The hidden magic of 40 years of 4 am's

In “The Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club, Jason Gay described the benefits of his two year experience of getting up at 4 am. I have been in this club for 40 years. Gay’s essay prompted this recollection about how my early morning habit started.

Early morning and success

It was January 1976. I was early for a 7 PM meeting. I parked my mustard-yellow 1972 Toyota Corolla next to the only other car outside a bank building in downtown Burlington, Iowa. A light shown from a second floor window. I saw a cardboard sign on a side door. I walked up a flight of stairs to the sign’s twin that pointed me through an open door. A man who looked about my age greeted me and handed me a flier. I looked around the room and spotted a table with cookies, coffee, and circulars. As I closed in on the cookies, the third person in the room appeared, with his hand extended. I recognized the smile. Eleven months later Jimmy Carter would become the 39th President of the United States.

I met Mr. Carter at a time when I was looking toward the future. In How I learned to hit a baseball and love my students, I wrote about how I had become a competent middle school teacher. But I was restless and had begun to think about what I might do next. Though I had no crystal ball about Carter, I decided to read about his life. One story resonated. Jody Powell, the man who gave me the flier, caught Carter’s attention a decade earlier by arriving at work even earlier than Jimmy. Powell directed Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign and would become President Carter’s press secretary. I don’t know why that story about early rising and success stuck, but it did. And was available when something else happened later that year.

The gift of possibility

My Social Security page reminds me I earned $8,384 in 1976. $6,353 was my teaching salary and the rest came from a summer job at the Burlington Tent and Awning Company. Low salaries meant every lay teacher at St. Johns worked full time, from June through August. During my four summers in Burlington, I poured cement, painted houses, sold encyclopedias and, in 1976, sewed tents. One of my sewing companions was a guy a little older than me, like Jody Powell. He had earned a graduate degree from Iowa State University. While his name and degree program have vanished, my summer friend gave me the gift of possibility.

“If he can do it, I can do it,” I thought after a month of break-time conversations. This sounds belittling but I don’t mean it that way. The thought sprung from lack of confidence in myself rather than deficiency in him. My friend was an average guy who had figured out how to do something I thought hard. Maybe I could do it as well. For me, the it would be a graduate program in Political Science. I was at the Carter meet and greet because politics had always interested me. I had worked for political campaigns and even run, unsuccessfully, for the Burlington School Board. But studying politics, as opposed to doing it, seemed a better fit.

Graduate school, really?

Today universities have web sites that provide all the application details. In the summer of 1976, I called the Iowa State Political Science Department and requested an information packet. Today academic departments have Administrative Assistants. In 1976 I talked with a secretary who told me the department did offer an MA in Political Science. A few days later a catalogue arrived that opened a new world to me. I have inhabited the world of higher education for so long it is hard to remember that 45 years ago I knew nothing. My summer-sewing-friend opened the door and I was ready to walk through.

The catalogue told me admission to ISU’s Political Science MA program required a BA, letters of recommendation, and minimum scores on the quantitative and verbal parts of the GRE. I had an undergraduate degree from St. Ambrose University, but my grade point was mediocre and my major was Sociology. My St. Ambrose sociology professor, Keith Fernsler, was a kind man and said in phone conversation that he would write a letter for me because he thought I would be a better graduate than undergraduate student. Over my forty year college teaching career, I wrote hundreds of recommendation letters and never started a letter without first thinking about Dr. Fernsler’s kindness. Even with a solid letter, to get into ISU and to qualify for an assistantship that would pay for tuition and living expenses, I needed strong GRE scores.

The GRE

I hated standardized tests. In grade school we took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Sometimes I scored high and sometimes low, really low. I never understood why, nor did my parents. Even today, knowing my academic story turned out OK, that picture on the right tightens my stomach. And what it represents, judgment based upon a test, still angers me because those tests sucked the life out of my school experience for too long. In 2022 the ISU Political Science Department no longer requires the GRE. But in 1976 it did and that was a problem.

Curious, I spent a few minutes today looking at the GRE online site. I discovered everything is at my finger tips. I can register, prepare, and even take the test, if my computer is up to snuff, without leaving my chair. And if I need help to maneuver around this massive site, Anita, a virtual assistant, is available.

In 1976, ETS, the nonprofit that has administered the GRE since 1947, had a mailing address, phone number, and paper of all sorts. If I wanted to apply to ISU for fall 1977, I needed to take the GRE no later than December 1976. My mail carrier stuffed the GRE packet in my box sometime in June. The closest test location was Iowa City, about an hour from Burlington. So I signed up to take the GRE on a Saturday morning in December, giving me five months to, well, that’s when my Jimmy Carter story became more than a story.

Early morning preparation

The GRE material contained practice tests. I knew the quantitative portion of the test would be my biggest challenge because it had been a decade since my last math class. I decided I would devote two hours a day to working through math practice questions. My tent sewing job meant daytime was out and my body clock had always made night challenging.

In my early teens, I don’t remember ever seeing the end of a Saturday night Creature Feature movie. And that driveway in the picture was the midnight curfew scene of many late teenage near misses and one disastrous night when I pinballed my parents’ car topped-off by nicking a corner of our small garage. It was little consolation to my dad that this incident was late night fatigue and not alcohol.

So in the summer of 1976 I started getting up early to work through math questions. In early 1977 I got my GRE scores. The verbal was higher than expected and the quantitative was good enough. ISU accepted me and awarded an assistantship. The really early mornings, however, did not kick-in for good until my first graduate course exam the fall of 1977. Ross Talbot taught in the Political Science Department for 40 years. Dapper, with a bow tie, this former minor league baseball player made students an offer at least one could not refuse. Two days before the first exam he handed us a list of five essay questions. He would pick three for us to answer the day of the exam, with no notes.

This was a fish or cut bait moment for me. I either become a good student or I don’t. I worked all the first day on the answers to each question. On the day of the exam, in my little dorm room in Buchanan Hall, I got up at 4 am to commit to memory each answer.

I used Professor Talbot’s exam method in my 40 years of college teaching. And I wrote the questions at 4 am and graded the answers at 4 am. Mr. Gay is right about the quietness of the house in the very, very, early morning, with no demands from kids or spouse. In Buchanan Hall I was the only one getting coffee from basement machine. As I finish this blog at 5:23, Rebecca is asleep and quiet is the loudest sound.