In 1951 my father found himself as economic attaché at the US Embassy in New Delhi, India. He was faced with the problem of getting me into a school. Most of the diplomatic corps’ kids went to a Protestant missionary school. My father was a convert to Catholicism and refused to send me there. (Converts to Catholicism make Italian Cardinals look like screaming liberals.) So he sent me off to a Catholic missionary school run by Irish Patrician Brothers. Unfortunately, from the perspective of his world view, he did not take a tour of the school or he might have reconsidered.
First, a little background. My parents brought new meaning to the word “bigotry”. They had no use for Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Protestants, English, Jews, French, and about 99.99% of the rest of the world. I still haven’t figured out who they did like. So if my father had realized that a German kid and I were the only two pure white kids in a sea of Indians and Anglo-Indians with varying shades of brown skin, he would have been apoplectic. In addition, the school was run on a shoe string and there was no money for amenities like hot water for showers, which gets interesting when the school is at 2500m elevation in the foothills of the Himalayas. The swimming pool was an abandoned brewery tank; you had to douse the leeches with salt when you got out. All in all, it was not quite the kind of place dear old dad had in mind for his only son.
For my part, I had hated grammar school and high school in the US, but I loved St. Georges College in Mussoorie, India! I mean, how neat it is to go out in the morning and find pug marks from leopards and tigers on the soccer field! They even had teachers who actually taught stuff! And I was, by far, the rowdiest kid in the place, so I had instant status. But most of all, it taught me that my parents were full of shit.