Every year at Thanksgiving, the Kid’s mind drifts back to the late ’60s – a long time and worlds away from where he is now.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving 1966,the Kid, barely 18,was in a reform school in New Jersey called Annandale. He was taking classes for a General Equivalency Diploma, mostly because it got him out of washing pots in the mess hall.

The Kid was no dummy – though he was rebellious beyond belief and did a lot of stupid things – so he figured he’d be able to pass the test and get his GED. Who knows, he thought, it might come in handy some day.

The test was given in two sections a couple of days apart. On the day of the first half, Joe Tichy, the director of the reformatory’s education program, told the dozen kids in the class that anyone who got in trouble and was put in solitary between the first and second parts would not be allowed to finish.

Of course the Kid immediately got into trouble for cursing at a guard and was taken, in handcuffs, to the segregation unit. He was angry at himself for blowing his chance to get a GED, but mostly he was angry at the world.

There were no beds in segregation, just a mattress on the floor at night, so the kid was sitting on the cold floor when a guard turned the key in the cell door the next morning and Joe Tichy walked in.

“You know, you aced the first part of the test,” said Tichy, a short, slightly paunchy man of about 40 with glasses and thinning brown hair. “There’s no question you would have gotten your GED.”

The Kid knew he’d screwed up, but he wasn’t going to show weakness to anyone. “So what?” he said. “Nobody cares.”

Tichy looked the Kid in the eye and said quietly, “I care.”

The Kid looked away. Tichy began to speak: “If I can get the administration to go along with it, will you take the second half here?”

“Sure,” the Kid said, trying not to show his surprise. “Yeah.”

Tichy returned the next day with the second part of the test and the Kid ended up getting an equivalency diploma.

Flash forward three years to a little before Thanksgiving 1969. The Kid was nearing the end of a 16-month sentence in Bordentown, a youthful-offenders prison. He was just about to turn 21, he was locked in a wing with the worst-behaved cons in the place, and he was still rebelling against everything and everybody.

He’d been doing okay. He’d just gotten transferred to a new tier and gotten a new jailhouse job, working on a labor gang picking apples and potatoes and sometimes working in the dairy.

But lately things were beginning to bother him – little things that never affected him before – and he frequently found himself in trouble for minor infractions.

Just before Thanksgiving, he’d broken some minor rule and had to go before the disciplinary panel, referred to as court line. It was no big deal, the Kid thought; he’d just get a couple of movie misses.

He stood across from the cranky old deputy keeper, who was sitting on the other side of a heavy wooden table flanked by two other guards.

“How do you like your new tier?” the deputy keeper asked.

“I don’t like it,” the Kid sneered.

“How do you like your new job?” the deputy keeper asked.

“I don’t like that, either,” the Kid replied.

The deputy keeper’s face reddened as he glared at the Kid. He slammed his fist on the table and snarled: “If you don’t like it, don’t come back!”

Hmm, the Kid thought, maybe the old guy’s onto something here.

Lives don’t change overnight, so there were still a couple of bumps in the road, but the Kid eventually went to college, landed a string of increasingly better jobs, and raised a family.

Most of the people he grew up with didn’t do so well. Some died of drug overdoses, some of AIDS, and a couple were murdered. A few are still in jail, and a guy he knew in passing from Annandale spent time on death row before the Supreme Court overturned capital punishment in 1972.

So every year around this time, the Kid gives thanks to Joe Tichy, who was willing to bend the rules for a smart but wild teenager, and to a deputy keeper whose unintended words of advice helped him to see there was a better way to live his life.

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