Before the White House, Kennedy was a high-school prankster

Years before he captained the torpedo boat PT-109, ran for office or set the United States on a path to put a man on the moon, President John F. Kennedy was a troublesome teen whose hijinks nearly got him kicked out of his prestigious boarding school.

The scion of a wealthy Boston family, Kennedy spent his mid-teens at Connecticut’s elite Choate Rosemary Hall, where he excelled at history and literature – but infuriated the school’s headmaster by organising pranks as a member of an unofficial school club known as “The Muckers.”

Those details of the early life of the 35th president, whose term was cut short by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas in 1963, emerge in a new exhibit at Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, timed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth on May 29, 1917.

Pages from a high school scrapbook, diligently filled out by the man who would go on to become the first Roman Catholic president, show he loved ancient history, music and football, as well as “beefing,” slang for complaining or arguing. Despite his later fame as an orator, he never got higher than the middling grade of C+ in public speaking, according to the school.

“Got shot at today for calling an old farmer a bad name,” reads an entry written by a 17-year-old Kennedy on Oct 19, 1934. “Almost got hit.”

Kennedy’s chair from the US Senate. Source: Reuters/Brian Snyder

The scrapbook pages are among 40 Kennedy relics never before publicly exhibited, with notes extending to his years at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, before his World War II service aboard torpedo boats and well before his first successful run for Congress in 1947.

Kennedy went on the serve in the Senate before being elected president in 1960, at the start of one of the most tumultuous decades in United States history.

The museum’s curator, Stacey Bredhoff, said:

“That’s why I so love this scrapbook, because it is so revealing about who he was at the time.”

Kennedy and his prankster friends went head-to-head with Choate’s headmaster, George St. John, in his years at the school. The “Muckers” club took its name from a speech in which St. John excoriated pranksters, using the label applied to Irish immigrants whose only work was shoveling up horse manure.

The group took the idea and ran with it, commissioning gold shovel pins and hatching a plot to pile horse manure in the school gymnasium.

“George St. John caught wind of it,” the school’s archivist Judy Donald said. “Even though the prank never materialised, it was enough they would even consider such a thing, so he threatened to expel them all.”

St. John eventually relented, according to Donald.

The details of the group’s successful pranks may be lost to time, but Donald said an oft-told tale that a young Kennedy blew up a school toilet with a powerful firecracker known as a cherry bomb is not true. While that incident did occur, it was the work of another student a decade later, she said.

“St. John was understandably angry,” Donald said. “But JFK was not responsible for that one.”

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