Mr. Write's Page

Newt Gingrich is back in the news. I find this most regrettable. Newt has been a great annoyance to me — a burr under my personal saddle — for many years.

It’s worse than you think. My history with Newt goes back to high school.

The high school I attended, from 1958 to 1960, was located on a U.S. Army base in Germany. Stuttgart American High School was normal and typically American in every way, except the students were military dependents living overseas.

Newt also attended SHS. He was one year behind me.

SHS was a small school. My graduating class in 1960 numbered only 99. The place was big enough to avoid someone if you wanted to, but small enough so that everybody knew everybody.

Everybody knew, and wanted to avoid, Newt Gingrich. Terms like nerd and geek and dweeb and dork had not yet been invented, but any one of them would fit him.

Of the several hundred kids at SHS, two were widely considered to be in the uber-weirdo category: one was George Martin, a white version of Steve Urkel, and the other was Newt.

George Martin, like Urkel, wore glasses, had a voice that often cracked, and his khaki pants were highly lifted up.

He was the epitome of uncool, yet was oblivious, or maybe indifferent, to the perceptions others held of him.

George was a large, lurching, physically unpredictable menace to the unwary. He was so clumsy that we nicknamed him “Tank.” But he was good-natured and good-hearted, and quite the brainiac.

Newt was similar to Tank in many respects — the glasses, the brains, the slicked-down hair, the high-pitched voice — but you couldn’t describe him as good-natured or good-hearted.

Newt always seemed to be underfoot with too much to say. Where George was a lovable doofus, Newt was cocky and brash. Instead of a trace of humor to lighten his demeanor, there was a hint of acrimony.

And I doubt that he was oblivious to his classmates’ perceptions of him.

Unlike Tank Martin, Newt had no nickname. I guess you can’t improve on Newt and Newty.

Newt’s family returned to the U.S. in 1960, the same year I did. He finished high school in Georgia, of all places, then went on to Emory and Tulane.

I didn’t know that until later, when Newt surfaced in Georgia politics. In the 1970s, he ran for Congress in the district covering the northwest Atlanta suburbs, eventually won, and was reelected six times.

I, of course, was stunned. How could the Newt I had known, so irksome and off-putting, whose name was spelled three different ways in the SHS yearbook, succeed so well in politics? When Newt became Speaker of the House, I nearly swooned.

Richard Clarke, the terrorism expert, once said that the difference between nerds and geeks is that “geeks get it done.” In that sense, Newt certainly was a geek. He had the audacity and the daring to reach his goals.

As for his improprieties and indiscretions over the years, you can look into those at your leisure, if you so desire. The record isn’t flattering. It makes his righteous indignation over Bill Clinton’s personal lapses seem amusing.

Anyway, I feel entitled, at this juncture, to wish for Newt to go away. I want him to fade again from the public eye and return to doing whatever old conservatives do.

After high school, I lost track of George Martin. For all I  know, he got into politics, too.

Tank probably would have made a damn fine Speaker of the House.