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In the end, thanks to Otis’s inspiration, all the effort the boys put into building up their bodies did not go unrewarded. George and most of his garage set did indeed succeed in making the varsity team when they arrived as sophomores at Weymouth High School in 1958 (in Weymouth the junior high school went through the ninth grade). The fact that George’s own performance on the football field never quite reached the total triumph he’d so achingly longed for had less to do with any lack of ability or preparation on his part than with an increasing tendency to behave, particularly where adults were concerned, in a manner that was becoming more noticeably and perversely defiant.
Head coach Jack Fisher had developed something of an attitude himself, having arrived at the school in the long and heavy shadow of his predecessor. He had been given to feel from the start that serious questions existed as to whether he could measure up to the great Arlinson. “Jack Fisher was very aware that he followed God,” says Buzzy Knight, the principal. “He was never allowed to forget it; they never let him off the hook.” Arlinson had rarely raised his voice, exercising control over the players by gentle manipulation, by using the force of his brilliant record to make them stretch themselves to their fullest. Fisher, on the other hand, was excitable and temperamental, and worst of all where George was concerned, a strict disciplinarian, who shouted at his players and demanded they abide by his rules or face warming the bench. And most of all, in no small part to prove that he stood equal to his predecessor, Fisher wanted desperately to win.
A wiry man with a shock of white hair and aquiline features, Fisher had been a notable star himself, as quarterback at Fordham University behind the original “Seven Blocks of Granite,” which constituted one of the most impregnable lines in college-football history. The blocks won their name from the sportswriters during the 1930 season after executing three successive shutouts over Boston College, Holy Cross, and New York University, then football powerhouses, by scores 3–0, 6–0, and 7–0, respectively. Coach of the famous squad was Frank Cavanaugh, known as “the Iron Major” for the shrapnel wounds he carried in his head from World War I, and whose exploits—he went nearly blind from his wounds in his final coaching days and died in 1933—became the subject of a 1943 movie starring Pat O’Brien.
Comporting himself at Weymouth in the take-no-guff style of the major, Fisher succeeded in ruffling feathers his first season by kicking six seniors off the squad for believing, as he saw it, that having played under Arlinson earned them the right to dog it during drills. Whether its purpose was to enforce discipline or just expunge the team of Arlinson worship, the move didn’t go down too well in Weymouth, considering that football was the town’s major social event. Fathers not only came down at nights to hang around watching their sons practice under the lights but would also follow the players back to school and mingle with them in the locker room. “I got a lot of phone calls and letters over that one,” says Fisher, who had to finish out the season with a team composed mostly of sophomores. “I remember we did knock off Brockton that year, though.”
By the time George arrived at Weymouth High, Fisher had a state championship under his belt, thanks in no small part to Otis Godfrey, and felt assured that his rules were producing results. On Friday nights, for instance, he wanted the players to be in bed by 10:00 P.M., instead of staying up late and raising hell, as they had under Arlinson. He told them he didn’t want to drive around town and see them hanging out. “I’d tell them, ‘Go to a movie or a friend’s house, but whatever you do, I want you to get home early and I want you to stay off the street corners.’” Practice sessions were tightly organized drills, and he demonstrated little shyness about singling out a player over some transgression and yelling at him in front of the squad. “I coached hard, but I coached fair,” he says. “I used to say to them, ‘The time for you to start worrying about whether you’re playing is not when I’m yelling at you but when I stop yelling at you, because then I don’t think you’re worth it.’”
Needless to say, George didn’t respond positively to getting yelled at or to Fisher’s rules in general. One of these rules required sophomores on the varsity squad to play Saturday mornings on the junior varsity as well as show up in the afternoon for the main event. George saw little profit in doing the JV nonsense, since the games drew a tiny crowd and produced little in the way of glory. He thought himself especially abused after the second varsity game against Medford, when he was put in as a substitute halfback late in the contest and smashed across the goal line for a score, his only carry of the afternoon. The following Saturday he decided not to turn out for the JV game. Coach Fisher responded by benching him not only for that day’s game but for the rest of the season and a good part of his junior year as well.
To compensate partially for his football failure, George won a place on the varsity track team as the discus thrower, the same event in which Otis Godfrey had set the school’s record. Track didn’t command anywhere near the attention everyone paid to football, but George did eventually beat Otis’s toss by seven feet. By his senior year, George had also inched his way back into Fisher’s good graces, enough to become the team’s starting right halfback. But even that experience turned sour. He got to carry the ball less than half as often as the other backs, despite averaging a fairly impressive 5.7 yards a carry, the best on the team. And he ended up missing the big Thanksgiving game because of a knee injury during a scrimmage, when he got decked by his pal John Hollander—which was probably just as well, since Weymouth got killed by Brockton that year, 54–0.
Fisher is now eighty-eight years old, but his memory of that team remains sharp, unfortunately so, in his view, because it produced the worst Weymouth record since World War II. “That’s a class I’d kind of like to forget,” he says. Of George in particular, he recalls a boy with a lot of natural talent and potential who, for reasons that remain a mystery to him, never fulfilled his early promise. “George, well, yes, in junior high he was a standout. He had all the physical tools, more so than most young boys. But something was going on with him, I couldn’t understand. His attitude, something, where he just wasn’t with everybody else.”
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During George’s high school years the headlines were beginning to reflect the worrisome kinds of events that would dominate the coming decade of the 1960s. The Russians were leap-frogging America in outer space with the launch of the Sputnik satellites. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to send in federal troops to protect black students during desegregation of the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Fidel Castro was coming down from the mountains to take over Cuba. That was also when Charlie van Doren of Columbia University was convicted on perjury charges for denying that agents of the NBC-TV quiz show “Twenty-one” had supplied him the answers. Elvis had arrived, of course, but rock and roll still had to share slots on the jukebox—five plays for a quarter—with the likes of “Tom Dooley,” “Volare,” and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” The grown-ups, meanwhile, were trying to figure out the cha-cha.
In Weymouth, the football guys all had their hair cut down at Dick’s Barber Shop on Washington Street, known as “Dirty Dick’s” for the Playboy magazines and the more raunchy stuff perusable on the premises. Most ordered up crew cuts, which needed constant laminations from the old wiffle stick so the hair stood up right. George opted for the cooler, more sophisticated Peter Gunn style, after the suave TV detective—the hair a little longer and lying flatter than a crew. The girls wore long pleated skirts, and round-collared shirts under their sweaters, and if they were lucky enough to be going with someone on the varsity, their boyfriends’ maroon and gold letter jackets with his name embroidered on the right sleeve. Weymouth being basically a one-class town, social divisions among teenagers were fairly narrow and ran pretty much along the lines of what kind of car your father could afford. Kids in the vocational high school, which was located in the rear of the regular school, were looked down upon slightly, but if vocational-prog
ram guys like Barry Damon (carpentry) or Brian Dunbar (sheet-metal working), played football—Barry at center, Brian in the backfield—they could hang out with the other football guys and partake of all the attendant privileges.
Friday nights were party nights. One of the girls invariably offered up her house for a gathering. Armed with beer bought by one of the guys whose beard was thicker than most, the boys drove over into Johnny’s Lane near the sandpit and drank until half of them threw up, which in most cases required four or five beers apiece. George could usually hold the most, and Barry Damon, whose snow-white hair earned him the nickname the Great White Rabbit, often barfed first, not necessarily missing his sneakers and the shoes of some of the other guys. George had a firm policy of never taking his father’s car out on Friday nights.
Saturday night was date night; guys would grab a car, a girl, and head to the Weymouth Drive-in for Psycho, or Tammy and the Bachelor, or Troy Donahue in A Summer Place. After that it was a race to Weymouth Great Hill, a 153-foot-high glacial drumlin with room at the top for fifteen to twenty cars that provides a spectacular view over Wessagussett Bay to the lighted spires of Boston. The movie would end at about eleven, and the girls had to be home by midnight, which meant the guys inside the cars with the windows steaming up fast had less than one hour to devise a strategy that would culminate in the laying of a hand on top of a female breast. “Let me tell you, you weren’t going too far in those days,” says George. His regular date, Gerry Lee, rated high up in the “nice girl” category, which compelled George to take one or two other girls out during the course of a weekend to explore a wider set of possibilities. “Every girl had her standard code. Some of them, if you tried to do anything, they’d start to cry. I liked to try to take out older girls; they were a little more, you know, liberal.” The sexual revolution, after all, was a good five years off, and while few teenagers in Weymouth at that time gave any thought to sexually transmitted diseases, there was certainly plenty of anxiety about other exigencies. In one notorious incident, a boy at school had gotten his girlfriend pregnant his senior year, and the two had to quit school and get married, and he joined the navy; their future, for all its former promise, was now regarded by their friends as a closed book.
While George failed to become the school’s chief football star, he more than made up for that by his lordship over the social life. “George always managed to have the action rotating around himself; he was the hub, the manipulator of the social scene,” says Jack McSheffrey, who grew up on the Circle. “He was the one you called to find out who was going to drink beer at the sand pit or who was going into Quincy or to the beach. If you weren’t with him, you had the feeling of being left out.” After George’s mother changed her sales job from Ann Taylor’s in Braintree to Remick’s Department Store in Quincy, more or less the Neiman Marcus of the South Shore, George became one of the few kids to have his own charge card and a wardrobe that stayed center-front in the style of the day—herringbone jacket, khaki pants, button-down shirt, crewneck sweater, penny loafers, Jack Purcell tennis sneakers with the blue stripe across the toe. “I would kind of emulate the way George dressed,” recalls Barry Damon. “He always bought whatever was happening, Harris-tweed coats, saddle shoes; everything always had to come from Remick’s. He’d look at what I was wearing and say, ‘What are you buying that shit for?’”
On the rare Saturday night when they had no dates, George and Barry would lead a foray up to Great Hill and try to disrupt whatever activities were going on by treating the other guys and their girlfriends to moonshots under the stars. In chemistry class his junior year, George not only tortured the nerdy kid with the thick glasses next to him, violating his experiment with alien chemicals while the boy had gone to the bathroom, but also went after the teacher himself, a little old man with a cheap set of false teeth, whose jacket George would burn with acid and whose examinations he’d get a girlfriend in the mimeograph office to run off for him and his friends. To be sure, the teacher sensed that something was amiss when the class screw-ups all scored A’s on the test, so he arbitrarily issued them D’s in the course.
For date purposes, George had access to his father’s 1956 Mercury Phaeton. White on top with aqua-blue on the sides, it was one of the sharper cars in the group, and George washed it so often the paint almost came off. He also had sophisticated taste where music was concerned, which made him stand out in sharp relief from his contemporaries. He liked rock and roll okay, but his real penchant ran to Cole Porter, a taste he acquired from his mother. He also raved to his friends about Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, and Ella Fitzgerald, about Tommy Dorsey and other bands of the 1940s, along with Ahmad Jamal and the other progressive jazz artists. He went in to Boston to listen to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the late 1950s, before they’d even started producing records. “George was years ahead of everyone else in Weymouth,” recalls one of his girlfriends. “I’ll never forget it, we were juniors in high school, and he took me in to see Erroll Garner at Storyville in Boston—George loved him; he played his records all the time—and here we are having cocktails, seventeen years old, doing the things that people did when they were twenty-three or twenty-four.”
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published in 1957, to little fanfare in Weymouth, but George read it as soon as he heard about it, along with The Dharma Bums. He talked endlessly to his best friend, Malcolm MacGregor, about Dean Moriarty and the adventures he and his bunch had stumbling around the country, drinking wine out of jugs, always seeming to be passing through Denver. George and Malcolm and Jack Leahy read Ernest Hemingway and idolized Jack London, the oyster pirate, the gold rusher, the master of the Snark. They talked of riding freight trains, hitchhiking around America, going to Alaska and Spain. He and Malcolm sat up nights plotting about the trimaran they were going to build and sail around the world on. “George had this thing about him that made people just want to be around him; they liked to tell their friends they’d been with George,” says Malcolm. “George was always bolder than anyone, always doing things that were out of the ordinary. He’d do just about anything if it would make him different from everybody else.”
Ever since his early teenage years George had exhibited a preference for playing it close to the edge, sometimes literally. At age thirteen, he and his friends swam regularly in a quarry not far from his house, where a forty-foot cliff loomed above two jagged rocks sticking out of the water, one close to the cliff face, the other about ten feet out toward the middle of the quarry. To do the jump you had to land exactly between the rocks; a little too short or too far and you had a hard landing. Not many boys besides George tried that one very often.
When George got his driver’s license at age sixteen, he began treating the town as his own personal raceway. In one of his more spectacular accidents, George was motoring along in his father’s Mercury with Barry Damon during his senior year when a car pulled up close behind him on the twisting two-lane road that ran by the football stadium at Legion Field. “I could hear his engine revving, and he starts to make a move for the outside,” says George. “We get up to seventy or eighty, and I’m straddling the white line and won’t let him get by, and so he tries for the inside, and we’re neck and neck going around a right-hand curve, and I’m trying to force my way back in our lane when suddenly this car comes around the corner right at me.” George jerked the wheel to the right, just in time to avoid a head-on collision with an elderly couple staring popeyed at what they must have seen as certain death. As it was, he sheared off only the whole side of their car, doors and fenders included, and sent the other dragster smashing into a fire hydrant. His father’s Mercury was now also a total wreck and the road a howling litter of car parts, skid marks, gasoline fumes, and the smell of freshly burnt rubber.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking about George in recent years, and especially since I saw him on TV recently,” says his other best pal, Mike Grable, who as well as being the team quarterback was also president of the senior class. �
��And back when we were growing up, I can’t think of anything that happened in that town you could point to now and say that’s why he turned out the way he did. The only thing I can say is George just always had what I would call a casual attitude.”
“I think ‘risky’ is kind of a good word for it,” says another girlfriend of that period. “He was different from everyone else, and I think that’s what appealed to me. It did to a lot of the girls. They were fascinated with him. He was good-looking and popular and strong. And he was someone on the outs, like a James Dean, but preppy. He’d have all these loony ideas—he wanted to go to Tahiti, and he never wanted to, I absolutely remember him saying to me, ‘I am never going to work for a living.’ I remember that as clear as a bell.”