Resolute Youth

When my maternal grandfather was a very young man, his mother died, and his father, married a second time, and started another family.  As those things so often happen the first born son did not get along particularly well with his step-mother, and took it upon himself to leave home and set off for Boston.  He was living in Gorham Maine where his father had received a land grant; the family had immigrated north from Truro on the Cape.  The boy walked the 104.50 miles (which MapQuest calculates as a 41 hour hike), and family legend has it that when he arrived at the Boston Common he sat down where now there is the Public Garden and dangled his feet in the waters of the Charles River estuary to soothe them after the long walk.  His counterpart, my paternal grandfather, arrived from Germany as a teenaged boy with his cousin in the mid 40's of the nineteenth century, and knowing no English made his way to Chicago, perhaps by walking and working in fields along the way for shelter and food.  He got his citizenship by enlisting in the Union Army when he was 19, and his education by apprenticing himself to a Chicago businessman, and became enough of a success to sit on the Oak Park School Board and have a local grade school named after him. When he was in his mid forties he went back for a visit to Germany.  The journal he wrote of the trip was in English; one wonders how well he communicated with his father.   He died young in an accident, and left a small estate and lots of progeny who had to be farmed out since their mother did not have the means to raise them all.  The oldest sister Hannah took over a good deal of the housekeeping and mothering.  An older boy who had gone through the University of Wisconsin and their law school, and was now in practice in Chicago supported my father as an undergraduate at Wisconsin, and the family story is that my father, who became ardent about acting and wanted to do a theater major was summoned to Chicago by his older brother and warned sternly that he would not pay for acting, only something practical.  Howard became a surgeon.  When I was fifteen I ran up an enormous bill at a record shop while I was a student at Andover.  Mother made me pay it off by working on the building and grounds crew of the public school system two summers.  I knew later on that this had been a good thing when I was denied a scholarship my second year in graduate school at Harvard and I set forth and got a job as a night watchman at Jordan Marsh, a Boston department store.  Harvard students were not supposed to work, and many of them had no idea of hourly wage labor.  I well remember at a reunion my wife's dancing with the man who married my nominal "girl friend" of junior high school days, and talking later of his telling her about his car tow business, when I suddenly realized that she had never talked socially with someone like that nor herself ever worked at all other than as an architect.  Her parents gave her a small trust fund when she was a teenager so she would never have to pester them for money for her clothes, books, etc.  It was these trust funds that her best friend at Radcliffe always talked about when she reminisced about my wife and her classmates, she herself from an Italian/Irish working class family who had worked every summer for the money she took to Radcliffe as her spending money.  I have taught at Yale and Stanford and I have taught at Lehman College up in the Bronx; the challenges to my Lehman students not only with their working to raise money to live on, but their obligations to help support the family if not with money then with time spent performing tasks, has always seemed to me such a miserable and unfair barrier on the road to success and for many students from ethnic groups other than Anglo Saxon and thus obviously or latently disparaged a subtle or not so subtle hint of their incapacities.  When I went to university the GI Bill was in full gallop and classrooms were filled with men who were being decently supported for being there and thought themselves second to none for what they had done for their country which then brought them into the classroom.  They were so much more at ease because the GI Bill was not unlike the present day expectations of the bourgeoisie: they have a right to try for excellence in education.   That's the way it should be for everyone.