How To Raise An American

Myrna's American Tale

      

Unfortunately, I only know the broad outlines of the story of my immigrant grandparents’ arrival in America. What I do know is that my father’s parents came from Hungary and arrived in this country at the end of the 19th Century. My grandfather became a pants-presser who worked very hard in a garment factory, six days a week. My grandmother raised four sons and one daughter. My father was the youngest.
       They soon bought some land and had a small farm on Staten Island, which is still the most rural of New York’s five boroughs and then, truly, was the country. Living in Manhattan today with its skyscrapers and endless traffic, it’s hard for me to imagine that one set of my grandparents were farmers just a few miles from here.
       My father started work when he was thirteen, just after finishing eighth grade. He worked for a fabric company and eventually, after saving enough money, started his own small business and became quite a successful businessman. He never complained about having to leave school early and he did go back and get his high school degree later.  But, it was just expected that he would work and so he worked and worked hard.
       My mother was born in England and came here as a young girl. Her father had come to America first, like many men did at the time and he later sent for my grandmother and their six children, four girls and two boys.
       After high school, my mother worked as a secretary at the Boy Scouts Association and met my father on a New York subway. And he was so taken with my mom that he went home the night and told his mother that he was sure he had met the woman he was going to marry. In some ways, my family’s story, like so many others, is not very special. My grandparents came here and worked hard. My parents worked hard. They were always very grateful that they had the opportunity to work and achieve what they wanted----a home of their own, cars, the ability to put their children through college, a comfortable retirement.
       In 1995, I was one of the delegates to the UN Conference on Women in Beijing. As I sat there surrounded by delegates from around the world, I thought of my immigrant grandparents, and my father who had gone to work so young. I knew how proud they would have been. I also knew that nowhere else but in the United States could I have had, in one generation, the opportunity to be the official representative of my country at a world conference of women.

Angels in Straw Hats

     

In April 2002, an F-4 tornado cut a 64-mile path across southeast Maryland leaving three dead, more than a hundred injured and $100 million in damages. La Plata, Maryland, a small 19th Century town of old Victorian homes and pretty streets lined with 30 foot oaks, found itself in the deadly tornado’s epicenter. In a matter of minutes, La Plata looked more like a war zone than a prosperous county seat with few of the city’s homes and buildings undamaged. Many were destroyed.
    The next morning, however, God answered a lot of prayers when groups of Amish men, farmers and carpenters from nearby St. Mary’s County, began arriving to pitch in. They put up tarps on battered roofs and cleared away the remnants of the town’s once towering trees that now blocked the main roads and side streets. The town would have been lost without their help in those first few days, but their biggest challenge lay ahead.
      Despite the terrible destruction everywhere else, in the center of town, one of the local landmarks was still standing proudly – the more-than-a-century-old Christ Episcopal Church. And though the old stone walls had inexplicably withstood the 158 mile an hour winds, most of the church’s Gothic-timbered roof was gone. That was a big problem. Replacing it was going to take a small miracle because the hundred-year-old timbers that were needed required special milling – a bit of a lost art in the age of Home Depot.
      When the time came to rebuild the church roof, it was the Amish, once again, who came to the rescue. They still knew the old ways, and within a few weeks these quiet men had milled the special timbers and rebuilt the roof better than before. When offers of payment were made, not one of the angels would take a dime. Instead, they simply said, “Pass it on."

An American Tale: When Every Vote Counts

          The last couple of Presidential elections have proven that every vote counts. But so did one recent election in Hillsdale, Michigan when an 18-year-old, Michael Sessions, ran for Mayor and won.  Michael, who became the youngest Mayor in America, in charge of running a town with a $20 million budget, won his election by two, yes, just two votes--670 to 668.  An enterprising high school senior, Michael registered to vote the day after his eighteenth birthday.  But he wanted to do more than just vote; he wanted to run for office; and he wanted to win.  Michael was too late to be on the ballot, so he started his own write-in campaign for Mayor with $700 he earned from a summer job.  He campaigned energetically and won a key endorsement, the support of the town’s firefighters.  (Before endorsing his candidacy, the head of the group called one of his teachers to check on Michael’s 3.25 GPA!)
          His parents were very supportive except when his enthusiastic campaigning threatened to get the better of him. He spent so much time on the chilly streets knocking on doors, ignoring his mother's pleas for him to wear a coat, that he ended up in a hospital emergency room with bronchitis.  But by then his “big mo” had become unstoppable.  And who does he think gave him those two deciding votes?  “My parents, of course,” he said.  Yes, even in the family, every vote counts.

Showing The Flag

      To help your children understand the special meaning of our flag tell them this story about Senator John McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.  One of his fellow prisoners was a young man named Mike Christian, who came from a small town near Selma, Alabama.   At 17, Mike enlisted in the US Navy.  He later earned a commission by going to Officer Training School. Then he became a Naval Flight Officer and was shot down and captured in 1967.
     The Vietnamese allowed prisoners to receive packages from home. In some of these packages were handkerchiefs, scarves and other items of clothing.  Mike made himself a bamboo needle. And then, over a couple of months, he created an American flag, using what he had been sent, and sewed it on the inside of his shirt.
     McCain told it this way, “Every afternoon, before we had a bowl of soup, we would hang Mike's shirt on the wall of the cell and say the Pledge of Allegiance. I know the Pledge of Allegiance may not seem the most important part of our day now, but I can assure you that in that stark cell it was indeed the most important and meaningful event.”
     One day, the Vietnamese guards searched the cell and discovered Mike's shirt with the flag sewn inside and confiscated this symbol of America’s freedom and one American’s courage. That evening, they returned and beat Mike Christian severely for more than two hours.
     “The cell in which we lived had a concrete slab in the middle on which we slept,” McCain recalled.  “Four naked light bulbs hung in each corner of the room.  That night, I looked in the corner of the room, and sitting there beneath a dim light bulb with a piece of red cloth, another shirt and his bamboo needle, was Mike Christian. He was sitting there with his eyes almost shut from the beating he had received, making another American flag.”
     “He was not making the flag because it made Mike Christian feel better. He was making that flag because he knew how important it was to us to be able to Pledge Allegiance to our flag and our country.”
     Every American child should hear Senator McCain’s story.  Ask your children to think about it the next time they say the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag. 

Chriss Tells A Story: A Veteran's Tale

           

   Not too long after John F. Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States, my family was sitting around the dinner table one night in Sioux City, Iowa, where I was born and raised.  Before dinner, we’d all seen a story on the local evening news about a soldier who had been awarded a medal for bravery.  I was thirteen at the time; but my younger sister, Sue, was only ten and piped up, “Hey, dad.  How come you don’t have any medals?”  My father, a World War II veteran, saw more action than most during his five-year stint as an Army engineer – North Africa, Sicily, Utah Beach, the Battle of the Bulge.   
          Dad, who never spoke of the war, sighed and told my sister that he was, in fact, owed some medals, but he hadn’t bothered to pick them up at the time.  That would have been the end of the story except that my sister sat down the next day and ripped off a letter to the new President telling him, “My father won all these medals in World War II, and he never got any of them.  Could you find them and send them to him?”
          My brother and I thought this was pretty funny, but she got the last laugh.  About six weeks later, a small cardboard box arrived in the mail addressed to my sister with a very official looking label – United States Department of Defense.  When she opened it, she found a letter from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and a raft of medals including a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.   Of course, we bombarded Dad with questions about how he won the Bronze Star, but characteristically, he refused to talk about it saying only, “It wasn’t anything.  I was just doing what I was supposed to do.”   
          Thirty-five years later, in August of 1997, my husband and I took my Dad's first grandson, then just eleven, to Normandy.  There, we rented a car and followed exactly the path my father’s platoon had taken, fighting all the way, from Utah Beach to Cherbourg in the D-Day invasion.  We did it because we wanted Ian to understand the great sacrifice his grandfather and so many others had made for him.  We brought back pictures and mementos for Dad and planned on sharing them at Christmas.  My father died unexpectedly a month after we returned. 
          The local American Legion provided a three-gun salute for Dad’s funeral; and as his casket was lowered, Ian took the sand from Utah Beach he’d carefully saved in a small plastic bag for his grandfather and sprinkled it into the black Iowa earth.