Pater: Not exactly politically correct...

Pater: Not exactly politically correct...  The photo at right is from June, 2007, from Lassen National Park in northern California.

Respect must be earned...

Way back in one summer in the late '50s, my dad piled me and my younger brother Scott into his old 1948 Dodge (similar to the one below, though his wasn't nearly as good looking) and we headed out for a grand trip to the western U.S.  I was, I think, just 7 or 8 years old; my brother a year younger.  I have lots of fine memories from that trip, but today I want to focus on just one.

We were driving on a hot, dusty dirt road in middle of Texas, headed toward Big Bend National Park.  We had left the Ozark Mountains of southwestern Missouri early that morning, and now it was the hottest part of the day.  The high humidity had us dripping with sweat – cars back then didn't have air conditioning, and opening the windows didn't help very much when the humidity was so high.  On top of that, it was dusty – the gusty winds picked up grit and powder off the fields and roads.  It was just plain miserable out, and all of us badly wanted to get this section of the trip over with.

At one point, our road climbed a long uphill path, up from a dry gully to the bluffs above it.  My dad downshifted and pushed that old Dodge up the hill, past an older gentleman walking slowly up alongside the road, hauling a heavy-looking homemade rucksack.  He slowed down to keep from blowing dirt all over the guy, and looked over to the right as we passed him, and waved with a smile, just being friendly.  Then his face changed to one of concern, and he stopped our car.  He got out, and my brother and I clambered out as well, happy for a chance to be out of the car and moving around after a few hours stuck inside it.  My dad walked back to the old fellow and started talking with him.  I wasn't near enough to hear the conversation, but I wasn't at all surprised when the guy climbed into the front passenger seat (my brother and I were in the back), put his rucksack on his lap, and rode with us for a while.  That's just the kind of thing my dad would do.  But the old fellow looked a bit surprised by his good fortune.

Not far from the top of that hill was a gas station, and we stopped to fill up.  I don't remember the price of gasoline back then, but it was probably something like 10 or 15 cents a gallon – and the attendant filled the tank, not us.  That's when my dad did the first thing that day that surprised me: he offered to buy our passenger a cold soda.  Now we didn't have much money, and we traveled very frugally – buying one of those expensive drinks at a gas station was not something my dad would normally do.  Furthermore, we never had soda – milk or fruit juice or iced tea, sure.  But soda?  Not happening.  Our passenger accepted the offer, and eagerly – he must have been very thirsty, and my dad must have seen that.

My dad and that older gentleman walked together into the tiny store built into the gas station, and my brother and I tagged along.  We were hoping that some of my dad's new-found willingness to buy soda might benefit us (it didn't).

What happened next is one of those memories of the permanent kind.  I can still remember tiny details about that little gas station store: the dirty floor, the torn and faded posters and advertisements hanging, the wind making everything move about, the noisy soda cooler that looked like a chest freezer, my brother heading for the rest room, and, most especially, the clerk telling that old gentleman that he wasn't allowed in the store.  The old gentleman, you see, was black (though that term wasn't used back then – the polite term then was “colored”).  This was an example of “segregation” and overt racial prejudice at its most basic level, but it was completely new to me.  I grew up around “colored people”; one family were tenants in a house on our farm.  I played with their kids, and their mom (Gertrude) was often our babysitter.  I'd never before seen anything remotely resembling the naked, blind prejudice this clerk so nonchalantly displayed.

My dad's face got very hard at the clerk's words.  It scared me, and my little kid self was feeling danger close at hand.  I know now that my dad had seen this sort of thing before, both in the Army and in his travels, so he knew exactly what was happening there.  He told the clerk that he was buying the gentleman a soda, and his expression said he wasn't going to take “no” for an answer.  The clerk hesitated for a moment, then took my dad's money and handed him a soda.  The tension eased.  My dad opened the soda, and gave it to our passenger – who took a long, appreciative slug and handed it back to my dad, to share.  To my absolute astonishment, my dad took a swig and handed it back, telling him to finish it off.  That surprised me so much because my dad would never have done that even with a bottle one of us had drunk from, much less a stranger.  He would have carefully wiped it off first.  But here he was with this guy we barely knew, with a small gesture of intimacy that I don't think I'd ever seen him make before.

We waited outside for my brother to finish in the restroom, and then we all clambered back into the car and drove up the road another mile or two, where our passenger told my dad that his home was.  We stopped, and that old black fellow shook my dad's hand, thanked him for the ride and the drink, lifted his rucksack, and took off along the dusty path to his house.  He never looked back, and of course we never saw him again.  My dad didn't said a word to us about the incident, but for hours afterward it was easy to see that he was upset about it.

Now my dad wasn't blind to someone's race or cultural background.  Far from it, actually.  He held many stereotypical preconceptions that at times made me quite uncomfortable.  For instance, he thought Italians were somehow predisposed to run in battle, and that Jews were likely to get the good end of any bargain you made with them.

But no matter what someone's race or cultural background, my dad had great respect for them if they worked hard and were honest.  It really was that simple, I think.  The black couple who lived on our farm with their family worked very hard – Wilmer, the dad, held down two (and at times, three) jobs, and Gertrude, the mom, did all sorts of odd work to bring in a nickel. Their older kids worked as well, and helped support the family.  They worked hard and were straightforward and honest folks, and thereby earned my dad's respect as people – and their race then didn't matter to him at all.  His preconceptions didn't enter into his evaluation of them.  Something similar happened with our black passenger, I think.  He didn't have his thumb stuck out begging a ride, and he was obviously working steady and hard to get up the hill.  My dad had a short, simple set of criteria for sorting people into those whom he'd respect, and those he wouldn't.  As best I can tell, race, ethnicity, education, wealth, or celebrity didn't enter into it in the slightest.  The unfairness of that gas station clerk's refusal to serve a hard-working man was just the kind of thing to get my dad's dander up – it was disrespectful of a man who deserved respect.

My dad, through his landscaping business and later work at a private arboretum, rubbed shoulders with quite a few accomplished, wealthy, and famous people.  My brother and I often came along with him in his landscaping work on the homes of some of these people, and I watched his interactions with them.  It was easy for me to tell those people he genuinely liked and respected; his body language was very different with them.  They could be rich or poor, accomplished or not, white or purple, celebrated or unknown – it didn't matter.  If they were hard workers themselves, and had honest interactions with him, they'd have my dad's respect – like that old fellow laboring up the hill in Texas.  Otherwise, he'd just do the job they paid him to do – polite and respectful, but not respecting – and move along.

I was in my late teens before I got an inkling that my dad's selective broad-mindedness wasn't the norm for everybody, and it wasn't until I joined the Navy in the '70s that I encountered entrenched blind prejudice.  In the late '60s I had a job as a sort of handyman for a slumlord in Trenton, N.J., a Mr. van Czak.  He gave me a real education in prejudice.  If you weren't white and of northern European descent, then there was absolutely nothing you could do to earn Mr. van Czak's respect.  Nothing.  He'd consider you fair game for cheating, humiliating, and even injuring; there was nothing subtle about his prejudice.  The contrast with my dad could scarcely be more striking.  Later, in the Navy, I ran into more institutionalized forms of prejudice.  The example that struck me most profoundly were the “stewards” – enlisted men who were servants to the officers, and virtually all of whom were either Filipino or black.  Some of the officers were more like my dad, but the majority – especially the older ones – were offensively demeaning and belittling of these hard-working and much abused men.

No, my dad wasn't blind to race or ethnicity.  But he also wasn't blindly prejudiced, and wouldn't condemn you because of who your parents happened to be, or where you were born.  Work hard and be honest, and you'd earn his respect.  And maybe a cold soda shared along a hot, dusty Texas road...