For a Catholic kid in parochial school the only way to survive the beatings - by classmates not the nuns - was to be the funny guy.
I wanted to be a great white hunter a prospector for gold or a slave trader. But then when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.
When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota we never referred to the national debt it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.