If our good friend Yogi Berra were still around, he might say something like,
“Success in life is ninety percent just getting up and the other half is pretending you know what you are doing until you DO know what you are doing.”
Here’s the situation: The other day, I was standing up there on this itty-bitty stage when I came to my senses, emerging from the same old dream state that had grown so familiar. When I could organize my thoughts better, I couldn’t help but mutter to myself, “By George, it seems like I fooled them again! Those people out there actually think I can pick this banjo and that I can carry a tune, that I can harmonize with this beautiful lady on my right.” And since I believed myself incapable of doing ANY of those things well enough to be rated acceptable, I was again amazed at how gullible some people were! Over the years, this working knowledge has become recognizable to me as a way I have pursued most of my life – by challenging myself to do something, then doing it, then accepting that I had done it…. and finally not being entirely sure that I had accomplished the thing I had set out to do! I’ll give a few examples.
As a youngster growing up in the rural South, my family lived “out from” just about every small town in Georgia. I was in junior high before we moved to anything resembling a city, that being Savannah. Anyhow, on those long school bus rides on mostly dirt roads, I was almost always the new kid, not a member of the settled group. I was picked on a bit, but I didn’t mind that too much because at least it was attention. (Later, I did get a lucky right onto the nose of Colon R, and the gush of blood ended his career as a bully).
But what I found out early-on was that if I pretended to know more about the world than others did, they (who must have been a little bit simple) would grow to accept you for what you pretended to be! It took a while but it worked. At lunch or recess, as I pretended to know what the teacher had covered that day, people would seek me out for help. On the bus, going home or to school next day, the ill prepared or completely helpless would seek me out to share a bit of homework. After a while, pretending to be smart appeared to make me smart, and I gained a kind of status among my backwoods peers. Of course I had to repeat this act every time we moved (and that was about 35 times in my first fifteen years of life). Still, for those few high school years, I fooled both students and teachers who somehow thought I was a smart kid!
All this really began to work when my teachers and coaches got in on the act. For some reason they started awarding me good grades and written compliments on my report card! When I joined the basketball team, I right away fooled the coach into planting me on the varsity’s starting five, and there I stayed! But Junior Lee Donne Olvey, brilliant guy (Five years later I watched Cadet Lee Donne Olvey, with the President, as he was getting all the awards as the TOP U.S. Military Academy graduate) kind of gave me the eye once in a while after I dislodged him from the first team. To this day, I have a feeling that HE knew I was faking it, although I was five inches taller and almost as mean as he was on defense.
Being a typical country bumpkin, I recognized the trait in others I was too shy to look directly at a girl – any girl, so when they began to stop by my desk and notice that I didn’t chew my nails or that my khakis were always ironed, I knew that I had fooled them about something, but I couldn’t figure out what that something was. I finally reasoned that it was grades again. I got through school like that.
And, that hayride in the Fall of my senior year forced me to deal with the conflict that had dogged me for years –about girls – How to handle that powerful need to get close to them while at the same time, assuming that air of “Believe me – I’m not shy, I’m smart!” They don’t necessarily go together! My best friend Franklin Phillips had his mother’s truck and had piled it high with his brother’s hay, and he was that perfect-for-hayrides driver, good at idling along. When Betty Jean accidentally plopped down like she had been jostled by bad driving or rough dirt roads, I played smart, wrinkled my brow, turned slowly in her direction and accepted that she was accidentally my seat mate. I fooled her for the rest of the ride and most school days afterwards, when she accidentally found the seat next to mine. That girl was easily fooled!
The whole thing got really serious in the Army. Early in 1950, after Basic Training, some fool or other gave me a Pullman ticket and sent me off to a “Leadership School” at Fort Bliss, Texas. About two months later, another fool sent me by troopship and an LST to Inchon then to North Korea and a few etceteras followed. I fooled somebody into making me a Corporal and putting me in charge of a Tank, something I had seen in World War II newsreels. I was absolutely certain I would screw that one up, but nobody seemed to be watching me or counting my mistakes.
Just when I felt a tiny bit comfortable “commanding” that tank crew, who all pretended I was their leader, a bunch of sissy-type lieutenants took me aside and told me I was to be sent to Tokyo right away to be an “Honor Guard” for General Mathew B. Ridgeway. I just closed my eyes and went along. I knew what would happen, and it didn’t take long to fool them into making me a Sergeant.
In early 1952, in my shiny Honor Guard Uniform, which made me look at least seventeen, I opened the front Military Headquarters building door for a young girl, an intern for some American business in Tokyo – and, wouldn’t you know it, she ignored me completely. That was because I had temporarily turned off my attitude and was merely mortal. As soon as I got my Mojo back, that girl noticed me and kept getting in my way as I paraded around Tokyo getting in her way. I fooled her into a legal trip to the American Consulate, the local Tokyo Prefecture and the Army Chaplain for the right papers and a few I do’s. I kept on fooling her through three children and beyond! So far it has been about sixty-three years and change. When my commander at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, put me in for a direct commission, I pretended to go along with him, and when a committee of tall and steely-eyed senior military officers had me in front of them, I knew what to do. I pretended that If they sent me out of that room, I could immediately lead a Battery of artillerymen into combat, and so those Colonels said OK. A few years later, the US Army, who should know better by now, sent me to Vietnam and made me a Battalion Commander, it was all academic, I played my part and so they started handing out Bronze Stars and Flying Wings and Meritorious medals and other stuff.
When they sent me home, it was only as far as Honolulu. When a Colonel at the office of the Commander in Chief, Pacific, told me I would be working directly for Admiral John S. McCain, I mumbled something that he took to be, “You bet I can do it!” The Admiral and I got along just great, and later I came to find out that he had been pretending to know what he was doing for more than thirty years! Every time we passed each other in the hall, we would wink and salute and laugh like hell.
When the Army was finally ready to retire me at Fort Ord, the Post Commander asked me if I wanted a Retirement Parade. I said, “My God, no! I don’t want the Garrison, on their day off, to get up at six for an inspection at eight and a march to the parade field at ten and a wait in the sun until eleven O’clock… with every man standing there and cussing me and the Army with every breath.” I didn’t tell the Colonel that I was not about to tempt fate for one more minute!
So now, I’m standing up here again on this dilapidated stage, faking it a bit and trying to look less like Grandpa Jones and more like a skinny Earl Scruggs! If I slink back a couple of steps and out of the light, the audience may not notice that my fingers are not actually touching the strings. The band knows, but they’re not talking.
