Free Blow by Bruce Porter Page A

Silver-haired, with the rosy nose of a hearty drinker, Horrigan was plain-spoken in ways not then common in public high schools. He was in the habit, for instance, of giving colleagues the finger when he wished to make a point during faculty meetings, and endearing himself to the guys in his class by referring to fellow teachers as “assholes” and “fairies.” “Horrigan was not your traditional-type teacher, but he was very effective,” says Buzzy Knight, who was on the faculty then. “He had a wonderful sense of humor, and in class he could butter up a story so you’d be living it rather than just reading about it.”
    Horrigan lived in a sea captain’s house overlooking Weymouth Landing, and he encouraged George and Malcolm and Mike Grable and Frank Shea and the other guys to come by on Friday nights, when he would sip his Scotch, tell them navy stories, and talk about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. “He was really a wonderful man,” recalls George, who honors few of the adults he ever knew with a compliment. “He tried to give you knowledge without making you feel insecure about it.” In school, his assignments ran more toward Nordhoff and Hall than Shakespeare, and “if you wrote a composition,” says George, “he’d say you had great ideas here, but not much grammar. But that was okay, because when you grow up and become a writer, they had people to put the grammar in, secretaries, people like that.”
    Whether or not it was Horrigan’s approach that lifted George’s spirits, certainly something made a difference that year, because his scholastic record took a big jump upward. Besides the not-too-unrespectable C he managed to get in physics, he ended up with a B in English, another B in economics, and an A in Problems of Democracy. In fact, that final spring he made it to the dean’s list, truly a flabbergasting event for any of the faculty who’d encountered George in the other years. “I remember, Jack Fisher called me in and said, ‘What’s this, George, a mistake?’ Then he said, ‘You know, George, have you ever heard the expression a day late and a dollar short?’”
    Fisher’s assessment, unfortunately, was all too correct, in that George’s smashing finish did not quite obliterate the general dismalness of his high school record. His first SAT scores, from the tests he had taken in the spring of his junior year, were less than stellar—a total of just over 600, out of a possible 1,600, on the math and verbal combined. He did have one more chance the following fall to take the SATs again, which is when he thought of enlisting the help of his best pal, Malcolm MacGregor. Malcolm had scored a perfect 1,600 the previous spring, even without much sleep the night before, and thought that sufficient to get him into his first-choice college, which was Worcester Polytechnic Institute. So he had no reason to take the tests again. And he didn’t—at least not under his own name. In a fit of ill-advised friendship, he agreed to go into the testing room that Saturday morning in the fall, take the SAT, and forge George’s signature. And it could well have worked. Indeed, Malcolm finished fifteen minutes early, and there was no challenge when he left by the outside proctor hired to monitor the exam, who didn’t know George or Malcolm from a Pygmy warrior. But Malcolm forgot to do one thing. For some reason, possibly a Freudian explanation, it never occurred to him to lard the test with any purposeful mistakes, at least enough so George’s scores turning up this time at the Springfield College admissions office wouldn’t add up to a perfect 1,600.
    The unraveling of the scheme occurred swiftly enough. At Springfield, the admissions officer took one look at the thousand-point difference and called down to Mr. Wallace L. Whittle, then the principal of Weymouth High School.