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But there is a haunted side to Turner.
He is as acutely aware of childhood traumas as of childhood dreams of conquest. His memories are shot through with a ceaseless struggle to prove himself worthy, with a sense of rejection as a Yankee in the South and a Southerner in the North, and with the agonizing depressions and deaths of his father and his only sibling Mary Jane. Coupled with an inborn restlessness, those memories have left him all but incapable of repose.
His father Ed Turner came off a hardscrabble farm in Sumner, Miss., and entered the billboard business. In pursuit of ambition he moved the family from Cincinnati to Savannah when Ted was nine. Almost immediately Ted was shipped off to Georgia Military Academy, just outside Atlanta. He arrived six weeks after the school year started, the last entrant to his class, with an alien accent; he knew trouble was ahead, and came out fighting. Thus began a pugilistic attitude that lasted into adulthood. Turner was all the more motivated to establish his virility with his fists because he found no glory on the playing field: he tried football, basketball and baseball and was lackluster at each. He finally turned to a sport that required no special physical talent, just brains, determination and nerve. Ted Turner soon became known as the Capsize Kid, a fanatic sailor. He took crazy chances and rarely won, but he loved the competitive frenzy.
Life was strict, punishment swift and reward restrained at home as at military school, though father and son were close. Ed occasionally used a wire coathanger "to get my attention," Ted recalls. He was assigned onerous chores to earn his pocket money, and by his late teens his father charged him rent during summer vacations. For Ted's graduation from his second military academy, the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ed Turner offered an enticing but booby-trapped present: a share of the cost of a Lightning-class sailboat. The rest was to come from Ted's savings, and would, his father knew, take virtually every cent the boy had.
For college Ted wanted to go to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father insisted on the Ivy League. Rejected by Harvard, Ted went off to Brown to study the Greek classics whose mythical and historic heroes had inspirited him as a teenager. His father again disapproved and sent a long, literate but contemptuous letter. It said, "I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today ... I am a practical man, and for the life of me I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek ... I have read, in recent years, the deliberations of Plato and Aristotle, and was interested to learn that the old bastards had minds which worked very similarly to the way our minds work today. I was amazed that they had so much time for deliberating and thinking, and was interested in the kind of civilization that would permit such useless deliberation ... I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me."
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