Published: June 09, 2009 11:44 pm      

John Cannon: Mom gives son a record of childhood: 6/10/09

My mother is determined to rid herself of many of her unnecessary possessions and, in the process, assigning to File 13 a lifetime of memories.

I support this decision. What my mother, age 91, throws away now is that much less my sisters and I will have to discard after Mom is no longer with us.

To say that Mom is a pack rat would be an understatement. This woman has kept things I am fairly certain, 99.9 percent of all people would have thrown away years ago.

My oldest sister recently spent a weekend at Mom’s helping her go through her things and get ready for a giant sale Mom is planning. (She also attended her grandson’s high school graduation while there.)

On the Tuesday after that weekend, I received a large package from my sister. It was packed full of little bits of information that chronicle much of my childhood.

Most of it was worthless junk. I mean who really cares what my grades were in the third grade? Yet, I now possess every single report card from the first through the eighth grades.

There were two items in this stack of material from more than 40 years ago that proved to be fairly accurate predictors of my future.

One was my scores in the Air Force Aptitude Test taken when I was a senior in high school in the fall of 1965. I never really intended to join the Air Force, but I took the test as something to fall back on if I flunked out of college and was drafted. Of the four branches of service, I found the Air Force most appealing.

I don’t remember much about the Air Force’s test except that it was a lot more difficult than I expected it to be. I remember in one section, there were sheets of paper with lines drawn on them. On the next page, you had to choose what the paper would look like if folded along the lines.

To some, this may have been a rather simple exercise, but to me it was mission impossible. I had never been able to construct a paper airplane that could fly. Folding paper was definitely not one of my strengths.

In the letter telling me of my test results, I received scores for “administrative,” “general,” “mechanical” and “electronics.”

“What do you think I did the best in?” I asked my wife.

“That’s easy,” she said. “It would be administrative. Your worst would have been mechanical. Between general and electronics, I’m not sure which you would be better at, probably general.”

She was right. My highest score by far was in “administrative,” and I was really weak in “mechanical.” While I did do a little better in “general” than in “electronics,” my scores in those two areas were quite close.

The Air Force said I was destined to be a clerk. That was not exactly my dream job but it was better than shooting at people.

My mother had also saved an article from the May 8, 1966, Columbus Dispatch in which I was one of 39 recipients of the “Outstanding High School Newspapering Award.” For that, I received a certificate, which still hangs on the wall of my office, a free meal and a tour of the Dispatch.

The award definitely had an impact on my life. More than anything else, it convinced me to study journalism in college. It was nice to be told I was good at something besides milking cows and planting straight rows of corn.

The paragraph in the article about me said, in part, “John’s strong point is digging interesting news stories. He also lends a hand with layout and production on the Tracer” (my school’s newspaper).

Forty-three years later, you can say much the same thing about me. For some reason, The Dispatch — or maybe it was my high school journalism — saw potential in me that I didn’t even know I had.

JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2649.