P.S.: The Autobiography of Paul Simon

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Chapter One

The Early Years

Perhaps being born the year before the Great Depression of 1929 made me fiscally conservative, and the misery faced by so many people made me socially liberal.

    I was born November 29, 1928, in Eugene, Oregon. My parents had just returned from being Lutheran missionaries in China. Years later I would tell Chinese-American audiences that I was "made in China" and also that no other member of the United States Senate grew up playing mah-jongg, a Chinese game. My parents returned to the United States after a mini-theological controversy in the midst of the civil war there. My father accepted what Lutherans refer to as "a call" from Grace Lutheran Church in Eugene to serve as its pastor. The theory of the call is that the voting members of the congregation assembled (then only men), after prayer and deliberation, issue an invitation to serve that has a combination of human and divine factors. Then the person receiving that invitation prayerfully determines whether or not to accept the call.

    My father grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, near Bonduel, about thirty-five miles west of Green Bay. His parents would probably be characterized today as lower middle class economically. My Grandfather Traugott (meaning "trust God") Simon, like most Americans in the latter part of the nineteenth century had agricultural roots, and he married a Lutheran parochial school teacher, Eleanor Elbert. Early photos show a man with almost movie star good looks and an attractive young woman. Eleanor knew tragedy early. Born in Courtland, Minnesota, in 1871, a few years after the Civil War, her mother's first fiance died of smallpox, and a sister of my grandmother lived only three months. Large families were common, and death visited them frequently in the days of primitive medicine. Like many others in this Germanic community, the Elberts spoke German and English. The family moved every few years, to Milwaukee, then to Budsin, near Crystal Lake in Wisconsin, on to Salters in Jackson township. At Salters the Lutheran congregation offered the teacher housing, five acres to farm, and $350 a year. Before they left Salters the Elbert family had ten living children. Eleanor's brother Paul graduated from college and took a teaching position at a parochial school in Bonduel, Wisconsin. The school needed a teacher for the primary grades and in 1896 Eleanor accepted her brother's invitation to become that instructor. She had sixty pupils in her class that first year! Most teachers then did not graduate from nor even attend college. An indication of the future social conscience of the family was a letter Eleanor wrote to her family about the mother of two of her pupils who died eight days after giving birth. The new mother had purchased material to make a dress for each of the two older girls, and my grandmother sewed the dresses for them. A small thing, but a portent of a sensitivity that she would transfer to her own family later.

    In a letter to her home my grandmother describes Bonduel, but could be describing almost any small Wisconsin town of that period: "There is a public school, and a cheese factory where they make good brick and cheddar cheese. A man by the name of Bachmann manages the factory. A shoe, boot and rubber store is run by A. Boettcher. Theodore Meyer owns the Bonduel Roller Mills. He saws lumber, shingles, and such things. Then there is the hotel called the Midland House, owned by H. C. Zuehlke. There is a blacksmith, harness maker, and milliner, two hardware stores, saloons and other places. I forgot the dry goods store. It is owned by Christ Bonnin.... He sells furniture, coffins and other articles besides groceries.... When farmers want to sell cows or pigs, they have to load them on a lumber wagon or drive them on foot to Seymour, Cecil, or another town. If the day is hot, animals sometimes die on the way or soon after."

    Then she added an important note: She met Traugott Simon in the church choir, the native son of one of the settlers of Bonduel. Soon she wrote to her family: "Traugott took me home again last night.... You must have guessed it by now, Traugott and I DO love each other. He walks all the way from his farm near Zachow, which is six miles, to come and see me." His father bought him 200 acres of timbered land which he gradually cleared and seeded. His father also gave him one cow. A year-and-a-half older than Eleanor, he married her in July 1899 in Melrose Park, Illinois, where Eleanor's family now lived.

    My grandparents kept careful records of their earnings and expenditures. In January 1902 they had income of $50.05; from churning butter (75 [cts.]), sale of sheep ($10.70), potatoes ($15.79), beef ($12.65), and clover seed ($10.16). Their expenses that month were $6.67 more than their income, but that included a tax bill of $23.80. The items purchased included two books, a magazine, and a newspaper, presumably subscriptions to the last two. Two months later, however, they had income of $121.77 and expenses of only $10. Income included $84 from the sale of logs, $11.95 from raccoon pelts, and 49 [cts.] from the sale of butter and eggs. For the year 1902 -- three years after their marriage -- they had income of $532.14 and expenses of $504.84. That did not allow luxurious living, but eggs sold for twelve cents a dozen, for example, and my grandparents did not want for essentials. Much of the food they ate grew on their farm. They spent less than five dollars a month for groceries.

    The year of my father's birth, 1903, they bought two geese for one dollar each and a horse, because of the death of another horse, for twenty-five dollars. The hide from the horse that died sold for two dollars.

    My grandfather was a good farmer but not an outstanding farmer. His greatest skills were working with wood. To build a new barn, he cut down the trees, sawed them into logs, and erected the barn with the help of friends and neighbors. I have a creative wooden lock which he made to put on that barn, a well-designed and well-crafted piece of work.

    Holding the family together fell to the lot of my grandmother. Theirs was a partnership marriage when such things generally did not prevail. Running the farm and seeing that the family had food and shelter fell into his domain, but decisions about rearing and religion became hers, though both shared each responsibility. When my grandfather sometimes charged items purchased at the hardware store, it upset my grandmother, the more frugal of the two.

    My grandparents were largely of German extraction, though family historians point out that some of the territory in which my ancestors lived crossed over into Denmark and Poland, as borders changed from time to time. But they lived in predominantly Germanic communities in the United States, and even though they were one or more generations from their European roots, they adapted to the language of their community. Services at the Lutheran church they attended were conducted in German and English, with more people worshiping at the German service. At that point in our nation's history we had a much higher percentage of citizens with a mother tongue other than English than is the case today, though you would hardly guess it from some of the alarmist literature that now is distributed.

    My grandparents' second child, Martin, my father, arrived on February 16, 1903. They paid the midwife two dollars. My grandparents wanted him to become a Lutheran pastor and that meshed with his wishes from early childhood on.

    My grandparents had nine children. The oldest, Gertrude, later became a medical missionary in China, and then Hong Kong. A dynamic person who worked particularly among tubercular patients, she had a large high school in Hong Kong named for her following her death. The other eight children contributed significantly in various ways, three of the boys becoming ministers. The youngest, Henry, became a district president of our branch of the Lutheran church, the equivalent of a bishop in the larger branch of Lutherandom or the same title in the Roman Catholic Church or the Methodist Church. Probably because he was the youngest, ten years older than I am and nearer to my age, I felt closer to him than to my other aunts and uncles of my father's family. To accommodate nine children the small house my grandfather built had to be replaced by a much larger ten-room home.

    When my father had barely reached the age of two, my grandmother's younger sister died in childbirth, a none-too-rare occurrence in the period.

    My grandfather gradually shifted more and more of his agricultural emphasis to dairy cows, and the family helped with milking. All the children knew how to milk before attending school. Their childhood involved work on the farm, and long walks to school in a rural community almost totally free of crime, though my grandfather's brother, William Simon, did place a classified ad in the Bonduel Times: "Whoever took my four fine hams out of the smoke house, please bring them back so I can finish smoking them." There is no record of a response.

    At the age of eleven my father wrote a letter to his Elbert grandparents and noted: "Our storekeeper's wife, Mrs. Bramschreiber, encourages Mamma to charge her groceries, but Mamma won't. She says they have to be paid sometime anyhow." My grandmother made dresses for the young girls in the family out of larger dresses given her by relatives. And though the family struggled financially, there are no oral or recorded recollections of anyone ever going without a meal, an advantage of living on a farm. Canning fruits and beets and cucumbers when they ripened also helped during the winter months.

    My father's sister Clara recalled: "In winter we rode the sleigh to church every Sunday. On Saturday afternoons Pappa and the older children lifted the large wooden, topless box onto the sleigh and laid the boards across for us to sit on. When it was colder than usual, we sat on horse blankets or quilts. Then Mother would heat the bricks and flat irons to help keep our feet warm. We had a beautiful team of grey and white mottled work horses. When everyone was dressed in their church clothes, Pappa hitched the harnessed horses to the wagon.... Off we went, gliding over the snow. This was especially thrilling on Christmas Eve when the stars were out and everything was covered with snow."

    I visited my grandparents at their Wisconsin farm at the age of three, and I can remember nothing about them or the visit, other than the porch that circled their large house on which I enjoyed running. When my brother and I were nine and eleven my grandparents visited our Oregon home, a gift from their children for a fortieth wedding anniversary. I recall it as a warm, marvelous visit. The sense of humor of my grandfather impressed us, perhaps exhibited more to grandchildren than others. My father's youngest brother, Henry, does not remember that great sense of humor. Years later I picked up the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and saw an Associated Press picture of my grandmother, then in her late seventies or early eighties, translating books into braille, a voluntary effort on her part. After leaving college I visited my grandparents a few times, but they were getting feeble. My grandfather enjoyed playing his fiddle but his memory had faded. We have a picture of them with my daughter as an infant, their oldest great-grandchild. As a boy I would correspond occasionally with my grandmother, and even though I did not see that much of either grandparent, they were an important presence in my life.

    The branch of the Lutheran Church called the Missouri Synod had prep schools covering the high school years for those who wished to enter the ministry. At the age of thirteen my father left home for Concordia in Milwaukee for that purpose. During his third year there, almost half the family income went to pay for his education. The combination of education and religion was a high priority for my grandparents.

    After finishing at the Milwaukee school, he attended Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. I do not recall my father ever telling me anything particularly eventful about his academic studies, though from conversations with others it is clear he had above average abilities.

    My five-foot four-inch father played on his high school basketball team but could not make the seminary team. However, he attended games and at one he attended on January 22, 1926, he met Ruth Troemel, who attended the game with one of her friends, Alice Schoenhoss. My father took Ruth and Alice home -- Ruth first -- and then he asked Alice for Ruth's telephone number. The next day, a Saturday, he called and asked her to attend a concert with him that evening. Sunday, he visited at her home, and six months later they became engaged. A graduate of a two-year high school program, my mother worked for Ralston-Purina in St. Louis, eventually keeping track of time cards of employees in the building in which she worked. Though she worked there only a short time, they promoted her quickly.

    My mother's childhood did not have the same idyllic caste that my father's had. Born in the vicinity of Fort Dodge, Iowa, she is listed as having the family name of Ainsworth (presumably English by background) but shortly after birth went to a Lutheran orphanage, and a Lutheran pastor there took her, and probably other children, to St. Louis for adoption. Herman Julius Tolzman, an accountant who became known by his middle name, and his wife Sophia adopted my mother. Sophia became seriously ill and died when my mother was three. During the latter part of her illness, she asked her sister Amelia Troemel and her husband Gustav to take care of my mother. The only memory my mother has of Sophia, the mother who adopted her, is of the funeral. Two years later Sophia's husband Julius died. "I was seriously ill with whooping cough," my mother relates. "My father would come to visit me every day. He suddenly stopped coming and I was told he had died." Years later she learned he committed suicide. At the age of five my mother had lost both parents. The Troemels had six older children, and suddenly having a seventh and much younger child did not bring great joy to the parents, particularly Amelia. Gustav ran a small bakery on the south side of St. Louis, and spent long hours there. Amelia repeatedly let my mother know that she "didn't belong to us" and that she was unwanted -- several times a week as my mother recalls -- and while Gustav cared for her, the older children in the family who also treated her with kindness had either left home by that time or soon would. All of this resulted in an unhappy childhood for my mother that left its emotional scars.

    The relatives of my mother to whom we were closest -- emotionally and geographically -- were her step-sister (never called that) Emma, her husband Rudy and their children and our cousins Vicky, Leah, and Carlos. They lived in Oregon City, about 100 miles from Eugene. The nearest Simon relatives -- Ernest and Irene (Simon) Andres, and my cousins Dorothy, Eldon, and Arnold -- lived near Woodburn, Oregon, where they farmed. We visited them frequently.

    One thing that still bothers my mother, who is ninety-one as I write this, is that she first learned of her adoption from my father, just prior to their marriage. The home in which she grew up did not mention it, probably out of the best of motivations. The jolt she felt when my father told her lives with her yet. My father discovered it going through the legal papers necessary for marriage and assumed she knew.

    The engagement of my parents coincided with my father's graduation from the seminary. On September 8, 1926, they married. Three days later they boarded a train for San Francisco, had a brief honeymoon there, and then boarded a freighter that took a limited number of passengers, and spent the next twenty-three days on the sea voyage to China where my father had "accepted the call" to do missionary work. They landed in Shanghai and took a river boat up the Yangtze River -- more than 1,200 miles, a scenic but slow venture. On New Year's Day of 1927 my father wrote from Wanhsien, Szechwan, China, to his family in Wisconsin: "The past year has been by far the most eventful in our young lives. Last year I was studying Greek -- this year, Chinese. Then conveniences -- now few, anywhere we go. Then I only casually considered going to a foreign country. Then I did not even have a steady girlfriend -- now I am married.... Then I was a carefree individual -- now I am four-fold happier." Then he added on a more serious note: "I still do not pray nearly as often and as earnestly as I ought to and would like to.... We are really in the midst of wars and rumors of wars.... All China seems to be full of soldiers, but a person becomes accustomed to them as he does to the dogs that bark at you from most houses. Yang Sen [apparently in charge of this part of China] sent Ruth and me a Christmas greeting. He is a fine General." However, my father looked with less than complete favor on the general's having five wives.

    About a year and three months after arriving, my father preached his first sermon in Chinese. But as he progressed in his knowledge of the language and the culture, the civil war in China heated up, and my father became engaged in a controversy within the missionary community known as "the term question" -- what Chinese word should be used to refer to God. The Lutheran missionaries in China voted 11-2, siding with my father in favor of a distinctive Chinese word for God that differed from a more generic term that people used for a variety of forms of worship. But a senior missionary who differed with the majority appealed to the mission board in the United States, and that board agreed with him and issued an order that missionaries in China had to use the generic term which the large majority opposed. The issue inflamed passions and caused people of conscience on both sides to write lengthy discourses. My father felt crushed by what today appears to be an arbitrary decision by a board thousands of miles away that did not understand the issue. Years later my father told me that he still believed that he held the correct position, but that he could have been more diplomatic in handling the matter.

    The combination of the doctrinal dispute over the Chinese term to use, and the civil war, caused my parents to return to the United States. Probably also a factor: They soon would become parents. Missionaries with small children or who soon would have them received priority in leaving, even though both sides in the civil war generally respected the fact that people from other nations were non-participants. My parents came back with the expectation that they soon would return to China.

    My father filled a temporary pastoral vacancy at Grace Lutheran Church in Eugene, Oregon. About a month after my parents moved there, on November 29, 1928, my mother gave birth to me. Two years later the only other member of the family, my brother Arthur, arrived.

    It gradually became clear that my parents would not be able to return to China because of the unsettled situation there, and my father accepted the permanent pastorate of the church. Prior to my parents coming to Eugene, a small band of twenty-five Lutherans purchased the building from the Church of the Brethren, an edifice with a beautiful all-wood interior. The church had a tall tower, so tall that when there were strong winds the building shook. A member in those days, Ken Brauner, recalls that during evening services he and other young people would sit in the balcony and when storms hit "the whole balcony would pitch and sway, creak and groan, as though it would come crashing down at any moment." In a 100-mile-an-hour windstorm in 1962, it did. When we had cool weather, my father got up at five on Sunday mornings and started the wood furnace in the church. Men volunteered with their shovels to dig a basement under the church, and how beautiful that basement looked to me when finished. I remember the church as being huge, and to a child it was, but since then I have seen pictures of it and I realize that when my parents came home after a Sunday service attended by more than 100 people, that excited them -- and filled the church. Our lives revolved around the church and its activities.

    Our closest friends were church members: the Sullivans, the Libkes, the Zinikers, and others. And when we bought groceries, we bought from Mr. Gieseke. (First names were used much less frequently then even by reasonably close friends.) His cash-and-carry store offered the advantage that it was neither cash nor carry. We charged our grocery bill, as most people had to, and Mr. Gieseke often delivered to our door, sometimes selling cosmetic Rawleigh products in the process (Rawleigh being a somewhat primitive predecessor of today's Avon products). I also recall the Metropolitan Life Insurance salesman who stopped at our home once a month to collect twenty-five cents on an insurance policy my parents had.

    Behind the church on Ferry Street in Eugene stood the parsonage, where we lived. The frame building had six small rooms for living and a large kitchen, all above a ground-level dirt-floor basement. The basement held jars of fruit and vegetables my mother canned, and sizable quantities of wood that we used for both the kitchen cooking stove, which also heated that room, and a stove in the middle of the house that served as our main source of warmth. The wooden floors had linoleum covering that showed considerable wear. I vividly remember years later in another home when we had our first rug, which seemed an almost unbelievable luxury to me.

    These were depression years. My father earned $62.50 a month as pastor, and during the fruits and vegetable harvest my mother worked at the local cannery, the Eugene Fruitgrowers Association. They paid her on the basis of food processed, not hours. My mother, always nimble with her fingers, whether typing or working in the cannery, helped our family finances considerably. My parents made a good team. My father had a good business sense -- or he could not have been successful in his later publishing venture -- but he sometimes would be inclined to be more idealistic and more generous than our family finances warranted. My mother had a slightly more pragmatic streak on some of these things, helping to preserve our family's economic integrity in difficult times.

    Our family was more fortunate than many, but out-of-work relatives stayed with us frequently, and in those days homeless men referred to as "tramps" or "bums" would come around asking for food, and we always provided some. My mother thought they had some type of mark on our house, letting others know that they could get free food from us. (Years later, the senior Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago told me his mother said the same thing and his family also always helped.)

    My parents did well enough financially that my father could study part-time at the University of Oregon in Eugene, completing work for a doctorate.

    We lived in a very different culture then. No television, but listening to the radio stretched our creative juices and we could clearly visualize the people in the Lone Ranger or Gang Busters. By the time I entered high school I listened every Saturday night to the Lucky Strike Hit Parade to discover the ten most popular tunes in the nation that week. Small stores had hard round balls of gum called jawbreakers that we bought for a penny. All stores had Blackjack gum. Candy bars sold for either a penny or a nickel and gasoline cost 18 cents a gallon. If Parents Magazine said a movie was fit for children, my parents allowed us to attend on a Saturday afternoon -- once a month until we reached the age of ten and then once every two weeks. Laurel and Hardy and Tom Mix had great appeal, and the State theater in Eugene had a hole in the screen where an irate viewer had thrown an obstacle at a villain. Without my parents' permission, I saw an aging former boxing champion, Joe Louis, spar a few demonstration rounds.

    Kindergarten did not exist in Eugene or most of the nation. My first four years of education were at Washington Grade School -- and the local public library which I haunted. I shall always be grateful to those who made that library possible.

    More difficult economic circumstances than some students faced did not present problems for me. Several students in grade school dressed better than I did, but it did not seem to bother me -- though I remember it, so I guess it did bother me a little. I also remember things that most young people in our country have not experienced, like my mother putting socks over a small wooden device to patch holes with carefully crafted thread work. Every sliver of soap had to be saved and then placed in a small metal device that my mother would shake in a pan of water to make suds for washing dishes. It still bothers me to walk away from a motel or hotel room and leave a fairly large piece of soap. Art and I had baths every Saturday night. We slept in a double bed with metal spokes at the head, the important middle spoke dividing our territory. If either of us crossed into the other's territory during the night we became vocal about it.

    On a rare special day we would stop at Christensen's Dairy Store and get an ice cream cone. And visiting my uncle and aunt, Rudy and Emma Messerli, in Oregon City, I ate strawberry shortcake for the first time, an exotic taste that lingers with me yet.

    Many church members farmed. We visited farms frequently, and in the pre-Rural Electric Administration about half of them did not have electricity. Every farm had a few cows and after milking we turned a crank on a separator to divide the cream from the milk. It took two of us children to haul a milk can to the edge of the road where the "creamery" truck -- for some reason never referred to as a dairy -- picked up the can or cans. No refrigeration. I have often wondered how many people got sick on that milk. We then referred to undulant fever, a rarity today but common then and known as "milk fever." Life on a farm today is dramatically different and better -- and safer for those of us who consume food.

    My brother Art and I learned to work from early childhood on, for which I am grateful to my parents. We had certain duties in the house, like drying the dishes, but no allowance. However, every year my father planted a garden in our back yard, and for each can we filled with stones and glass from the garden, we received one penny. Starting in about the fifth grade we also worked for farms in the area, jobs we could then legally get from the Employment Service. I picked string beans and cherries, weeded rows of beets and carrots (hard on your back!), all of it paid by the pounds of beans or cherries, or the number of rows weeded. We did not earn much, but we learned the value of money and hard work. Later my father started printing religious material with equipment we had in a converted garage in back of our home. Art and I put in one hour a day there, and three hours on Saturday, as part of our responsibility to the family. For any hours we worked more than that we received fifteen cents an hour.

    During his earlier years, Art had health problems, none of a major nature but sometimes he did not appear to be as robust as he should have been. He had a particularly bad case of whooping cough (still a major killer of children in the developing world), and a form of typhoid fever, as well as other minor ailments. At one point our family physician incorrectly thought he had leukemia, the impact of which I did not understand other than that that diagnosis upset my mother. But he gradually outgrew his health problems, and when he became the star pitcher on our grade school softball team I took special pleasure in cheering him on.

    Neither of us had great skills athletically, but we enjoyed playing. My father built a backboard against the side of our garage and we played basketball between ourselves and with friends. Both Art and I wore glasses from the early grades on, and that primitive basketball court accounted for several occasions when we broke them, not a source of pleasure to our parents. I also vividly remember when an older high school student, Ernie Danner, was playing softball with Art and me and two of our friends. One of his classmates rode by on a bicycle and shouted to Ernie, "What are you doing, playing with those little kids?" Ernie Danner responded with words that gave us great pride, "These kids can play better than you can." Art and I followed athletic scores and the sports pages faithfully, particularly anything to do with the University of Oregon. Besides encouraging my reading skills and giving me good exercise, following sports later played a role in getting me my first newspaper job.

    My father had a creative streak, and would do things most parish pastors did not. Periodically he would have an African American minister from California, Rev. Marmaduke Carter, speak in our church. He stayed in our home when he came, probably in part because our church could barely pay his train fare to Eugene, and not any hotel bill. He slept in the double bed my brother and I ordinarily slept in, and we would fight for the honor to sleep with him -- an honor I am sure he would have appreciated not having! But we learned lessons of race relations from our earliest childhood days.

    My father also started branch Sunday Schools, including two in mill towns more accustomed to hearing religious terms in profanity than in worship.

    When he tried to get some children's religious literature which the church could give to those attending Sunday School, he discovered none existed, and so he started writing and publishing a little four-page paper printed on newsprint called The Children's Hour. Russell Evans, a Christian Scientist, assisted him in this endeavor by providing a low printing price. I remember particularly vividly that Russell Evans's Valley Printing Company had as its neighbor the Rose Bud Bakery, the aroma of which tantalized me. Occasionally my brother and I would persuade our parents to buy something at the bakery, making a trip to what seemed to us like a dull printing plant worth the effort. My father started this publication for his own church but interest spread, and when he had a circulation of 11,500 he decided to leave the parish ministry and devote himself full time to his publication. I should have made that word plural, publications. He also started a monthly magazine for parents called The Christian Parent. That had reached a circulation of 2,500.

    My parents bought a home on West 26th Street, two blocks outside of the city limits of Eugene, which had a population of 23,000. They put an addition on the garage, put a concrete floor in part of it, purchased printing equipment with a loan, and my father became a full-time publisher and editor. My mother took care of the book work and Art and I learned to operate the printing equipment.

    The new house seemed large, though pictures show it to be anything but that. But Art and I now had space for separate beds in our bedroom. I remember little else about the room except that I had a picture of General Douglas MacArthur and his corn-cob pipe hanging over my bed during the years of World War II. The house had shingle siding and a steep roof on a fairly narrow lot, but my father bought four adjacent lots for ten dollars each. That gave the two of us and our friends plenty of room to play.

    The move to 26th Street brought other momentous changes in our lives. We got an oil heating stove, so that we no longer had to pile the wood in the basement, and bring it up frequently for a stove that seemed to burn mountains of wood. Not only was it cleaner and less work, the oil stove could be set to provide a constant level of heat. What an incredible improvement! I felt we were living in luxury. To add even further to our new standard of living, the old kitchen stove, which had a seemingly insatiable appetite for wood that Art and I had to chop, had as a replacement a smaller, cleaner modern marvel: an electric stove.

    But moving outside the city limits meant that Art and I would have to attend a rural school. We protested vigorously. We called the Dunn School we were slated to attend the Dumb School. It had several grades to a room and we assumed that would stunt our intellectual growth immeasurably. But our protestations went for naught when my father checked and found that we would have to pay steep tuition to attend the city schools. Walking a mile and a quarter to school did not please us either. However, once we started, much to our surprise, academically this rural school was ahead of the city school we had attended. Within a few days we made friends and settled in comfortably.

    Two of my years there I had a remarkably fine teacher, Mrs. John Rodgers. She made learning fun and exciting. One of the great advantages of such a rural school came when as a fourth grader I had finished my work; I could listen to her instruct the fifth graders and the sixth graders in the same room. One day she sent a note to my parents saying that if they liked the idea, I could move from the fourth grade to the fifth grade, which I did. She stretched us. In 1940 she had us debate before the PTA, "Should Franklin Roosevelt Be Elected to a Third Term?" I am pleased that she lived long enough so that I could tell her how much her teaching meant to me.

    One of those in my grade at Dunn School became a friend for life, Donald Schmieding. Don's father operated the Midgley Planing Mill in Eugene that Don eventually took over. A businessman with an unusually sensitive social conscience, he has quietly contributed much to the Eugene area over the years. And when I first ran for the Senate in 1984, Don and his wife Sylvia donated three months to come to Illinois and campaign for me -- no small contribution!

    One of the families who lived about a mile-and-a-half from us, and sent their children to the same grade school, was the Wayne Morse family. He became dean of the law school and later a United States Senator, a genuine maverick who served in the Senate as a Republican, then an independent, and later a Democrat. In the third grade his daughter Nancy had a crush on Art, to Art's embarrassment. At that age his interest in girls had not developed. I occasionally saw Wayne Morse after I entered politics, and then my wife Jeanne and I had a chance to visit with his widow a few times. I did not serve with him in Congress and did not get to know him well. But years later when I received the Wayne Morse Award for Courage in Government, it had special significance for me.

    Around the time we moved, our family finances improved enough so that we started taking family vacations, piling blankets and clothes into the old 1929 Model A Ford, driving through the wooded hills about ninety miles to Munsel Lake, near Florence, Oregon. Munsel Lake's position about two miles inland from the Pacific Ocean meant less strong wind and a great place for a small family. The word "motel" had not entered our lexicon, and we stayed in a cabin at the isolated lake and enjoyed swimming, boating, climbing on sand dunes, and paying a daily visit to the mighty ocean, sometimes fishing. We prepared all our own meals; I don't remember ever going to a restaurant there.

    The least pleasant time of my early years were the first three years of high school. As I mentioned in telling of my father, Missouri Synod Lutherans had a system of pre-seminary high schools. My parents wanted my brother and me to become ministers, and so when I graduated from eighth grade at Dunn School the family assumed I would go to Concordia in Portland, a residential high school designed for those with ministerial ambitions.

    Concordia had only twenty-two students, all male. Because of my November 29 birthday, and because I had skipped a grade, I started high school at the age of twelve. Those who were juniors and seniors could inflict hazing on freshmen and sophomores, everything from being hit by a paddle as many times as an upperclassman wanted to running errands to the nearby grocery and drug store. Some of the freshmen had upperclassmen as roommates, who seemed to get great pleasure in paddling and inflicting rather painful requirements on the freshmen. I resolved that when I became a junior I would never do that, and I didn't, my non-participation causing some resentment on the part of a few of the other juniors and seniors.

    Academically the school excelled. I had Latin, Greek, German, and a high school curriculum exposure superior to that given most secondary school students. The four-person faculty afforded me an opportunity to grow intellectually, for which I am grateful. Because the school enrolled so few students, I managed to be on the basketball and baseball teams, though even with such a small enrollment I barely made them. I served as the sixth man on the basketball team, the first substitute, and managed to get enough time to earn a letter; and in baseball I played second base, where I fielded reasonably well but had a breathtaking batting average of .115. I enjoyed sports, but no college scholarships came my way!

    Of the twenty-two at the school, some intended to become ministers and a few were assigned there by the courts as an alternative to going to the state reformatory. Distinguishing between the two types of students sometimes did not come easily. I recall one student, who became a pastor, who slipped down to the local burlesque show every Saturday. At that point in my life I found that more revolting than I do today, having now seen more of life and the deficiencies of all human beings, including myself.

    Life magazine in that period would have a picture or two of a semi-nude woman about every third week, and the Concordia principal would take ink and cover the picture. We would hold the page up to the light to catch the details, and if that didn't work, there would be a mass exodus to the drug store two blocks away, where we could look up the picture in the stand that contained magazines for sale. At that point our culture did not tolerate magazines like Playboy or Penthouse.

    The language of the students, in terms of profanity and telling "dirty jokes," was much like the language of my Army basic training unit years later. I regret to say I took on all of these bad habits, wanting to be part of the crowd. That continued until my junior year, when a student named Don Brandon transferred from a public high school and did not use profanity and tell off-color jokes. Don later became a professor at the University of San Francisco. His conduct so impressed me that I quit the bad speech habits then and have never gone back to them. It makes me no more virtuous than anyone else, but it illustrates the power of example. Years later political columnist Robert Novak asked me whether I ever swear, and I told him, "Only when I read your column."

    I am sure I tried the patience of the small faculty. My report cards indicate deportment was not a strong suit for me, at one point noting that another student and I played football outside without our shirts on, a violation of campus rules. Deportment problems in high schools today are a little more serious!

    In those days young people hitchhiked in relative safety. I frequently hitchhiked on weekends between Portland and Eugene -- about 120 miles -- something that amazes me now since I started at the school at the age of twelve and my parents exercised caution about so many things. During my college years and during my Army time, I did the same. In all those years, only twice do I recall being picked up by drivers who had too much to drink, but otherwise I never had a problem. Hitchhiking provided cheap transportation and a chance to meet interesting people.

    Most weekends I went home, but one Saturday and Sunday sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations I stayed in Portland, and I remember it because of what happened that Sunday. I attended services at Trinity Lutheran Church, perhaps one mile from the school. As two friends and I walked back to Concordia, we noted excitement among people along the way. We asked what had happened, and they told us that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I had no idea about the location of Pearl Harbor, but I knew from the conversation that it was a U. S. base, and that meant war. My friends and I went to the home of the principal, F. W. J. Sylwester, and my classmate Bob Sylwester, for Sunday dinner and the silent group listened to the radio -- no television then -- getting much of the initial information from an eloquent national radio preacher, Dr. Walter A. Maier, who totally changed his Sunday sermon because of Pearl Harbor. After the initial shock, most Americans felt that it would take only a short time to respond to the attack and defeat Japan. The war monopolized conversation and resulted in an immediate and overwhelming sense of coming together as a nation, but few people I knew or listened to had any idea how long and costly the war would be.

    Not just at this school, but generally, people had nicknames attached to themselves more frequently than today. When I read the obituaries in my local newspaper in southern Illinois where I now live, it is much more common for older people -- men particularly -- to have nicknames than the younger people who die. But sometimes the nicknames were cruel. One student at Concordia with a long nose and a receding chin had the nickname "Mole". Some were worse. Why I did not become more sensitive to that at the time I cannot explain.

    After three years of that boarding school I knew I did not want to become a minister. My guess is that if I had not gone to this pre-seminary school, I might have entered the ministry. But I persuaded my parents to let me return to school in Eugene, where I graduated from Eugene High School. There I had two outstanding teachers, Juliette Gibson, who taught journalism and served as adviser to the school paper on which I served as sports editor, and Golda Wickham, an English teacher. Both took a real interest in students. Miss Gibson, as we always called her, had the bark of an army sergeant, and would not have won any personality contests, but she demanded quality in our work, and we learned, whether we wanted to or not. Mrs. Wickham had a more outgoing personality but did not hesitate to give us sizable assignments, and made everything from Chaucer to Shakespeare come alive. She later became Dean of Women at the University of Oregon.

    We had some uncommonly fine student leaders at Eugene High School. Warren Webster, our student body president, followed his father into becoming a Baptist minister, and James Luckey, head of the men's student organization, eventually headed a museum in Hawaii. That relatively small high school in a few years graduated Neal Goldschmidt, who became Governor of Oregon and the Secretary of Transportation for the nation; Cecil Andrus, later Governor of Idaho and U. S. Secretary of the Interior; and this future U. S. Senator.

    We attended high school in a different era. I think I knew what went on there, but I never heard of anyone using drugs. When a few male students really wanted to have "a wild time," we would sneak into the woods somewhere and drink a little beer, the taste of which I have always hated. But I drank a little on one occasion when I was in high school, a sort of testing of emerging manhood. (Years later, while serving in the Army in Germany, when German families automatically placed a stein of beer in front of me I drank a little to be polite. A distorted sense of taste that makes people like beer or green peppers is beyond my comprehension.)

    When I reached the grand old age of fifteen in 1944, I served as a substitute mail carrier for the Eugene Post Office. It faced serious personnel shortages. World War II drew men away from civilian jobs, and in those days not only were women not used as mail carriers, I never heard anyone even mention the possibility in all the discussion of shortages. I did learn that a substitute carrier gets the hilliest route, where the more economically fortunate live, who subscribe to heavy magazines and various book clubs. When I regularly finished my mail route ahead of others, two of the older carriers pulled me aside and urged me to take more time on my route, pointing out that I would make more money, since they paid me by the hour. The unspoken but obvious other part of their consideration was that I made them look bad coming in earlier from a tougher route. I sympathized with the fact that they did not have the eagerness of a fifteen-year-old, and if I had been carrying mail for as long as they had, I might be doing it more slowly also. I managed to find some things to do in the morning before sorting my mail, helping clean up the post office, and leaving for my deliveries a little later, and then getting back a little later.

    One small thing happened while I delivered mail. I occasionally saw a beautiful grey, bushy cat in making my rounds, and one day I saw the cat pounce on a robin, and walk away with the squealing robin in its mouth. That bothered me for several days, and is still vivid in my mind. Life is not always as you would like it to be.

    The summer before my post office job I worked as a stock boy at J. C. Penney's, my first job outside of working on fruits and vegetables on area farms. My first job with a regular pay check!

    After graduation from high school I had the good fortune to land a part-time job writing sports for the Eugene Register-Guard under the tutelage of a genuinely fine journalist, Dick Strite, the sports editor. He assigned me to make up the sports page or pages each day, pull the copy off the wire and determine what stories should run, write headings, and cover minor events that occurred in the area, including the circus of Saturday night wrestling, which we treated as genuine, even though we knew it was more show than athletic event. Occasionally Dick let me write a sports column, and I would earn a few dollars now and then serving as a "stringer," phoning in sports news to L. H. Gregory at the Oregonian in Portland. Dick Strite wrote good stories, and expected the same of me. He also had the affliction of most journalists in that day, a love of whiskey and smoking. His top right-hand drawer had a fifth of whiskey in it, which he made clear I should not touch. Years after I left the Register-Guard I stopped back there to see Dick. He had survived a heart attack and I asked him whether he planned to follow his physician's orders. "Hell no," he said, showing me a package of cigarettes.

    William Tugman, editor of the paper and father of a boyhood friend of mine, Tom Tugman, occasionally assigned non-sports feature stories to me. Those stories would not win any journalistic prize, but they helped to teach me writing. The only way to learn how to play tennis is to play tennis, and the only way to learn how to write is to write! Bill Tugman later played a key role in getting Wayne Morse elected to the United States Senate. After retiring as editor of the Register-Guard he moved to Reedsport, Oregon, and took over a weekly newspaper.

    My job writing sports gave me an excuse to buy a used car, and used it was. A 1934 Ford, it showed every sign of wear, but despite the torn upholstery and substantial oil consumption, it gave me transportation. A University of Oregon star halfback, Jake Leicht, made it to the East-West Shrine game in San Francisco, then perhaps the biggest football end-of-the-season event outside of the Rose Bowl. I got a press pass and a few dollars from the Register-Guard to cover it, and started for San Francisco with Art and my classmate Don Schmieding. We still had gas rationing, and good tires were rare. We had enough coupons to get there on gas, and had to buy one miserable used tire. Forty miles south of Eugene we ran into a flood and after going through high water our brakes did not work for a short period. Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge we heard something rattling and cars passing us -- which most of them did -- pointed to the bottom of our car. But we couldn't stop on the bridge. We discovered nothing more serious than a dangling tailpipe. We made it both ways, a great adventure.

    I sensed that my destiny would be in journalism, and though my experience involved sports coverage, I had an interest in politics from my early years. My father took me at the age of eight to hear Eleanor Roosevelt speak. I listened with fascination to the radio broadcast of the Republican convention that nominated Alf Landon in 1936. My father's political roots were in Wisconsin with the LaFollette Progressives. He met "Old Bob" LaFollette once, and to his dying day believed that the two greatest Americans who ever lived were Abraham Lincoln and "Old Bob" LaFollette. Because the LaFollettes eventually became Republicans, my father considered himself one also. Oregon Republicans have a progressive streak (Charles McNary served in the Senate from Oregon then, with Wayne Morse, Robert Packwood, and Mark Hatfield later representing the same tradition). But despite considering himself a Republican, I can remember the Roosevelt sticker on our Model A Ford. And Dad took an interest in issues, occasionally writing letters to the editor that stirred mini-controversies, such as his letter to the editor defending the right of retail clerks to strike. Race relations interested my parents -- today it would be called civil rights -- and probably because of their concerns, I went through the most moving book I ever read, Black Boy by Richard Wright. An autobiographical story, it did not reach the recognition of another of his books, Native Son, but it hit me at the right time and moved me deeply.

    When we moved outside the city limits, only a few homes lined the street on which we lived, but building stopped at our place. From there we had open fields in which we could run, have neighborhood softball games, and occasionally see pheasants take off. Pheasants in a field usually do not move until a person comes right up to them, and when we roamed through the fields the sudden flapping and take-off of the big birds frightened us. About a city block from our home, across an open field, the only local radio station, KORE, had its facilities. My father gave guest sermons on the station occasionally and one caused a controversy. In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon and Washington, none of whom had committed a crime, from their homes. They had from one to three days to sell all of their property and put all their possessions into one suitcase before the federal government sent them to camps in Idaho and other inland states. This happened two months after the start of World War II and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Patriotic fervor gripped all of us. My father, who usually avoided any political references in his sermons, somehow worked in an objection to how our government treated the Japanese Americans. My mother believes that he also sent a letter to the editor on this, but I do not remember that. I recall a few hate phone calls and hostile comments from friends. I remember standing in front of a cutter in the printshop in back of our house while my father explained to Art and me why what the President did was wrong. But my father's actions embarrassed me. Thirteen at the time, I did not appreciate the pointed remarks, half-joking and half-serious, from my friends. I wished he had not done it. But it taught me an important lesson I have never forgotten: If you believe something, stand up, regardless of the opposition. In retrospect, I wonder where were those who should have stood firmly for the rights of their fellow Americans? Where was the American Bar Association? Where were the other members of the clergy? The State of Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union immediately objected, but the national ACLU moved more slowly. One of the ironies of the situation is that one of the few public officials to protest the action, while the President had it under consideration, was J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose later record showed considerably less sensitivity to civil liberties. While the action of our government cannot be compared to Hitler's Holocaust, it is illustrative of the reality that the passion of a nation can be aroused against a minority if leadership is irresponsible. My father's actions are a source of pride to me today, but the situation that developed then is a reminder of how badly public officials can go astray in an emotional situation. There need to be restraining voices defending the rights of minorities or those expressing unpopular views.

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