This publication has received notice that Tuesday, Feb. 22 is National Cook a Sweet Potato Day. That announcement, through the circuitous pathways the mind divines, took me straight back to 1962, when I mounted a rickety effort to win a Rhodes Scholarship and thus secure my future among our nation’s elites, where I was sure I did not belong but hoped nevertheless for the imprimatur of two years studying at Oxford University in England, after which I would be marked for whatever greatness our system could bestow.
At that point, I was in my first year of graduate school in New York, with stylishly long hair and a thin patina of sophistication, which carried me through the Georgia stage of Rhodes interviews held at Emory University in Atlanta. Two of us were chosen to go on to the regional interviews, from which two Rhodes Scholars would be chosen. Since those regional interviews would also be held at Emory in a week, I just went home to Greensboro to wait and study for semester finals in the bosom of the family.
Naturally, before going back to Atlanta for the regionals, a haircut was in order, so I stopped by Bub Moody’s barbershop. Bub endeavored to give everybody his money’s worth, so in spite of my request for “just a little off,” he practically shaved my head, leaving me no longer the New Yorker but just a boy from Greensboro as I headed back to Emory.
Our Georgia Rhodes rep was a lawyer with one of the big Atlanta firms, and of course he didn’t know us and didn’t extend himself particularly. By contrast, there were a couple of tall, handsome tennis players from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, shepherded by a suave operative from the CIA, which at that pre-Vietnam time was the coolest and most prestigious of government jobs. The spook introduced his guys all around, and they radiated their confidence, while mine lay on Bub’s floor.
The interview committee was expert at probing weaknesses and was quick to discern that I had no particular life plans, aims, goals, etc. Both the tennis players came out of the interviews as Rhodes Scholars. Perhaps they went on to play at Wimbledon before beginning their careers in the Deep State.
I hopped on Delta with one of the other losing candidates, a big, friendly, exuberant fellow from South Carolina who was studying law at NYU. It was a late night flight with few passengers, and his fun-loving good spirits caught the attention of the stewardesses. He confided to them that we were sweet potato salesmen who needed somebody to show us around the city, and they were so charmed by his bonhomie that by the time we deplaned, we both had dates with perky sky hostesses.
I took my prize to a nightclub I had heard about. In self defense I must point out here that during my time in the City I had developed a taste for scotch and I read The New Yorker, where I was familiar with the back cover ads for Dewar’s scotch, which, never having actually spoken it aloud, I read as “De-war’s,” with the emphasis on the second syllable. I asked my date what she would have, and she mumbled “Dewar’s,” with the accent where it belonged. I didn’t understand what she was saying, and, seeing my quizzical look, she finally felt the need to explain: “It’s, you know, a scotch.”
That was it. Even if I could have explained my misapprehension, not knowing how to pronounce Dewar’s would have been even less cool than not knowing what it was. The date was over, though it agonized on for an hour or so, with her wondering how she got stuck with such a rube and me regretting I ever tried impersonating a sweet potato salesman. But all that was long ago, and though I still blush at the mention of Dewar’s, I always find comfort in sweet potatoes. They taste good, and they’re easy to pronounce.
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