I realize that it may be a bit un-cool to dwell too much on one\u2019s own life experiences, but I have a point to make and I hope that I will be forgiven for doing so.<\/p>\n
I was born in 1933, in St. Louis County, Missouri, in the midst of the Great Depression. \u00a0My parents, both of whom came from generations of farm families, had sixth grade educations.\u00a0 Farming was a matter of hard dawn-to-dusk labor, so when children had learned to read, write, and \u201cdo their sums,\u201d they were expected to leave school to carry their share of the workload.<\/p>\n
When my parents married in 1929 they decided to purchase a small farm, but they had no money and the banks had no money to lend, so their only alternative was to become sharecroppers, giving a 1\/3 share of their crops to our landlord in lieu of rent.\u00a0 Sharecropping provided our family with a subsistence, but little else.\u00a0 Nearly all of the food on our table was either from our vegetable garden, from farm animals\u2026 chicken, turkey, beef and pork\u2026 or the rabbits, squirrels, ducks, geese, and catfish that my father brought home from his frequent forays into our local forests and rivers.\u00a0 Whatever butter and eggs we didn\u2019t need for our own table was taken to South St. Louis every Saturday and sold to regular customers, door-to-door. \u00a0But then, when war clouds gathered over Europe and the Pacific in the late 1930s my father took a job as a pick-and-shovel ditch-digger at 67\u00bd cents an hour, helping to build a new munitions plant under construction at Weldon Spring, Missouri.<\/p>\n
My older sister and I attended a small one-room brick schoolhouse at Harvester, Missouri, three miles from our home, but when my father decided to give up farming for good in 1941 to work in the defense plants, we left our little red brick schoolhouse and moved to St. Charles, a suburb of St. Louis, where we were enrolled at a Lutheran parochial school.\u00a0 And when we completed our primary school education we attended St. Charles High School, a public high school.<\/p>\n
I was not a good student and had little interest in high school.\u00a0 However, my parents insisted that if we wanted to get a good job, we had to have a high school diploma.\u00a0 It was the only thing they ever said on the subject.\u00a0 Attending a college or university was never a consideration, so during my four-year high school career I successfully avoided all subject matter related to mathematics and the sciences.\u00a0 I graduated in June 1951, with a GPA of just under 2.0, a C-minus average.<\/p>\n
After graduation I took a job as a \u201cgrease monkey,\u201d tow truck driver, and mechanics helper at a local automobile dealership, and months later I went to work as an assembly line riveter at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, a major manufacturer of jet fighter planes for the U.S. military.<\/p>\n
Then, in July 1953, I received a letter from the president of the United States; it began with the word \u201cGreetings.\u201d\u00a0 I was drafted into the U.S. Army on August 12, 1953, and was trained as a Field Artillery Operations and Intelligence (O&I) Specialist.\u00a0 After completing my basic training and my O&I training I was sent to West Germany for seventeen months as a member of the post-World War II occupation forces.\u00a0 Upon being honorably discharged in June 1955, I returned to McDonnell Aircraft where I worked as a Production Control Expediter for eighteen months.<\/p>\n
During that time, as therapy for an injury to my left knee, the result of a \u201cfriendly fire\u201d incident during basic training, I took a second job as a ballroom dancing instructor in St. Louis.\u00a0 Those two jobs kept me fully occupied for at least fifteen hours each day, five days a week.\u00a0 However, my injury prevented me from adequately performing my day job, so I took a job selling sewing machines and vacuum cleaners in the housing projects of St. Louis.\u00a0 My sales territory included the infamous Prewitt-Igo housing project where it was absolutely foolhardy for a white man to enter without an armed escort\u2026 let alone attempt to repossess a sewing machine or a vacuum cleaner from a black family who\u2019d failed to make their monthly payments.<\/p>\n
Finally, in December 1956, I took a job as a draftsman for Laclede-Christy Corporation, a major refractory manufacturer in South St. Louis.\u00a0 My job was to design open-pit strip mines on leases in Missouri and Illinois, and to assist the company surveyor in laying out prospecting plans for our drilling crews.\u00a0 It was during the nearly two years that I worked for Laclede-Christy that I developed an interest in surveying, mining engineering, and geology.<\/p>\n
In February 1957, I married my ballroom dancing partner, with whom I\u2019d earned an all-St. Louis ballroom championship.\u00a0 However, being unable to afford the rent for a house or an apartment of our own, we were forced to move in with my parents.\u00a0 But then, as the economic recession of 1957-58 worsened, I learned that my job at Laclede-Christy was to be phased out.\u00a0 It was then that I made the decision to \u201cescape\u201d into college, to enroll as a full-time student at the University of Missouri College of Engineering.\u00a0 It was something that my supervisors at Laclede Christy had urged me to do, but I had little or no high school background in science and mathematics.\u00a0 So, during the 1957-58 school year I took two evening courses in Intermediate Algebra at Washington University (St. Louis)\u2026 just to see if I could handle college-level mathematics.<\/p>\n
In two semesters of Algebra I earned two Cs.\u00a0 So in August 1958, armed with nothing but my two Cs and an abundance of hope and determination, I enrolled at the University of Missouri.\u00a0 Since I had no money and no background for the study of engineering, I look back on that decision as the most courageous thing I\u2019ve ever done.\u00a0 After selling everything we owned, except for our clothing and our 1953 Ford, I went to the local Goodwill store and purchased three rooms of kitchen, bedroom, and living room furniture off the junk pile in the alley behind the store for a total of fifty dollars.\u00a0 It was not good furniture; it was on the junk pile for good reason.<\/p>\n
In early November, 1957, we were blessed with the birth of a beautiful baby boy who was ten months old in August 1958 when we loaded all of our belongings, including our fifty dollars worth of junk furniture, into a U-Haul trailer and moved into a dilapidated three-room tar-paper shack in Columbia, Missouri, just across the road from the Missouri Tigers football stadium.<\/p>\n
Our only regular income was the $125 I received each month under the Korean G.I. Bill\u2026 $27 of which paid our monthly rent.\u00a0 The remainder of our income, earmarked for the next semester\u2019s tuition and books, gasoline, utilities, and insurance, left us with a food budget of only sixty cents a day.\u00a0 After we\u2019d purchased milk and other supplies for the baby we were able to afford only beans, spaghetti, and an occasional bottle of catsup to mitigate the blandness of our starchy diet.<\/p>\n
But the biggest shock of all was the difficulty of the course work.\u00a0 I was a 25-year-old veteran with a wife and child to support, and I found myself competing for grades against seventeen and eighteen-year-olds with four years of engineering prep in their high school careers.\u00a0 I attended class every day, I studied very hard, and I completed every homework assignment.\u00a0 Yet, when mid-term grades were posted during my first semester, I found that I was failing every course.<\/p>\n
With no alternative, I developed a radical new study regimen.\u00a0 I was in class at 7:40 every morning and completed my lectures by noon.\u00a0 By 1:00 PM I was home, hitting the books, and I refused to turn the page in a textbook until I thoroughly comprehended everything on that page. \u00a0I was up every morning at 6:00 AM and I studied for fourteen hours a day, every day of the week.\u00a0 It worked.\u00a0 At the end of my freshman year I found that, not only had I turned those Fs around, I was named to the Dean\u2019s Honor Roll.<\/p>\n
Our second child was born in January 1960, after which my wife took a night-shift job at the University Medical Center.\u00a0 Each night at 10:00 PM I\u2019d load our sleeping children into the back seat of our Ford and drive my wife to the medical center in time for her 10:30 PM shift.\u00a0 After driving home, I\u2019d return our children to their beds and resume studying until 2:30 or 3:00 AM.\u00a0 After a few hours sleep I was up again at 6:00 AM, changing diapers and feeding the children.\u00a0 And after dropping the boys off at our babysitter\u2019s home, I\u2019d pick up my wife at 7:00 AM and drive her home so that she could get eight hours sleep.\u00a0 I was in class at 7:40 AM, and when I\u2019d completed my morning lecturers I\u2019d return home to repeat my 14-hour study regimen.<\/p>\n
It was our daily routine, and it was brutal.\u00a0 When I entered the university in August 1958 I was 6 ft. tall and weighed 153 lb., but when I graduated four years later, in June 1962, I was still 6 ft. tall but I weighed only 116 lb.\u00a0 But I have no regrets.\u00a0 During my junior year I was elected to Chi Epsilon, National Scholastic Honor Fraternity; in 2001 I was elected to the Civil Engineering Academy of Distinguished Alumni; and in 2012 I was named an Honorary Knight of St. Patrick, receiving the Missouri Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Engineering.<\/p>\n
During my junior and senior years we had a neighbor with three small children whose husband was serving a long prison sentence.\u00a0 And although she was on the public dole, her in-laws often delivered supplies of freshly-butchered beef and pork from their farm\u2026 which she promptly tossed into our neighborhood garbage pails because, as she explained, she didn\u2019t like \u201cthat old country meat.\u201d\u00a0 When I returned to the university for my 20th<\/sup> class reunion in 1982, our former landlord reminded me that he and his wife had often seen me rooting through those garbage pails with a flashlight, late at night, digging out food with which to feed my family.\u00a0 It was such a painful experience that I had apparently washed it from my memory.<\/p>\n As we drove away that day, my eldest son said, \u201cDad!\u00a0 You fed us out of garbage cans?\u201d\u00a0 To which I replied, \u201cYes, Mark, I did.\u00a0 I did whatever I had to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Those were difficult, character-building years.\u00a0 But now, after more than fifty years of unlimited opportunity and exciting challenge, Barack Obama informs me that I\u2019ve played no role in any of that\u2026 that I\u2019ve arrived at this stage of my life because I\u2019ve \u201cwon life\u2019s lottery.\u201d\u00a0 I can\u2019t help but wonder what life would be like if I hadn\u2019t purchased that lottery ticket.<\/p>\n Paul R. Hollrah is a retired corporate government relations executive and a two-time member of the U.S. Electoral College.\u00a0 He currently lives and writes among the hills and lakes of northeast Oklahoma\u2019s Green Country region.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I realize that it may be a bit un-cool to dwell too much on one\u2019s own life experiences, but I have a point to make and I hope that I will be forgiven for doing so. I was born in … Continue reading