As a youngster I was painfully shy. I tended to hang around with the two or three people I knew, and even when I played team sports I never participated in the team chatter. When I started school, because my mother had taught me to read and do basic arithmetic, during my first four years in the classroom the teachers mostly gave me books from the higher grades to read, had me go to the blackboard (which were actually black in the 1950s) and show the other students how to work problems, and otherwise left me to my own devices.
