| Notes |
“Look,” Brick told Booth, “school is going
to be starting. I can’t take care of you myself. I’ve
arranged for you to go to school on the East Coast.”
Emboldened, Booth’s response was “No way in
hell!” “You have to do it,” Brick said, adding that
The Vermont Academy was a top prep school. He
tried to sweeten the deal by noting that Jim Griffin,
Booth’s pal from next door, was going there and the skiing was great. “Well, let’s explore
alternatives,” Booth countered. But he struck out. “So I got on the train and went back. I
kept score all the way – where we stopped, how much things cost, every detail. I talked
to all the porters on the train. Not being a grown-up I could check out conversations and
not threaten people. I plotted an escape. I got off at Springfield (Massachusetts) and took
another train out to Saxtons River near Bellows Falls in Vermont, where the school was.”
It was the fall of 1951. Booth, just turned 15, dutifully enrolled for his sophomore
year in the bucolic new setting. “I hung around for a month. Then, on a full-moonlit night, I ran away.” He walked to town and caught the train to Boston. In September, he’d struck
up a conversation with the father of a boy from Providence, Rhode Island, so he decided
to head there. He got a job waiting tables at a restaurant and found a place to stay. “I was
on my own for about five weeks. I called the school and I called my dad. I told him, ‘Here’s
what I’ve done. But I’ll negotiate with you.’ He said, ‘If you stay there I promise you can
come back next year.’ So it was a deal. I went back to school. My world had been turned
upside down, but I learned I was in control of my life, and that I could make it.”
Laird Harris, Booth’s friend and former policy aide from his years as governor, was
listening intently in 2009 when he related how he’d run away all those years ago – a story
few have ever heard. “Most people who run away know what they don’t want but have
little idea of what the answer is,” Harris observed. “You knew and you were ‘running to’ the
solution.” Booth nodded. The memory of his declaration of independence was still vivid.
As things turned out, his year at Vermont Academy was a welcome break from the
upheavals back home. Although he
was a year older, he was assigned
to a freshman dorm – actually
a seven-bedroom house – with
Griffin and 12 other ninth-graders,
likely because he and Jim were
friends and the administration was
nervous about him taking off again.
Griffin, who years later ended up
being a key fund-raiser for all of
Booth’s political campaigns, has
fond memories of that year in
Vermont. “I lived on the third floor with a roommate and Booth had a single room on the
second floor,” he recalls. “But Booth and I were often together in the evening until ‘lights
out.’ ” One of Booth’s parlor tricks was to
remove the arms from his spindle-back desk
chair and play “Taps” on the radiator like
a drummer. The sound vibrated off every
room’s radiator, Griffin says. “When he
heard Mr. Lucy, our ‘master,’ sneaking up
the creaking stairs and tiptoeing down the
hall listening at each door, Booth quickly
put the arms of the chair back in place. He
was never caught. It’s a good example of
his mischievous sense of humor. However,
during our childhood and throughout
Skiing in Vermont. Booth second from left. Gardner family album.
Booth at a weekend party during his year at the Vermont
Academy. Photo courtesy Jim Griffin.
36
adulthood, I never saw Booth use his humor at anyone’s expense.”
Come June, they both headed home to the Northwest. Booth was going to board
with family friends and attend the Lakeside School in Seattle, while Griffin – who bounced
around after his own parents’ divorce – returned to Clover Park High School. That winter,
Mildred Blethen Gardner was granted a divorce from Brick. She received a 1950 Pontiac;
a checking account in her name in the amount of $14,164.71; a savings account of about
$5,000 and a judgment against him in the sum of $15,000. |