Personal Growth
45 Years of 4 AM’s
Why I get up so early
The beginning
It was January 1976. I was early for a 7 PM meeting. I parked my mustard-yellow 1972 Toyota Corolla next to the only 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 my age greeted 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 when I was 27. I had been teaching middle school but was restless and thinking about what was 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 before Jimmy. Powell directed Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign and would become his press secretary. The early rising and success story stuck. 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 from my teach 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. 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 came from absence 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 and teaching about politics seemed a better fit.
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. A few days later a catalogue arrived that opened a new world. I have inhabited the world of higher education for so long it is hard to remember that 46 years ago I knew nothing. My summer-sewing friend opened the door and I was ready to walk through.
The GRE
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 Graduate Record Exam.
I hated standardized tests. In grade school we took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Sometimes I scored high, sometimes low, really low. I never understood why. Even today, knowing my academic story turned out OK, my stomach still tightens when I think about filling in those little ovals. In 2022 the ISU Political Science Department no longer requires the GRE. But in 1976 it did and that was a problem.
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. I had five months to prepare and that’s when my Jimmy Carter story became more than a story.
Early morning preparation
The GRE material contained practice tests. The quantitative part would be the biggest challenge because it had been a decade since my last math class. I decided to devote two hours a day to working through math questions. My tent sewing job meant daytime was out and my body clock always made late nights challenging.
So in the summer of 1976 I started getting up early to do math. 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, the 4 AM habit, did not kick-in until my first graduate course exam the fall of 1977. Ross Talbot taught in the Political Science Department for 40 years. Dapper, always with a bow tie, this former minor league baseball player on the first exam made students an offer at least one could not refuse.
On the Friday before the Monday exam, Professor Talbot handed us a list of five essay questions. On Monday, he would pick the three we had to answer, without notes. This was a fish or cut bait moment for me. I either become a good student or I don’t. I worked all weekend on the answers. 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.
Repeat what works. Not only did I use Professor Talbot’s exam method in my own 40 year college teaching career, but I wrote all the questions and graded all the answers at 4 AM.
And…It’s now 6:44 AM.
