'Pass It On'. Anonymous
of uncle or father” to Bill. They had worked together on summer jobs and helped string the first telephone lines into East Dorset. They also hunted and fished together, and they shared an interest in Vermont history. Later, they would drink together, although Mark’s drinking never progressed into alcoholism.
During the fall of 1915, Bill made an effort to compensate for past failures at school. His course of study was electrical engineering, which he chose because of his interest in science. Some of his old drive had finally returned, and he began to become popular on campus. Several of his classmates found themselves involved in a hazing incident. Because no one would name names, the whole class was suspended for a full term. The hazing scandal and the suspension happened to coincide in time with the Mexican border troubles. (The following year, U.S. troops under General Pershing were sent into Mexico in a vain attempt to capture Pancho Villa.) Because the Norwich cadets were part of the Vermont National Guard, they were mobilized — although they never were sent to the border. The mobilization was fortuitous for Bill, because it meant that he was reinstated at Norwich.
He continued to be driven by a need to stand out, to do something unique. He found such an opportunity, he believed, in a calculus course.
“I was failing miserably in calculus,” Bill recalled. He had had difficulty memorizing formulas in algebra, and he was encountering similar problems in calculus. “I realized that I was going to be an absolutely flat failure in calculus. In fact, the professor promised me that I would get zero.”
Then Bill discovered that his professor had certain shortcomings in his own understanding of the subject. “He was a catalog of formulas; he could apply the formulas; he was glib; but deep down, he didn’t know how the thing worked,” Bill said. “And I made up my mind I would learn.’’
Bill, stretched out at a picnic with Mark Whalon (center foreground), in a pose many remember as characteristic.
At the library, he studied the history of mathematics and the evolution of calculus. Finally, he grasped the concept sufficiently to discuss it. He had developed considerable talents in argument.
“I got the professor over a barrel, and I made a fool out of him before his class,” Bill said. “He did give me zero, but I had won one battle. In other words, I was the only one on the school grounds — the Number One man again — the only one who deeply understood the underlying principles of calculus.’’
The incident did nothing to help him academically, but it did make him the center of attention. It was a rerun of the boomerang project. His drive for prestige was reasserting itself, making him a sort of hero to his classmates — but a brash upstart in the eyes of his calculus professor.
Bill was an unusually gifted young man, although he was often hypercritical of himself. He possessed a native talent for leadership, which was finally recognized in the military program at Norwich.
“I had been made a corporal or a sergeant in the corps,” Bill said, “and then it was discovered that I had talent for instructing people. Curiously enough, though awkward myself, I had talent for drilling people. I had a voice and I had a manner that would compel a willing obedience, and so much so that the attention of the commandant was drawn to it.” This talent for leadership would serve him well on active duty in the Army. And, he assumed, it would serve him equally well when, upon leaving military service, he would find himself “at the head of vast enterprises,” which he “would manage with utmost assurance.”
Bill had mixed feelings about military service. It was honor, glory, and duty, but it was also danger and death. Growing up in East Dorset, Bill had spent countless hours target-shooting with old Bill Landon, Civil War veteran and “great character” who lived next door. Grandfather Griffith never talked about the Civil War, but old Bill Landon “would spin me yarns by the hour. He had been sergeant on Sheridan’s staff, and he used to tell me how, on a charge, a minié ball had struck his musket butt, and it passed through and stuck in his skull just over the eye; how he plucked it out and continued his charge. And old Bill had a drooping eye, a scar, and poor sight to prove all this.’’
Landon, reliving the glories of the Civil War, also spoke with great scorn of those who had managed to avoid active service. “One of the worst forms of opprobrium that could be cast on anybody when I was a kid was to be called a slacker,’’
As a young officer, Bill anticipated honor and glory, feared danger — and had his first drink.
Bill remembered. “Those who failed to go to the Civil War, evaded service, or got some sort of an easy job got a stigma that they carried all their lives.’’ Old Landon had told Bill about a wealthy and respected East Dorset citizen who carried this stigma. “All during the Civil War, he was ill and used to toddle down to the village with a long shawl over his shoulders, very much stooped, with a bottle of smelling salts, and all during that period, no one would speak to him,’’ said Landon.
But in the cemetery south of East Dorset is a marker for Waldo Barrows, Bill’s great-uncle, killed in the 1864 Battle of the Wilderness. And the Gettysburg battlefield, which Bill had visited with his grandfather, also had a cemetery. “Neurotic that I was, I was ambivalent,” he said. “The great upwellings of patriotism would overtake me one day — and the next day, I would just be funked and scared to death. And I think that the thing that scared me most was that I might never live my life out with Lois, with whom I was in love.’’
The tradition of military service, however, was deeply embedded in Bill. When America entered World War I in 1917, he was called up by the military and never graduated from Norwich.
When he was called, he chose to serve in the Coast Artillery. The decision later caused him guilt, because that was considered one of the safer branches of military service.
From Norwich, Bill was sent to the new officers training camp at Plattsburgh, New York. Here, he discovered that the Norwich cadets’ military training had given them a head start on the others in the camp, and he moved rapidly through the training. His flair for leadership brought him further recognition, and after additional training at Fort Monroe, Virginia, he was commissioned a second lieutenant. It was a heady experience for a 21-year-old who only a few years earlier had been in deepest depression. Then, he was sent to Fort Rodman, just outside New Bedford, Massachusetts. “Here was all the tradition of the old Army, seasoned regular officers and noncoms, along with the drafted men and volunteers,” he remembered. “How I enjoyed that atmosphere, encouraged as I was by actually being put in command of soldiers. But still there crept into me at times that nagging undertone of fear about going abroad.’’
Lois, accompanied by Bill’s grandmother and his sister Dorothy, had visited him at Plattsburgh. She and Bill had now been engaged for almost two years; it was clear that they would marry. Lois’s parents approved of Bill so completely that she was actually permitted to visit him unchaperoned. “Their understanding and their trust in Bill and me were very unusual during that conventional era,” Lois wrote. She was 25 years old; her comment clearly illustrates how young women of her day continued to answer to their parents, even when they were no longer living at home. At this time, Lois had a teaching position in Short Hills, New Jersey, and was living with the aunt who operated the school where she taught.
It was at Fort Rodman, New Bedford, that Bill’s life took a new course. He learned about liquor.
Until that time, he had never had a drink. The Griffiths did not drink, and there was a family memory of what alcohol had done to some of the Wilsons. Bill, who thought it may have been one of the reasons for his parents’ divorce, was afraid of liquor. He was critical —specifically of Norwich students who sneaked off to Montpelier to drink beer and consort with “loose women.”
New Bedford was different. Bill would later remember the charged atmosphere of the town in that wartime period: “moments sublime with intervals hilarious.” He also remembered the social circles that opened to young officers like him. “The society people in town