LESSONS LEARNED

It is hard to believe that it has been fifty years since that March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s timeless speech. I was in my mid-thirties at the time living through a pivotal moment in history, although, at that time, I did not realize how momentous an occasion it was. I think most of us whites were holding our collective breath, hoping that it would not turn into a race riot.

When I grew up in the thirties and forties, prejudice was a fact of life and woven into our pattern of existence. We had black servants and had a warm if paternalistic relationship with them. They were part of the family but at hands’ length. My mother was southern, from Kentucky. Her grandfather had slaves, although he freed them before the end of the Civil War. In fact, our cook had been born a slave on her grandfather’s land, and she had stayed with my mother and her family, emigrating to Ohio with my mother and grandmother. My mother had a warm relationship with Rachel the cook and other black servants but always with that patronizing “we-must-take-care-of-them-because-they-are-only-good-as-servants” inherent attitude. I never heard my mother use the n-word; “darkie” was the milder perjorative used or, more often, colored.

Growing up in Ohio I went to school with blacks, played sports with them. In fact, our cook’s grandson was a friend, and I often invited him to come to my house where we had lots of land, twenty-four acres, to play baseball or touch football. He often came in the house after sports for a refreshing drink, but always in the kitchen where his grandmother held sway. My early days in public school were integrated, and white and black kids played together on the playground. Since only about three percent of the population was black, such could hardly be called integration-at-work. When I went away to private school in the nineteen-forties, I had no black students as classmates. It was only in college in the east that I had black classmates and, proportionately, only a handful at most. I remember we voted my only black classmate as President of our class in my senior year at Hamilton College in upstate New York. We thought we were quite “liberal” and daring in 1950 to vote for this Negro, as we called them then.

My journey through civil rights started with this kind of background, which in many ways was typical of northern American attitudes toward blacks and other minorities. Don’t let anyone kid you into believing that de facto segregation did not exist in the north: this same cook’s son in 1946 in our small town in Ohio led a sit-in at the lunch counter in the Greyhound Bus Terminal where blacks were frowned upon and opened it up for interracial dining. We didn’t have Jim Crow, but his shadow was upon us.

Somewhere in my slow maturation, the truth about discrimination and its shameful existence as part of the fabric of our lives began to seep into me. College certainly kick-started the process and opened my mind to greater understanding. I remember living in New York in my young batchelorhood and early years of marriage. I was a salesman of men's and boy's apparel and covered Manhattan by foot, rolling my sample case over large tracts of that island. Harlem was part of my territory, and I never ran into any racial problems there, except on occasions when the NAACP would have a protest day and young blacks would lock arms and walk down 125th street, daring anyone to get in their way. I would carefully move my sample case and stand in the gutter as they passed by, and they never bothered me.

But it took the Civil Rights movement to bring the elephant in the room into real focus. The March on Washington and the freedom demonstrations in Selma and Birmingham finally grabbed some of Whitey’s attention and, at least to some of us, we began to understand how shameful our complicity and averting our eyes from reality were on us. I remember how awed I was by the courage of both blacks and whites in those traumatic times and wondered if I would have had the courage to participate in those demonstrations with the physical abuse and cruelty of the police of Birmingham and Selma.

Looking back, I realize I was not much different from many of my generation in the north: we paid lip service to the concept of equal rights but did little to make it happen until our noses were shoved in it. We are usually products of our environment and shaped by the circumstances in which we live. It takes those with real moral insight and plain guts to stand up and say that this was wrong, and we needed to do something about it. Those demonstrators one hot August day in Washington in 1963 spoke the truth by their actions. We all should have learned a lesson that day, but look what happened within a year---the death of JFK and MLKJr. We have come a long way since then, but we still have a long journey to understanding and total reconciliation.

We are all interdependent in this world of today but are still riven. I hope in the short time I have left to see America live up to its democratic principles and speed up the laborious process of understanding each other and learning to live together with tolerance. If an old man like I can try, then a helluva lot of younger people should make that effort to live together in racial and economic harmony.

It is the key to a better life for all, not to mention survival.

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME...

My wife and I are in Ohio visiting my eldest daughter and family. Her two daughters, who live in Myrtle Beach, have both come home separately, so we have been able to enjoy time with them.

I arranged with my sister, Linda, who is a baseball fanatic like I, to procure tickets to my beloved Cincinnati Reds who were playing a day game last Wednesday against the Oakland A's. Linda outdid herself and had wonderful seats in The Great American Ballpark about ten rows up behind the catcher. Linda rented a van and took her daughter Lisa and husband John, a girlfriend of Lisa. my son Alex and me from Dayton to the ballpark. She even had a handicapped hanger so that my worn-out knees would  be spared, as we parked in the stadium, just below where our seats were located:---a few steps up, an elevator ride and, voila, right by our section and a few easy steps down.

The best part of the actual game was seeing Aroldis Chapman, the Cuban-born fireballing closer for the Reds, who came on in the ninth to protect a one-run lead. Two pitches and two soft fly outs. Then the crowd rose to their feet and started to roar. Three fastballs later, the last of which I couldn't see,  the game was history.

But the real best part was seeing this wonderful spacious ballpark, now ten years old, and the family crowd there on a Wednesday afternoon. It was old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool, pure Americana, seeing so many families enjoying the game and enthusing together in a happy comradely atmosphere. You just felt good sitting there!

As if this were not enough, I then got a tour of the Reds Hall of Fame and Museum, a cathedral dedicated to all things Reds. I relived my baseball history, and more, in that fabulous museum. You can even look out a window and see a bed of red flowers with a white patch of flowers in the center, memorializing the spot where Pete Rose lined his record-breaking single on June 11, 1985.

Yes, I was kid again---and loved every moment.  You can take me out to the ball game anytime---and include a brat with the best spicy mustard ever. Thanks, Linda!