Hey Joe,
Your essay "No Balls, No Gains" had me crying. Our fathers were very different kinds of men, but I remember that world just a little bit. My dad was a schoolteacher. In the mid-60s, when I was really, really little, he taught in the coal camps in the north end of our county.
At that school, he taught fifth through eigth grades in one of the two rooms. They've told me the woman who taught first through fourth cooked the free lunches and Dad's second chore in the school was to be the janitor. His third chore was being the principal.
I have vivid memories of a chili supper they had one night when I was three or four. I remember our car climbing up into the mountainous part of our county and being so scared of the curves and the bluffs. I remember running around screaming with a crowd of miners' kids and feeling that joy that never comes again in adulthood. (When grown-ups run around in circles screaming, it is never good. Part of me just doesn't understand why that is.)
I had some self-centered kiddie idea the whole chli supper thing was a treat meant for me, but it was actually a fundraiser for the school. The best memory, though, is a vision of men with clean faces and dirty nails standing in a circle around my dad. They were all smiling at him. They were all proud of him. They all liked him, and I thought at the time that they must be very smart men to like my daddy as much as I did.
I suspect now that the chili supper must have been soon after Daddy's run in with the county about a boy the school officials down in the Oak Ridge part of the county insisted was retarded. Daddy insisted he was not. Oh no, oh hell no. Dad had a master degree in special education from University of Tennessee and he was using it. He kept telling them the boy had dyslexia and that he could learn to read with enough time and tutoring. The county wanted to send the boy to an institution (in Oak Ridge, where else? if you knew me well, you'd know I have serious issues with Oak Ridge and its Yankees, not to mention its bombs.)
The kid's mom was hysterical at the thought they might take him away. Added to the whole mix was the fact that the boy's father had recently been killed. Daddy lost his own father to the Great Depression, insanity, and the bottle when he was three. He always has had a soft spot for fatherless boys.
Finally, so they tell me, a kind of deal was struck with the courthouse officials. Dad convinced them to wait until September. He would tutor the boy all summer. If the kid couldn't read by the fall, then he'd try to convince the family that going to the county institutional school would be the best thing for him.
By the fall the boy could read and then he took off intellectually. He eventually went to college and became a businessman, rags to riches story, became a member of the "pickle vendor" class who occasionally publicly thanks Daddy for what he did. I have another vivid memory of his mom having some kind of hysterics of gratitude or something. In any event, she stood in our front yard yelling thank you so many times and so loud that it was embarassing.
Teaching this boy to read was -- as far as I can piece the story together -- the beginning of the end of my father's "career." The board of education had no use for him after that. He had tenure by that point, but he had proved he was an overeducated hillbilly with an attitude -- or something. The officials despised him and punished him every way they could. Dad quit and moved us all to Indiana trying to get away from it -- maybe the Yankees would be less idiotic kind of idea, except they weren't. Didn't work out well at all.
After we came back home, he went through a time of working first shoveling shit at the UT Ag Farm, then someone got him a bookkeeping job with Plastiline, before he ever went back to teaching. All his teaching jobs after that lasted three years until, as Dad put it, "the school board would figure out that I'm not a Republican and then they'd 'fail to re-elect' me." He worked in one county school system and then another, never more than that three years.
He never had a steady job again until he got on with a locally notorious Democratic machine in the next county over. They kept him teaching until he retired, but even at that, Daddy would get in trouble. He just couldn't stop pulling stunts like pointing how that the school "no hats" rule was arbitrary and made the boys resentful for no real educational or disciplinary purpose. And so the party boss would intervene for him again and -- I always knew Daddy was right about crap like that and yet I always was so ashamed to be his daughter. Damn, it was just embarassing. I was still too childish, still too much like the three-year-old who thought the chili supper was all for her. He didn't go to work with the Democratic party bosses in the other county until I was a teenager. God forgive me, when I was a teenager, and even before, I assumed that my Dad was simply incompetent and couldn't face the truth about himself.
As the years have passed and as I've listened to people telling stories about Dad, I've realized he actually was a hero. I've had to face bureacratic creeps and corporate creeps and I've never dealt with it with anything like the courage and the carelessness Daddy did. It wasn't just that he stood up to the creeps about wanting to send that miner's son off to the institution. It was that he kept on working. He kept on trying. He kept on speaking up. He kept on getting tireder and older and more discouraged. I mocked him for not providing for us like I figured the children of the professional classes deserved (along with some stuff he actually did deserve). I was a spoiled brat, but he was hell bound he was going to be a good daddy like his daddy never was, and he was.
He and my mother, another schoolteacher, used to come home from meetings talking about whether the National Education Association should be a "professional association" or a union. They didn't know that everyone would call the NEA a union no matter what names or limits the NEA chose for themselves. They ought to have gone on and been a union because they were going to be cussed as a union no matter what they did. Somehow I think that choice of being a "professional association" was the beginning of the end of something -- the end of the kind of world where a teacher from the working class standing up to officialdom for the sake of a miner's kid wasn't all that surprising? Something like that.
My uncles, Daddy's brothers, union men at Alcoa, union men with -- yeah, the Teamsters. Sometimes I look around me and can't quite believe it's the same world as it was when all the men in my family were unionized -- except Dad with that silly feeble "professional association" which never is called a "profesisonal association."
I think when I've written to you before I've called myself a "coalminers' schoolteachers' daughter." Now you know what I meant.
I got involved in Pledge to Impeach late in the Bush Administration. It was an effort to organize the American people -- those few left of us left with some common decency and some guts -- to threaten a general strike unless the Congress broke down and did their freaking job. To impose a general strike if it had to come to that. To plan for how we could all survive a general stirke if it came to that. Of all the unions we approached, only the west coast Longshoremen were interested or helpful. The Longshoremen did go on strike - May 1, 2008 over this -- and Pledge to Impeach people didn't show up for work either. I work for a nonprofit which was having a crisis that day, so I went to work and then docked my own pay so at least one day's taxes didn't reach the federal jackasses and monsters.
Almost no peace groups were interested. A few local Green Party organizers signed on. No other impeachment groups joined in. It was a pitiful showing. We had hoped that, after getting rid of Bush and repairing the Constitution, our efforts would renew the labor movement, bring back some respect for honest work. Fat chance. The people I signed up all disappeared when Barack Obama became their favorite primary candidate. I told them and told them it wasn't about who was president, it was about how the powers of the president and how the president behaves and they just did not get it. I've been withdrawn, burned out, kind of a sad case ever since. My inner Shrieking Bitch doesn't even have any energy anymore.
But yeah, business as usual just ain't gonna get it. Someone's going to have to dare to teach that loser kid to read and not give a damn if the superintendent of schools finds it deeply, deeply embarssing. Someone's going to have to dare to simply refuse to work, at the very very least.
Just thoughts and memories I wanted to share, Joe. In art and labor, indeed. I'm going to go hug my Dad's neck now and I wish you could hug your Dad's neck too.
Linda
Knoxville, Tennessee
