A SOCIETY WITHOUT SCHOOLS
When American philosopher John Dewey visited Utopia, he once revealed, he discovered that the most utopian thing about it was the absence of schools. Oh, yes, they still had education, but without anything like schools. And it worked.
Children gathered in centers with adults who directed their activities, and you might right away say the centers were substitutes for schools. But when Dewey asked his Utopian friends what their purposes or objectives were, “the whole concept of the school, of teachers and pupils and lessons, had so completely disappeared” that it was as if he was “asking why children should live at all.”
The Utopians did help youngsters make their lives worthwhile for them and society, and they did see to it that they grew and developed. But the notion of special goals that all children should try to attain was completely foreign to them. Instead, Dewey found, the fundamental purposes of education--discovering aptitudes, tastes, abilities and weaknesses of each child--were thoroughly ingrained in the activities they engaged in. That was Dewey’s famous--or infamous, for a lot of people--Progressive Education. Learning by doing.
But how did these people know whether the children every learned anything? Once more the Utopians were nonplussed. Did he think it was possible for a normal boy or girl to grow up without learning what they needed to learn? Only “a congenital idiot” would do that.
Dewey was discovering that the “whole concept of learning as acquiring and storing away things had been displaced by the concept of creating attitudes, shaping desires, and developing the needs that are significant in the process of living.” The non-Utopian world, he was told, is dominated by the idea that education is a personal acquisition and private possession-which, of course, fits snugly into a society driven by accumulating stuff. It had “taken possession of the minds of educators” and controlled all of the educational system.
There was also competition and rivalry (like today's Race To The Top); the use of rewards and punishments, examinations to determine success or failure, and the idea of promotion. The Utopians viewed these as ways to produce achievements and successes in an acquisitive society; where learning and scholarship were considered private valuable possessions, even if they were little more than “useless or remote facts.”
Utopians had discarded objectives that every child was required to achieve, which they saw produced a brand of rote learning without enjoyment; instead “fear, embarrassment, constraint, self-consciousness. and the feeling of failure and incapacity.” In their place were the “development of a confidence and a readiness to tackle difficulties; of actual eagerness to seek problems instead of dreading them and running away from them.”
If it disturbs you to think of America without schools, it may be because you equate going to school with education--and maybe some other things along the way, like baby-sitting, sequestering youngsters in institutions that take on the character of prisons to keep them under control. After all, we have no other place for them to go. It also does the work of employers by house-breaking young people to take future jobs
But we all know--don't we?--that it's possible to become educated with little or no help from school. Just because you don't do what they do in schools doesn't mean you can't learn. We all know that. But it's just that we forget it when we think about schools.
But what Dewey saw was that nothing less than a cultural revolution would be necessary for a society to adopt what the Utopians had. The last time something like that was tried was 40 years ago or so, when UC Berkeley student Mario Savio uttered the immortal words, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious. . .you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears. . . you’ve got to make it stop.”
And you know how far we got with that!
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
"THERE'S NO BEST IN KINDERGARTEN"
When Noah began kindergarten, dutiful parent that I was, I went around every Friday to work out with him and his cohort. I could see why people thought his teacher was thought to be the best in the school.
She could get instant attention simply by counting out loud; “One two three,” and the children would freeze. (The school used the same tactic to round up the students when recess ended: A blaring horn blew, and the kids would freeze. I mean no matter what position they were in when the horn blew, they froze--standing on one leg, leaning forward with arms outspread, you name it. And they held the position until the horn blasted again, and then ran off to take their places in their classrooms' lines.)
Noah's teacher ran a tight ship, strictly no nonsense, never having to raise her voice. No child was idle; no one out of line. I imagined a banner over her classroom door: “A place for every child, and every child in his place.”
She was friendly but not warm, with an inscrutable reserve that left me wondering what she was really thinking and feeling. She never touched the children; no stroking or patting or hugging, and quite formal when she said “good morning” and “goodbye.”
From the moment they entered the room the kids went to work on their basics. My job was to help them through the drills
set for them. It wasn’t the sort of thing I had hoped I might do.
One day the teacher assigned me to walk the kids from the classroom to the playground and back. They immediately began testing me; I think they suspected a softie. They were right, soon running all over the place. I was a lousy disciplinarian, and sensed teacher’s quiet disapproval.
But those kids found another weakness: I would touch them, pick them up, let them sit on my lap, and they made the most of it. When it was time to be read to, or to watch films, I sat on the floor and they vied to see who would sit on my lap. I had to set up a waiting line; even Noah had to take his turn, which he didn’t particularly like.
Those children hungered for that kind of attention. I had to peel them off so the others could have their turn. Kids came out
of their shells as they climbed and hung on me. I could see a part of them that the curriculum excluded. They were just normal youngsters who liked to be touched and held and picked up and bounced around.
One boy, big for his age, ordinarily withdrawn, was first in line every morning. He reeked of urine and sour sweat, and his clothes looked like the hand-me-downs I wore during the Depression. I almost gagged when he first snuggled up, but after a time he didn’t stink so much--or I got used to it.
If all I did was allow those kids some physical de-compressing from their regular regimen, I thought, I could make a significant contribution. But the activity was becoming disruptive. I had become an attractive nuisance, a subversive insidiously undermining what was going down in that classroom in the name of education.
Along about November the teacher quietly told me she was concerned about my picking up kids, fearing they could be hurt, and the school district would have to pay.
“I haven’t dropped one yet,” I cheerily replied, not yet sure she was serious.
“I know,” she firmly replied, “but it could happen and then someone would sue.”
“Gee, I wish there was some way I could pick them up. They so much want to be held, and don’t seem to ever get enough.” (I was using my new non-authoritarian problem-solving skills; avoiding "you" statements, that sort of thing.)
“Well,” she said after thinking about it a bit, “perhaps if you just kneel down when you pick them up, and don’t do it out on the playground.”
It was a deal.
But Teacher’s concern had gotten to me, and I began soft-pedaling, holding off the kids, restraining them--and myself. I wondered if what I was doing was unseemly to her. The kids became even more clamorous for my attention.
I began to see why Noah, when I asked him what he liked best about kindergarten, sourly replied, "There's no best in kindergarten."
"Well," I responded, careful not to be judgmental, "what do you do in kindergarten that you'd like to do more of?" Right away his reply was, "Go outside!"
Noah's teacher might have thought I was as much trouble as help.
Given her agenda, I think I was.
When Noah began kindergarten, dutiful parent that I was, I went around every Friday to work out with him and his cohort. I could see why people thought his teacher was thought to be the best in the school.
She could get instant attention simply by counting out loud; “One two three,” and the children would freeze. (The school used the same tactic to round up the students when recess ended: A blaring horn blew, and the kids would freeze. I mean no matter what position they were in when the horn blew, they froze--standing on one leg, leaning forward with arms outspread, you name it. And they held the position until the horn blasted again, and then ran off to take their places in their classrooms' lines.)
Noah's teacher ran a tight ship, strictly no nonsense, never having to raise her voice. No child was idle; no one out of line. I imagined a banner over her classroom door: “A place for every child, and every child in his place.”
She was friendly but not warm, with an inscrutable reserve that left me wondering what she was really thinking and feeling. She never touched the children; no stroking or patting or hugging, and quite formal when she said “good morning” and “goodbye.”
From the moment they entered the room the kids went to work on their basics. My job was to help them through the drills
set for them. It wasn’t the sort of thing I had hoped I might do.
One day the teacher assigned me to walk the kids from the classroom to the playground and back. They immediately began testing me; I think they suspected a softie. They were right, soon running all over the place. I was a lousy disciplinarian, and sensed teacher’s quiet disapproval.
But those kids found another weakness: I would touch them, pick them up, let them sit on my lap, and they made the most of it. When it was time to be read to, or to watch films, I sat on the floor and they vied to see who would sit on my lap. I had to set up a waiting line; even Noah had to take his turn, which he didn’t particularly like.
Those children hungered for that kind of attention. I had to peel them off so the others could have their turn. Kids came out
of their shells as they climbed and hung on me. I could see a part of them that the curriculum excluded. They were just normal youngsters who liked to be touched and held and picked up and bounced around.
One boy, big for his age, ordinarily withdrawn, was first in line every morning. He reeked of urine and sour sweat, and his clothes looked like the hand-me-downs I wore during the Depression. I almost gagged when he first snuggled up, but after a time he didn’t stink so much--or I got used to it.
If all I did was allow those kids some physical de-compressing from their regular regimen, I thought, I could make a significant contribution. But the activity was becoming disruptive. I had become an attractive nuisance, a subversive insidiously undermining what was going down in that classroom in the name of education.
Along about November the teacher quietly told me she was concerned about my picking up kids, fearing they could be hurt, and the school district would have to pay.
“I haven’t dropped one yet,” I cheerily replied, not yet sure she was serious.
“I know,” she firmly replied, “but it could happen and then someone would sue.”
“Gee, I wish there was some way I could pick them up. They so much want to be held, and don’t seem to ever get enough.” (I was using my new non-authoritarian problem-solving skills; avoiding "you" statements, that sort of thing.)
“Well,” she said after thinking about it a bit, “perhaps if you just kneel down when you pick them up, and don’t do it out on the playground.”
It was a deal.
But Teacher’s concern had gotten to me, and I began soft-pedaling, holding off the kids, restraining them--and myself. I wondered if what I was doing was unseemly to her. The kids became even more clamorous for my attention.
I began to see why Noah, when I asked him what he liked best about kindergarten, sourly replied, "There's no best in kindergarten."
"Well," I responded, careful not to be judgmental, "what do you do in kindergarten that you'd like to do more of?" Right away his reply was, "Go outside!"
Noah's teacher might have thought I was as much trouble as help.
Given her agenda, I think I was.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE
It became for me the anthem of academic pretentiousness--that march by Sir Edward Elgar, which you've probably heard at every graduation you ever attended: Sir Edward Elgar's "Pomp And Çircumstance."
There's nothing in either its composition or its musical nature that explains why it came to be the theme song for graduation. It originally wasn't intended for that purpose. Elgar composed it for the coronation of King Edward VII.
But in 1905 Elgar received an honorary doctorate from Yale, and they played the song. Other Ivies--not to be out-shown, I can imagine--quickly followed. Princeton, Vassar, the University of Chicago, even dear old Columbia. By the 20s its use as a Commencement march had become part of the academic protocol.
"Just the thing that you had to graduate to," one commentator noted.
The origin of the title confirmed my questioning about its use in the Groves of Åcademe. Elgar took it from Shakespeare’s Othello, where the Moor is lamenting what he has lost after being tricked into thinking his beloved Desdemona and Cassio have been getting it on:
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
Farewell, Othello's occupation's gone!
Act III, Scene III
One commentator has written that perhaps the academics were moved by the ability of music to “sound triumphant, but with an underlying quality of nostalgia, making it perfectly suited to Commencement that marks the beginning of one stage of life, but the end of another.”
Triumphant over what? Ignorance? I know what’s ending, but what’s beginning?
I didn't attend my college graduation; nor the graduation when I was supposed to received my PhD. But it was an unwritten Commandment where I taught that faculty shalt attend, and in the full regalia of their caps and gowns.
Now here we may be getting closer to what that pomp and circumstance at graduation is fundamentally about. Ecclesiastics began wearing caps and gowns back in the 14th century, embodying the authoritarian and hierarchical structure of their positions. And so, too, the regalia calls attention to the structure of the professoriate. The students don black or white; but oh! those professors' garb. Depending on the degrees they hold, there are hoods down the back, and the floor-length gowns bear the different colors of their degree-granting universities.
For those holders of the supreme PhD there are black velvet stripes on the puffy arms (reminding me of the "hash marks" on the Navy's Chief Petty Officers marking the number of four-year stints they've put in). Down the front of the doctoral gown, on either side of the robe openings, is a black velvet stripe.
Most caps do earn the title of board--as in mortar boards--but Columbia's cap had no such stiffener, and it flopped down the sides of my head, making me look like a Roman Catholic Cardinal. Those caps and gowns reek of the ecclesiastical influences that, believe it or not, still lurk in the darker recesses of Academe.
You can’t wear such regalia and solemnly march to Elgar’s tune without calling attention to yourself. I felt like one of those ecclesiastics you see marching down the aisles of great cathedrals. Why all this attention to the faculty, anyhow? Wasn’t this supposed to be a day to honor the students? Elgar’s march soon became like a dirge to me. To this day I have trouble listening to it.
A possible opportunity for me to expose this folly arose at the first Commencement of an alternative B.A. program in the University Without Walls movement I'd became involved with in the 70s. It was one of Antioch College's far-flung alternative programs, called Antioch West. It was dedicated to inventing alternatives to just about everything in higher education.
There were only seven students receiving B.A. degrees at our first Graduation, and with an equal number of faculty and administrators we'd gathered in a student’s home for some sort of ceremony. But other than a buffet and drinks, and giving the students their degrees, we had no idea what we would do.
I brought along my elegant Columbia cap and gown, though I had no idea what for; or even whether I'd wear them. We faculty members put our heads together. One had composed some humorous verses for the occasion; one would play a faintly recognizable "Pomp And Circumstance" on a kazoo. But what would I contribute?
Then it hit me, just before the hastily constructed ceremony began. I took off all my clothes and donned the robe, which, like all such robes, had nothing to keep it closed. Never mind, I joined the others on the program standing before the seated students. And as we proceeded I could be spotted shaking a wicked leg out from the robe.
Ånd when the students came forward to receive their degrees I threw my arms around them in a big hug--the robe opening be damned. My point was well received (no pun intended): underneath all that medieval splendor there were only naked bodies.
It all turned out to be quite creative, and when it was over we went skinny-dipping in the pool.
It became for me the anthem of academic pretentiousness--that march by Sir Edward Elgar, which you've probably heard at every graduation you ever attended: Sir Edward Elgar's "Pomp And Çircumstance."
There's nothing in either its composition or its musical nature that explains why it came to be the theme song for graduation. It originally wasn't intended for that purpose. Elgar composed it for the coronation of King Edward VII.
But in 1905 Elgar received an honorary doctorate from Yale, and they played the song. Other Ivies--not to be out-shown, I can imagine--quickly followed. Princeton, Vassar, the University of Chicago, even dear old Columbia. By the 20s its use as a Commencement march had become part of the academic protocol.
"Just the thing that you had to graduate to," one commentator noted.
The origin of the title confirmed my questioning about its use in the Groves of Åcademe. Elgar took it from Shakespeare’s Othello, where the Moor is lamenting what he has lost after being tricked into thinking his beloved Desdemona and Cassio have been getting it on:
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
Farewell, Othello's occupation's gone!
Act III, Scene III
One commentator has written that perhaps the academics were moved by the ability of music to “sound triumphant, but with an underlying quality of nostalgia, making it perfectly suited to Commencement that marks the beginning of one stage of life, but the end of another.”
Triumphant over what? Ignorance? I know what’s ending, but what’s beginning?
I didn't attend my college graduation; nor the graduation when I was supposed to received my PhD. But it was an unwritten Commandment where I taught that faculty shalt attend, and in the full regalia of their caps and gowns.
Now here we may be getting closer to what that pomp and circumstance at graduation is fundamentally about. Ecclesiastics began wearing caps and gowns back in the 14th century, embodying the authoritarian and hierarchical structure of their positions. And so, too, the regalia calls attention to the structure of the professoriate. The students don black or white; but oh! those professors' garb. Depending on the degrees they hold, there are hoods down the back, and the floor-length gowns bear the different colors of their degree-granting universities.
For those holders of the supreme PhD there are black velvet stripes on the puffy arms (reminding me of the "hash marks" on the Navy's Chief Petty Officers marking the number of four-year stints they've put in). Down the front of the doctoral gown, on either side of the robe openings, is a black velvet stripe.
Most caps do earn the title of board--as in mortar boards--but Columbia's cap had no such stiffener, and it flopped down the sides of my head, making me look like a Roman Catholic Cardinal. Those caps and gowns reek of the ecclesiastical influences that, believe it or not, still lurk in the darker recesses of Academe.
You can’t wear such regalia and solemnly march to Elgar’s tune without calling attention to yourself. I felt like one of those ecclesiastics you see marching down the aisles of great cathedrals. Why all this attention to the faculty, anyhow? Wasn’t this supposed to be a day to honor the students? Elgar’s march soon became like a dirge to me. To this day I have trouble listening to it.
A possible opportunity for me to expose this folly arose at the first Commencement of an alternative B.A. program in the University Without Walls movement I'd became involved with in the 70s. It was one of Antioch College's far-flung alternative programs, called Antioch West. It was dedicated to inventing alternatives to just about everything in higher education.
There were only seven students receiving B.A. degrees at our first Graduation, and with an equal number of faculty and administrators we'd gathered in a student’s home for some sort of ceremony. But other than a buffet and drinks, and giving the students their degrees, we had no idea what we would do.
I brought along my elegant Columbia cap and gown, though I had no idea what for; or even whether I'd wear them. We faculty members put our heads together. One had composed some humorous verses for the occasion; one would play a faintly recognizable "Pomp And Circumstance" on a kazoo. But what would I contribute?
Then it hit me, just before the hastily constructed ceremony began. I took off all my clothes and donned the robe, which, like all such robes, had nothing to keep it closed. Never mind, I joined the others on the program standing before the seated students. And as we proceeded I could be spotted shaking a wicked leg out from the robe.
Ånd when the students came forward to receive their degrees I threw my arms around them in a big hug--the robe opening be damned. My point was well received (no pun intended): underneath all that medieval splendor there were only naked bodies.
It all turned out to be quite creative, and when it was over we went skinny-dipping in the pool.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
IF THE NAME'S THE SAME, WE MUST BE RELATED
I have used some genealogical findings of Jeffrey Keller and Martha Anderson in what follows. They are not responsible, however, for how I use them
There was a time when I thought I had a pretty good fix on the genealogy of Frank Joseph and Eugenia Antoinette Remillard Robischon, and their Kalispell 711 Seven. (711 was the Kalispell, Mont. home at: 711 3rd. Ave. E.) And then I heard from Sara Robischon in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
She'd come across my name while searching the Net. Might we be related? Turned out we are; and so, too, are all the rest of you 711 Seven offspring. She could count up to 18 R's living in the Minnesota area Frank and Genie were from--and that was ten years ago.
Her heritage goes back to the same man as the 711 Seven's: Mathias Robischon, my Dad's father. Her wing of the family is a descendant of Mathias's first marriage--to Marie Castenholtz in 1875--while we 711 Seven are descendants of his second marriage--to Gertrude Hriber in 1884.
So Dad had a ("full") brother and sister, Michael and Mary, and two half-brothers, Peter and John. But, as apparently often
happens with half-siblings, there was little contact between the two groups of children and their offspring.
"It's so weird to know now that I have other relatives out there that I have never even really heard of or even met," Sara commented following her discovery that we were related. "Funny how life is sometimes."
Someone out there reading this right now may experience a similar feeling as I tell you about relatives you never knew you had.
Like Mary Robischon Ventura and the New York State Robischons.
I'd become hooked on Robischon genealogy, like a user searching for a fix, and was poking around the Net to see if there might be other R's when I came across Mary Ventura, who at the time lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She happened to be looking for information on a Peter Robischon, and I wondered, 'Çould she perhaps have any Robischons in her genealogical tree?'
She sure did! She proceeded to provide me with 13 pages of Robi's, most from the Eifel area of the Prussian Rheinland of Germany, bordering Luxembourg and Belgium. With her help I was able to trace the Eifel Robischons back to 1743. But the name appears as early as the 13th century in France, where it was spelled, "Robichonet," or "little Robert." So contrary to what my father thought, and took pride in--i.e., that we all originated in Prussian Germany--we may well have gotten started in France. Sacre bleu!
The Eifel region, with its rich ore deposits, attracted many people from France looking for work. But by the mid-1800s it had become known as the Poorhouse of Prussia. And many Germans had begun migrating in search of work.
"I think all the Robischons are related somehow," Mary Ventura wrote. And with her help, I concluded that our common ancestor was a Peter Robischon, born about 1768. But until I contacted her, she knew nothing about the Minnesota Robischons.
Though I discovered a man in the Utica area named Robischon back in the late 50s--who in a photo he sent me looked so much like Dad--I knew nothing more about Mary Ventura's relatives. They first appeared in the U.S. in the 1880's, when almost one and a half million Germans emigrated to the U.S. Among them were nine Robischon children and their parents, and they were from the same Eifel region that Mathias Robischons was from.
I am not sure why they chose to settle in upstate New York. By the 1800s, the north-central states of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan were the principal settlement area for Germans.
So that makes three branches of the Robischon tree: One grown from New York, and two from Minnesota. But there's one more branch you should know about. They live today in Germany; two of them I am in touch with: Fritz and Rolf Robischon, the latter a teacher in a Progressive public primary school, and a cartoonist.
There are others; some with the name that Rolf and his brother are unable to connect with genealogically. Rolf told me about a Christian Robischon, son of a Joseph Robischon, living in Strasbourg, who Rolf says is not related. But how can anyone have the name and not be?
If you are in need of a genealogical fix, Google the Robischon name and your plate will runneth over. But beware: keepers of records can be capricious. You're apt to encounter Rubischons, Rubitschones, Rohenschons, Rubatschems, Robenschons, Robinschons, Robichons, and a quixotic Roberchon de la Guerinier (in France). (Reminds me of how often the name is mis-pronounced.)
For an even more quixotic version there's Robidouche, the name given me by my buddies on the U.S.S. William P. Biddle, the ship I bled and died for my country on during World War II.
A recent book by Alexander Roth--Unterwegs in der eisernen Welt (which I feebly translate as having something to do with iron workers)--has 13 spellings. They range from Roichon and Robischon, to Rubitschung and Rudischum.
Grossvater Mathias Robischon, 24, arrived in the U.S. on September 10, 1868, accompanied by his cousin Johann and wife, and his mother Wilhelmia (his father had died). It was during the time when Minnesota's foreign-born population nearly tripled, as a result of aggressive recruiting by, inter alia, railroad companies and civic boosters. They were publishing books and pamphlets extolling Minnesota's virtues.
Like many other German Catholic immigrants the Mathias entourage settled in Minnesota, first in Minneapolis. In 1877 Mathias and Marie moved to St. Cloud (I've not been able to find a record of what became of his cousin and mother). Mathias went into the soda pop business--Robischon And Thelen Bottlers--which eventually was taken over by Peter.
One thing my father revealed about himself--you will see how seldom he did that--was the pride he took in his Prussian roots. He would praise its values and ideals, and its highly vaunted military discipline. He not only approved of “German discipline” and “German efficiency,” he walked his talk, embodying it in his own life.
But I am not at all sure he included his father in those positive feelings, and a big reason might have been the way Mathias treated his children. Dad told how his father would get his kids out of bed at five in the morning, whether it was needed or not, and wouldn’t allow them to put sugar on their breakfast food. What I know about him, he doesn't strike me as a father his children could easily relate to.
My father reflected some of that sort of thing with his own children. He didn’t prevent his children from putting sugar on their breakfast food, as Grossvater Mathias had; nor did he roust them out of bed when nothing required it. But while he allowed us to sleep longer than his own father had, there was no shilly-shallying about getting out of bed and into your clothes in the morning. (How amazed--and envious--was I when I found my chum Bobby Evans still in his pajamas when I went to see his Christmas presents one morning.) To this day, I do not feel comfortable if I stay in my bedclothes.
I also find it worth pointing out that while there was a Franz and a Gertrude among my sibs, there was no one named Mathias.
My father was never as sure about his mother Gertrude Hreber's origins as he was about his father’s. She was born in 1849 in Gorga (Gorje) in northwestern Slovenia, at that time part of Austria and now part of Serbia. She came to this country in 1874 on the U.S.S. America with her parents, Appolonia and Simon, and her brother Franz. They settled on a farm 20 miles east of Sauk Centre.
When Uncle Mike told Dad their mother was from Slovenia, he adamantly refused to believe it. Slav blood in his Prussian gene pool? Mein gott in Himmel! Dad went into near-terminal denial. Eventually, after a good deal of convincing by Uncle Mike, my father accepted the Croation in his family background. But I don't think he fully shook the stigma in his own mind. He died without knowing about the French origin of the family name.
I do not find it difficult to imagine that Mathias might have harbored some Volkisch repulsion for Gertrude’s Slovenian background. Her father was a poor Bohunk farmer who couldn’t speak English, in contrast to Mathias’s status as a successful businessman.
But, though they lived only 15 miles away, little is known about the Hreber family. And I never could find out how it was that Mathias Robischon hooked up with Gertrude. Neither of my parents, for that matter, could come up with much information about the families of their parents and grandparents. Such knowledge may not have been considered important enough to bother about.
Or was it part of the efforts by immigrants to separate themselves from their past, and avoid the xenophobia that still bubbles in the great American Melting Pot?
NEXT: Eugenia Antoinette Remillard adds a new mixture to the blood of the 711 Seven.
I have used some genealogical findings of Jeffrey Keller and Martha Anderson in what follows. They are not responsible, however, for how I use them
There was a time when I thought I had a pretty good fix on the genealogy of Frank Joseph and Eugenia Antoinette Remillard Robischon, and their Kalispell 711 Seven. (711 was the Kalispell, Mont. home at: 711 3rd. Ave. E.) And then I heard from Sara Robischon in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
She'd come across my name while searching the Net. Might we be related? Turned out we are; and so, too, are all the rest of you 711 Seven offspring. She could count up to 18 R's living in the Minnesota area Frank and Genie were from--and that was ten years ago.
Her heritage goes back to the same man as the 711 Seven's: Mathias Robischon, my Dad's father. Her wing of the family is a descendant of Mathias's first marriage--to Marie Castenholtz in 1875--while we 711 Seven are descendants of his second marriage--to Gertrude Hriber in 1884.
So Dad had a ("full") brother and sister, Michael and Mary, and two half-brothers, Peter and John. But, as apparently often
happens with half-siblings, there was little contact between the two groups of children and their offspring.
"It's so weird to know now that I have other relatives out there that I have never even really heard of or even met," Sara commented following her discovery that we were related. "Funny how life is sometimes."
Someone out there reading this right now may experience a similar feeling as I tell you about relatives you never knew you had.
Like Mary Robischon Ventura and the New York State Robischons.
I'd become hooked on Robischon genealogy, like a user searching for a fix, and was poking around the Net to see if there might be other R's when I came across Mary Ventura, who at the time lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She happened to be looking for information on a Peter Robischon, and I wondered, 'Çould she perhaps have any Robischons in her genealogical tree?'
She sure did! She proceeded to provide me with 13 pages of Robi's, most from the Eifel area of the Prussian Rheinland of Germany, bordering Luxembourg and Belgium. With her help I was able to trace the Eifel Robischons back to 1743. But the name appears as early as the 13th century in France, where it was spelled, "Robichonet," or "little Robert." So contrary to what my father thought, and took pride in--i.e., that we all originated in Prussian Germany--we may well have gotten started in France. Sacre bleu!
The Eifel region, with its rich ore deposits, attracted many people from France looking for work. But by the mid-1800s it had become known as the Poorhouse of Prussia. And many Germans had begun migrating in search of work.
"I think all the Robischons are related somehow," Mary Ventura wrote. And with her help, I concluded that our common ancestor was a Peter Robischon, born about 1768. But until I contacted her, she knew nothing about the Minnesota Robischons.
Though I discovered a man in the Utica area named Robischon back in the late 50s--who in a photo he sent me looked so much like Dad--I knew nothing more about Mary Ventura's relatives. They first appeared in the U.S. in the 1880's, when almost one and a half million Germans emigrated to the U.S. Among them were nine Robischon children and their parents, and they were from the same Eifel region that Mathias Robischons was from.
I am not sure why they chose to settle in upstate New York. By the 1800s, the north-central states of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan were the principal settlement area for Germans.
So that makes three branches of the Robischon tree: One grown from New York, and two from Minnesota. But there's one more branch you should know about. They live today in Germany; two of them I am in touch with: Fritz and Rolf Robischon, the latter a teacher in a Progressive public primary school, and a cartoonist.
There are others; some with the name that Rolf and his brother are unable to connect with genealogically. Rolf told me about a Christian Robischon, son of a Joseph Robischon, living in Strasbourg, who Rolf says is not related. But how can anyone have the name and not be?
If you are in need of a genealogical fix, Google the Robischon name and your plate will runneth over. But beware: keepers of records can be capricious. You're apt to encounter Rubischons, Rubitschones, Rohenschons, Rubatschems, Robenschons, Robinschons, Robichons, and a quixotic Roberchon de la Guerinier (in France). (Reminds me of how often the name is mis-pronounced.)
For an even more quixotic version there's Robidouche, the name given me by my buddies on the U.S.S. William P. Biddle, the ship I bled and died for my country on during World War II.
A recent book by Alexander Roth--Unterwegs in der eisernen Welt (which I feebly translate as having something to do with iron workers)--has 13 spellings. They range from Roichon and Robischon, to Rubitschung and Rudischum.
Grossvater Mathias Robischon, 24, arrived in the U.S. on September 10, 1868, accompanied by his cousin Johann and wife, and his mother Wilhelmia (his father had died). It was during the time when Minnesota's foreign-born population nearly tripled, as a result of aggressive recruiting by, inter alia, railroad companies and civic boosters. They were publishing books and pamphlets extolling Minnesota's virtues.
Like many other German Catholic immigrants the Mathias entourage settled in Minnesota, first in Minneapolis. In 1877 Mathias and Marie moved to St. Cloud (I've not been able to find a record of what became of his cousin and mother). Mathias went into the soda pop business--Robischon And Thelen Bottlers--which eventually was taken over by Peter.
One thing my father revealed about himself--you will see how seldom he did that--was the pride he took in his Prussian roots. He would praise its values and ideals, and its highly vaunted military discipline. He not only approved of “German discipline” and “German efficiency,” he walked his talk, embodying it in his own life.
But I am not at all sure he included his father in those positive feelings, and a big reason might have been the way Mathias treated his children. Dad told how his father would get his kids out of bed at five in the morning, whether it was needed or not, and wouldn’t allow them to put sugar on their breakfast food. What I know about him, he doesn't strike me as a father his children could easily relate to.
My father reflected some of that sort of thing with his own children. He didn’t prevent his children from putting sugar on their breakfast food, as Grossvater Mathias had; nor did he roust them out of bed when nothing required it. But while he allowed us to sleep longer than his own father had, there was no shilly-shallying about getting out of bed and into your clothes in the morning. (How amazed--and envious--was I when I found my chum Bobby Evans still in his pajamas when I went to see his Christmas presents one morning.) To this day, I do not feel comfortable if I stay in my bedclothes.
I also find it worth pointing out that while there was a Franz and a Gertrude among my sibs, there was no one named Mathias.
My father was never as sure about his mother Gertrude Hreber's origins as he was about his father’s. She was born in 1849 in Gorga (Gorje) in northwestern Slovenia, at that time part of Austria and now part of Serbia. She came to this country in 1874 on the U.S.S. America with her parents, Appolonia and Simon, and her brother Franz. They settled on a farm 20 miles east of Sauk Centre.
When Uncle Mike told Dad their mother was from Slovenia, he adamantly refused to believe it. Slav blood in his Prussian gene pool? Mein gott in Himmel! Dad went into near-terminal denial. Eventually, after a good deal of convincing by Uncle Mike, my father accepted the Croation in his family background. But I don't think he fully shook the stigma in his own mind. He died without knowing about the French origin of the family name.
I do not find it difficult to imagine that Mathias might have harbored some Volkisch repulsion for Gertrude’s Slovenian background. Her father was a poor Bohunk farmer who couldn’t speak English, in contrast to Mathias’s status as a successful businessman.
But, though they lived only 15 miles away, little is known about the Hreber family. And I never could find out how it was that Mathias Robischon hooked up with Gertrude. Neither of my parents, for that matter, could come up with much information about the families of their parents and grandparents. Such knowledge may not have been considered important enough to bother about.
Or was it part of the efforts by immigrants to separate themselves from their past, and avoid the xenophobia that still bubbles in the great American Melting Pot?
NEXT: Eugenia Antoinette Remillard adds a new mixture to the blood of the 711 Seven.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Thanks to my niece, Joann Albrecht, for encouraging me to share my family experiences. And as always, thanks to my dearest friend, lover, and co-conspirator, Mariona
Family, the immediate extension of self,
is obviously critical to any writer writing her life. . .
- Jill Johnston
I stand in a light September rain outside 426 West Alder in Missoula Montana, gazing at the house my parents must have lived in 80 years ago. I'm looking into the past--my past, in a way. I talk into my tape recorder; will someone living there wonder what I am up to?
I try to picture the railroad bookkeeper living here with his wife, Eugenia (Genie), their year-old son, Franz, and newborn daughter, Mary. I want to hug that house, and the people who lived there. I want to know more about them and their life in this house.
Something quite plain, almost banal, has become a shrine in my eyes, and an inexplicable touch of awe comes over me. I've never felt that way about the house I grew up in. There’s something about seeing this one for the first time; I wonder what it was like when my parents and their two infant children lived in this unimposing two-story yellow clapboard house with what looks like recently added-on aluminum siding.
Its ground-floor bay window looks out on a front porch with three columns, only as wide as the front door. Upstairs a window on one side, two windows in front, probably another in back. I imagine two bedrooms, my parents in one, the children in the other, in a small house on a street of frame houses that all look pretty much alike. Those must have been here, too. The neighborhood is still generally pleasant with lawns and trees.
Now, someone is standing in the doorway looking at me. Should I go to the door and tell them what I am doing? Perhaps they would invite me in. But no, I don’t want to break the spell.
I was in Missoula on one of my research trips to Montana. I'd reserved a room at a Travelodge Motel, not knowing anything about the neighborhood it was in. But when I came across the Robischon name at the West Alder address in county records, I realized it was only two blocks away from the motel.
Across the street from the motel was St. Patrick’s Hospital, where I also thought my sister, Mary, might have been born. But later, when I consulted the hospital records, I am unable to find her. Behind the motel is the church that my parents must have attended: St. Francis Xavier’s.
All this family history in a three-block area! It was almost enough to make one believe in some sort of supernatural karma!
My brother, Franz, had been born just a year after my father and his pregnant wife migrated from Staples, Minnesota to Missoula. I suspect my mother remembered her family’s warning about the dangers and deprivations of living in the still new West, and had gone back to Minnesota to have Franz. Maybe Mary was born at home and not in St. Patrick's--my mother, worried about leaving Franz with someone during the three or four days it was customary to keep new mothers in hospital, deciding to have him at home.
I want to know more about the 28-year-old man and his 23-year-old wife who came to live in the house on Alder. What did they think of this piece of the West? Did they ever think they may have made the wrong decision to come to this small town that Montana writer Caroline Patterson (The Montanan, UMont., Fall 2002) described as growing up around a flour mill, and the “hub of five mountain valleys drunk with rivers.” It was a town only 25-30 years older than they, but its frontier rawness had been altered by settlers like them--respectable working and middle-class people, homeowners, entrepreneurs, churchgoers--and a university. But out on the edges of town the rawness was still evident.
Was that house on West Alder a company house? The railroad for which Frank worked, the Northern Pacific, was just two blocks away. A block away is an old brick Montana Hotel, which looks like it, too, was here when they were. and a business section. This must have been a principal part of the town when they were here.
St. Francis Xavier Church, their church, was I am sure a comforting familiar presence for them. (On my first visit to Minnesota I noticed how much the Catholic churches there resembled those in Montana, with their identifying tall steeple topped by a cross. It was built in 1892.
I wonder what I might find about my parents and their children in the church's records. A woman warmly welcomes me to the office. I tell her what I am looking for without revealing my connection. She genially says something about maybe I might become interested in Catholicism. She strikes me as rather desperate. I feel she's snooping about me--in a nice sort of way.
The church’s handwritten baptism records she brings me reveal Mary's name written in Latin--Mariam Antoinette. My father’s is Francisco, but my mother’s is just plain Eugenia Antoinette. How come? My uncle Mike was also there as one of the child’s sponsors, and so was ma mere--my mother’s mother. Minnesota moral support in the Montana wilds, I am sure.
If the house on Alder is like a shrine for me, so too that church. It is surprisingly large--a good three stories high. Inside, its fluted stone pillars support arches across the ceiling. A pipe organ is in the gallery in the back where choir galleries always are in Catholic churches. There's a room along one wall called the “Reconciliation Room.” It's the replacement for the confessional. I don’t think that name was always there. It sounds a bit too humane. It has a sign to tell you whether it is occupied, and a place to kneel before a screen. But it looks almost public, and I wonder how I would have felt confessing my awful masturbatory sins in such a setting.
The paintings on a very large ceiling overhead don’t strike me as very good. Standard church decorations--but imposing, a full story high, with the effect of an art museum. On the walls oval paintings of various icons hang above larger programmatic portrayals. I wonder if some would-be Michelangelo ran wild here. How tempting it would have been to gaze upward to study the paintings while sitting through Mass.
There's a turned-around altar in the sanctuary, of the Catholic church’s bows to modernity. How strange when I think that as an altar boy I would have faced the congregation.
The wooden pews look like originals, with kneeling railings that pull out, cushioned and leather-covered--a luxury we wouldn’t have dared think of in St. Matthews parish up in my hometown. But what is that heavy curved strip of iron there dividing the pews into two halves? Separate pews for separate families?
Sitting late in the afternoon I try to imagine which pew my parents sat in. But in the church office I found no records of their church membership, or pew assignments (perhaps my father was unable, as he was at St. Matthews, to contribute enough to be assigned a pew).
Hanging in my bedroom is the formal picture of my father's Sauk Centre high-school graduating class, in what must have been its original oval frame. Five men and 12 women, and I wonder why those women were there; my mother didn't go to high-school because girls weren't expected to go.
I see a good-looking young man shorter than his four male classmates--looking a little like Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate." His hair is parted almost in the middle, eyebrows are full, nose prominent but not distracting. It's his mouth that interests me most, and I realize I had not noticed before the sensuous--though not sensual--curve to the upper lip.
Picture this dashing young man, derby at a moderately rakish angle, white collar mounting firmly (almost) to his chin in the fashion of the day. A good catch, my Aunt Louise said of him (thereby suggesting that maybe the Remillards didn’t think my mother married down). He continued to be attractive to the ladies as he grew older, with his Old World charm, tipping his hat to them; always neatly dressed; always orderly and reserved. In a passenger elevator I'm sure he would have taken his hat off.
He attended the University of Minnesota, planning to be an engineer. But after a year he left when, he said, the money ran out. But there's another, possible explanation. My father may have been a mother’s boy (to a point of distraction for him), and the money for his university education came by way of his mother. He was her favorite child, and she might well have observed the changes college was making in him--as parents are wont to do. She might have feared she would lose him. But I admit this is speculation.
I could never determine from him exactly how he felt about not being able to continue at the university. I suspected buried hurt feelings. With his desire to better himself, and his respect for education, he must have been disappointed. And so he took a job in the office of the general counsel of the Northern Pacific Railroad in St. Paul. There, he was offered a job as a traveling secretary with one of the NP’s top executives, which he admitted would have been an excellent career move. But he didn’t want to have to travel, he explained to me, and it is true, he didn’t like to travel. (I always thought he never quite made his peace with the infernal combustion engine. He may also have turned down an offer to go to work for a congressman in Washington.)
But my father didn’t give up entirely on advancing himself. And he knew that was something everyone--well, every young man, certainly--should be mindful of. But the office in St. Paul didn’t offer him the opportunity to become more actively engaged in railroading. And so, he requested and was granted a transfer to Staples sometime around 1914. But why Staples, a considerably smaller town 130 miles or so up the line from the Twin Cities? Could it have been that he would be closer to his mother, who after his father’s death had moved in with my father’s sister, Mary, in Sauk Centre? Or perhaps Staples offered the kind of opportunity he was seeking.
It was in Staples that he met my mother, and they married in April 1915. Their wedding photo shows a nattily dressed man standing beside, but not touching, a woman who looks older than her 22 years and rather down (though it was not the custom then to smile when your picture was taken). He was 27.
His relations with the Agent in the Staples office were all right, but there was limited opportunity for advancement beyond the level of a clerk. But another opportunity arose--as a clerk in the Northern Pacific agency in Missoula, Montana. And the West still was the epitome of the land of opportunity.
My mother’s family was well situated in Staples, and couldn’t understand why my father would want to leave the comforts of such a life for the hard life of the frontier. And when ordinary forms of persuasion failed, my mother’s family warned the couple of the hardships and deprivations--and dangers--of life on what they imagined to be a still savage country.
My brother Franz was now on the way, so it's understandable that my dad's desire for advancement with the NP would be even more pressing. My father was a moderately ambitious young man, and I think of him as seeking the opportunity to be more than a stenographer, in a position where he could show how well he could do his work. I also imagine my mother not keen to go west--not all the way to Montana. But she would have acceded to her husband’s wishes. It is what wives were supposed to do, and she would see it as her duty not to question or complain.
I have no knowledge of Dad's relations with his wife’s family, but it is not difficult to imagine him not too comfortable with them. They may have been a notch above his own family in Sauk Centre on the social/economic scale. I am pretty sure the thought of getting away from his father, Mathias, didn’t particularly trouble him. And his mother, Gertrude, not all that much more. He might have realized that getting away from her would have freed him from a possessive and at times troublesome person.
Despite the warnings and dire predictions, my father accepted the position in Missoula.
He was not seeking the success and fortune in the land of milk and honey that attracted so many to the West, suspicious as he was of money and wealth, and what it can do to a person. He wasn’t an immigrant looking for free land to farm, nor an upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial type, nor an ambitious young man on the make. Far from it! He was no boomer or booster, nor an adventurer, or experimenter or risk-taker. He never tried to scale any heights that I know of. He would have regarded aspiring to rise to a class beyond the one he was born into with serious reservations. (Not my mother, however, as we shall see in the sequel.)
He had turned down opportunities that would have meant a better life for him and his family. And choosing the life of a bookkeeper in a railroad office in Montana, in the absence of any redeeming considerations, strikes me as following that same holding himself back, cautious, not going too far. It was enough that he dared to pick up and start over way out in Montana. That was what many people were still doing in those days, and with less assurance about their future. There was at least a job waiting for him.
Mother must have missed the cultural life she had grown up accustomed to, and the class and social status her family enjoyed. Writing about women who developed a love/hate relationship with the Great Plains they had come to settle, Kathleen Norris (in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography) observes that it lives on in their children. “Some mourned the loss of European culture or ethnic roots; others the social status they’d enjoyed in cities back East. Only the toughest survived here.” I must have picked up my persistent and insistent belief that there must be--has to be--something better than my hometown from her.
Norris also notes that the ambivalence--or rage--these women had toward the Plains found expression often in doting on the children who moved away, and shabbily treating those who remained. I suspect that part of my mother's desire to see her sons perform and achieve was a way for her to make up for what she had lost when she moved west.
Family, the immediate extension of self,
is obviously critical to any writer writing her life. . .
- Jill Johnston
I stand in a light September rain outside 426 West Alder in Missoula Montana, gazing at the house my parents must have lived in 80 years ago. I'm looking into the past--my past, in a way. I talk into my tape recorder; will someone living there wonder what I am up to?
I try to picture the railroad bookkeeper living here with his wife, Eugenia (Genie), their year-old son, Franz, and newborn daughter, Mary. I want to hug that house, and the people who lived there. I want to know more about them and their life in this house.
Something quite plain, almost banal, has become a shrine in my eyes, and an inexplicable touch of awe comes over me. I've never felt that way about the house I grew up in. There’s something about seeing this one for the first time; I wonder what it was like when my parents and their two infant children lived in this unimposing two-story yellow clapboard house with what looks like recently added-on aluminum siding.
Its ground-floor bay window looks out on a front porch with three columns, only as wide as the front door. Upstairs a window on one side, two windows in front, probably another in back. I imagine two bedrooms, my parents in one, the children in the other, in a small house on a street of frame houses that all look pretty much alike. Those must have been here, too. The neighborhood is still generally pleasant with lawns and trees.
Now, someone is standing in the doorway looking at me. Should I go to the door and tell them what I am doing? Perhaps they would invite me in. But no, I don’t want to break the spell.
I was in Missoula on one of my research trips to Montana. I'd reserved a room at a Travelodge Motel, not knowing anything about the neighborhood it was in. But when I came across the Robischon name at the West Alder address in county records, I realized it was only two blocks away from the motel.
Across the street from the motel was St. Patrick’s Hospital, where I also thought my sister, Mary, might have been born. But later, when I consulted the hospital records, I am unable to find her. Behind the motel is the church that my parents must have attended: St. Francis Xavier’s.
All this family history in a three-block area! It was almost enough to make one believe in some sort of supernatural karma!
My brother, Franz, had been born just a year after my father and his pregnant wife migrated from Staples, Minnesota to Missoula. I suspect my mother remembered her family’s warning about the dangers and deprivations of living in the still new West, and had gone back to Minnesota to have Franz. Maybe Mary was born at home and not in St. Patrick's--my mother, worried about leaving Franz with someone during the three or four days it was customary to keep new mothers in hospital, deciding to have him at home.
I want to know more about the 28-year-old man and his 23-year-old wife who came to live in the house on Alder. What did they think of this piece of the West? Did they ever think they may have made the wrong decision to come to this small town that Montana writer Caroline Patterson (The Montanan, UMont., Fall 2002) described as growing up around a flour mill, and the “hub of five mountain valleys drunk with rivers.” It was a town only 25-30 years older than they, but its frontier rawness had been altered by settlers like them--respectable working and middle-class people, homeowners, entrepreneurs, churchgoers--and a university. But out on the edges of town the rawness was still evident.
Was that house on West Alder a company house? The railroad for which Frank worked, the Northern Pacific, was just two blocks away. A block away is an old brick Montana Hotel, which looks like it, too, was here when they were. and a business section. This must have been a principal part of the town when they were here.
St. Francis Xavier Church, their church, was I am sure a comforting familiar presence for them. (On my first visit to Minnesota I noticed how much the Catholic churches there resembled those in Montana, with their identifying tall steeple topped by a cross. It was built in 1892.
I wonder what I might find about my parents and their children in the church's records. A woman warmly welcomes me to the office. I tell her what I am looking for without revealing my connection. She genially says something about maybe I might become interested in Catholicism. She strikes me as rather desperate. I feel she's snooping about me--in a nice sort of way.
The church’s handwritten baptism records she brings me reveal Mary's name written in Latin--Mariam Antoinette. My father’s is Francisco, but my mother’s is just plain Eugenia Antoinette. How come? My uncle Mike was also there as one of the child’s sponsors, and so was ma mere--my mother’s mother. Minnesota moral support in the Montana wilds, I am sure.
If the house on Alder is like a shrine for me, so too that church. It is surprisingly large--a good three stories high. Inside, its fluted stone pillars support arches across the ceiling. A pipe organ is in the gallery in the back where choir galleries always are in Catholic churches. There's a room along one wall called the “Reconciliation Room.” It's the replacement for the confessional. I don’t think that name was always there. It sounds a bit too humane. It has a sign to tell you whether it is occupied, and a place to kneel before a screen. But it looks almost public, and I wonder how I would have felt confessing my awful masturbatory sins in such a setting.
The paintings on a very large ceiling overhead don’t strike me as very good. Standard church decorations--but imposing, a full story high, with the effect of an art museum. On the walls oval paintings of various icons hang above larger programmatic portrayals. I wonder if some would-be Michelangelo ran wild here. How tempting it would have been to gaze upward to study the paintings while sitting through Mass.
There's a turned-around altar in the sanctuary, of the Catholic church’s bows to modernity. How strange when I think that as an altar boy I would have faced the congregation.
The wooden pews look like originals, with kneeling railings that pull out, cushioned and leather-covered--a luxury we wouldn’t have dared think of in St. Matthews parish up in my hometown. But what is that heavy curved strip of iron there dividing the pews into two halves? Separate pews for separate families?
Sitting late in the afternoon I try to imagine which pew my parents sat in. But in the church office I found no records of their church membership, or pew assignments (perhaps my father was unable, as he was at St. Matthews, to contribute enough to be assigned a pew).
Hanging in my bedroom is the formal picture of my father's Sauk Centre high-school graduating class, in what must have been its original oval frame. Five men and 12 women, and I wonder why those women were there; my mother didn't go to high-school because girls weren't expected to go.
I see a good-looking young man shorter than his four male classmates--looking a little like Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate." His hair is parted almost in the middle, eyebrows are full, nose prominent but not distracting. It's his mouth that interests me most, and I realize I had not noticed before the sensuous--though not sensual--curve to the upper lip.
Picture this dashing young man, derby at a moderately rakish angle, white collar mounting firmly (almost) to his chin in the fashion of the day. A good catch, my Aunt Louise said of him (thereby suggesting that maybe the Remillards didn’t think my mother married down). He continued to be attractive to the ladies as he grew older, with his Old World charm, tipping his hat to them; always neatly dressed; always orderly and reserved. In a passenger elevator I'm sure he would have taken his hat off.
He attended the University of Minnesota, planning to be an engineer. But after a year he left when, he said, the money ran out. But there's another, possible explanation. My father may have been a mother’s boy (to a point of distraction for him), and the money for his university education came by way of his mother. He was her favorite child, and she might well have observed the changes college was making in him--as parents are wont to do. She might have feared she would lose him. But I admit this is speculation.
I could never determine from him exactly how he felt about not being able to continue at the university. I suspected buried hurt feelings. With his desire to better himself, and his respect for education, he must have been disappointed. And so he took a job in the office of the general counsel of the Northern Pacific Railroad in St. Paul. There, he was offered a job as a traveling secretary with one of the NP’s top executives, which he admitted would have been an excellent career move. But he didn’t want to have to travel, he explained to me, and it is true, he didn’t like to travel. (I always thought he never quite made his peace with the infernal combustion engine. He may also have turned down an offer to go to work for a congressman in Washington.)
But my father didn’t give up entirely on advancing himself. And he knew that was something everyone--well, every young man, certainly--should be mindful of. But the office in St. Paul didn’t offer him the opportunity to become more actively engaged in railroading. And so, he requested and was granted a transfer to Staples sometime around 1914. But why Staples, a considerably smaller town 130 miles or so up the line from the Twin Cities? Could it have been that he would be closer to his mother, who after his father’s death had moved in with my father’s sister, Mary, in Sauk Centre? Or perhaps Staples offered the kind of opportunity he was seeking.
It was in Staples that he met my mother, and they married in April 1915. Their wedding photo shows a nattily dressed man standing beside, but not touching, a woman who looks older than her 22 years and rather down (though it was not the custom then to smile when your picture was taken). He was 27.
His relations with the Agent in the Staples office were all right, but there was limited opportunity for advancement beyond the level of a clerk. But another opportunity arose--as a clerk in the Northern Pacific agency in Missoula, Montana. And the West still was the epitome of the land of opportunity.
My mother’s family was well situated in Staples, and couldn’t understand why my father would want to leave the comforts of such a life for the hard life of the frontier. And when ordinary forms of persuasion failed, my mother’s family warned the couple of the hardships and deprivations--and dangers--of life on what they imagined to be a still savage country.
My brother Franz was now on the way, so it's understandable that my dad's desire for advancement with the NP would be even more pressing. My father was a moderately ambitious young man, and I think of him as seeking the opportunity to be more than a stenographer, in a position where he could show how well he could do his work. I also imagine my mother not keen to go west--not all the way to Montana. But she would have acceded to her husband’s wishes. It is what wives were supposed to do, and she would see it as her duty not to question or complain.
I have no knowledge of Dad's relations with his wife’s family, but it is not difficult to imagine him not too comfortable with them. They may have been a notch above his own family in Sauk Centre on the social/economic scale. I am pretty sure the thought of getting away from his father, Mathias, didn’t particularly trouble him. And his mother, Gertrude, not all that much more. He might have realized that getting away from her would have freed him from a possessive and at times troublesome person.
Despite the warnings and dire predictions, my father accepted the position in Missoula.
He was not seeking the success and fortune in the land of milk and honey that attracted so many to the West, suspicious as he was of money and wealth, and what it can do to a person. He wasn’t an immigrant looking for free land to farm, nor an upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial type, nor an ambitious young man on the make. Far from it! He was no boomer or booster, nor an adventurer, or experimenter or risk-taker. He never tried to scale any heights that I know of. He would have regarded aspiring to rise to a class beyond the one he was born into with serious reservations. (Not my mother, however, as we shall see in the sequel.)
He had turned down opportunities that would have meant a better life for him and his family. And choosing the life of a bookkeeper in a railroad office in Montana, in the absence of any redeeming considerations, strikes me as following that same holding himself back, cautious, not going too far. It was enough that he dared to pick up and start over way out in Montana. That was what many people were still doing in those days, and with less assurance about their future. There was at least a job waiting for him.
Mother must have missed the cultural life she had grown up accustomed to, and the class and social status her family enjoyed. Writing about women who developed a love/hate relationship with the Great Plains they had come to settle, Kathleen Norris (in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography) observes that it lives on in their children. “Some mourned the loss of European culture or ethnic roots; others the social status they’d enjoyed in cities back East. Only the toughest survived here.” I must have picked up my persistent and insistent belief that there must be--has to be--something better than my hometown from her.
Norris also notes that the ambivalence--or rage--these women had toward the Plains found expression often in doting on the children who moved away, and shabbily treating those who remained. I suspect that part of my mother's desire to see her sons perform and achieve was a way for her to make up for what she had lost when she moved west.
Friday, March 12, 2010
MY BAPTISMS OF FIRE: SELMA, MARCH 7, 1965
It would come to be known as Bloody Sunday, that day 45 years ago.
Leslie, a colleague from Tuskegee Institute's English department, and I were tooling down the highway to Selma, Alabama in my little four-cylinder, two-cycle SAAB. We were on our way to make plans for demonstrators from Tuskegee to meet up with the demonstrators who were setting out from Selma that day on a march to Montgomery.
The demand in Selma that Negroes be allowed to vote had been stirring Negroes and whites since 1963. And by 1965 it had become the focus of efforts by the wider civil rights movement: organizer James Bevel proposed the town as “an effective testing ground” for a mass movement. Martin Luther King agreed--though he feared there would be “a great potential for violence.” And on January 1, before a “standing, cheering” crowd of 700 in Selma’s Brown Chapel, he made it official.
But by the end of January, after repeated marches and attempts to register at the Dallas County Courthouse, only 57 Negro applicants had been able to get into the registrar’s office, and all had been rejected. The campaign was stalled, and King agreed pressures would be stepped up, including his going to jail.
On Monday February first demonstrations began. Nearly 800 Negroes set out from Brown Chapel, more than 500 of them school kids, who were promptly arrested. The New York Times kept score: 770 “seized” on Monday, 520 more on Tuesday, 500 students on Wednesday in nearby Perry County, and 300 more hauled away in Selma by Jim Clark. King, meanwhile, was composing a dozen political directives in jail, “to keep national attention focused on Selma.”
During the same week Malcolm X spoke at Tuskegee and then showed up the next day in Selma. President Johnson also told a press conference “that all Americans should be indignant when one American is denied the right to vote. . .The basic problem in Selma is the slow pace of voting registration for Negroes.” Exactly what King hoped he would say.
On Friday evening February 26, Bevel took to the pulpit at a mass meeting in Brown Chapel to mourn the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson. Jackson had tried to register in nearby Marion and took two bullets in his stomach, plus a cudgeling, when he tried to protect his mother, who'd been beaten to the floor by state troopers. He would be the first of four demonstrators to die in the Selma area during the voter-registration drive.
Bevel's text was Esther 4:8, in which being warned of an order to destroy the Jews, Esther was charged to go to the king and make a request for her people. The king, Bevel told the Brown Chapel gathering, was now Alabama Governor George Wallace.
“I must go see the king!” he shouted. Soon he had the whole congregation on its feet vowing to go on foot as the Bible said. “Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! Be prepared to sleep on the highway!” King approved the walk to Montgomery to begin Sunday March 7.
I'd been totally out of what had been going on in Selma (some Tuskegee students and teachers had been jailed there in support of the voter registration efforts). But now I was about to receive my first Baptism of Fire.
Leslie and I began our search for someone to make plans with in the little cafe in the Negro part of town where marchers--spilling out onto the sidewalk--were preparing to set out for Montgomery. But not finding anyone to talk to, we went over to Brown Chapel six blocks away, where the march was beginning.
Not long after we began seeing marchers making their way back to the Chapel; many injured by the billy-club beatings, tear gas and pursuits that Sheriff Jim Clark’s posse and state troopers had administered.
I don’t know what moved me to head out for the Edmund Pettis bridge. Certainly not to join the march: perhaps to see what had happened; or how I might help; or maybe just to show my support. But police were keeping people away from the bridge, and all I got to see was posse members and troopers back at the Dallas County Courthouse, standing outside laughing and poking one another like winning athletes returning to the locker room.
But when I saw Sheriff Jim Clark and five of his deputies in hot pursuit of demonstrators running for cover, I decided it might be a good idea for me to get back to Brown Chapel too. The sheriffs were bashing demonstrators on the head all the way back to the very Chapel steps. A few Negro youths began throwing rocks at the Sheriff and his men and they retreated across the street, but demonstration leaders stopped them.
On the way back I was stopped by a young white male, who in the broadest accent asked me, “Y'all one a them?”
“Who?” I asked, trying to appear innocent.
“One a them nigger lovers.”
Eyeing me up and down he appeared to be particularly attracted to the beret I was wearing. That must have done a lot for his suspicions.
“No, no,” I assured him, doing my best job of acting as if I had been unfairly accused. “No, I’m just out here seeing what’s happened.” To my surprise, he let me go. The next day I told my philosophy class about the incident, admitting that I had played "Uncle Tom“ to save my neck. They nodded knowingly, and no one seemed to think I had done a bad thing--at least none looked like they did.
(Uncle Tom was an Åfrican American character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly," who demeaned himself before white folks to stay on their good side--though she meant for him to be something of a hero.)
I didn't dare attempt to enter the Chapel, and instead I found refuge in a home in the public housing project next door. Other refugees were there, and we could hear the screams of the marchers and the harsh oaths and orders of the constabulary out in front. We were keeping a low, low profile in the house, figuring it was unlikely that the attackers would invade.
One of those in the group was Rev. James Bevel himself. I knew next to nothing about him at the time-- other than he was among the leaders of the Selma voter registration project; and nothing at all about the part he had played in making the march happen.
He didn’t look like a minister--dressed in the striped bib overalls of a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee member. He also wore a yarmulke, to honor Jesus and the Old Testament prophets, his heroes. He'd been among the marchers at the bridge. We sat talking for upwards of two hours, and nothing he said gave me a clue as to the remarkable part he played in the civil rights movement.
When the dust settled outside we decided it was safe to go over to the Chapel. I found Leslie and we decided that with the growing darkness it would be best if we got out of town. I left feeling a little guilty--as I always did when I stood by and watched others participate in a cause I embraced.
That evening, at a small de-briefing gathering of Tuskegee people who hadn’t been in Selma, I was startled--and a little embarrassed--when I began to choke up as I tried to describe the events I had witnessed. “It can be a chastening experience,” my Dean commented. Well, that was one way to put it.
A week later, the newspapers in Springfield, Mass., where I'd taught for four years, somehow learned I'd been in Selma, and called me for an interview.
“I was scared as hell. . . horrified,” I told the interviewer. “You see it on TV but being right there makes quite a difference. I couldn’t believe it was happening. We take for granted a peaceful society.” I predicted that Negroes would not stop demonstrating, and “nothing short of direct federal intervention will do anything in Selma.” Protest messages to President Johnson were needed, I added, because he depends on consensus, and “won’t do anything unless there is a widespread demand for it.”
For once I was right on the mark.
The Star-Gazette in Elmira, NY, where I'd become deeply involved in local civil rights activities before taking a teaching position at Tuskegee Institute, also phoned me for an interview, and ran a story across the top of its page 3, with the headline, “Ex-Elmiran After Seeing Selma Events: ‘I Wept.’”
"The reality of the beatings had gotten to me," I told the paper. “You hear the thuds [of the beatings] all around you. I came back from Selma just full of it. It took me some time to work it off. I just sat down and wept.”
The day after Bloody Monday, leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference filed suit to enjoin the state troopers and Jim Clark’s goons from interfering with the attempt to march again on Tuesday. Federal Court Judge, Frank Johnson, agreed to hear the suit the following Thursday, but only if the Montgomery march was cancelled. There was a further condition, however: No demonstrations in Montgomery, and no demonstrations during the hearing.
But Tuskegee student activists were feeling they should mount some sort of public reaction to what happened. They sent two members around to each dorm that night, and most of the residents turned out for a mass meeting. With the $1200 they collected they planned to rent buses that would take a thousand students to Montgomery on Wednesday--the day the Selma marchers had planned to arrive there.
It would be the first time Tuskegee students participated in a public civil rights demonstration. The accomodationist hold of Tuskegee's founder, Booker T. Washington still gripped Tuskegee and its middle-class blacks.
The head of the Montgomery Improvement Assn. was “angry and disturbed” when told about the march; King's group (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) said flatly, “We know what we’re doing. You all don’t, so don’t go down there.”
I had signed up to provide transportation. But something more would occupy me. My second baptism was about to begin.
It would come to be known as Bloody Sunday, that day 45 years ago.
Leslie, a colleague from Tuskegee Institute's English department, and I were tooling down the highway to Selma, Alabama in my little four-cylinder, two-cycle SAAB. We were on our way to make plans for demonstrators from Tuskegee to meet up with the demonstrators who were setting out from Selma that day on a march to Montgomery.
The demand in Selma that Negroes be allowed to vote had been stirring Negroes and whites since 1963. And by 1965 it had become the focus of efforts by the wider civil rights movement: organizer James Bevel proposed the town as “an effective testing ground” for a mass movement. Martin Luther King agreed--though he feared there would be “a great potential for violence.” And on January 1, before a “standing, cheering” crowd of 700 in Selma’s Brown Chapel, he made it official.
But by the end of January, after repeated marches and attempts to register at the Dallas County Courthouse, only 57 Negro applicants had been able to get into the registrar’s office, and all had been rejected. The campaign was stalled, and King agreed pressures would be stepped up, including his going to jail.
On Monday February first demonstrations began. Nearly 800 Negroes set out from Brown Chapel, more than 500 of them school kids, who were promptly arrested. The New York Times kept score: 770 “seized” on Monday, 520 more on Tuesday, 500 students on Wednesday in nearby Perry County, and 300 more hauled away in Selma by Jim Clark. King, meanwhile, was composing a dozen political directives in jail, “to keep national attention focused on Selma.”
During the same week Malcolm X spoke at Tuskegee and then showed up the next day in Selma. President Johnson also told a press conference “that all Americans should be indignant when one American is denied the right to vote. . .The basic problem in Selma is the slow pace of voting registration for Negroes.” Exactly what King hoped he would say.
On Friday evening February 26, Bevel took to the pulpit at a mass meeting in Brown Chapel to mourn the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson. Jackson had tried to register in nearby Marion and took two bullets in his stomach, plus a cudgeling, when he tried to protect his mother, who'd been beaten to the floor by state troopers. He would be the first of four demonstrators to die in the Selma area during the voter-registration drive.
Bevel's text was Esther 4:8, in which being warned of an order to destroy the Jews, Esther was charged to go to the king and make a request for her people. The king, Bevel told the Brown Chapel gathering, was now Alabama Governor George Wallace.
“I must go see the king!” he shouted. Soon he had the whole congregation on its feet vowing to go on foot as the Bible said. “Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! Be prepared to sleep on the highway!” King approved the walk to Montgomery to begin Sunday March 7.
I'd been totally out of what had been going on in Selma (some Tuskegee students and teachers had been jailed there in support of the voter registration efforts). But now I was about to receive my first Baptism of Fire.
Leslie and I began our search for someone to make plans with in the little cafe in the Negro part of town where marchers--spilling out onto the sidewalk--were preparing to set out for Montgomery. But not finding anyone to talk to, we went over to Brown Chapel six blocks away, where the march was beginning.
Not long after we began seeing marchers making their way back to the Chapel; many injured by the billy-club beatings, tear gas and pursuits that Sheriff Jim Clark’s posse and state troopers had administered.
I don’t know what moved me to head out for the Edmund Pettis bridge. Certainly not to join the march: perhaps to see what had happened; or how I might help; or maybe just to show my support. But police were keeping people away from the bridge, and all I got to see was posse members and troopers back at the Dallas County Courthouse, standing outside laughing and poking one another like winning athletes returning to the locker room.
But when I saw Sheriff Jim Clark and five of his deputies in hot pursuit of demonstrators running for cover, I decided it might be a good idea for me to get back to Brown Chapel too. The sheriffs were bashing demonstrators on the head all the way back to the very Chapel steps. A few Negro youths began throwing rocks at the Sheriff and his men and they retreated across the street, but demonstration leaders stopped them.
On the way back I was stopped by a young white male, who in the broadest accent asked me, “Y'all one a them?”
“Who?” I asked, trying to appear innocent.
“One a them nigger lovers.”
Eyeing me up and down he appeared to be particularly attracted to the beret I was wearing. That must have done a lot for his suspicions.
“No, no,” I assured him, doing my best job of acting as if I had been unfairly accused. “No, I’m just out here seeing what’s happened.” To my surprise, he let me go. The next day I told my philosophy class about the incident, admitting that I had played "Uncle Tom“ to save my neck. They nodded knowingly, and no one seemed to think I had done a bad thing--at least none looked like they did.
(Uncle Tom was an Åfrican American character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly," who demeaned himself before white folks to stay on their good side--though she meant for him to be something of a hero.)
I didn't dare attempt to enter the Chapel, and instead I found refuge in a home in the public housing project next door. Other refugees were there, and we could hear the screams of the marchers and the harsh oaths and orders of the constabulary out in front. We were keeping a low, low profile in the house, figuring it was unlikely that the attackers would invade.
One of those in the group was Rev. James Bevel himself. I knew next to nothing about him at the time-- other than he was among the leaders of the Selma voter registration project; and nothing at all about the part he had played in making the march happen.
He didn’t look like a minister--dressed in the striped bib overalls of a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee member. He also wore a yarmulke, to honor Jesus and the Old Testament prophets, his heroes. He'd been among the marchers at the bridge. We sat talking for upwards of two hours, and nothing he said gave me a clue as to the remarkable part he played in the civil rights movement.
When the dust settled outside we decided it was safe to go over to the Chapel. I found Leslie and we decided that with the growing darkness it would be best if we got out of town. I left feeling a little guilty--as I always did when I stood by and watched others participate in a cause I embraced.
That evening, at a small de-briefing gathering of Tuskegee people who hadn’t been in Selma, I was startled--and a little embarrassed--when I began to choke up as I tried to describe the events I had witnessed. “It can be a chastening experience,” my Dean commented. Well, that was one way to put it.
A week later, the newspapers in Springfield, Mass., where I'd taught for four years, somehow learned I'd been in Selma, and called me for an interview.
“I was scared as hell. . . horrified,” I told the interviewer. “You see it on TV but being right there makes quite a difference. I couldn’t believe it was happening. We take for granted a peaceful society.” I predicted that Negroes would not stop demonstrating, and “nothing short of direct federal intervention will do anything in Selma.” Protest messages to President Johnson were needed, I added, because he depends on consensus, and “won’t do anything unless there is a widespread demand for it.”
For once I was right on the mark.
The Star-Gazette in Elmira, NY, where I'd become deeply involved in local civil rights activities before taking a teaching position at Tuskegee Institute, also phoned me for an interview, and ran a story across the top of its page 3, with the headline, “Ex-Elmiran After Seeing Selma Events: ‘I Wept.’”
"The reality of the beatings had gotten to me," I told the paper. “You hear the thuds [of the beatings] all around you. I came back from Selma just full of it. It took me some time to work it off. I just sat down and wept.”
The day after Bloody Monday, leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference filed suit to enjoin the state troopers and Jim Clark’s goons from interfering with the attempt to march again on Tuesday. Federal Court Judge, Frank Johnson, agreed to hear the suit the following Thursday, but only if the Montgomery march was cancelled. There was a further condition, however: No demonstrations in Montgomery, and no demonstrations during the hearing.
But Tuskegee student activists were feeling they should mount some sort of public reaction to what happened. They sent two members around to each dorm that night, and most of the residents turned out for a mass meeting. With the $1200 they collected they planned to rent buses that would take a thousand students to Montgomery on Wednesday--the day the Selma marchers had planned to arrive there.
It would be the first time Tuskegee students participated in a public civil rights demonstration. The accomodationist hold of Tuskegee's founder, Booker T. Washington still gripped Tuskegee and its middle-class blacks.
The head of the Montgomery Improvement Assn. was “angry and disturbed” when told about the march; King's group (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) said flatly, “We know what we’re doing. You all don’t, so don’t go down there.”
I had signed up to provide transportation. But something more would occupy me. My second baptism was about to begin.
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