In kindergarten I remember my teacher, Mrs. O’Neill, and how much I liked her. Throughout grade school I also remembered the nuns very well.

For grammar school I went to saint Michael’s in Findlay. I also went to Saint Joseph’s in Tucson, Arizona and Immaculate Conception in Baltimore, Maryland.

Or high school I went two Loyola high, a Jesuit school in Baltimore, Maryland. I went to college at Santa Clara University in California.

I didn’t register for the draft but the year that I might have gone in was the same year they abolished the draft. When the numbers came out for that year I was about ten, eleven, or number twelve. Thank goodness they abolished the draft.

When I moved and went into eighth grade, we didn’t have a track team and Baltimore. That was in 1967. I played one year of soccer, and that was it. When I got into high school we didn’t have track or cross-country teams so I played football and wrestled.

In college and after college I got into a road running.

Moving from Findlay, Ohio to Tucson was easy. It was casual, it easy, and laid back. Not so on the aristocratic east coast. If you weren’t in the Blue Book, you were nobody. That was a really, really eye-opening experience.

I remember many times sitting on the kitchen counter and just bawling to my mother how horrible life was.

I remember people asking if we rode camels in the desert in Arizona. They would ask if we still had cowboy and Indian fights because they were so ignorant of anything in the west. They knew Maryland, Ocean City, Europe, and nothing about the rest of America. At least that was my perception as a young man.

Coming from Arizona and going into school in Baltimore I wore saddle shoes with white socks. Talk about a laughing stock!

I had a bit of a rough time in eighth grade and even into a high school. I mean, I had friends and I enjoyed myself that I remember telling them how I couldn’t wait to get away from Baltimore.

As an adult I like the environment I like Baltimore. But as a young kid it was difficult to fit in at the time.

When it came time to go to college all my friends went to Ivy League schools up and down the eastern seaboard. One kid I knew when to Dayton. Then there was me. I went 3000 miles away to Santa Clara University.

My brother was a Santa Clara graduate and I had visited the school. My father graduated from Notre dame. I applied to Notre dame and to Santa Clara. I checked all the schools up and down the West Coast to see if there were any that were better than Santa Clara, but it seemed that Santa Clara was just a great fit for me.

They applied to Notre dame and Santa Clara. I worked out with Notre dame’s wrestling team for a few days and was really impressed. I got accepted to both schools on the exact same day. In the wisdom of my youth I told myself that I didn’t want to go to an all-boys school. That year, Notre dame had just become coed; they had 500 girls and 7000 boys.

I also told myself that I didn’t want to live in the Midwest. I wanted to live on the West Coast. So here I am 30-something years later still living in the Midwest!

But really I couldn’t go wrong with either school. They’re both outstanding institutions.