooklyn. At some point that year, I saw An American in Paris, and there was Gene Kelly playing a guy named Mulligan, a Mick like me, singing, dancing, and painting in Paris. And he had Leslie Caron too. In September 1952, I joined the U.S. Navy. The Korean War came to an end in the spring of 1953, and I ended up at the naval air station in Pensacola, read Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dos Passos for the first time at the excellent base library, and finally met people who had been to university. If they could do it, so could I. Every one of them urged me on. “You only have one life, man,” one said. And the two of us listened to Hank Williams on the jukebox.
From there I went on to live my life: art school in Mexico in 1956 (even then I couldn’t afford Paris on the $110 a month from the GI Bill), graphic arts work in New York, finally the newspaper business. Along the way, I gave up cartooning for painting and failed out of painting (in my own eyes) into writing.
But I had also developed the habit of continually making up for the mistake of dropping out of high school. In the company of friends, I read the classics (my copy of Aristotle’s Ethics was full of my underlinings of the wrong passages). I absorbed the newest work. I moved around with Camus in my head and Sartre, and also Kerouac and Burroughs and Corso. Joyce moved into my skull to stay, and one writer always led to another. As a reporter, I learned about my own city on the streets, but also absorbed the city’s history, the dense, thrilling narrative that had preceded my arrival. I lived as a reporter in Barcelona and Dublin, San Juan and Rome, and visited many other places, fr
om Saigon to Belfast to Managua. With the exceptions of Dublin and Belfast (which felt like home), I moved through these places as a New Yorker. They all taught me something about my own city. I also learned Spanish, an experience that taught me about my own language.
WHAT I LEARNED
I learned that education only could end with death. Now I realize that I’ve been playing catch-up ball since I was sixteen. Even now, playing in overtime, I wake up wanting to know something new, whether the instructor is the New York Times or Cicero. Every writer is an autodidact at heart, of course, and I am no exception. I have an ongoing project now: reading again those books I thought I had read when young. From Don Quixote to Bleak House, they are now books filled with human riches, because between readings I have lived my life, for better or worse. Now I know much about human folly (including my own) and human grandeur, about decency and evil. A few years ago, I even reread Caesar’s Gallic War, the grinding curse of my adolescence. This time around, the book was a joy. It was a model of clarity, its prose filled with rhythms that I realized had been engraved in my own mind for life. I wanted to thank someone, but the poor Jesuit who tried to help me to accept his gifts is almost certainly dead. These words will have to do. Yes: Gaul is divided into three parts. Just like many human lives.
JULIAN SCHLOSSBERG
Motion Picture, Theater, and
Television Producer
During the early 1960s, I had just graduated from college and had already served in the army. A college friend, older than I was, worked for an employment agency. He knew I wanted to get into show business and told me of a job at the NBC television network. It turned out the work was in Englewood, New Jersey, right over the George Washington Bridge.
I went to the office of the supervisor and was asked a lot of questions about my background. The interview seemed to be going very well when he asked what my immediate goal was. With a smile I said, “To have your job.” He just stared at me. “Only kidding,” I added quickly, with what I thought was a warm smile. The interview came to an end and we shook hands and said our goodbyes.
As soon as I returned to New York City, my friend at the employment agency called and told me that I had been too aggressive in the interview. Obviously, I didn’t get the job.
WHAT I LEARNED
Kenny Rogers’s song “The Gambler” has the most apropos lyric: “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” As any good performer can tell you: know your audience.
PHIL KEOGHAN
Host of The Amazing Race
At nineteen, I thought nothing could hurt me. I felt invincible and had no understanding of how fragile life was. I thought nothing of risking my life, flirting with disaster, always assuming that somehow I was different from everyone else. Sure, I had a few close calls, but nothing woke me up until I found myself lost underwater inside a 22,000-ton shipwreck, running out of air.
I got my first hosting job on an adventure television show when I was nineteen, in New Zealand. There were three hosts and every week people would write in and get us to do things they’d like to see on TV. One of my first assignments was to go with a team of divers and a camera crew down into a sunken ship. The vessel had never been filmed before and was filled with some great stuff. Although I was a pretty inexperienced diver at the time and very claustrophobic, I couldn’t wait to go.
I followed another diver into the water, and he kept going down, down, down, until we came to this massive cruise ship lying on its side. Right away, the other diver slipped through a porthole and into the ship, and I followed him through liquid corridors and dark passageways. Everything was covered in silt. We navigated this underwater maze and ended up swimming into a former ballroom where everything, including swaying chandeliers, was preserved almost perfectly underwater.
At first it was a dreamlike experience, but it soon turned into a nightmare. Somehow we got separated from the camera crew. So we were hanging around in this underwater ballroom with our lights off to save battery power. And suddenly my dive buddy turned his light on. He signaled to me, “Stay put!” and then just like that he was gone. So now I was alone, deep inside a mass of steel. It was pitch-dark and dead quiet, and I didn’t know where up and down were. I started to panic.
I was thinking, Where did this guy go? What if he doesn’t come back? I started checking my air gauge and then beating the valve, which meant I was breathing so fast that I started taking in water. I panicked to find my light and turn it back on. Claustrophobia took over as I realized I was lost inside a mass of steel and was running out of air. I was wondering if I should stay put or try to swim out, knowing that if I moved they’d never find me if they did come back. I briefly managed to be rational, and then lost it—every minute my fear grew. My life started flashing in front of me. But I was not thinking about what I’d done—instead, I was thinking about all the things I hadn’t done. There was so much I wanted to do with my life, and now I’d never get the chance. What an idiot I’d been. How could I have been so stupid?
WHAT I LEARNED
Well, obviously I did get out of that nightmare. My buddy came back. When he finally got me back to the dive boat, I realized my life had changed forever. I couldn’t wait to start living. I couldn’t wait to write a list. The only piece of paper I could find was a paper bag, and I just started dumping down everything I felt I needed to do with my life. I made a contract with myself to seize the day and live without regret. Now, bear in mind that I was nineteen, a young man, so obviously there are some things I’m not going to tell you about . . . But the first thing was to go back into the shipwreck, get back on the horse and face that fear. Ever since my biggest mistake, I’ve had a list on which I keep ticking off, adding, deleting . . . I move things around, and that helps keep me focused on living the biggest possible life I can. This is where my philosophy “No Opportunity Wasted,” or “NOW,” comes from.
I decided that the best life I could have would be to turn my list into a career, to get paid to do all the things I had on my list. And after a lot of hard work, that’s exactly what happened. Prior to working on The Amazing Race, I traveled to more than sixty countries making other television shows like Keoghan’s Heroes and Phil Keoghan’s Adventure Crazy, doing everything from swimming from Asia to Europe across the Bosporus, to lugging a three-hundred-pound chef to the top of an erupting volcano for a five-star dinner.
Now, you might say, Clearly he didn’t learn a lesson from his experience in the shipwreck. He’s still risking his life. Well, no: I’ve learned my lesson. I’m more careful about how I do things. I no longer leap without looking or just forge ahead without a thorough plan. I no longer take life for granted; I treat it with respect. Life really is a gift, a gift that comes with an expiration date, and it is up to all of us to make the most of it!
GIL SCHWARTZ
Author
There are all kinds of mistakes: little ones that slip off your back like water from the feathers of an arctic gull, midsize errors that seem to disappear for a while, then pop up like a mole from an unexpected hole in the tundra of everyday life, big ones that make you stop for a moment and wonder where all those precious brain cells you were once so proud of might have gone.
And then there are the mistakes that are more than simple missteps of one size or another: acts that in themselves reveal yawning flaws in your character and make you wish that time in its haste would stand still, turn, and give you that one critical moment back, things that cannot be erased, spun, cleansed of their base matter, that can only be learned from. Knowledge gathered does not erase the mistake, for in its essence it is something done that cannot be undone. Hopefully, however, some insights may be gained, some sour, bitter slice of wisdom that, in future, can be drawn on to minimize the chances that one may stray so far from the light again.
When I was thirty-one, my father was admitted to the hospital with the symptoms of a stroke. He was sixty-five and had been of middling health for a while. It turned out, after ext
ensive testing, not to be a stroke precisely, but rather to be a related circulatory problem that led to similar symptoms. He wasn’t himself, though. He seemed smaller in the hospital bed than I had ever seen him, and while he had received certain assurances from the doctors that things were not at a critical point, he was frightened. My father was an atheist to the bone, not even a cowardly agnostic, and the prospect of the utter void that, as far as he was concerned, followed our stay on this earth yawned very large indeed to him.
My father and I were not on the best of terms, hadn’t been for years. There were a lot of excellent reasons for each of us, and fault enough to go around, I see now, on both sides. The tension between us was particularly painful for him and for me because when I was a child we were uncommonly close. And even after the permafrost descended after I married, I still doubted that he adored me with the fierce, profound merging of identities that distinguishes a truly great neurotic love from its more comfortable and managed counterpart. Ah, how he loved his little boy! And when that boy became a man, how he missed that little fellow, and how sad I was in my heart that I could not give him that gift of perpetual infantile devotion.
Still, after a period of horrendous discomfort, we settled into an almost equally terrifying cordiality that was somewhat better. And there we stayed, drifting like two ships in a giant sea of love, blame, memory, and regret, just keeping each other in sight but never drawing close enough to engage in any meaningful way with each other. Years went by. Nothing changed, but then, nothing got worse either. And then there he was, suddenly, in that sad little hospital gown, looking at me from his cranked-up bed, hair askew, eyes filled with fear and hurt and anger, for above all my dad was an extremely proud guy who really resented being in this ignoble position.
If I Only Knew Then... Page 4