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pushed me, Betsy Johnson, Gayle Elliot, Carol Farley and Joan Throop to write and produce a play about five girls taking an imaginary trip to Europe. It was an assignment from Mrs. King that led me to write my first autobiography. I rediscovered it in a box of old papers after I left the White House, and reading it pulled me back to those tentative years on the brink of adolescence. I was still very much a child at that age, and mostly concerned with family, school and sports. But grade school was ending, and it was time to enter a more complicated world than the one I had known.

UNIVERSITY OF LIFE
    “What you don’t learn from your mother, you learn from the world” is a saying I once heard from the Masai tribe in Kenya. By the fall of 1960, my world was expanding and so were my political sensibilities. John E Kennedy won the presidential election, to my father’s consternation. He supported Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and my eighthgrade social studies teacher, Mr. Kenvin, did too. Mr. Kenvin came to school the day after the election and showed us bruises he claimed he had gotten when he tried to question the activities of the Democratic machine’s poll watchers at his voting precinct in Chicago on Election Day. Betsy Johnson and I were outraged by his stories, which reinforced my father’s belief that Mayor Richard J. Daley’s creative vote counting had won the election for President-Elect Kennedy. During our lunch period we went to the pay phone outside the cafeteria and tried calling Mayor Daley’s office to complain. We reached a very nice woman who told us she would be sure to pass on the message to the Mayor.
    A few days later, Betsy heard about a group of Republicans asking for volunteers to check voter lists against addresses to uncover vote fraud. The ad called for volunteers to gather at a downtown hotel at 9 A.M. on a Saturday morning. Betsy and I decided to participate.
    We knew our parents would never give us permission, so we didn’t ask. We took the bus downtown, walked to the hotel and were directed into a small ballroom. We went up to an information table and told the people we were there to help. The turnout must have been less than expected. We were each handed a stack of voter registration lists and assigned to different teams who, we were told, would drive us to our destinations, drop us off and pick us up a few hours later.
    Betsy and I separated and went off with total strangers. I ended up with a couple who drove me to the South Side, dropped me off in a poor neighborhood and told me to knock on doors and ask people their names so I could compare them with registration lists to find evidence to overturn the election. Off I went, fearless and stupid. I did find a vacant lot that was listed as the address for about a dozen alleged voters. I woke up a lot of people who stumbled to the door or yelled at me to go away. And I walked into a bar where men were drinking to ask if certain people on my list actually lived there. The men were so shocked to see me they stood silent while I asked my few questions, until the bartender told me I would have to come back later because the owner wasn’t there.
    When I finished, I stood on the corner waiting to be picked up, happy that I’d ferreted out proof of my father’s contention that “Daley stole the election for Kennedy.”
    Of course, when I returned home and told my father where I had been, he went nuts. It was bad enough to go downtown without an adult, but to go to the South Side alone sent him into a yelling fit. And besides, he said, Kennedy was going to be President whether we liked it or not.
    My freshman year at Maine East was a culture shock. The baby boomers pushed enrollment near five thousand white kids from different ethnic and economic groups. I remember walking out of my home room the first day of class and hugging the walls to avoid the crush of students, all of whom looked bigger and more mature than me. It didn’t help that