“My hackles rose when he said that nobody but an Australian could do it. I can remember how I cried out, ‘Well, I will be the first white man ever to make and throw a boomerang!’ I suppose at this particular juncture I was 11 or 12.”
For most children, Bill later reflected, such an ambition might have lasted a few days or at most a few weeks. “But mine was a power drive that kept on for six months, and I did nothing else during all that time but whittle on those infernal boomerangs. I sawed the headboard out of my bed to get just the right piece of wood, and out in the old workshop at night by the light of the lantern I whittled away.”
Finally, the day came when Bill made a boomerang that worked. He called his grandfather to watch as he threw the boomerang. It circled the churchyard near their house and almost struck Fayette in the head as it came back.
“I remember how ecstatically happy and stimulated I was by this crowning success,” Bill said. “I had become a Number One man.”
Success with the boomerang now set Bill to proving himself a Number One man in other activities. He decided that with enough perseverance and determination, he could do anything he set his mind to. With surprising tenacity and fierce concentration, he began to excel in scientific endeavors, in baseball, and in music. “In my schoolwork, if my interest was high (as it was in chemistry, physical geography, and astronomy), my marks would range from 95 to 98 percent. Other subjects, including English and algebra, caused me trouble, and I received poor grades.”
Bill later described himself as extremely happy during this period of his life, because he was succeeding on all fronts that mattered to him. “It was during this period that I can see how my willpower and yearning for distinction, later to keynote my entire life, were developed. I had many playmates, but I think I regarded them all as competitors. At everything, I must excel. I felt I had to be able to wrestle like Hackensmith, bat like Ty Cobb, walk the tightrope like the folks in the circus, and shoot like Buffalo Bill, who I had seen at the circus riding a horse and breaking glass balls thrown in the air.
“My attempt to make a replica of this performance consisted in taking out a hod of coal and holding my rifle in one hand and tossing a lump of coal into the air with the other. I would try to break the lumps with the rifle, and got so good that I could do about two out of three, although it was a wonder I didn’t kill some of the farmers about, as it was a very high-powered gun.”
He turned his room into a chemical laboratory for a while. Then, he started experimenting with radio, a brand-new invention at the time. “I believe I had one of the first wireless-reception sets in Vermont. I studied Morse code and was always amazed that I never could keep up with the fast operators. But my radio adventures created quite a sensation in the town and marked me out for distinction, something which, of course, I increasingly craved, until at last it became an obsession.’’
Bill’s grandfather challenged him to learn the violin — so he did, first rebuilding an old fiddle that he found in the attic; it had once belonged to his Uncle Clarence. He taught himself to play by pasting a diagram on the fingerboard and then sawing away until the right notes emerged, whereupon he announced his intention to become the leader of the school orchestra. He spent hours listening to the Victrola, after which he would return to his fiddle practice, neglecting all else.
Nearly accomplishing his announced ambition, Bill became first violin in the high school orchestra. He would later downplay this by describing himself as a very bad first violin and the orchestra as very poor. Although he would dismiss his achievement as just another bid for recognition, music would nonetheless provide him a satisfying outlet all his life.
In the period when the Wright brothers first proved their ideas about heavier-than-air flying machines, Bill built a glider. “Like many of his other projects, it didn’t exactly work out,” his sister Dorothy said — Bill had given her the dubious privilege of piloting the craft off the roof of a building. Fortunately, it plummeted softly into a haystack.
“He did a great many useful things, too,” Dorothy said. “He made maple syrup every year out in the backyard, using a huge iron kettle.” She remembered the dogged way he stayed with the job. “It didn’t matter if it got dark or if he had to get more wood. The sap was running, and he would keep at it. That was the way he was built.’’
Was he merely stubborn? Dorothy didn’t think so. “Persistent is a better word,’’ she said. “People who are stubborn are apt to be disagreeable. And I never remember Bill being disagreeable.”
Bill also made bows and arrows, an iceboat, jackjumpers (a jackjumper is a one-legged stool mounted on a short ski), skis, and sleds. His grandfather insisted that he learn how to do farm work. He spent sweaty afternoons in the cornfields, getting in the fodder, milking the cows.
Of all Bill’s adolescent activities, it was probably baseball that claimed most of his physical energies and brought him the recognition he craved. In primary school, he excelled at baseball but later declared that the other players there had not been much good. It was a different matter in secondary school, where he found real competition on the baseball field.
It started badly for him. “On my very first appearance on the field, someone hit a fly ball,” Bill recalled. “I put up my hands and somehow missed catching it, and it hit me on the head. It knocked me down, and I was immediately surrounded by a crowd of concerned kids. But the moment they saw I wasn’t hurt, they all started to laugh at my awkwardness, and I remember the terrible spasm of rage that came up in me. I jumped up and shook my fist and said, ‘I’ll show you! I’ll be captain of your baseball team.’ And there was another laugh. This started a terrific drive on my part to excel in baseball, a desperate struggle to be Number One.”
Bill eventually did become the best baseball player at the school. Pursuing this goal with the same fierce, single-minded determination he had demonstrated in making the boomerang, he practiced every spare moment. “If I could not get anybody to play with me, I’d throw a tennis ball up against the side of a building. Or I’d spend hours and hours heaving rocks at telephone poles to perfect my arm, so that I could become captain of that baseball team. . . . I did develop a deadly aim and great speed with a baseball and had a high batting average. So, in spite of my awkwardness, I became Number One man on the baseball field. The pitcher was the hero in those days. I became pitcher, and I finally made captain.”
The school was Burr and Burton Seminary, in Manchester, Vermont, and when Bill started there in 1909, a new world opened for him. Established in 1829 as a training school for ministers, Burr and Burton quickly became a coeducational institution for general education. The semiprivate academy still serves as the main high school for the Manchester-Dorset area. The main building, with its load-bearing walls of thick gray limestone, was already more than 75 years old when Bill attended the school, and is still in service.
Bill traveled from East Dorset to Manchester by train, boarded at school five days a week, and went home for weekends. As one of Bill’s classmates remembered, Bill “had to hike [about two miles] to Burr and Burton from the station. That was a jaunt. The kids won’t do it nowadays.’’
Manchester, just south of East Dorset on the Rutland Railroad, had long been a fashionable resort town; its famous Equinox House could rival similar grand hotels in Saratoga or Newport. Manchester is built on the foothills of Mount Equinox and is still known for its marble sidewalks and streets shaded with stately maples and elms. Summer tourists have been coming to Manchester ever since the post-Civil War era. They have included Mrs. Abraham Lincoln and later her son Robert Todd Lincoln, who established his summer home, Hildene, there. One of Manchester’s two country clubs is the elegant Ekwanok Country Club; its 1899 founders included the fathers of Lois Burnham and Ebby T., two important people in Bill’s life.
Ebby T. was the son of a family that had been prominent in Albany for three generations and kept a summer home in Manchester. He and Bill first met in 1911, when Bill played ball in Manchester. Later, Ebby was a classmate of Bill’s for one season at Burr and Burton. Their friendship was a significant one for Bill and for Ebby.
Bill’s years at Burr and Burton were happy and successful. Popular with his schoolmates,