Demarcations
A polaroid photo of Wayne Barnes in his off-campus apartment at Penn State in 1967, 132 ½ South Barnard Street, State College, PA.
There are certain moments in our lives that really do make a difference, not for the world at large, but in our own very personal experiences.
When I was a Boy Scout back in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, there was only one way for an inner-city boy to earn certain merit badges with the goal, someday, of becoming an Eagle Scout. Temple University opened their pool for scouts across the city to learn to swim over several weekends to be able to pass the swimming merit badge. Hundreds of us did.
Then came a narrowing down, where only the boys who had grasped the fine points of the different strokes could advance to the lifesaving merit badge.
My brother, Ken, who was two years older, had always been a trailblazer. I was right behind, certainly with second-child syndrome. But I was a very athletic and coordinated little kid, perhaps the result of trying to keep up, always being second.
Tall Bob, the swimming instructor with a southern drawl, lined up dozens of young scouts at one end of the pool. They waited in anticipation to jump in and swim the required strokes.
My brother and I were in lanes beside each other when Tall Bob called out, “Now the breaststroke!” We all did as we were told.
“Pull, kick, glahde, pull, kick, glaaaahde,” he chanted.
Always the mimic, I pictured what he had taught us and matched it exactly. My brother, right nearby, apparently didn’t have the order as well as I did and was doing a pull, glide, kick. Bob pointed at him and emphasized, loudly, “No, no, pull, then kick, then glaaahde.” But no matter, Ken couldn’t get it right.
By the time we reached the end of the pool and were getting out, Bob was pointing at each boy and motioned them to move to one side of the pool or the other.
“You, over here,” he pointed at me, motioning near to where he stood. “And you, over there,” he motioned to my brother, to the other side of the pool.
There was shock on three faces: my own, my brother’s—who had never been singled out as not able to do something I did—and over in the corner, my father’s.
As we drove home up Broad Street to West Oak Lane, my father was contemplative. He had a certain wisdom and perspective on life which I admired as more than just fatherly advice.
He said this was a significant moment in our lives, a demarcation. I hadn’t known what the word meant, but it became an important one in my life.
My brother realized this was his one and only chance to try for the lifesaving merit badge. Without it, he could never be an Eagle Scout. So, in his young teenage view, what was the point of doing all that stuff? The other badges would have been easier to earn, but the ultimate rank would be unachievable without lifesaving. He dropped out of scouting and, to a certain extent, out of my life.
I continued in the Boy Scouts and did achieve the rank of Eagle. I stayed very connected with scouting, attending the Valley Forge National Jamboree in 1964, and I was a Nature Counselor at the Philadelphia counsel camps in the summers.
Our lifetime paths from then on were split apart. This is the wisdom of my father, who understood, almost as soon as Tall Bob pointed for me to go to one side of the pool, and my brother to the other.
I would no longer be following Ken in all endeavors. I would have a new and fresh path to take which I would manage and direct and control. I would be a trailblazer and face all challenges as my own. I even became good at it.
Back in the Temple University pool, unbeknownst to me at the time, I had left my second-child syndrome behind.
Every FBI Special Agent has a story about how they became an agent, but for many, how they almost did not become agents. And then there are thousands of others whose stories are how they almost became FBI agents, but never did.
All of us who carry FBI credentials and the little gold federal badge are proud from the first day we receive them. It is an achievement like few others. My story has demarcations, as my father used the term, which wound the path of my life through circumstances I could not have imagined, which would have me end up where I am.
In Leeds Junior High School, there was a foreign language requirement. The one for youngsters like me was Spanish. I didn’t particularly like our teacher, Señor Diggs, who became Mr. Diggs when he coached soccer. In his class, there seemed to be more bullying than teaching.
For all of my life up to that point, I had been the smallest kid in the class, and certainly too small to be on most sports teams. But I tried out for soccer, which only required speed and an ability to kick the ball. The boys were kicking one around in a circle, and Mr. Diggs pointed out that I didn’t have soccer cleats. I would need a pair to be on the team.
My family was what would later be described as working-class poor. I could not imagine asking my parents to spend the money for soccer cleats, which I would grow out of in less than a year’s time anyway.
My brother and I would each get one suit a year, right before Easter, so we would look presentable in church on Sunday. They were always purchased a little big so we would grow into them throughout the year. By the next Easter, they would be too small to wear to church. Even as a boy I knew the difference between what I could and could not ask for.
For Mr. Diggs, it was an easy decision. I was off the team.
I continued in Spanish in Germantown High School but was not happy about it. While Señor Diggs had left a bad taste in my mouth, it was possible I might start off fresh in a new school.
In the tenth grade I had a wonderful Spanish teacher and really got the hang of this romance language.
In the eleventh grade, I walked into Mrs. Haftel’s Spanish class. She piled her hair high on her head and wore fashionable dresses, a different new one every day. But she belittled her students and addressed them as though you weren’t really sitting right in front of her. She seemed to speak to a place ten feet behind you. I suffered through her class for the whole school year.
When my senior year finally came, I found myself, again, seated in the front of Mrs. Haftel’s class. I am sure my facial expression said it all. Neither she, nor I, wanted me there.
A couple of weeks into the semester, I went to my counselor to discuss transferring into another Spanish class and got better news than I had hoped for. Only three years of a foreign language were required and I would never have to face the likes of a Mrs. Haftel or Señor Diggs again! So, what else could I take?
My counsellor had a few recommendations, but said it might be hard for me to catch up in the other courses, “unless you want to take the Chorus class.”
This had never occurred to me, but the next day I became a first tenor and loved every minute of it. I would soon sing in the Cedar Park Presbyterian Church choir on Sundays and had a duet role with friend Kenny Sklar at our high school graduation in the spring. We sang the verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, with 391 classmates in the bleachers behind us on the stage chiming in with the chorus.
A couple of years later I was at the main campus of Penn State looking for courses to add to my schedule in the Political Science Department. My counselor said I could take an additional single credit each term if I tried out, and made it into the Penn State Men’s Glee Club. Well, that was a no-brainer, and I sped off to see if I could make the grade there.
The legendary Frank Gullo, leader of the Glee Club for decades, stood my slender, then-six-foot-tall frame beside the piano. I told him I was a first tenor. He touched the keys on the upper range of the piano. I matched them pretty well with me-me-mes, then going down lower.
He stopped and said, “Your voice has changed.”
Not only that, but it had also broken to go down through second tenor and baritone. When he was through plunking the keys on the piano, my range had gone me-me-meing deep into most of the second bass notes covering four octaves.
He said he would make a deal with me. “You stand in the double-bass section, and the boys around you will help you hit the low notes you’re not used to. Then when the notes are higher, you still have strength in those areas, so you keep the rest of the bass section on key with notes they can hardly hit.”
It was a big smile for me, and the deal was struck. I was a second bass in the Penn State Men’s Glee Club!
The fellow I stood beside, and who would become one of my best college friends was Bill Guitteau from Butler, PA. He was definitely the quiet type, up until it was time to perform. The blending of seventy voices was heavenly. My modifying vocal cords sung loudly with the high notes and the fellows around me stayed on key. Then they eased me into the lower ones where they were comfortable, and brought me down near to a low D, but I was learning.
We traveled to girls’ colleges for dual concerts. Bill and I always sat beside each other on the bus and were roommates for the overnight stays. It was a special time in my life.
But after graduation, our world as we knew it had changed. The Vietnam War was on and all deferments for college ended the day of graduation. To your local draft board, you were nothing more than a statistic. Many took the best options they could to serve in some aspect of the military.
Three years after graduating from Penn State, I was a counselor in the undergraduate dorms at Villanova University, attending law school right outside of Philadelphia.
I answered a knock on my door to find a man in a suit standing there. He was from U. S. Army Intelligence and wanted to speak with me.
Quite a surprise, I invited him in. I offered him the chair at my desk and I sat on the bed.
He told me an individual who was a translator in the army and stationed in Ankara, Turkey, was to be elevated to a higher position as the interpreter for the base commander. For this, he needed an upgraded clearance, and so he had dug deeper to provide a few further names of social acquaintances to be interviewed for the clearance process.
I was at a loss to understand any of this, and I am sure this was conveyed in my facial expression. Then he asked if I recalled William Guitteau.
My smile told him about all he needed to know. I said Bill was a decent guy, never used marijuana or drugs, drank beer, but not to excess, and his moral turpitude was at the top of the charts.
But I had questions of my own. I asked the army officer how he had found me, and about the clearance process. How did he end up in a suit and tie, and not a uniform? Had he chosen this path? And what had happened in his life which led him to be the one to knock on my door?
By the time an hour was up, the man stood and said, “This is the first time I have ever conducted an interview where I felt like I was the one being interviewed. Would you consider a career in Army Intelligence?”
I didn’t know what to say. My sights on my future after graduation within a few months had a wide range, but with no immediate prospects of what I would do with a Juris Doctor degree.
Then the man stopped himself in his tracks, and said, “Oh, that’s right, you’re in law school. The place for you is the FBI!”
So where were my life’s demarcations? Swimming the breaststroke better than my brother began the loss of second-child-syndrome and a new level of personal assertion. Grief with a pair of bullying Spanish teachers led me to Germantown High’s choir, and then Maestro Frank Gullo’s decision to weigh down the bass section with a recent first-tenor, placed me beside the quiet one, Bill Guitteau. Three years later, he had dug deep into his old-friends list, needed for an upgraded Army clearance, and then the literal knock on the door.
Without any of those steps, none of what became my life in the FBI would have happened. Some were filled with el griefo, and some had reached glorious harmonic heights, but it all contributed to the endgame. It is part of taking the good with the bad, and succeeding with both, in spite of, and because of, the demarcation events in your life. You simply have no idea what the path is that takes you winding through the forest.
There was an unforeseen benefit through all of these events. A language was required in college and I finally learned something besides Spanish. I took several terms of French with a B average. It was the experience of having knowledge of two Romance languages which resulted in my receiving a high score in the Army Language Aptitude Test administered during FBI training. A couple of years later I was transferred from New York to Monterey, California and, for nine months at the Defense Language Institute, learned Romanian. I was transferred to the Washington Field Office, where my career against the Soviet Bloc intelligence services took off. I would end up working against the Soviet KGB. It was a career that makes me prouder than you could know.
There are forks in the roads for all of us, which might not be recognized at the time as demarcations. But decisions made at those moments would not so much change your life, but they would be the ones which set you on a new path you might never have foreseen.
Can we see some of the demarcations coming at us? Sure, like in choosing which college to attend, near to home or far away. In my senior year of high school, I was offered a gymnastics scholarship to Iowa State University. Having never been across the Mississippi River, and hardly ever west of the Susquehanna, Ames, Iowa seemed like the end of the earth to me and was never really a consideration for this city boy. But that would have set me on track for an entirely different life.
I think the most interesting demarcations are ones you never realize are there, and it is only with the perspective of years, perhaps decades, when they come to the front of your mind. It is when you have your aha moment and think, wow, if I hadn’t done this or that, I wouldn’t have had this life, this family, and these five children. Maybe elsewhere, but not in this here-and-now.
It is okay if such perspective comes as a shock to you, but it should make you wiser. You may even want to go back and thank someone from your distant past who, inadvertently, was involved in the choices you made, the road you took. If only my Spanish teachers hadn’t been such bullies, I wonder—where would I be today?
Wayne A. Barnes
August 24, 2021
Plantation, FL
Addendum:
I hoped this essay would inspire readers to ponder their own lives and realize the demarcations which brought them to where they are now, but I had no idea how soon that would happen.
Ellen Tanner has been a twenty-year editor of dozens of my essays. Along with edits to this one, she sent me the following:
It’s strange that you sent your “Demarcations” essay today. I didn’t read it until I got home from visiting our 97-year-old next-door neighbor now in an assisted-living facility in Dothan (AL). He is always such a joy, with great old stories and funny gossip from neighbors. He started telling us about his love for comic books when he was a teenager. He was in a book store in Dothan when he noticed a book on how to make the challenging recruiting test—coming up soon because he had just graduated from high school and WWII was raging—more understandable. Well, he bought the book for a dollar which he thought was way too expensive, took it home and studied it. When it came time to take the test, along with a large number of other young men, he felt pretty confident. At the end, two of them had made above average scores, and while the others were sent to the Army Infantry and many killed, the two were placed in the Army Air Corps where he became a machinist. He realized how smart he was and when he got out of the military, they paid for him to get his degree from Auburn, then he went on to get his Masters in Physics. He was soon picked up for the Manhattan Project in Tennessee and worked there until he retired. And he kept repeating, “I don’t know where I would be if I hadn’t bought that book.”