freezing at night and pretty cold in the daytime

> > > "It's a pretty good place," he ["Jack" Kennedy] wrote a relative, and "the swimming pool is great," but he saw little else to recommend the school.  ---------------- {excerpt, An Unfinished Life}---------He was "pretty homesick the first night" and at other times thereafter. 

The football team looked "pretty bad."  Worse, "you have a whole lot of religion and the studies are pretty hard.  The only time you can get out of here is to see the Harvard-Yale and the Army-Yale [games].  This place is freezing at night and pretty cold in the daytime."

His attendance at chapel every morning and evening would make him "quite pius [sic] I guess when I get home," he grudgingly told Rose.  He also had his share of problems with his classes.  English, math, and history were fine, but he struggled with science and especially Latin, which drove his average down to a 77.

In the fall of 1930, when he was thirteen and a half, Jack was more interested in current events and sports than in any of his studies. 

Football, basketball, hockey, squash, skating, and sledding

were Jack's first priorities, but feeling closed off in the cloistered world of a Catholic academy made him increasingly eager to keep up with the state of the world.  He wrote Joe from Canterbury:  "Please send me the Litary [sic] Digest, because I did not know about the Market Slump until a long time after, or a paper.  Please send me some golf balls."  A missionary's talk one morning at mass about India impressed Jack as "one of the most interesting talks that I ever heard."  It was all an early manifestation of what his later associate Theodore C. Sorensen described as "a desire to enjoy the world and a desire to improve it...."

...In 1960, when Time journalist Hugh Sidey asked Jack, "What do you remember about the Great Depression?" he replied, "I have no first-hand knowledge of the depression....About the only thing that I saw directly was when my father hired some extra gardeners just to give them a job so they could eat.  I really did not learn about the depression until I read about it at Harvard."

> > > The Kennedy children ... had little sense of being confined to a place and time.  One of Jack's childhood friends remembered them this way:  "They really didn't have a real home with their own rooms where they had pictures on the walls or memorabilia on the shelves but rather would  come home for holidays from their boarding schools and find whatever room was available. . . . 'Which room do I have this time?'" Jack would ask his mother. 

> > > Joe Jr., bigger and stronger than Jack, bullied him, and fights between the two -- often fierce wrestling matches -- terrified younger brother Bobby and their sisters.  Jack particularly remembered a bicycle race Joe suggested.  They sped around the block in opposite directions, meeting head-on in front of their house.  Never willing to concede superiority to the other, neither backed off from a collision that left Joe unhurt and Jack nursing twenty-eight stitches.

Joe Jr. patiently instructed all his younger siblings in the rules and techniques of various games, except for Jack.  A football handoff became an opportunity to slam the ball into Jack's stomach "and walk away laughing as his younger brother lay doubled up in pain."

Jack, who refused to be intimidated, developed a hit-and-run style of attack, provoking Joe into unsuccessful chases that turned Jack's flight into a kind of triumph.

But for all the tensions, Jack thought Joe hung the moon....A young woman Jack dated as a teenager remembered that whenever they were alone, Jack would talk about his brother.  "He talked about him all the time:  'Joe plays football better, Joe dances better, Joe is getting better grades.'  Joe just kind of overshadowed him in everything."

> > > Charles Spalding, one of Jack's close childhood friends, who spent weekends and holidays with the family, noted, "You watched these people go through their lives and just had a feeling that they existed outside the usual laws of nature; that there was no other group so handsome, so engaged.

There was endless action . . . endless talk . . . endless competition,

people drawing each other out and pushing each other to greater lengths....The Kennedys had a feeling of being heightened and it rubbed off on the people who came in contact with them.  They were a unit.  I remember thinking to myself that there couldn't be another group quite like this one."

> > > Jack's first ten years were filled with memories of Grandpa Fitz taking him and Joe Jr. to Red Sox games, boating in Boston's Public Garden, or on the campaign circuit around Boston in 1922, when the old man made a failed bid for governor....

Young Jack regularly took morning walks with Rose and one or two of his siblings to the local shopping area, the five-and-ten, and the parish church, which Rose explained was not only for Sunday or special holidays but part of a good Catholic's daily life.  And there were the summers away from Boston, first at Cohasset, a Protestant enclave on the South Shore,

where the family met a wall of social hostility in 1922,

including Joe's exclusion from membership in the town's country club, then at the Cape Cod villages of Craigville Beach in 1924 and Hyannis Port, beginning in 1926, both more welcoming....The Kennedys rented a two-and-a-half-acre estate overlooking the Hyannis Port harbor.  There, Jack learned to swim and enjoy the outdoor activities that became a constant in the family's life.---------------------- {end, excerpts}

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Excerpts from An Unfinished Life.  John F. Kennedy; 1917 - 1963.  Written by Robert Dallek.  Copyright 2003 - Robert Dallek.  publisher:  Little, Brown and Company -- Boston, New York, London

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