Whiffs of smoke rose up the tree and BAM! BAM! BAM!—three squirrels shot into my bag at about ninety miles an hour—they almost knocked me off the tree. Somehow I was able to hang on and tighten the drawstring so I could lower it down to my roommate. The squirrels inside were going crazy and it was funny watching them try to punch their way out. We ran back to the dorm with the bag of squirrels and let them go on the third floor, where they took off and ran around like mad. It took about half an hour for our startled dorm-mates to get the windows open and shoo them out.
The mischief making was fun, but McCallie was a tough school whose administrators were determined to make gentlemen out of us. Their disciplinary system was elaborate but the bottom line was you got demerits for different offenses and were only allowed up to ten per week. These were very public, and as with my lights out violation, were posted next to everybody’s name on the dormitory bulletin board. For anyone racking up more than ten, punishment was reserved for Saturdays. Students who steered clear of punishment were given four hours of freedom every Saturday afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00, and would often hitchhike downtown to hang out or go to the movies.
But if you had more than ten demerits by 1:00 on Saturday, you had to walk laps around the “bullring,” our name for the track, and the punishment was one quarter mile lap for each demerit over ten. That doesn’t sound like much but I got into trouble so frequently that it wasn’t hard for me to rack up as many as fifty marks in a week. That’s forty laps, or ten miles! The laps took forever because you couldn’t run—they made you maintain a walk’s pace. Needless to say, ten-mile walks kept me away from the movies and all the fun the other guys were having. But they were all part of my program and the price I’d have to pay for being one of McCallie’s worst cadets.
You might wonder how one kid managed to get all those demerits, but in truth, for me it really wasn’t very hard. First of all, they didn’t just give them out for big stuff like setting squirrels loose in the dorm. They also put a lot of weight on your general attitude, which they measured by things like military drills and personal inspections. They figured they could tell how much you believed in their system by how well your shoes were shined. So if you really wanted to get ahead and were with the system 100 percent you’d have the best spit shine on your shoes that you could muster. In my case, not only did I not shine my shoes, I used them to show my disdain for the system. Right before inspection I’d take the heel of one shoe and grind down the tops of the other so that they were the scruffiest-looking things you ever saw. Every day like clockwork I’d get demerits for my shoes and every weekend I’d wear them for laps around the bullring. I wanted all of McCallie to know I was a rebel; heading to the track while they left for the movies was my way of driving the point home.
I was disruptive in class, too, and had to see the Discipline Committee about every two weeks. This group consisted of the headmaster and five or six professors. I’d have to walk in there and they’d tell me to grab my ankles and then they’d whack me hard on the backside with a paddle. It wasn’t pleasant, but I could take it. I’d endured worse from my dad and I was so eager for attention that even this humiliating punishment couldn’t deter me.
My first year at McCallie I was in front of the Discipline Committee about fifteen times out of a possible eighteen. They grew so tired of seeing me there that they even overhauled the system for the following school year. Among other changes, they made a rule that if you faced the discipline committee more than three times you’d be suspended. This got my attention and I was always careful to avoid crossing that line. Getting in trouble was one thing, but getting kicked out and being sent back home was
not
an option.
While my misbehavior continued, I never broke the school’s code of military honor. We were not to lie, cheat, or steal nor tolerate that behavior in others. As difficult as I may have been regarding my personal appearance and disruptions around the campus, I was raised to be honorable and took the code seriously, even to the point of turning in classmates who fell short of its standards. We were required to attend church and Sunday school in two separate buildings and one time I saw a kid steal a magazine from a drugstore on the walk between the two buildings. It was against the code so I turned him in. They didn’t throw you out for your first honor code violation, but you had to get up and apologize before the entire student body. After that, the Student Council tried your case. The council consisted of seniors elected by the student body. They took their jobs seriously and came up with some pretty severe punishments. For the first offense you’d get a lot of demerits and might be confined to campus for three weeks or so. The second time you might get suspended from school for three or four days and have to go home. It really was a very fair system. They believed in honor and I think it was good training for all of us to have to live up to those standards.
McCallie was a tough place and my summers at home weren’t a whole lot easier. By the time I was twelve, during my summers my father had me working forty-two-and-a-half-hour weeks at his billboard company. Being the boss’s son didn’t get me special treatment—in fact, I did a lot of the toughest jobs. I spent a lot of the time with the construction crew, the bill posters, and the sign painters—the guys who had to go out in the Georgia summer sun to build the billboards and post the signs. The toughest assignments I got were cutting weeds in front of the billboards. They were planted right off the highway and the grass would grow high enough to hide rattlesnakes and all kinds of other critters. We’d have to slog through swampy water and we got bitten by mosquitoes and leeches.
I was the only kid and the only white person in the group. The entire team was black and they were great big bruisers. They could have stomped me into the ground but I followed their orders and worked hard. My dad had hired good people and as long as everyone did their job, we got along great. In later years I spent more time with the salespeople and traveled around town with a briefcase full of presentations. But in those earlier summers I got a sense for how the tough, physical side of the business got done.
The billboard work was always hard, but my toughest McCallie summer was the year my sister got sick. With big blue eyes and long brown curls, Mary Jean was a beautiful, sweet, charming girl. She made everyone smile and our family adored her. Her early schooling was all done from home and she attended local private schools in Cincinnati and Savannah. That meant most of the time I spent with her was during the summer. She loved horses and riding lessons were her favorite thing in the world. She idolized her big brother and I loved her dearly. She used to beg me to play chess with her, and I’d make her bet a quarter on every game. I almost always won, so soon she’d be broke, and I’d buy her whatever she would have spent her allowance on, mostly candy and ice cream. Her special place in our family made the news of her diagnosis particularly devastating.
Mary Jean was just twelve years old when she developed lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease. While turning a body’s defenses against itself, the disease makes you vulnerable to other potential problems. In Mary Jean’s case, we knew from the beginning that it was serious. Her condition deteriorated quickly. Shortly after the initial diagnosis, she then developed encephalitis, a swelling of her brain that put her in a coma. She didn’t emerge for two months, and by the time she did she had experienced significant brain damage. My parents were also told that their precious twelve-year-old daughter might have as few as five years to live.
Needless to say, this put a tremendous strain on everyone. For the next several years, my parents tried to provide the best care possible. My father was practical and solution-oriented and brought her to all the finest specialists he could find. My mother played more of a nurturing role, making sure that Mary Jean was as comfortable and loved as she could be throughout her ordeal. It was incredibly hard to watch such a wonderful girl go through such agony and it was a situation that would have strained the strongest of marriages. For my mother and father, it was almost too much to bear.
It was hard for me, too. Because of the severe mental damage caused by her encephalitis, it became very difficult to interact or to communicate with Mary Jean. I remember sitting on the floor with my little sister and rolling a beach ball back and forth between us. That was the most we could play with each other. There were days when I would walk up to her and she’d say the most simple, childish thing like, “Teddy, you’re my brother,” then walk away and bang her head against the wall. It was heartbreaking.
Looking back, I don’t know for sure if these events were linked, but shortly after the summer of the onset of Mary Jean’s illness, my attitude at McCallie started to change. I was about halfway through the tenth grade and my mother had bought me new dress shoes (after I’d worn through the previous pair from laps around the bullring). Staring at those shoes, an idea struck me. Ted Turner was going to shock the daylights out of everyone by showing up at inspection with a spit shine. Not just any spit shine, but the very best I could muster. I’d spent three and a half years trying to be the worst cadet on campus, and now I was going to try a completely different approach.
I had never put any real effort into shining my own shoes, but after a year at Georgia Military Academy and my time at McCallie I’d seen enough to know how it was done and worked the leather on those shoes until they were absolutely perfect. Standing at attention in drill line, I waited for the inspecting officer to make his way down to me. When he looked up from my beautiful shoes to find them attached to my body, he nearly fell over backward!
From that point on I became completely gung ho. I got good grades, I stayed out of the bullring, and I had a ball in the process. I had plenty of energy and since my dad had instilled a strong work ethic in me, instead of using mischief as my outlet, I now channeled my drive into being the best cadet I could be. I’d gone halfway through my sophomore year and was still at the level of private, but because of my turnaround they nominated me to be a corporal and I passed, managing to get back to the level of the other top classmates. By the end of my junior year, I was completely in high gear, winning the Linus Llewellyn Award for the school’s neatest cadet.
The headmasters at McCallie were really pleased with what I had done. They never gave up on me and eventually their system had won me over. I fed off their positive reinforcement and started hitting my stride as never before.
My love of reading began at an early age and most of my intellectual energies went toward books. Students with a B average or worse—my early pattern—had to do four hours of mandatory study hall. I could get through my assignments in about two hours so that left about two more to use however I wanted. Reading was always my choice and I checked out nearly every book in McCallie’s library that had anything to do with history—particularly naval history. At my reading pace of fifty pages an hour I could read 250-page books in just over two days so I finished about two books per week. Between academic years we had to read three or four books for school and my father made me read another book a week on top of that. So for the summer I figured I read a book a week and during the school year it was more like two and a half on top of my regular study load.
When it came to books, I couldn’t get enough. In addition to military literature, I read a lot of the great classics—many for school but several just for fun. From Dante’s
Inferno
to
War and Peace
and
Les Misérables
; you name it, I read it. I also got into memorizing sections of poetry, and I wrote and memorized some of my own poetry as well. I wrote one called “Indecision” for a school assignment and I can still recite it to this day:
While great Caesar lay yet dying
Brutus had the chance for the glory.
Had the future lain before him
His would be a different story.
At the feet of Hannibal
Like a ripe plum Rome once lay.
Oft he put the time of conquest
To a later, better day.
Hamlet’s course was laid before him
All he had to do was act.
Yet he lacked the inner courage
To make his deep convictions fact.
Shortly after First Manassas
Fate knocked at the door of Lee
But he failed to take advantage
Or a different country this might be.
Many times through the ages
Like as not the chance appears
But because of indecision
Man’s fond hopes are drowned in tears.
In addition to receiving an A+ grade, I’ll never forget my teacher’s comment. He wrote, simply, “
That’s
a poem!”
This kind of feedback motivated me and I looked for other ways to excel and to be noticed. I joined the debate team and quickly became its star performer. My junior season, I had a memorable experience that would be a precursor to some of my future success in business.
Every year debate teams from all over Tennessee were given the same subject and there were affirmative and negative sides that you’d have to defend. The statement that year was “Resolved: Governmental subsidies should be granted according to need to high school students who qualify for additional training.” At that time the government was contemplating whether it should have a role in providing financial aid to students, so everyone interpreted the question as asking if the government should grant aid to students according to the need
of the students
. After studying the statement long and hard and reading it back and forth, I concluded that the question could be interpreted differently; that the government should decide whether or not to grant subsidies based on the need
of the government
. Our team agreed to reinterpret the question completely, but to make sure we were on solid ground I consulted the head of the University of Chattanooga English Department, who agreed to state in writing that our interpretation of the terms was legitimate.