Me and My Vote - v

This has gone on far too long, but I've never really thought about it chronologically, so I hope you'll bear with me as the story unwinds. 

After graduation, I went home. The Vietnam War was raging, university campuses had been shut down all over the country, and while all of that dissent concerned me and continued to interest me, it didn't include me personally now. I was out. I was 4-F. I was not going to be drafted. 'Nam wouldn't have been an option even if I wanted it to be. 

I'd graduated. I had a college degree, was licensed to teach, but I hadn't looked for a job that spring because the matter of the draft made planning difficult--not impossible, but difficult. Furthermore, I was trained to teach in a Christian high school, but at that point in my life I had no desire whatsoever to teach in a Christian school.

I grew up in what remained of a tribe, an ethnic and religious family I didn't know existed until I showed up on the campus of one of its educational institutions. I was Dutch Reformed, or Dutch Calvinist. When I first arrived on the campus, I don't think I knew that. Regardless, in 1970, the officialdom of that tribe--the ruling council--was made up of sober conservatives (think the Dutch Masters on cigar boxes) who ruled the roost and had no time for long hair, beads, and Beetles, thought all of that counter-cultural stuff not only "animalistic" (as Professsor Magoo maintained), but "anti-normative," a tribal word that meant, roughly, conduct not only unbecoming and unwise, but a kind of violation of the laws of God.

A few contrary minds had begun to appear, a few faculty voices that began to question the stiff Republicanism the powers-that-be simply determined to be the true scriptural, biblical, and thus "Christian" way. Those voices began to question whether there wasn't more involved in political thinking at that point in our national saga than the ancient "divine right" theory, which argued that God himself had chosen Richard Nixon to be President, a fact which made dissent apostate. Needless to say, those profs were the ones to whom I lent my favor.

But I went home after graduation, alienated from the tribe, jobless, without even a smidgeon of sense about my future, no girlfriend--I'd got dear-John-ed even without courtesy of a letter. I went home because there was nowhere else to go. 

My political views were alien to my parents', who never really stepped out of line from the staunch conservatism that had long roots in the sandy lakeshore soil,  within its churches especially. My alienation occasionally led to quarreling, but no slammed doors. Even back then, I would have said I had good parents--they were, in my estimation, as blind as so many others to what was going on in the streets all around.

Almost immediately, I took a job with the crew putting in the new interstate between Milwaukee and Green Bay, I-43. I worked with the gang that put down sod on the string of overpasses between, say, Belgium and Sheboygan. It was the hardest work I'd ever done in my life. All day long we'd cut and roll sod balls from some river banks west of the lakeshore, truck them all back to the unpaved highway, then unload and lug them up the steep sides of overpasses and underpasses, nothing but soft dirt under our feet, straight up hill or down. Made good money, but sometimes I'd get home, after six, walk to the side of the house, get out the hose, sit in the grass, hose myself off, then stay there, just lie there, every last muscle in my body moaning. 

When we worked up toward Sheboygan, the boss told me I was welcome to stay with them as they moved farther and farther north, but I'd spent too many nights so tired I couldn't sleep, over-tired, if that makes sense. But, hey!--I was a teacher.

Someone, somewhere told me, I'm sure, about the Milwaukee Journal's classified ads, which included teacher openings across the state.  I'd done very well as a student teacher. Kids liked me--I didn't know they would, but they did. A couple days after my stint had begun, the cooperating teacher simply up and left for Montana, told me--and I assume his administration--that his brother was ill. The plain fact of the matter is, as impossible as this might sound, my cooperating teacher never once saw me in his classroom. 

When I went to him after the five-week stint and reminded him that he'd never been in my classroom, he smiled gingerly. He was--and I knew it--a master teacher my students both respected and loved. Shelp, his name was, and theater was his forte. "I know what kind of teacher you are," he told me when we talked, "because my students tell me." I got an A.  

Mid-July I applied for jobs and interviewed three places--one "up north" in Wisconsin--I don't remember the town. Another was St. John's Military Academy, in Delafield, an interesting place, but I didn't think it would be a good fit for either my politics or my tribal history. I wasn't offered the job, and that was just fine.

The third place that looked over my papers was a rural school in far southwest Wisconsin, a place called Blackhawk, in a tiny burg named South Wayne, pretty much straight east of Dubuque. I knew nothing about the place. I had never been anywhere near that corner of the state, but I knew small-town America and I assumed I could get along in rural Wisconsin. I was just four years out of my own small-town public high school. 

The superintendent did all the hiring, told me he liked my credentials--I could teach English, coach basketball, and do the high school drama.  I fit their needs. When he said that, I had no idea what he was saying would be absolutely impossible to accomplish by a first-year teacher. During my interview, I never met any other teacher or even the principal of the high school, but the two of us--his name was Batchelor, I remember--did just fine until late in the conversation. 

"Says here on one of your recommendations that you've shown yourself to be given to some radical views," he told me. 

I had no idea some prof had said that, but I wasn't totally surprised. Those recommendations were written for Christian school administrators, not supers at public schools. 

"Care to explain?" he said.

I told him I'd gone to a very religious school (he'd never heard of Dordt), a place that didn't like its students drinking beer. 

Now consider: I was interviewing for a job in a Wisconsin high school, where lots of students were from local dairies or family-run cheese factories. Beer drinking was as everyday as deer hunting. South Wayne had only one eatery--a local pub. If I needed to stay in town between coaching frosh basketball and practicing the play, I ate there. That the new teacher at the high school sat up at the bar and had a frozen pizza and a PBR was no big deal in South Wayne in 1970. Not only that, the district was less than an hour from Madison, where the university had been shut down by sometimes destructive anti-war protest. 

"What it means to tell you," I told him, "is that I've been known to drink beer and talk openly about it."

He didn't believe me.

"Seriously," I said. "I didn't always abide by the rules of the college, politically either."

I'm sure he would have had more doubts about an applicant who was a teetotal-er than he did about me. 

I got the job.