MICHIGAN: Prodigy's Progress

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At a gangly 14, Soapy was shipped off to Salisbury (preparatory) School in Connecticut. There he gravely determined that he would get good grades. To the regular curriculum he added a special course in Greek, came out of Salisbury with the highest grade average the school has ever had, before or since. "In my experience," recalled Soapy's old Latin and Greek teacher Samuel Carr, last week, "most schoolboys, when they excel, are just precocious. But with him it was a little different. He was very thorough. He just thought things through ... He had a social gift and more breeding than most boys, and it rather amazed me. because he came from the Midwest and you expected the best breeding among the boys from the East."

Young Republican. When Soapy went on to Princeton in 1929, he deliberately shut himself off without a roommate so he would not have to waste study time in senseless gabbling. With mathematical exactness, he budgeted his time among his studies, sports, activities and an occasional social whirl. Once, he decided that the time had come for him to know something about drinking. (Today he rarely drinks anything stronger than milk.) "We stopped one night and bought a bottle of gin, and one of Scotch and some champagne," says Soapy's old friend Standish Backus Jr. "We took the booze and went to a hotel and holed up for some serious experimental drinking. Soapy wanted to find out how much he could drink without getting sick. Four hours later we had the answer to that. But Soapy didn't seem to mind. He just checked it off to experience."

By graduation (1933), Soapy had made Phi Beta Kappa, had skied, wrestled, played basketball, rowed on the junior varsity crew, and won two football letters. He also won. the presidency of virtually every organization he touched—including, to his later chagrin, the presidency of the Young Republicans.

Politics bit him hard. "If God and Mammon are willing," he wrote Stan Backus one summer, "I'm going to play some part in government. I'm praying to God for brains and faith, and I'm going to try to wrench away some of Mammon's treasure for power to do things."

Blind Date. Soapy's inevitable next move was into law, and he enrolled in the fall of 1934 in the University of Michigan Law School. At Ann Arbor he fell under two major influences: 1) the spell of the New Deal, and 2) the spell of a slender, quick-witted social-service student from Ypsilanti named Nancy Quirk. Nancy and Soapy met one night on a blind date. Like Soapy, she was naturally friendly, bright and outspoken. Like Soapy, she hated social airs and petty pretenses. They were married in 1937.