Becoming a Counselor. Samuel T. Gladding
rifle chamber and close it. Closing was tough. If you did not remove your thumb from the chamber quickly enough, the bolt would spring forward rapidly with something like 40,000 pounds of pressure per square inch and you would get an “M1 thumb.”
I am writing these words to reveal that I know what an M1 thumb feels like. My first attempt at removing my thumb from what I now call “the chamber jaws” of the rifle was unsuccessful. The result was that my thumb quickly filled up with blood and throbbed like the beat of a rogue rock band. Today this type of accident would send someone to the emergency room, but not then. My medical attention came from Sergeant Hacker, who was always smiling, had a beard like Richard Nixon, and had seen many M1 thumbs. After my company commander brought me into the ROTC office from the field behind the football stadium where we had drill, Sergeant Hacker immediately took over.
The remedy was to open the thumb and get the blood out. Proper equipment was required to do this, so the good sergeant took me to the chemistry lab, which was not in use that period. Next he lit a Bunsen burner and found a thin piece of copper wire. He heated the wire and instructed me to give him my thumb. I did, and as I looked on, he pushed the tip of the hot wire through my thumbnail. Blood came spurting out as if he had struck the mother lode of a newly drilled well. Somehow the blood did not get on the sergeant or me, but it rained down on several glass beakers. Relief came as the blood flowed forth. After the rush of the gush, it was simply a matter of covering the hole in my thumbnail by wrapping the thumb with adhesive tape. Next the surgical sergeant and I cleaned up the mess we had made and waited for the bell to ring, and I went to my next class.
It took a few weeks for the hole in my thumbnail to heal. Looking back, I am amazed at what Sergeant Hacker did, that my parents never questioned what went on, that school personnel never got involved, and that I did not miss my next class. After the “operation,” I learned to quickly remove my thumb when closing the chamber of my rifle. Fortunately, I never developed an excessive fear of Bunsen burners, cooper wire, or the unfamiliar!
Chapter 26 Cool Breeze: A Lesson in the Tragedy of Racism
In high school I was a football manager. That basically meant taking care of the team’s equipment, taping ankles before games, and cleaning up after the players went home. On Saturday mornings during the season, it meant straightening up the locker room as well as doing some of the team laundry. While we waited for the dryers to finish, my fellow managers and I would play games of touch football out on the field that had been the center of attention the night before. Sometimes we played among ourselves, all White boys from the Atlanta suburb of Decatur. At other times African American kids would join us, and prior to the integration of our high school we would have a spirited interracial game.
My favorite player on either side of the ball was a 15-year-old African American kid about my age known as “Cool Breeze.” He earned the name because of his speed. He was faster than anyone else. Whether going up the middle or around the end, we were seldom able to catch him, let alone stop him. Instead, he would dart past, and afterward we would feel the cool breeze of the air he had stirred up. In a word, he was awesome!
As great as Cool Breeze was on the field, his life and success were later not as terrific. The reason why is that he did not have choices educationally, socially, or vocationally. He was relegated to a lifestyle that restricted his movement and ambition because of segregation. What could have been never was. The mindset of the day kept people down and prevented possibilities. Whenever I think of the time, it makes me sad and mad. Life is too valuable to waste, and individuals are too important to treat like chattel. If there is one thing counseling can do and one reason I am a counselor, it is to open up possibilities for those who, because of background or circumstances, have not had opportunities. Although openings do not guarantee success, without options people almost always fail.
Chapter 27 Mount Up-Some-More and Beyond: The Appalachian Trail
At the end of two summers in my late teens, I hiked the Appalachian Trail with three of my good friends. Our hikes were in Georgia and North Carolina. We took enough food for a week and enjoyed the trail and one another’s company. The type of backpacks available now were not sold then. We had to jerry-rig knapsacks to meet our needs. I remember my mother giving me sponges to put underneath the straps of my knapsack so they would not dig into my shoulders.
Our group, both times, was harmonious. We each took a turn leading. The rotation was smooth. We spent the nights in lean-tos built by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in the 1930s. Hiking the trail was not nearly as popular in the 1960s as it is today. Every night we built a fire and cooked over it. The meals were edible but forgettable. We brought a variety of foods, including dried fruit and Gouda cheese for snacks. Nothing we brought needed refrigeration.
I kept a diary on these trips and invented “Mount Up-Some-More” for a mountain that had another name but seemed to go up in a steep incline forever. Highlights of the trips included field mice making a nest of toilet paper in my pants, playing football using sand in a baggie for a ball, and enjoying nature and one another’s company. When we finished the last hike, we had only a week or two before college. My peers on the trail taught me a lot about groups, traveling on foot, and life. From the wild I became more civilized.
Chapter 28 How the Past Came Into the Present
was named for my maternal grandfather, Samuel Huntington Temple-man, I who was among other things a prominent Baptist minister in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the 1930s. I grew up thinking I wanted to be a minister like him. He was apparently a very good man. Once when he was pastor of a church in South Carolina he prevented the lynching of an African American man.
My maternal grandfather, who was born 20 years after the end of the Civil War, was a Virginian. He graduated from the University of Richmond, but instead of staying in the South where he would have been safe and welcomed, he finished his theological education at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School and Columbia University. Going north was a bold move because feelings between the North and South were still tense when he went. However, he thought he would be a better person and a more effective minister if he left his region for a while and got to understand other people and ways of life.
After I graduated from Wake Forest University, I too went north and attended Yale Divinity School. I felt that if my grandfather could do it in a time of tension, I could do it in a time of relative calm. I did not end up becoming a minister or saving anyone’s life in a dramatic way. However, getting outside my region helped me to become a more understanding person and relate to other people better. I owe a debt to my grandfather for giving me the courage to go beyond the safety of the world in which I grew up and get out of my comfort zone.
Chapter 29 Typing: A Morning Exercise
was not able to get a job between graduating from high school I and going to college. Although I would usually play tennis in the afternoon and go out with friends at night, my mornings were free, and after a few days they were boring. Thus, I looked for something to do. I found the something in a typewriter my parents had bought me. I could not type. In the early 1960s, keyboarding was for girls so they could get a job as a secretary, if needed.
I found a book on typing around our house that had belonged to my mother when she was an adolescent. One morning I put my index fingers on the “G” and the “H” in the second row of letters and expanded from there as I followed the instructions on how to type. It became a postbreakfast ritual. By the end of the summer, I could type three pages an hour if I kept my eyes on the keys. It was not much, but it was further than I had been. Months later it saved me the expense of having someone type my college papers. Unemployment and discipline paid rich dividends.
Points to Ponder
1 What were your strategies for doing