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Unlike Zooey and the rest, Sonny was anything but a Quiz Kid. His grades at public schools in Manhattan's Upper West Side were mostly Bs, but arithmetic baffled him. His IQ test score was merely average at 104, and his deportment was sometimes poor. The tall, skinny boy had a better time of it at Camp Wigwam in Harrison, Me., where, at eleven, he played a fair game of tennis, made friends readily, and was voted "the most popular actor of 1930."
Concerned about his studies, Sonny's parents enrolled him in Manhattan's highly rated McBurney School when he was 13 (at the enrollment interview, he said he was interested in dramatics and tropical fish). He flunked out a year later. A friend who knew Sonny then recalled that "he wanted to do unconventional things. For hours, no one in the family knew where he was or what he was doing; he just showed up for meals. He was a nice boy, but he was the kind of kid who, if you wanted to have a card game, wouldn't join in."
Unhidden Tears. When he was 15, Sonny was banished to Valley Forge Military Academy, a seat of learning heavily fortified with boxwood hedges and Revolutionary War cannon against dangers lurking in the Pennsylvania hills. Although the school is a recognizable model for Pencey Prep, the neurosis farm in Catcher, young Salinger—who talked of grabbing the big loot as a Hollywood writer-producer—was no Holden Caulfield. Classmate Alton McCloskey, first sergeant in Corporal Salinger's B Company and now a retired milk dealer in Lock Haven, Pa., remembers crawling through the fence with Salinger after lights out to poach local beer taps, but he is sure that Salinger never went AWOL, as Holden did, and practiced only accepted sorts of nonconformism.
In June 1936 Valley Forge gave him his only diploma. As literary editor of the yearbook, Salinger presented to the school a damply magnificent floral arrangement, since set to music and still sung at Last Parade:
Hide not thy tears on this last day
Your sorrow has no shame;
To march no more midst lines of grey;
No longer play the game.
Four years have passed in joyful ways—Wouldst stay these old times dear?
Then cherish now these fleeting days,
The few while you are here . . .
Off to Bydgoszcz. At night, tenting a blanket over his head to hide his flash light beam from the Valley Forge duty officer, Salinger (by now called Jerry) had written his first short stories. But if he told his family that he intended to be an author, he did not convince Papa Sol. In 1937, after Jerry spent a few unproductive weeks at New York University, the two Salingers set out for Vienna. "I was supposed to apprentice myself to the Polish ham business," Salinger wrote in a 1944 issue of Story Magazine. "They finally dragged me off to Bydgoszcz for a couple of months, where I slaughtered pigs, wagoned through the snow with the big slaughtermaster. Came back to America and tried college for half a semester, but quit like a quitter."