Midwest Talent Search 1984

In January of 1984, a thirteen-year-old boy took the SAT’s in a large and uncomfortable room surrounded by hundreds of other kids and scored a 920 combined. That score was good enough for me to qualify to attend a three-week summer academic program (a.k.a. "nerd camp") at Alma College from 8 July to 27 July called the Midwest Talent Search. Given the choice between a mathematics or English program, I chose English. 

I chose English largely because of a middle school teacher named Mrs. Brown, who taught a 7th + 8th grade English Enrichment class of which I was a student. In the two years that I was in English Enrichment, my writing simply wasn’t consistently good enough for Mrs. Brown, and I got the worst grades of my middle school career. At the time, my grandfather was the assistant principal and athletic director, so perhaps I suffered for the sins of the (grand)father, as not everyone warmed to the unyielding countenance of Earl Haight. Or perhaps it was the simple fact that I churned out cringeworthy work that only infrequently approached competence. (Trust me on this – my mom recently unearthed some of my middle school assignments, and I had to stop reading after a bit so I didn’t fail the student whose work I was reading, or at least burn the paper to exorcise the shit demons.) 

Regardless, I had a chip on my shoulder for English that I didn’t have for math, which seemed to come much easier to me, so off I went to Alma during a hot and humid July summer, determined to refine and expand my talents in English. I was part of a gang of regional academic all-stars, including:

Melissa Allen (Surline Junior High)

Kevin Blasy

Stacy Card (Rose City Junior High)

Jennifer Foulke

James Goodwin

Janelle Hoekstra

Matthew Klempp (Grayling Middle School)

Kimberly Lawrence (Roscommon Middle School)

Paraj Mandrekar 

Robert Martinez (Houghton Lake Middle School)

Yuko Miyazaki 

Nathan Neilitz (Fairview High School)

Thomas Nichols (Roscommon Middle School)

Margie Ohse 

Joseph Ostrowski 

Gwen Quigley (Rose City Junior High)

Kimberly Renner (Surline Junior High)

Chuck Shereda

Jerry Shore (St. Joseph Parochial School)

Philip Simon (Surline Junior High)

Daniel Smith (Houghton Lake Middle School)

Paul Solomon (Roscommon Middle School)

Dylan Spratling 

Kim Steckling (Roscommon Middle School)

Jon Taylor 

Melody Templeton 

Brian Tierney 

Greg VanderVeen 

Nicole White (St. Joseph Parochial School)

There were a handful of other students who commuted back and forth each day, but those above names were the kids who chose to stay in the dorms, spending hot nights in muted red brick buildings in the summer of “Round and Round” by Ratt and “When Doves Cry” by Prince, the summer between middle school and high school where I learned as much as I could while being a goofy supplicant to the cool kid (Tom Nichols) and silently crushing on the cute girl (Gwen Quigley) and thinking about what I wanted my future to be, for I knew all about my present.

In my bedroom at home, where the washer and dryer occupied a corner of my limited space, I read comic books and Stephen King novels and invented three-act scenarios for my Lego and Star Wars and G.I. Joe figures, an idea factory of one breathing in dryer lint on wash days. I hoped that I would one day get to write or perform some of the stories playing out in plastic and percolating in my head, but it never happened. However, thumbing through the box of clumsy cursive scribblings from my first go-round at the Midwest Talent Search, I remember the gift of seeing the first glimpses of life at the next level of development, what I imagined life to be at a certain age with certain skills, thinking that MTS was the first step to something other. And I continue to hope that young people of all iterations are able to have even one day of those three weeks in July that I enjoyed, where futures were made and fun was had.