Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa

For those of you who did not take three years of Latin like me, meaning my fault, my grievous fault.

I think there were several years during which I was a bully. Most especially, during Mrs. Hardy’s six-grade class, it was my time to be in the sun. If you’ve raised children, you know each goes through various cycles of change and stability. During those times of late childhood sexual latency, some kids shined within their little environment of teacher recognition, for boys athletic ability and whatever else among children provides status.

And with status came a certain arrogance.

When I reviewed the BA Alumni reunion sign-up sheet, I became concerned that I might see someone whom I had bullied and would be ashamed to see. As it was, I knew hardly anyone and don’t think any of my bully objects were in attendance.

To digress for a moment, one of my childhood friends was Kenny Williams. His mother and father, college-educated, created a very structured, guided home life for Kenny, In contrast, my parents were extreme in their permissiveness and lack of emotional guidance. They were sweet people, but unschooled and unprincipled in childrearing; perhaps it was Dr. Spock’s advice that a child should be allowed to follow his inner nature. At any rate, Kenny went to Sunday School, he was in Cub and Boy Scouts, he was on baseball and basketball teams, and his friend Don was carried around by Kenny’s poor Mom for many years to all these structured activities. A pinnacle activity for your boys was Demolay, and Kenny’s Dad, a Mason, put Kenny in and I trailed in too. Kenny’s Mom, active in PTA, was also friends with moms who were anxious about their sons’ social development. She on occasion tried to make a boyhood triad of a boyhood dyad, which really brought out the verbal bully in me.


Mrs. Williams at right wearing white movie star
sunglasses and with Kenny's younger brother.
Photo taken at Reinhardt Library, June 11, 2007.

Kenny’s Dad also was a staunch Republican. When I had a second popularity due to my early acquisition of a driver’s license, I remember a prescient escapade, some of you may have participated, in which we removed 30-40 campaign signs—Goldwater (or was it Nixon) for President—and deposited them on Mr. Williams two story-brick house front lawn.

When my parents first moved to Dallas, they rented a small place on Kilarney Street. Then they moved to a ticky, tacky $14,000 Fox and Jacobs house on Eastwood. Steve lived uptown on San Lorenzo. And Shari lived with the genteel, gentile set in old Casa Linda (that's a little joke that Shari is the source of).

I’m certain that I’m guilty of many other small brutalities, but my dying brain cells don’t bring all to mind. In Mrs. Hardy’s class, there was a smart but unstatused girl, I think her name may have been Maxine, who I was absolutely brutal to among my friends. Her family moved from Dallas and she came back to the class for a short visit. I remember the pain in her face when she saw me pump up my malicious social disdain.

So with the distance of 40 years, I carry some central guilt about my bully acts during several years of my Reinhardt years, but also have a larger understanding that we baby boomers, who grew up in this Southern middle class suburban cow pasture wasteland of ignorance and prejudice, were fortunate to have Reinhardt, which was at times an oasis in a desert for me.

As adults, we cannot fathom or expect to control the mysterious ways children and adolescents form hierarchy and peck on one another. There’s some brain chemistry, brain development and human evolution factors yet to be discovered. But we can hold adults to a higher level of expectation, and my next blog, “The Dark Underbelly of Reinhardt,” will explore some of the ways our teachers, parents and society might have done a better job.