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Bewildered Knight
The Life Story of John Payne, a Man Fighting to Find Himself
The Indian age: The Poyne scion had a real Fort, the Payne home, in which to play Redskins
The military age: At six he switched sides to do his fighting with the Whites
The mechanical age: He built a glider, added a motor, lost the motor, rode for a fall
^massed a fortune of over a million dollars. In the country outside toanoke was Fort Lewis, an enorlous old house with thick walls and rim exterior, but with spacious !ooms and magnificent grounds. I'lJeorge Payne bought it, called in a ■ang of arcTnitects and decorators and transformed it into one of the most leautiful estates in Virginia.
John, who was born in 1912, the bcond of three boys, spent his childood there. It was a completely norlal childhood by simple American tandards, not all happiness but not 11 unhappiness, either; no boy could omplain of such romantic surroundigs, where if you kicked a clod of arlh an arrow-head or a blade of a imahawk was likely to fall out. Tiere was a large swimming pool and le horses; and the woods in sum
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mer were a great, cool world where he could hunt and fish and let his imagination run riot. He could stick a handful of feathers in his hair, smear his face with mud and for the eternity of a child's afternoon go on the warpath against the Whites in the Fort.
In a family of cheerful, extroverted people John turned out to be the shy, the sensitive one. His mother, appreciating this, gave him especial attention, reading to him and teaching him music. He enjoyed these interludes but the world of his own making had a greater reality, peopled as it was from his own imagination.
The person who understood him better than anyone else, as he grew older, was Dr. Carl Block, a local clergyman who was also a great family friend. Dr. Block was the kind of
minister who would appeal to a boy of twelve; he was the antithesis of the pale intellectual, being instead a hearty, robust fellow with a deep voice, who liked to hunt and fish and whose brand of religion was militant and strong. John thought of him as a Right Guy, and decided if this hero represented the ministry, he would like to be a minister too. He was still convinced that the church would be his profession when, two years later, his parents sent him to Episcopal High School in Washington, D. C.
For the first time he stayed away from home, which meant that, also for the first time, he discovered how the other half — or rather the other ninety-eight per cent — lived. Their lives seemed infinitely more exciting than his. Most of his classmates had to work during {Continued on page 88)
i:tober, 1942
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