02:03That used to be one of the number one rules of a writer.
02:06You're going to keep a journal and things will happen within that journal.
02:09But again, it's a relationship and a working relationship.
02:11Yeah, but I think the value of a journal is simply that you write a lot.
02:15And it's just like, well, I mean, Mark Spitz spent his whole life in the swimming pool, right?
02:20Right.
02:20He's going up and down, and that's how come he can do it better than anybody else.
02:24And, yeah, they'll say keep a journal because that means you write every day.
02:31And in the generation before mine, American writers mostly came up through journalism
02:39and often hadn't even finished high school.
02:42It was Mark Twain or Ring Lardner or any of those people.
02:45They'd come up through newspapers, and if you work on a newspaper, you write three, four, five, six stories a day about anything, you know.
02:55And you're writing and you're writing and you're writing, and your mind is saying,
02:59okay, I guess this is what we're going to do, and we're going to do a lot of it.
03:03And so you get skilled that way.
03:07And this wonderful high school I went to, Shortridge, we had a daily paper.
03:12And it had a daily paper so long that my parents had worked on the Shortridge Daily Echo before I had.
03:21And so a whole lot of writers came out of Shortridge, head writer on the I Love Lucy show, a woman named Madeline Pugh.
03:29I knew her when she was a student, Dan Wakefield, my brother novelist and journalist.
03:33And I came out of there, and a hell of a lot of editors and writers for, you know, trade journals or down on that level came out of Shortridge.
03:44And they could write because Shortridge had had them writing all the time.
03:47That's the main thing.
03:49So what did Shortridge do right?
03:51So many impressive people have come out of Shortridge over the years.
03:54What lesson could people learn today from the Shortridge model?
03:58Well, to honor the teachers as leading members of the community rather than servants like firemen or policemen.
04:10And the very high morale operation and their salaries weren't high there at Shortridge.
04:16The Great Depression was going on.
04:17But the people were so proud, and they were so well-educated themselves.
04:24And during the Depression, if any steady job was a plum job.
04:30And so wonderfully educated people with master's degrees or doctor's degrees would consider themselves pretty lucky to be teaching in a high school.
04:41Okay.
04:42But they really knew their subjects.
04:45Did they know how to inflame the mind of the young person to make them interested in that?
04:49Well, the whole school did.
04:51And so if there was a teacher who knew his subject or her subject who had kind of a dud personality,
04:57you know, the high energy of the school carried you along anyway, as you were glad to get the information anyway.
05:05But my brother, for instance, went to park school.
05:11But he bicycled into Shortridge every day to study chemistry under Frank Wade,
05:16who was nothing ordinary about the man.
05:20The man was an extraordinary chemist.
05:23And such people are no longer encouraged to go into education.
05:30And I think there's a strong anti-intellectual strain in the United States.
05:39As you know, the pointy-headed intellectuals are scorning these people who know a lot of science or whatever.
05:46It's not going to get a young person a date on a Saturday night.
05:49No.
05:50And, you know, I think the Japanese are very pleased to have us.
05:56With our attitude about that.
05:57Yeah, they're very pleased to have us so little interested in activities of the mind.
06:03I'm talking about the general public.
06:05But the, well, at Shortridge, as great a school as it was,
06:10the athletes, the lettermen, looked on the rest of us as though we were all wimps and fairies, of course.
06:19And the model is Greek because great athletes used to, you know, help win the Battle of Thermopylae or whatever
06:29because those battles were hand-to-hand and a really strong guy.
06:33And then the great runner who ran all the way back to Athens to say that the battle had been won
06:39and then dropped dead and all that, his body's really mattered.
06:44But I think the Japanese are delighted to see us building these sports training centers
06:49and concentrating on winning gold medals, you know, because I didn't know what's going on at all.
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