Origins

When I was last in Florida, my brother gave me a big plastic baggie full of childhood documents, all related to me, that came from my mom's house. It was mostly a lot of school stuff and greeting cards that Mom had saved, and I didn't go through it very carefully. I brought it back to London and stuck it in a closet.

Over the long weekend I finally took it out and paged through everything. Here's some of what I found.

First, my footprint, taken at the hospital right after I was born. Much smaller than my size 11 feet now (size 10 in the UK)!

Here's the accompanying card laying out the details of my birth. As you can see, I wasn't a very big baby. I was about a month premature.

Mom saved several cards from relatives wishing us well after the birth. This one is from "Grandma Ratliff," who was my great-grandmother on my dad's mom's side. "I think of you all so often," she wrote. "Sure would like to see the baby. I love you all."

Poignant, because I'm not sure she ever saw me. She lived in Arkansas or Missouri and we lived in Florida. I certainly never saw her when I was old enough to remember. Also, curiously, she typed her message, which means she must have rolled that card through a typewriter.

According to the price on the back, it cost a dime.

My mom saved kindergarten programs and nearly all my report cards, from first grade into college. (She worked at the university so she had access to my transcripts!) Tucked into my first grade report card was this photo from 1972 or '73, which I don't remember ever seeing before. Am I carrying Spanish moss or a feather boa? Who's that girl?

In the summers I went to Camp Indian Head, not far from our house. I was a day camper and went home every afternoon. It was basically a way to keep me busy while I wasn't in school. My parents wanted me to learn to swim, and the camp had a swimming program with certified counselors. Here I am in a photo in the camp catalogue with the other boys in my age group -- all the kids were grouped by age and gender into "tribes," and we youngest boys were known as Navajos. (No one had any awareness of cultural appropriation in those days.) I don't remember any of my fellow Navajos, nor the counselors.

Is that one kid in the front row wearing a Budweiser shirt? Always a good look for a six-year-old!

A lovey-dovey note to my mom, written on "stationary" that I think I made using a rubber stamp. What struck me about this is how I signed my name. I've written before about struggling with the name "Stephen" because people always mispronounced it as "Steffen." I eventually switched to Steve, and these papers show I did that much earlier than I thought. There's a page from a school test in 1973, when I turned seven, that refers to me as Steve. But I signed this note "Steven," which was never my name. Weird! My guess is I initially signed Steve, but knowing my mom called me Stephen, I stuck an N on the end. Or maybe I tried Steven for a while. Who knows.

This is what our report cards looked like in elementary school. This one's from the sixth grade, in 1978. As you can see, I was a pretty average student. What strikes me most is that D for "expresses ideas in writing" in the second quarter. How the heck did that happen? I also got a C- and a D+ on two book reports. I was always good in English and language-related subjects like spelling and vocabulary, and I read all the time, so those grades seem bizarre. My guess is I procrastinated on the reports and then slapped them together at the last minute. Typical.

(I also never liked this particular teacher, which may have diminished my enthusiasm.)

My mom saved every standardized test score I ever received, even from routine state aptitude tests and the ASVAB, meant to show my strengths in case I wanted to join the military. (I don't even remember taking it.) Above are my SAT scores from October 1983. As you can see, I did pretty well in verbal but only middling in math. An 1190 is respectable, but no Ivy League for me! (Never a consideration given my grades.)

The highest math class I took in high school was Algebra II, so there may have been things on the SAT I'd never even studied.

Apparently I was already thinking about majoring in journalism and/or photography. But what's that career interest in anthropology? I don't think I knew much about anthropology, beyond what I read in Thor Heyerdahl's book "Kon-Tiki" and maybe National Geographic. Needless to say, that didn't work out, nor did my stated educational objective of a Master's degree.

Finally, I found a packet of photo proofs taken for my senior portrait. Here's one of them. The picture itself isn't bad but those superimposed profiles were so cheesy. We went with a different picture.

The senior photos were taken at school by a contracted photographer, just like photos for every other grade level. We did not hire private photographers and get portraits taken out in the wild, like some kids today who go to the beach or stand out in sunny fields or whatever. We had two photo styles -- the "formal" portrait, in jacket and tie, and the "casual" portrait, which for most boys meant a dark jacket and white turtleneck supplied by the photographer. (Like any of us would wear a white turtleneck, in Florida!) I convinced him to let me do the casual shot wearing my favorite shirt, a purple Izod, rather than the turtleneck/jacket combo. He was reluctant, but he said, "If you'll buy it, I'll take it."

We did not buy it.