USAWA

I really enjoyed your article, Thom, … and I can relate to it!! It is interesting that many kids who are bullied grow up to be very large, powerful men. Most of you probably know that Lou Ferrigno was bullied as a kid because of his speech defects that resulted from his hearing problem. So what happens? He grows up and becomes The Incredible Hulk!! Talk about a 180 degree turn! If anyone isn’t familiar with his life story, you may find this video to be interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6MUSCdGgmw

I started lifting weights in December, 1958 when I was 13, after receiving a weight set for Christmas from my parents. I was 5-7 and weighed only 107 pounds. My father called me “Bones”. In my first workout, I pressed 40 pounds for 8 reps.

In addition to be practically just skin and bones, my ears stuck out further than normal, a physical characteristic that I inherited from my father, who suggested that I might want to have that problem corrected surgically, as he did when he was a kid.

So picture a very skinny kid with ears that protruded, combine that with the fact that I lived in a less-than-desirable neighborhood from December, 1957 until June, 1960, and you can probably guess what happened.

I had three primary tormentors, who were all my age, and a secondary tormentor who was two years younger than me. I liked them and enjoyed interacting with them individually. But when at least two of them got together, they then practically became juvenile delinquents! So they would hide my school lunch occasionally, serenade me with a chorus of “Tom wears dainty panties”, etc. Nothing physical, but what they did was annoying enough.

I certainly didn’t want to fight them because they were my friends. In fact, one of them was my helper when I had a paper route for about 9 months in 1959 until my father advised me to give it up because we had problems with a dog and its owner, as the dog kept trying to bite my leg each time I rode my bicycle up a short street to deliver the newspapers.

Another one of the four was my teammate on a Babe Ruth League team for two years. I also got along well with the other two.

One day in the 10th grade I was being tormented by a couple of them, as we were all in the same biology class. One of them flipped some ink at me and it landed on my shirt.

That was the last straw! I told my baseball teammate that I would meet him after school. Cooler heads prevailed, however, and neither one of us showed up. 🙂 My father had just had a serious heart attack and was hospitalized and my old teammate found out about it, undoubtedly because our mothers worked for the same company and rode together to work.

So he suggested that we go play golf together, which we did. (His father was an avid golfer and I had played my first round of golf with father and son about two years earlier.)

Nobody ever gave me any trouble after that. One day during my senior year in high school, my old teammate stopped me in the hall to ask me a question. We spoke briefly and he then apologized for stopping me to ask me the question! I thought that was a bit funny as this was the same person who had tormented me just a few years earlier.

By then I was 6-4 and, because of weight training, I weighed 214 when I graduated from high school. After that, I kept getting bigger and bigger, eventually weighing slightly over 300 pounds. As a statistics professor, I would attend the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, which is always held in a large city. Of course walking around in the downtown area of such cities is not always safe. On one occasion I mentioned that I didn’t feel unsafe walking around and a close friend laughed and said that I really didn’t need to worry about being mugged. 🙂

As for my old neighborhood tormentors, the youngest of the four died a few years ago at the age of 65; the kid who helped me with my paper route served 3 or 4 prison terms for a total of 10 years and died 9 years ago; and the son of my baseball teammate attacked his former girlfriend with a claw hammer several years ago and served 3.5 months in jail.

The other kid was expelled from school in the 11th grade and I was told that he also spent time in prison. I believe I found a photo of him on the Internet a few years ago, “looking like something that the cat dragged in” at the age of 67.

So this is my story, Thom. 🙂

Tom

“i used to bully the bullies…”
…..c. ullom

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA I WILL NEVER FORGET CHADER SAYING THIS!

LOL. Well, I used to take a lot of advanced classes in high school so a lot of the “nerds” were my friends. There were times when I would happen upon some idiot trying to pick on one of these guys so I would give them a bit of their own medicine:)

CHAD ULLUM = STAND UP GUY.