Chapter 13

Bud's first memories were of his father's old general store on Rockville Pike. He could recall the smell of the place and still knew the layout of the shelves and remembered the metallic sound of the hand-cranked cash register and the smack of the screened door.

He was unsure whether or not he really remembered being in a playpen behind the counter, but he had heard the story of his early ability to escape from his wood-slat cage so often, that he thought he might. He even remembered the nameless cat that seemed to sleep all day on the windowsill.

Even before he went to school, like his sister Janie and his brother Philip, he worked in the store on a regular basis, learned to make change and to be polite and helpful. His Aunt Jenny's boys, Paul and Mike, had always seemed like grown-ups to him since they were finishing high school when he was just entering kindergarten.

At the store, Bud was a hard worker but never mastered the ability to total up a customer's order once he had filled it, and he had some trouble writing numbers properly on the brown paper bags, often making them more or less backwards.

Bud was seven when the streetcars stopped running on the line that lay behind his home so he received most of his early schooling in Kensington and rode a school bus back and forth from Garrett Park. Except in the worst weather, when his mother would keep him home and find him things to read in the Saturday Evening Post or chores to do, he walked the two miles cross country to the bus stop starting when he was eight.

After a bit of soul searching and budget balancing, Bud's parents enrolled him in the seventh grade at the Georgetown Preparatory School, whose golf course abutted the property of the family's old homestead, hoping that the discipline of the Jesuit school might help curb some of his youthful shenanigans as well as improve his reading. Since Bud delivered papers there, he already knew some of the teachers and students.

Bud struggled through two years of the lower school, but his reading problems and his difficulties with algebra led to him being withdrawn early in the eight grade before he was asked to leave. Despite his failure, he had liked the school and the teachers and had quickly become a standout on the athletic fields.

Bud then enrolled at the public junior-senior Rockville High School, but after a fire that nearly destroyed the old school building as well as the offices of the County school system, he and the other 7th and 8th graders were moved to Kensington Junior High School. Four years later, in the spring of 1945 with the war against the Japanese still in progress, Bud graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, but he did not get to walk across the stage in the Leland auditorium and receive his diploma from Dr. Broome much to his shame and his parents' embarrassment. Then he got married.