By the 9th Grade I'd realized the great disparity between what I read in library books and the puerile fare in daily classes. So I ceased "keeping up a front". When I logged a record number of "tardies" and my grade average slipped from "A" to "B", word recirculated, "I told you he's an over-achiever!" I was mustered out of The Honor Society, and I spent an hour after school every day, cleaning up the yard. The segregation I'd escaped by my scholastic achievements now resurned in part because no adult seemed to care about the reason for my abrupt change in work and behavior. However, two things revived my spirits. One was a book; the other, an opportunity to epxloit a physical talent which made me very popular among my fellow students.

The book was The Story of Philosopy, by Will Durant. Philosophy became a great love of mine. During the next 5 years, I read Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Nietsche, Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, Bergson, and Santayana.

As to the physical talent, I'm "double-jointed" (loose-jointed). (In the Service, in Physical Training, exercising prone on the ground, the solder next to me, hearing my bones pop in and out of joint, would say, "Hey, Sarge. I gotta get away from this guy. He's haunted!") In particular, I could (then)pop my toes in my shoes so that it sounded like the radiator errupting or some other disturbance. (This, incidentally, is how many "mediums" achieved that "table-rapping" allegedly from Spirit-Land.) Time and again, the whisper would start up in the class, "Hey, Sonny. Give us some toe-music!" I could break up any class, at will.

Before we started High School, my pal, David Hargis, warned me, "Sonny, those High School teachers are snooty. They won't call you 'Sonny', like the Junnior HIgh School teachers. What's your name?" "Herman." "Wow! Do you want to be called that?" "Naw! A few kids who knew that called me 'Herman, the Vermin'. Or 'Her Man'." "Well, what's your middle name?" "Juvenis." "Gosh, that 's worse. Why --?" I explained. "Well, can't you change one of your names?" "I guess so. I better not change the 'Herman' because that's Dad's name. But I could keep the middle initial and change it to 'John', my father's father's name." A high school teacher assured me that I didn't have to "go to court" to make the change.

Springfield High School was across the street from the Main Library. So I continued my "B-slob" ways in class, and sneaked off to the library at every opportunity. I showed up every week with a stubble of a beard (and was sent home to shave it off). I went about spouting T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, along with the ragtime verse of Vachel Lindsay and the jazzy verse of Kenneth Fearing and rhapsodic passages of Thomas Wolfe's novel, Of Time and the River, as well as verse of my own -- a pre-Beatnik. I was allowed to take a second year of Latin in the 10th Grade, and began French in the 11th grade. But I was not allowed to take any mathematics or science courses. (My last math class in public school was "Algebra" in the 9th Grade in junior high school -- putting me at severe disadvantage in the Army Air Corps Weather Service, and even more so when I entered Columbia U., after the War.)

Then the Principal ended what elective choice had been available to me. "Your working-class parents can't afford to send you to college. And you've proven to be an over-achiever. So I can't have you taking up room in that French Class. Tomorrow you transfer to Typing Class."

Now, at age 7, I'd learned to use the typewriter my father bought to complete lessons in "Landscape Gardening" from the International Correspondence School. In junior and senior high school, I typed assigned papers because of my "bad" handwriting, due to crooked and double-jointed fingers. So the Typing Class was another wasted class for me. (34 years later, wife Esther, while taking an "Education" course at State Teachers College, in Springfield, was told by her professor that, prior to World War II, Springfield schools had a double-track system, usually directing the poorer kids into vocational classes.)

Before I completed the 11th Grade, we moved back to Tulsa, where Dad though he might get work in the parks. Tulsa schools were now a little more enlightened. In the first semester of the 12th Grade, I was allowed to take Physics and Chemistry, but no math. And something happened at the beginning of the second semester of the 12th Grade which abruptly changed my life.

On the first day of the semester I entered a classroom listed on my schedule. It was filled with girls who began giggling noisily. The teacher entered and demanded to know what I was doing there. I showed her my schedule. "Well, that's a scheduling mistake. This is a girl's cooking class. No! You'll have to stay here this week, until the correction can be made." So I made myself French toast every day, and the girls slipped me cookies.

But I'd had it with school! And the discovery of two books that week seemed to confirm my attitude.

The school librarian in charge of "accessioning" new books would allow me to spend time in her backroom (not questioning "where I ought to be") and she introduced me to the recently published, Men of Mathematics, by E. T. Bell. I remembered Bertrand Russell's claim that "the best philosophers had been trained in mathematics", so I sought out books on "the philosophy of mathematics".

The other book was An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, by Harry Elmer Barnes, a huge tome of about 1200 pages. Over the next several months, I was allowed to renew it again and again, since no one asked for it.

I soon decided that school was seriously interfering with my studies, so each morning, when Mom thought I was off to school, I went to the Main Library (where I had once earned 13 reading certificates) to read Barnes or books on the philosophy of mathematics or popular books on science: a February dropout. When Spring came, I often sat reading on the bank of the muddy Arkansas River. In late April, Mom received a notice that I'd been expelled for non-attendance.

Mother still thought schools to be "inventions of the Devil", but I was so close to getting that "piece of paper" essential for working! For the first and only time (ever!) Mom went to my school -- never for the honors I'd received, never for the plays I'd acted in -- to plead my case.

Fortunately, the supervisor of my class was Miss Lulu Beckington, also my English teacher, so she understood my love of reading. Miss Beckington persuaded the Principal and my other teachers to allow me to be re-admitted, provided I do extra work. May I always praise the memory of my dear teacher, Miss Lulu Beckington! She changed my life!

Mom bought me a portable typewriter "on time". For two weeks I sat at the typewriter, sometimes all night, with a pot of coffee, typing the papers which I took in to school the next day. On one day, with a student taking notes for me, I completed all the physics lab experiments. And the next day, all the chemistry lab experiments. I had a deadline and a big incentive. Any senior completing all the required work by one week before Graduation received free tickets to all the movie theaters of Tulsa. That's why I graduated.

For many years after, I would read that Tulsa Senior High School was ranked as one of the 30 best high schools in the country -- which didn't improve my opinion of Education in The United States!