Section 3. Civics Class and the Zuparko boys
My brother Ned (class of 1969) and his friend Allen Rudolph (and later a faculty member) had a Civics class together under either Gerald McCloskey or Bruce Darling, studying the ways and means of government. A couple of years ago they related this story to me.
The students in the class were divided into a majority and minority party, and grades for the class were to be partly based on how much legislation each party could pass. Allen and Ned were leaders of the minority party. Joe Bellinger was the leader of the majority party, and absolutely wouldn’t support any of the minority party’s attempts to pass laws, so Allen and Ned had to figure out a way to get SOMETHING done, or else risk getting lousy grades.
Luckily, Allen and Ned knew someone who worked as an assistant in the front office. They got some hall passes (i.e. extraction notices) and filled them out with the names of a few of the leaders in the majority party, and had their friend deliver them to the class. The teacher believed the passes to be genuine and handed them out, and those few students all left the classroom to go to various locations on campus. In the ten minutes or so they were gone, Allen and Ned led their party, which now had a razor thin majority, in passing all the legislation on their agenda, and ended that session of Congress, and thus saving their grades.
Allen says that Bellinger was furious when he returned, and wouldn’t speak to him for days.
My experiences in Civics (which I took under McCloskey during summer school in 1970) were not as clever, yet still memorable. I did in fact learn a fair amount in that class … although not that much about Civics. For example, Doug Costanza (Fig. 3.2.1) (referred to by McCloskey as the “Los Gatos Mafia” when he signed my yearbook) one day brought into class a little (2×3”) pink card, from which we learned the letters of American sign language, during the slower moments of class.
However, there was one lesson that Mr. McCloskey taught that I took to heart, and remember to this day: why one shouldn’t trust second or third hand testimony. I repeat the methods here: you might wish to try it out for yourselves sometime.
Mr. McCloskey asked for five or six volunteers, and sent all but one of them out of the room. Then in front of the rest of the class, he told a short story (that, I think, involved a car accident, with a variety of details) to the one volunteer who had remained in the room (call this person volunteer #1). Immediately afterwards, volunteer #2 was brought back into the room, and volunteer #1 retold the story (in front of the class) as best as s/he could. Then volunteer #3 was brought in, and #2 retold the story. And then #3 told #4, and so on. I was the last volunteer brought back into class, and after I heard the story, I retold it to the entire class. And between McCloskey’s original telling and my final version, the story (although it may have followed the same basic theme) saw a change in a wide variety of details, as witnessed by the rest of the class who never left the room and heard each reiteration. This was a signal lesson to me about the reliability (or lack thereof) of human testimony, even without the influence of forgetting things over time.
It was also during this class that I first came up with my first plan to take over the world. Our class was in the L-1 classroom of the Library Building, and as I recall, 1) someone from the class had had a water pistol confiscated, and 2) a couple of janitors (or groundskeepers) occasionally drove a pickup truck (with a broom in the truck bed) into the central quad, right below the library’s front balcony. So Costanza and I came up with a plan that involved roping in several of our classmates: Todd Benson, Don Smoot, Bob Crema, Bill Chisholm, and Nick Gassman (N.B. none of them had any idea of this – we merely borrowed their names when mapping everything out).
Following in the best traditions of fiendish plots, we used codenames – for example, Doug was “Coward”, I was “Brains”, Bill Chisholm was “Welder”, Bob Crema was “About to get thrown off the truck” and the janitors were “Boy, are they going to be surprised”. The codenames even extended to the inanimate objects: the water pistol’s was “gun”, and the metal sculpture of the wildcat in the center of the quad was “Puma” (which was to be melted down into ingots and sold to help fund our plot).
But the real joy of the plan (see Fig. 3.3.2) was its unnecessary complications, detailed in five phases: I. The placing of agents, II. The seizing of the Wheeled Transport Vehicle, III. The seizing of the gun, IV. The loading of the ingots, and V. The escape. Some of the elements that were incorporated included cutting up the broom handle to mimic a gun while passing ourselves off as Cuban hijackers in order to distract the janitors, driving up and down the ramp and steps to access the area underneath the Library balcony, burying the cut-up broom handle (we didn’t want any incriminating evidence left around), throwing one of our own off the truck (just because), driving the truck near to Forbes Mill, returning up the ramp to the Library, driving through a series of rooms until we reached the spot where the water pistol was stored, and while Nick created a diversion by throwing lit firecrackers off the roof of the old English wing, loading up the ingots into the truck’s bed. Finally, we’d exit the quad at the northeast corner, and then make our way off to Chicago, where “we will put into operation the second step of the overall plan of Dominion of all the World by ourselves” (remember, we were only 17 at the time).1
1 When proofreading this section, I realized how naked it seemed without any end notes, so I included this one.