His parents enrolled him in a public high school, where he maintained a 
steady 2.0 average out of a possible 4. The coursework was so stunningly inane, 
the other children so dull, that Finkle-McGraw developed a poor attitude. He 
earned some repute as a wrestler and cross-country runner, but never exploited 
it for sexual favors, which would have been easy enough in the promiscuous 
climate of the times. He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes 
a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest 
way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of 
behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's 
life accordingly.