Bob Bestler | Bullied victim is successful, the bully still a jock

Hearing recently about so many young deaths that have resulted from bullying took me back to another time when I was involved in a bullying incident.

Sad to report, I was one of the bullies, not the bullied.

I have no idea why we decided to pick on this particular prey, a kind of nerdy classmate I will call Marshall. Maybe he had said or done something we didn't like. Maybe he was the smartest kid in class and we were, like, dumb jocks. Who knows?

Anyway, on a cold Minnesota winter day in our 13th or maybe 14th year, as we left school, three of us chased and tackled our prey, then proceeded to rub snow in his face and down his shirt.

It was, I guess, the meanest thing we could think of doing. It brought tears to his eyes and that was enough for us. Mission accomplished.

It was really a small incident that lasted no more than five minutes, but through all these years, I have not forgotten it.

This may be a reason why:

A few years later, while serving in Japan, I picked up a copy of Stars & Stripes, and there, in a two-page centerfold, were several pictures of 21-year-old Marshall being wined and dined by the U.S. Navy aboard a ship in the South China Sea.

It turned out he had built something called a MARK V Rocket, an 11-foot liquid-fueled missile that he had constructed in his basement back in our hometown.

The rocket was described, according to a Life Magazine article featuring Marshall, as the most sophisticated rocket ever built by an amateur. It had been successfully launched by the Navy at its China Lake test facility.

That same year, 1961, Marshall narrated a half-hour film about studying science in school. The film was introduced by President John F. Kennedy as part of push for space exploration. Yeah, who's crying now?

Marshall worked briefly with the Navy, then with Honeywell Inc. in Minneapolis.

Eventually he formed a high-tech company and received patents for dozens of scientific devices and procedures he invented, things that I could not pronounce, much less describe.

I don't expect that Marshall has totally cut his ties with his hometown, but as far as I can tell he has not attended a class reunion. One year he sent his regrets, saying he was busy with his company.

I sure hope he's not worried about the three bullies. While he was off doing great things for mankind, all we were doing was turning into even dumber old ex-jocks. So it goes.