My Mom and Dad, 61 Years Out

My parents were married on this day, 61 years ago.

Sixty-one. Jeepers. A lot of people have lived, and died, in that time. So I'd like to celebrate that right now: They're still here. Lots of my friends can't say that anymore.

Actually, they're pretty amazing in more than one way. And some of my inspiration for rising in the National Education Association belongs to my attachment to them.

My mother lost her father in a car accident in the early 1930s. She was the oldest of three. The rest of the family struggled through the depression years in Shawano, Wisconsin, about half an hour's drive (at this point) west of Green Bay. It wasn't easy for anybody, and it had to have been incredibly challenging there.

Mom was a very good student, editor of the school annual, and one of those really highly respected young ladies that our high schools have always produced. She had a chance to go to college, but couldn't because the family needed the money. It broke her heart.

But then, it was in search of the new direction that her life was taking that she met this sailor who'd been out of the service for a while, and had become a toolmaker's apprentice (when they still had such things), in Milwaukee. Apparently (says the legend), they were bowling with different people and started wising off to each other, so things haven't changed all that much.

Dad had quit high school to go into the service in 1944, just before his 18th birthday. He served on a destroyer escort, the U.S.S. Booth, through the end of the war, doing convoy and support duty.

It's what happened at the end that still strikes me with admiration. The Booth went through its post-war decommissioning by docking in Jacksonville, FL, in 1946. The officers and crew were going to have a dinner party to celebrate.

But the ship had four black stewards who, of course, had gone to their battle stations like everybody else when that awful siren had gone off again and again during the war. And since the party took place in the Deep South, and since Jim Crow was alive and well and would remain so for quite some time, the commander of the ship was told that the four black stewards couldn't participate in that dinner party in that hall.

The commander acquiesed. Dad didn't like it, and told him off. "They put it on the line like everybody else," he later said.

I thought that was pretty neat; not yet quite 20 years old, my old man stood up to his commander in the name of fairness and justice. Without knowing it--and Mom had to tell the story, otherwise we wouldn't have known it ourselves--he was sending something forward to his second son.

(I didn't say anything about this, either, until the last two years of my term; then, knowing that I wasn't going to run for an officer's position, I felt I could say such a thing and work it into speeches without it being too greatly dissected politically--although all things are for someone in my position, at least a little.)

Mom and Dad sent four sons through college, and it was going to happen, like it or not. I recall a conversation I'd had with Dad on the porch of the lodge at which we used to stay in Sayner, Wisconsin, on one August afternoon with the balmy temperature of about 58 or so, and drizzling. Dad was carving (which he still likes to do, and is great at it, having that toolmaker's pride of precision) a totem pole that he would dedicate to his four sons. I, wondering if this was relevant at the time, sat next to him on the bench of the screened-in porch, and asked him whether he thought I should go to college.

He demurred, saying that that was pretty much up to me. Mom was at the stove, not ten feet away. "He's going to college!" she said, with voice raised. And that was that.

It was that way because that was the way so many of us saw this country: as always moving forward, as having the next generation better than the last--smarter, richer, more worldly. I said it at a celebration at a Minnesota college in the spring of 2008, and I'll say it here again: They're supposed to be smarter than we are. Nobody was afraid of that back then, or at least, I knew of no one who was. (It's different now.)

The one way we knew that the next generation was better, was, simply, the educational level accomplished because we also knew that it signalled the decreasing need for kids to stay out in the field, and get into the classroom. Mom's grandmother got to the 5th grade; my grandmother, her mom, got to the 8th; Mom got through high school. Next?

And to get that money together four separate times, Mom went to work--in the Grafton public school system, as a principal's assistant. Which is to say: She ran three schools. The best ones do, you know. We need good support staff. Always have, always will.

She stayed for a few more years after my youngest brother got through college, but of course retired. She waited for Dad to retire when he got to be 65, and then, from the back of her mind, she renewed the dream she'd had back in 1942, when economics and tough luck held her back: she would go to college.

And so she did. She went for two years of classes to Concordia University in Mequon (we had settled in Grafton, a short distance to drive), being given credit for "life experiences," and taking advantage of being something of a writer herself.

Some of the best conversations we had between us were about her professors and the substances of the courses she took. She discussed those professors she liked and those she didn't like--which, at times, forced to me to take their positions--"He's the teacher, Mom"--in their defense. Afterwards, I had to smile.

At the age of 67, in 1991, she received her Associate Degree in Liberal Arts. We were supposed to observe decorum in the pomp-and-circumstance fashion when she approached for her diploma, mortar board and all, but we didn't; we hooted like the Brewers really had won the World Series.

We cheered for the distance travelled, for the hope that never faded, for a life that had come full circle. We cheered, and I cheer today, 61 years on.

Mom and Dad represent what's happened, and supposed to continue to happen, in this country. That, besides a grateful and proud family, and one member of which who took those examples and rose to the top of the largest education union in this country.

They left that behind, too, along with four children, ten grandchildren, and now even three great-grandchildren. The day after the nation gave thanks, I give thanks again.

Mister Mark