Genius

Cam signed up for the Storytelling Contest at his elementary school. He was chosen to represent his class at the 4th grade contest and told this story from my dad's personal history:

(This was the only photo I got before I started recording. Cam was putting the mic around his neck. The hat he has on was my dad's fisherman hat [—not that my dad ever went fishing] :)

GENIUS

In school, I flunked English every single year: 7^th, 8^th, 9^th, 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th. I’d flunk one semester and have to make it up every year. So I always had two English classes—that’s why I’m so good in English!

I had grown up in and out of about 10 foster homes. My mom was an alcoholic and married and divorced 7 times. When I was about to graduate from high school, my mother and stepfather sat me down and said they expected me to join the Navy and move out. They boxed up my clothes and set them out on the front porch the day after graduation.

I bought a 1935 Chrysler, believe it or not, for $15 dollars. I got in the car one evening, not knowing where I was headed, just driving away from San Diego, my hometown. I saw a golf course with a restaurant called the Royal Tahitian. So I decided to park in the parking lot and go in and buy a candy bar and think about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

I saw a “help wanted” sign and so I asked the hostess what they were looking for. She said a bus boy, and it paid $1.15 an hour, which was below minimum wage. I said, “Yeah, I can do that.” Because I had no place to live and no place to go, I worked two shifts, sixteen straight hours, and then I’d go out in the parking lot where my car was and sleep. So that’s what I did for two weeks until I got paid and could afford a hotel room.

In the meantime, there was a big wrestling tournament that was coming up in Imperial Valley and I knew that 99% of the kids would be college kids, from USC, UCLA, and junior colleges. So I thought I’d like to wrestle some of these college kids and see how I could do (I was captain of the wrestling team in high school). I went out to the tournament, wrestled it and won.

When I finished the last match I went over to get my gear together. This guy came up to me and introduced himself as the wrestling coach from BYU. He asked me where I was going to go to college and wrestle. I said I wasn’t going to college, and he said, “Why?” and I said, “Well first of all you have to be a genius to get into college, plus I don’t have the money.” And he said, “Well if I could give you a full-ride scholarship, would you come to BYU up in Utah?” I said, “What’s a full-ride scholarship?” He said, “It means the college would pay for your tuition and books and a room for you to live in plus board—food every day.” I thought,  “Man!” and so I said, “Yeah, you bet I would.”

So I gave him my address and everything and went back up to where I was living near Pamona, California. After, I kind of just blew it off and thought it was just a “pipe dream.” But low and behold one day I came home from work and there was a letter of admittance and another letter awarding the full-ride scholarship from BYU. So I thought, “I’ll go up and see how I can do wrestling for a college and see a little bit of the world. Then after they see how stupid I am and flunk me out, I’ll go back to my normal life.”

So one evening, I finished work at one o’clock in the morning and walked out to the freeway, Route 66, and hitchhiked all the way to Provo, Utah. This was January, and when I got into Utah a little past St. George, it had been snowing and it was bitterly cold, and I just had on tennis shoes, and some Levis, a t-shirt and a light windbreaker jacket and so I was just freezing. A farmer with no windshield had dropped me off in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

As I walked along it got colder and colder—my feet were numb, my hands were numb, and my face was numb. I started becoming really worried about freezing to death. I thought I heard a car coming up the highway, so I turned around and was walking backwards looking for it, and I stumbled onto something. I looked down at it, and saw it was a cow that was frozen stiff with its legs frozen straight out, and that really scared me.

So for the next couple of miles as I walked, I started thinking about what my friends might think at my funeral if I froze to death. I had picked up a couple of toothpicks at a diner I had stopped at, and so I decided I would put the toothpicks inside my mouth in such a way as to force me to smile. I got kind of a kick out of that, thinking that if I died with a smile on my face, it would really be funny at the funeral.

But I was able to make it all the way up to Provo. So that’s how I started college. I graduated a few years later and went on to a graduate degree in Public Administration. I married a beautiful girl I met at college, and we had six children. One of my daughters had Cam Briner Evans, my namesake. As you can see, Cam is awesome and really smart (and good looking), so my second chance at getting a good education got my life started on the right foot.

Turns out, I’m a genius.

And so are you.

Thank you!