Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (11 page)

One day I was having lunch with an old friend of mine, Tom Ingram, who had helped another friend, Lamar Alexander, get elected governor of Tennessee. I had left the campaign trail for a couple of hours, and we were chowing down at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. I was complaining about my
circumstances and finally said, “You know, if it was left up to me, I would just get in an old pickup truck and drive across the state, stopping whenever I wanted to talk to people.” Tom replied something to the effect of “Then why don’t you do it? That’s who you are.” “Yeah,” I thought. “That is who I am.” Back at the campaign the opinion was unanimous. Bad idea. So we did it anyway.

We found a red 1990 Chevrolet “straight stick” Silverado, and with a staff guy to drive me, we took off and did exactly what I envisioned. Wearing my jeans and boots, we would pull up in the middle of a crowd at a campaign stop and I would hop into the back of the truck bed and give ’em hell. It all fit. I was having fun, and folks said that it was showing. As I started climbing in the polls, my opposition unloaded on me. “He is a fraud,” they said. “He’s not really a good ole boy, but a champagne-sipping, Gucci-wearing, Grey Poupon–spreading Washington insider.” Frankly, I thought that was the best line of the campaign. But I also thought that accusing me of sipping champagne in Jack Daniel’s country was over the line. I replied that my opponent was just jealous that he didn’t have the advantages that I had by my
not
being a Rhodes scholar. I knew that I had ’em. I knew that I was coming off as exactly who I was.

The truck became pretty famous. We had campaign pins and buttons made with pictures of the truck on it. Sometimes when I would go out of state, folks would say, “Yeah, you’re the fellow with the red truck.” The old red pickup
truck now resides at the Baker Center at the University of Tennessee, where I donated my papers.

My opponent didn’t know about my dad, the car lot, and the way I grew up. When I had gotten into trouble with the campaign, I had simply gone back to my roots, including an old truck just like the ones I used to drive and clean up on my dad’s lot.

T
EACHING LATIN
to someone like me in high school was somewhat like trying to teach a pig to dance. It’s a waste of the teacher’s time and it irritates the pig. But such was the task that Mrs. Garner accepted at Lawrence County High School—with predictable results. If there is such a thing as teacher’s heaven where the saints of the profession go, then Mrs. Garner is undoubtedly there—for not having someone shoot me, or for not doing the deed herself. And there’s not a jury in the state that would have convicted her.

Mrs. Garner was a heavyset, middle-aged lady of mild disposition. Even I didn’t know how steady her temperament was until that day she walked into class—as usual, exactly at the time for the class to start—and took her seat at her desk. I, along with another classmate with no visible signs of redemption, had come into possession of a small supply of “cracker balls,” which were very popular around the Fourth
of July and Christmas season. They were like little round firecrackers, not much bigger than a large pea, and when you threw them on the sidewalk they made a pretty loud pop. Before class that day we put a cracker ball under each of the four legs of Mrs. Garner’s chair. She came in, sat down, and two or three of them went off. In the classroom it sounded like gunfire. Then something remarkable happened—nothing. Without so much as flinching, she proceeded to scoot her chair in behind her desk and begin the class as if nothing had happened. Man, this was awe-inspiring. And with that she managed to cause me to experience the one emotion that I hated most—shame. To my mind, her forbearance was even more remarkable in light of the fact that the chances of her being able to finger the right culprits in that class were about 99.9 percent. She wouldn’t even have had to “round up the usual suspects.” They were sitting right there in front of her, trying their best to look shocked and surprised. But she didn’t. I was so impressed, I even made a halfhearted attempt to learn a few Latin words, and I did. I just never learned what they meant.

Attempting to create “shock and awe” in class was not the only “independent study” I undertook to endear myself to the faculty. Every day we had to put in an hour in study hall. It was a large auditorium full of desks. My challenge every day was to decide how best to kill the time in study hall. Given that farming is a major part of life in Tennessee, we had a teacher who taught agriculture and was also our study
hall teacher my sophomore year. Mr. Ag was a big, rawboned fellow with straight blond hair. He could have posed for a Norman Rockwell painting. He was also what we called “wall-eyed.” His eyes just didn’t go in the same direction at the same time. When one was looking northeast, the other one was looking southwest. You can imagine the sensitivity my buddies and I demonstrated in our discussions about his appearance.

As best I could tell, he had two jobs in his role as study hall monitor as he sat on a slightly elevated platform and looked out over the auditorium. First, he had to evaluate the sneezes. Practically every day, once or twice, someone would let out a loud sneeze. Occasionally, one of them would be a real sneeze. Others were borderline, and most often they would be accompanied by a rhetorical flourish wherein the sneeze sounded like a dirty word. The teacher had to evaluate these sneezes as to whether or not they were fake or genuine and, if fake, dole out the appropriate punishment—usually demerits. But, of course, demerits didn’t inflict pain, and with us, anything that didn’t hurt did not serve as much of a deterrent. His second job was to be the restroom cop. People who wanted to go to the restroom had to sign a slip of paper and hand it to him on the way out.

Given Mr. Ag’s appearance, he was naturally a target-rich environment for the artistically inclined. One day I decided to work on my portrait skills by drawing Mr. Ag’s face. I was doing a pretty good job, if I do say so myself. I especially
wanted to get the eyes just right. I was concentrating heavily on that, and just before I finished I felt the presence of someone standing to my left and slightly behind me. Much to my chagrin, I looked up to see my subject, Mr. Ag. He was looking (as best as I could tell) directly at my handiwork. “Not bad,” he said, and walked on. Another close call. However, I knew better than to ask permission to go to the restroom for the rest of that semester during study hall, although I surely could have used a restroom break the moment I looked up and saw him standing there.

Yes, life for me in high school was pretty good. The only cloud on the horizon was provided by narrow-minded teachers who insisted that I show up on time and not talk in class. They bombarded me with demerits, which would be dutifully recorded by them on “pink cards,” which became a part of my permanent record. Given my rate of production of pink cards, I could imagine a “Freddie Thompson” file cabinet drawer dedicated solely to me.

The school faculty continued to remind me that they would follow me and haunt me for the rest of my life, and, well, I couldn’t have that. And my response? What I thought would be the response of any red-blooded American boy—eliminate the pink cards. One day during one of my frequent trips to the principal’s office, where the pink cards were kept, I unlatched the window to the office, which was on the
ground floor. I recruited another ne’er-do-well buddy, and we agreed that it would be a real hoot if we came over that night, sacked up all the pink cards, and took them to the woods and buried them to protect them from the prying eyes of future unknown busybodies intent upon ruining our glorious futures. Of course, school officials would have no idea who pulled off this brilliant caper. Never mind that I would probably rank as the top three suspects on any list. Or that when questioned I was the worst liar in the history of delinquency and usually I fessed up after the first question.

Nevertheless, the two of us laughed all the way to the school that night, enjoying the brilliance of our scheme. We continued to laugh when we discovered that the long horizontal window would open only halfway and we could not stuff our oversized bodies through it. And we were probably laughing with relief when we realized we weren’t going to be able to pull off the pink-card theft. We figured we’d eluded the night watchman, done our best, and when trying to right an injustice, it’s the thought that counts.

It didn’t occur to me until years later that it was only a matter of a few inches that prevented me from committing a felony before even leaving high school. They say that God protects drunks and children. I would add young morons to that list.

One of my other pals had his dad’s car one night, and a few of us were driving around when we saw this large sign,
“Gone Fishing,” over a bait and tackle shop on the outskirts of town. It took a considerable amount of time for us to get that sign unhinged and transported over to the high school. But it was more than worth the effort when we gazed upon our handiwork after we had nailed the sign up above the entrance to the study hall, which could be seen from the rest of the campus. The sign was up so high that it actually took the maintenance people two or three days to get it down, giving us plenty of time to appreciate the results of our hard work.

It’s not as though all my shenanigans went unpunished. In the arts and sometimes in sports, it is said that a person should be judged by their “body of work.” Unfortunately, that’s what happened to me. I was about to learn a valuable lesson. If you act like a jerk, the people you have offended will eventually get an opportunity to nail you—and often when it hurts the most.

In my junior year, I achieved what at the time seemed like the most important achievement in a person’s life: recognition by high school classmates. The juniors, showing great insight, voted me the Most Athletic boy. I had officially arrived. In my own mind, in three years I was transformed from a slow-footed nonathletic little boy to a real “hoss.” This analysis was now shared by the ultimate arbiter—my fellow classmates of Lawrence County High School.

However, unbeknownst to me, several of the teachers got together soon after the election and decided that—election
or not—no one with my academic and deportment record should be allowed to be a Superlative at Lawrence County High School. They decreed that I should be stripped of my honor and a new election held. Even worse, the teachers were being led by Mrs. Eleanor Buckner, mother of one of my high school buddies. Of course, I was outraged. I wanted to know, “What does athletics have to do with school and good conduct, for Pete’s sake?” With this kind of thinking I was ahead of my time. “What about the election? What about just making up new rules to get the results they want? Who do they think they are, the Supreme Court?” I would even have thrown in a “due process” argument if I had ever heard of it. However, it never occurred to me that I had any real recourse. Those were the days before students and their parents filed lawsuits against schools for violation of constitutional or other rights. Besides, I wanted to keep my parents out of it. They knew me better than anybody, and I knew they would be on the teachers’ side. As Mom said, “If you had behaved yourself, this wouldn’t have happened.” I had to consider seriously whether behaving myself would have been worth it. A heavy price to pay, it seemed to me.

Ironically, it was a teacher who showed me mercy when I needed it the most. Mrs. Little was the mother of another one of my football teammates. Unfortunately for her, she was also my French teacher my senior year. Toward the end of the year, I began to realize that my grade situation was worse than I thought. In fact, I needed to pass French in
order to graduate, and in order to get a passing grade, I had to pass my final French exam. There was only one problem. I hardly knew any French at all. Unlike Latin, French wasn’t a dead language, but it might as well have been, as far as I was concerned. I did think that the French accent of some of those guys in the movies was pretty cool, but that was about the extent of my association with the language. To my great surprise, my survival instincts and natural adaptability failed me, and I failed my final French exam.