George Brown
By George Brown

Looking back, I can say with certainty my junior and senior year of high school were the two most important years of my life. The only other two years that might compare would be my second and third year of life when I was in the care of foster parents, but I have no recollection of those years to know what they were like or if they compare.

Interestingly, my first two years out of college and the first two years of retirement (just concluded) were also important times of life; the first because I was settling into a career and the latter because I was settling out of a career. But neither remotely compares with the impact those two years of high school had on my life.

The two years I’m referring to extended from June 1962 to June 1964. But before describing those years it would be helpful to set the stage.

From the time I was returned from a foster home to the care of my Mother and new Stepfather a few months before my third birthday until I reached the age of 16, we moved 12 times. There is no way to more succinctly describe our circumstances during those years than to say, we lived in abject poverty.

My Stepdad earned a poor man’s dollar working at a local junkyard while Mom stayed home cooking enough beans and potatoes to keep us (my four older brothers, sister, and me) from going hungry, although we sometimes did. We were mostly clothed – and often fed – by the Salvation Army.

To say I grew up as a shy, backwards, backwoods country bumpkin is an understatement, and it didn’t help that I was a puny kid with four-eyed glasses that were always taped at the hinges, and who dis-exceled in sports as much, or possibly more, than the athletic boys exceled.

Somewhere along the way my family became acquainted with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and, thanks to the generosity of an anonymous benefactor, I attended the SDA church school in Mount Vernon for grades 6-8 before going to public high school for grades 9 and 10.

It was late April 1962 when the SDA church pastor visited our home to encourage my sister, who would be a senior, and me to attend Mount Vernon Academy (MVA), the SDA boarding high school that serves the State of Ohio. Mom was okay with the idea and my sister was enthusiastic, while I, the shy, incredibly insecure, backwards, backwoods country bumpkin, was easily talked into doing so – mostly because it was the agreeable thing to do. I had a couple of friends in public high school but no deep ties to keep me there.

Unlike the three years of church school, there would be no financial support from an anonymous donor, or from home. I would have to make it on my own – “work my way through”, they called it.

This would require moving into the boys’ dormitory at MVA the first week of June, which I did just six weeks after my 16th birthday. I would be working on campus to earn money to cover my tuition, room, and board for the upcoming school year.

At the beginning of August my sister had a change of heart and moved back home to attend public school, but there was no way I was going to do so. In those short two months I had discovered a new life. True, I was working hard long hours, and my life was strictly regimented from daylight until lights out at 9:00 p.m., but I had discovered a sense of freedom and accomplishment; seeds of self-worth had taken root and something inside of me wouldn’t let them die by moving back home.

And so, over the next two years, except for a day or two of home leave at Thanksgiving and Christmas, my home was the boys’ dormitory at Mount Vernon Academy, and I loved every waking and sleeping moment of it.

Academically, I was an average student. Athletically, I didn’t even try out, using the necessity of work as a legitimate excuse. Despite my four-eyed glasses (now tapeless at the hinges), I managed to piece together a social life, experiencing my first kiss and, ultimately, beginning a relationship with the girl I would later marry.

But mostly I worked. Over the course of two years I helped set up and tear down the huge canvas army tents used for the Church’s annual statewide camp meeting, learned to do every job in the campus laundry (I can still press a shirt like a pro), shucked corn and snapped green beans from the campus farm, cleaned the dorm hallways and bathrooms, served as backup for the night watchman, and worked the fulltime day shift at Loma Linda Foods during the summer and a four hour night shift (cleanup crew) during the school year. As one of the smaller guys on the crew I got the job of cleaning a cooker with a small porthole door just big enough to crawl in to scour the scorched soymilk scum from the walls and coils that occurred during the boiling process each day.

You’d think, having worked all those jobs and long hours, I would have earned more than enough money to cover my tuition, room, and board. Not so. When I marched across the stage and received my diploma folder in June 1964 it was empty. It would not be released until the final balance of $750 was paid. I’m not sure how many thousands of dollars that would be today, but it was a lot of money at the time.

So what did I do? Exactly what my time at MVA had taught me to do. I worked hard and paid off the bill, received my diploma in the mail, and then headed off to college on less of a shoestring than I had in hand when I arrived at MVA two years earlier.

In the MVA Treasure Chest yearbook for the class of 1964 no one was voted, “least likely to succeed”, but had they done so I would have been in the running. Even the guidance counselor encouraged me to join the Army or consider a technical school training course instead of college.

But my time at MVA was not about academics. It was about discovering, albeit modestly so at the time, that, with the Good Lord’s help and guidance along the way, I could make something of my life, although at the time I had no idea what that might be.

During those two years I had morphed from being that backwards, backwoods country bumpkin into a young man with potential – still poor to the core, but with drive and courage to explore and pursue life’s opportunities, and with a willingness to work hard to do so.

50 long years have slipped by but the memories of those two years remain joyous in my mind. Small wonder that I’ve not missed a single decennial class reunion, and look forward to this one coming up next week, perhaps more so than all these others.

George Brown is a freelance writer. He and his wife, Yvonne, live in Jackson Township.