I've been visiting my 85-year-old father this week.  He reads voraciously, and would be well described as an active and mentally alert gentleman for his age.  He is a self-taught student of history and can discuss mankind's various chapters without pause and with great understanding of underlying socio-economic factors.  During the course of our many conversations we discussed something I had not considered before.  While discussing our extended family, we observed that he had fathered three children, all college graduates, two of whom hold advanced degrees.  He is also the son of two college graduates, both educators, and all of his four older siblings have graduated from college.  My dad attended a yearlong interior design program following his service during WWII, and later entered the family furniture business.   His lack of a college education stood out in contrast to a family so obviously committed to the virtues of higher education.

I inquired as to why he, a man who enjoys reading and learning, of all the people in his immediate family had not attended college.  He told me he never really enjoyed school as a child, and when pressed to elaborate he told me a couple of things I'd not heard before.  He began his schooling in the early 1930s during the depths of the depression and starting school a year early, found himself in the same class as his older brother throughout his school years.  Being a younger kid in his class, he felt like he had to work extra hard to be taken seriously by his classmates.  He then related a story which he recalls taking place during his first day of school as a child.  As he sat at his desk, one of the other first graders was walking down the aisle past his desk and tripped as he passed my father.  The boy's chin was badly cut from the fall, and the class teacher accused my father of purposefully tripping him.  She berated and punished him according to her perception of the event.  During the course of her harangue of my father, in the spirit of the hard economic times they all shared, she remarked something to the effect of 'business-owner's kids think they can get away with anything'.  So my dad, the son of a Republican businessman, as a first grader in a public school felt disenfranchised, much as the working class had been disenfranchised during the presidency of Herbert Hoover, during the years leading up to the stock market crash of '29, and the subsequent economic depression.  That one event colored my dad's feelings about school throughout his formal education.  When his parents asked him in his senior year in high school if he wanted to continue on to college as his four siblings had before him, my father declined.

My dad ran into the grown man who he had allegedly tripped at his high school class's 40th reunion, and mentioned the prominent scar on his chin.  His classmate good-naturedly replied that he had acquired the scar when he was a first grader when some kid had tripped him, but added that he couldn't remember who it had been.  Being the scrupulously honest man he is, my dad informed him that he had been the other child, and that whatever had transpired, his 'complicity' had been wholly unintentional.  They both laughed about the vicissitudes of life and continued their individual journeys through life on paths they had chosen, and paths that had chosen them.  It strikes me how two children were scarred on that fateful day during the depression in a western Pennsylvania schoolroom.  One had a cut chin that would bear testimony to his injury for the rest of his life, while the other would internalize a sense that school was a hostile place, and wait patiently till he could be done with it 12 years thence in spite of a love of learning.    



Note:  Once again, I'm traveling today, so if I will check in here as I am able to.