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his junior and senior years. So his junior year he made the decision to go to Shattuck, a boarding school.” Donna also recalls the decision to attend Shattuck being Townes’, and she also says that he was simply seeking some kind of stability.
    A classmate and friend of Townes at Shattuck says he couldn’t imagine Townes “seeking that kind of rigidity.”14 Another classmate at Shattuck had a similar impression. “I got a feeling that all wasn’t well at Barrington High, and they saw the need for more structure for young John Townes. I’m afraid they offered Shattuck up, and Shattuck was good for what it was, but Townes was a pretty hot article.”15
    Founded in 1858, Shattuck Military Academy, in Faribault, Minnesota, was one of the oldest and most respected college prepara-tory boarding schools in the Midwest, known for rigid military discipline and strong academics, all situated on a classical-looking campus dominated by massive greystone Gothic buildings.
    In addition, Shattuck administrators were used to dealing with
    “hot articles”: they had, for example, seen fit to expel young Marlon Brando in 1941, his senior year. On the other hand, Hu-26
    A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt bert H. Humphrey III graduated in the Class of 1961, and a great many graduates went on to positions of prominence.
    “Shattuck was a mix of kids that were probably good citizens before they came to Shattuck, and also kids that had had some sort of run-in in their hometown,” classmate Todd Musburger recalls. “Nothing real serious, usually, but probably the parents or the school saying, ‘we think your son would do better in a military school,’ or strict parents saying, ‘I’m gonna straighten you out.’ … And some kids were just dropped on Shattuck’s doorstep because of parents that had money and sent them away. But when Townes arrived, my thought was, well, maybe something had happened.”
    Another classmate, Marshall Froker, has a similar recollection. “There were a lot of stories floating around,” he says. One was that “Townes had gotten into some kind of trouble back in Barrington. There were various versions of it, that there had been some row with another kid, and it may have involved a girl and it may have involved something that happened on the school property, and may have concerned his family enough, or may have gotten him in the kind of trouble where going off to military school is the way you avoid having a police record or ending up with probation or in some kind of disciplinary situation. But he wouldn’t talk about it.”16
    Townes’ good friend from college Bob Myrick asked Townes about Shattuck some years later, and Townes told him simply, “I did that for dad.”17
    At any rate, Townes Van Zandt joined the Academy Class of 1962 in the fall of 1960 to start his junior year of high school.
    The conflicts he was beginning to experience in his life surely became important ingredients in what must have been a very complex decision, however it was taken.
    According to Townes, at Shattuck he got “a real serious private prep-school ivy-covered education.”18 He also got an intensive introduction to military discipline. “When we were there,”
    says classmate Froker, “it was a full-bore Army ROTC program.
    It was ‘cadet this’ and ‘cadet that.’” Junior “new boy” cadet Van Where I Lead Me
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    Zandt was assigned to room with a young freshman from Oklahoma named Luke Sharpe, with whom he shared an interest in athletics. “He was a football player and a wrestler, and I was both of those things,” Sharpe recalls. “So we got along in that regard. Plus he was from Texas, I was from Oklahoma, and in Minnesota that’s a pretty good bond.”19
    Academically, Townes started out fairly well at Shattuck.
    Grades were given on a numbered scale, from 60 up to 100, and in his first semester, Townes scored an 83 in English and in Spanish, a 79 in geography, a 73 in algebra,