My mom was a school teacher in the Cleveland Public Schools. She taught first, second, and third graders to read and do math and basic science. Her school was in a poor inner-city neighborhood on the west side. Her kids were the kids left behind as everyone with transferable skills fled a city in a rapid descent into a post-industrial abyss. For my mom, education offered a way out for poor kids at the bottom of society’s ladder. How many lives did my mom change? She had 1000 kids or more come through her classroom while she taught. How many of those kids found confidence in my mom’s confidence in their abilities? How many learned to trust fate because of my mom’s optimism? How many were able to succeed in school because my mom patiently helped them master basic skills that might have been hard for them at first? How many of those students were provided with supplies, with contributions from the Elks and from my mom's own pocket?
She was the first in her family to go to college. She grew up in a poor family in a rural town, born four years before the Great Depression. My mom graduated from high school while the nation was fighting World War 2. She went to work in a factory in nearby Dayton. Someone she worked with - a woman named Nancy Kelly, who my mom subsequently lost touch with - told my mom she was smart enough to succeed in college. She didn't know how to go about applying for college, so she got a ride to nearby Miami University and talked to someone about enrolling. She did. We recently found some of her grade reports from college. In her freshman year she struggled a little, but by her senior year she was getting all A's and B's. She graduated with a major in Psychology.
She didn't become a teacher at first. She moved from her small town in southern Ohio to find work in Cleveland. She worked as a secretary. That's how she met my dad.
My mom often told the story of how her first date with my dad came about. She was working as an executive secretary at a firm in Cleveland. My dad was a salesman who called on her firm. He met my mom one day during a sales call and asked her out. She refused, because she had a policy of not dating men who did business with her firm. Months later my dad came back and found that my mom had left her job to go to a different firm. He didn’t sell to my mom’s new firm, so he looked her up and called. He asked her out for New Years Eve. My mom’s response: New Years Eve was an important night, and she didn’t want to be stuck with a date who couldn’t dance. She proposed a simple challenge: If my dad was willing to go out a few days before New Years Eve and prove he could dance, she’d go out with him on New Years Eve. He agreed. Luckily, for me, and my brothers, and our kids, he passed that test. They were married before the end of that year. At my mom's memorial service I fashioned a laugh line out of this story. I said: If there is a lesson here for my kids, it might be this - practice your dancing.
But, in all seriousness, I hope my kids learn the bigger lessons to be found in my mom’s life. Treat everyone well. Hold your hand out to the least advantaged. Help make the world a better place. Most of all: have confidence in the unfolding of fate.
My mom came to teaching through a series of fateful encounters. While she was working at a factory someone encouraged her to go to college. She moved to Cleveland with a college roommate and found work as a secretary at a firm my dad did business with. Once married, and the mother of three boys who needed to go to college, she knew she had to go back to work. She was drawn into education by an opportunity made possible by Lyndon Johnson's Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The law, part of Johnson's war on poverty, set aside funds for teacher training. This gave my mom the chance to get a Master's degree at Case Western Reserve University. Surely, her own experience, escaping her small town by going to college and earning a degree, shaped her belief in the transformative potential of education. And she put that belief to work in a classroom in a crumbling building in a city left behind as Americans gave up fashioning steel and machining parts for industry.
