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from breakfast is with a note from the school nurse, whom you will find in the school infirmary every weekday morning for half a day.” Again our headmaster paused for a moment. “I’ll save the rest of my announcements for lunchtime. So for now, enjoy your breakfast and become acquainted or reacquainted, whichever the case may be, with each other and then go ahead and head off to your classes as soon as you’re done eating.” And with that, the man sat down to finish his breakfast.
    Throughout breakfast and as we began to go through our first full day at the Academy, Matt and I tried to become acquainted with the other students. Most of them had come from the corridor which begins at Boston and then extends down through Providence and onto New York to end up in Philadelphia. There were also some foreign students attending. We had at least half a dozen kids from Venezuela, one from Iran, one from Turkey, and one from Colombia. And no matter how hard we tried to be friendly, practically everyone ignored us whenever we said hello. And we weren’t just being shunned whenever this happened to us. It actually seemed as if we were being held in contempt for daring to socialize with easterners.
    Our daily schedule was as follows:
    7:00 A.M. — Rising Bell
    7:30 A.M. — Breakfast
    8:30 A.M. — 1st Period
    9:20 A.M. — 2nd Period
    10:15 A.M. — Morning Break
    10:30 A.M. — 3rd Period
    11:20 A.M. — 4th Period
    12:15 P.M. — 4th Period Ends
    12:20 P.M. — Lunch
    1:05 P.M. — 5th Period
    1:50 P.M. — 6th Period
    2:45 P.M. — 7th Period
    3:35 P.M. — End of Classes
    3:50 P.M. — Recreation, Athletics
    6:00 P.M. — Dinner
    7:00 P.M. — Night Study Period
    9:15 P.M. — Study Period Ends
    10:00 P.M. — Lights Out
    For some reason which I never fully understood, we never had any classes on Wednesday afternoons. Apparently the reason for this quirk in our schedule was based on some ancient New England tradition which called for no work to be performed on Wednesday afternoons. In fact, I don’t know if this midweek vacation is still observed today, but shops in town actually closed their doors and refused to do business on Wednesday afternoons. And so, to make up for our lost class time, the Academy scheduled classes for us to attend every Saturday morning. But come Saturday afternoon, our time was our own until breakfast the following Monday.
    In the afternoon, that first day, Matt and I decided to go out for the school’ s soccer team. I had wanted to play soccer for some time by then, and I had been frustrated by the fact that at that time, there were virtually no teams set up yet in the west. Only in the eastern part of the U.S. had the sport begun to catch on. But after practice we learned that there were no locker room facilities where we could shower and change out of our gym clothes, so all of us on the team simply returned to our respective dormitories and took our showers there.
    The next day, after we had finished with our first round of Saturday morning classes, we found hamburgers waiting for us in the dining hall.
    “Oh, man. My favorite,” I announced to the others at our table as I took a bun and a patty from the serving platters when they were passed around the table.
    “Pass the ketchup please,” Matt asked of a kid who was sitting across the table from us. “And the mustard too.”
    “I’ll take those squeeze bottles when you’re done, Matt,” I remarked cheerfully. “A good hamburger has got to have ketchup and mustard on it.”
    While the rest of us were preparing our plates, Mr. Stuart got up again and tapped his glass with his spoon so he could make some more announcements.
    This time he started off by introducing the school proctors to us. In other schools they were usually known as prefects or resident assistants, but at Ulster, the students who were paid a few dollars to have authority over the rest of us were called proctors. Of course all five of the students now standing before us