Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) Read online

  As David was going into the Air Force, he and Jean married. Mom earned a one-year teaching certificate from Luther College and then left school, following David to Lowry Air Force Base, near Denver. Dad was only in his early twenties, but he was smart; he taught electronics on the base. Mom got a job as a secretary at a nearby company called Red Comet, which made fire extinguishers. One time, President Eisenhower came to visit the corporate headquarters, and Mom had the opportunity to shake his hand. She was a Democrat, but she was thrilled to meet a great hero of World War II, now the leader of the free world.

  My older brother, David Jr., was born at nearby Fitzsimons Army Hospital, in 1953. After Dad’s military service, the three Ambles ambled back to Waterloo. Dad took a full-time factory job at Chamberlain Manufacturing, an ordnance maker for the Pentagon, working a lathe to pay the bills. Meanwhile, he used his GI Bill benefits to attend Iowa State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Iowa. The first in his family to go to college, he studied engineering, aiming for a white-collar career.

  The family moved into a tiny house at 210 East Ninth Street. As a piece of real estate, it wasn’t much, but it was their own little piece of the American Dream. Like my grandparents, my parents lived on the first floor and rented out the second floor; they even rented out the attic. On a bright spring morning in 1956, my mother was planting tulips and went into labor. My dad was at school taking a test, so a distant relative, Elmer, who was renting upstairs, drove Mom to the hospital. Dad was at the hospital by the time I was born; he was the first to tell my mother, “Honey, we have a little baby girl!”

  My first memories are of that house, sitting in the kitchen, watching my mother as she canned tomatoes. We had a black-and-white TV, and I remember watching President Eisenhower and thinking to myself, Mommy knows him!

  But we didn’t watch much TV, because Mom was a reader, and she wanted all her children too to be readers. She was—and still is!—a classic 1950s/1960s mother. She has always been feminine, gracious, ladylike, and totally devoted to her children. Soon there were four of us; Davey and I were joined by little brothers Gary in 1960 and Paul in 1962. Yes, I had the privilege, if that’s the way to say it, of growing up with three rambunctious brothers, and I knew what it was like to compete with the boys; I learned what you have to do to fight back. In other words, it was great training for politics.

  The six of us lived near a Dairy Queen, but it was a rare treat to go there. The more usual food was a Wonder Bread sandwich with a slice of lettuce and a layer of mayonnaise. We never ate fancy, but we were happy and we had freedom to play outside without the need for adult supervision—and that was the greatest wealth.

  In addition, we had our extended family. It seemed that just about every weekend we would drive out somewhere to visit with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or close family friends. We would sometimes cook out, but I don’t really remember food being the focus of our lives; the focus was our family and friends. We would go to church together, then maybe go for a drive to visit relatives; we did everything together. When I needed a new dress, my mother or grandmother would sew one for me. It wasn’t the posh life, but it was the good life.

  We also listened to the adults talk politics.

  Let me tell you about my grandmothers. My mother’s mother was named Laura, and she was a New Deal–style Democrat. She had worked hard all her life, but she also believed that FDR was a great president, that he had saved the country back in the thirties. She loved me and all of her other grandkids, and she let us know that she did. In my heart, she will always be just one thing: pure love.

  My father’s mother, Anna, was the Republican in the family. She would read Time magazine cover to cover—it was Republican back then—and she would devour too the Wall Street Journal every weekday. Then she would be ready for a lively discussion and, if need be, a spirited debate. She was a thorough reader, an intent listener, and a terrific conversationalist, although she always argued from principle. She loved to talk, and she loved to put pepper on food, and so on weekends she’d do both. I’d listen to her as she talked, added some pepper, then talked some more, then added more pepper. Her dishes had a lot of pepper. To this day, I like pepper so much that I usually remove the top of the shaker!

  One day, sometime in the mid-1960s, I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen on Lafayette Street, listening to my dad and my grandmother argue politics. Dad, always a Democrat, was talking to his mother, the family Republican, about what was happening in Washington, D.C. Dad said that President Lyndon Johnson was doing a good job pushing Great Society social-welfare programs. And my grandmother said, “David, it won’t be you who pays for all these programs, it will be Davey and Michele.”

  At the age of eight or nine, I knew more about Barbie dolls than about fiscal issues, but that scene has stuck with me ever since. Government programs with nice-sounding names may seem like a good idea, but someone has to pay for them. And as we have learned in the decades since, Grandma Anna’s prediction has come true. Indeed, I don’t think that even Grandma Laura, the staunch Democrat, if she were with us today, would believe that the welfare state still works for working people—or anyone else. Indeed, I am sure she would be shocked and troubled by the degree to which governmental “help” has become, instead, a crushing burden on all of us.

  Moreover, I know both grandmothers would say that all of us must be restrained and prudent in our spending. That’s the way they got through their own lives; why should it be any different for the nation as a whole? Reckless people don’t survive; neither do reckless countries.

  Yet for all the spice of the food, and the spice of the argument, things never got too hot for us back in Waterloo. We were family. And that was everything to all of us, no matter which party we identified with.

  I thank God for the loving framework that nurtured me. Faith, family, friends—we all need those. On Saturday night, we would take our weekly bath, put on our jammies, watch dinosaur cartoons on TV, and then go to bed early. The next morning, we would go to the early service at First Lutheran Church of Waterloo; later we went to the Nazareth Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cedar Falls. My father’s mother was an adult Sunday school teacher at the church, where she taught the Bethel Bible Series. And every summer, we went to two weeks of vacation Bible school. It was a life of comforting routine and simplicity, and it was all we wanted. To me, growing up, those familiar rhythms meant that I had everything.

  It’s a shame now, especially for children, that in the 1960s we started to lose those protective frameworks for families. It’s vital that children be allowed to grow up in an environment of innocence, protected from inappropriate adult situations. How foolish it is to hurry children into premature crisis by exposing them to mature themes. Kids need to master the basics as they grow up; they need book learning, plus, of course, strong values. If kids are prematurely pushed into adulthood, oftentimes adult problems will ensue.

  So some things should just wait—or never be seen at all.

  For example, I went to kindergarten at Hawthorne Elementary School on Franklin Street, just a few blocks from my house. The neighborhood was definitely on the wrong side of the tracks, but back then, nobody worried for my physical safety. I walked to and from school, and the worst I’d see was beat-down old houses and beat-down old cars and rowdy taverns.

  Today, it would be different. A neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks nowadays isn’t just physically beaten down; it’s morally beaten down. Kids can handle scarcity, but they can’t handle depravity. If our failed institutions produce young people, and then adults, who lack values and a moral compass, no neighborhood will ever be safe. And if those same failed institutions are also revolving doors of recidivism, then inevitably some neighborhoods will become war zones. No American child ought to live like that.

  When I was in kindergarten, my parents moved out to the suburbs, to Cedar Falls. It was a
three-bedroom rambler, as they called it, but you couldn’t ramble very far, because it was no more than eight hundred square feet for the six of us. Still, compared with the old house, it felt like a palace.

  My dad worked, and my mom took care of us at home full time. We walked to school, came home for lunch, then walked back to school, then came back home at three thirty. Or back toward home, I should say, because mostly we played outside after school.

  I always liked school. I loved learning about words and numbers and holidays and music. Once, in third grade, the teacher asked us who didn’t know how to tell time. I was the only kid who raised my hand. My teacher sent a note home to my mother, who had just assumed that I knew. But the teacher was nice; she gave me a clock to study, and soon I mastered it. I will always be grateful to her for that extra bit of kindness.

  I learned of larger events too, along with my fellow students. All of us in the postwar generation—packed, as we were, thirty-five or more to a classroom—shared experiences, especially those brought to us by television. I happily remember, for example, sitting in the school gymnasium, watching the NASA Gemini program, as the rockets launched and the astronauts spacewalked—all on a single little black-and-white TV.

  One day in school, I looked up from my second-grade schoolwork to see that my teacher, Mrs. Whitmeyer, had stepped out of the classroom and into the hall, speaking in serious but hushed tones with another teacher. I could tell immediately that something important was happening. Probably something bad, because both women were crying. Without saying a word, Mrs. Whitmeyer walked back into the classroom and wrote on the blackboard: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Then she turned to face the class, tears in her eyes, and said, “Children, the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, has been killed.”

  Mrs. Whitmeyer continued, “Now I want you each to pull out a piece of paper and write down these words and remember them, in honor of our late president.” Then she dismissed us, and we went home for days of national grief and mourning. That was November 22, 1963. The news made us little six- and seven-year-olds sad—and sadder when we came home and saw that our parents too were crying. Indeed, the whole world was shocked and stunned by the terrible loss of the dashing young leader.

  And yet the powerful images of ceremony, duty, and grace stay with me, even now. The riderless horse. The little boy, John-John, raising his tiny hand to salute his father as the funeral caisson passed by. And Jackie Kennedy, regal in her gauzy black, demonstrating dignity and essential decency as she led her children, and the nation, through the proper rituals of honor and respect for her late husband.

  Overall, my Iowa childhood was happy. As I grew older, I read more and more, the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden mysteries being favorites; even then, in my own adolescent way, I loved piecing together forensic and legal puzzles. That was my idea of an extracurricular activity in grade school—to be curled up with a book. Yet most of the time, I was playing with my brothers or the neighbor kids. For fun we might play tag or hide-and-seek or run through the sprinkler. Eventually, I even figured out how to ride a bike; I’ve never been much of an athlete.

  On a rare occasion, we would see a movie. Our parents took us to see two Disney movies, Flubber and Son of Flubber. That was a big deal, such a big deal that Mom sewed new outfits for me to wear. Just so we could go to a movie! Once a year we would go to the Cattle Congress, a combination amusement park and state fair at Waterloo.

  My parents bought a 1959 Edsel station wagon; I remember it as two-toned white and lime green, with a powerful V-8 engine. To a little girl all that machinery was impressive, powerful, and shiny. My brothers were proud of our big, fast station wagon; from the backseat, we would beg Dad to drive it faster.

  When I was in sixth grade, Dad took us on vacation and drove us up to Rainy Lake, Canada, for two weeks of fishing. He loved the sport, and from him I too learned to love fishing.

  Our family of six piled into our new car, a tiny little Volkswagen Beetle, packed with all our luggage, gear, food, and even a boat motor. My older brother David and I, plus heaps of stuff, squeezed into the backseat. And my two little brothers, Gary and Paul, wedged even more tightly into the tiny cubby slot behind us; that slot was better suited for maps than for children, but it was all the room that we had. From Iowa all the way to Canada! On that trip we were an exceptionally close family, and not by the kids’ choice!

  Sometime during the sixties, I heard that wonderful Beatles love song, “Michelle.” But it always confused me that the song title was spelled “M-i-c-h-e-l-l-e,” with that double L. Why the two letters? Both ways of spelling are accepted, of course, but when I was little my mother teased me, saying that my father had given me my name and had not known how to spell it!

  I was one of the seventy-six million or so baby boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, when classes were big, cars had high tail fins, and national hopes were even higher. Thanks to the ingenuity and sacrifices of our parents, we boomers grew accustomed to a better life—yet a life all too often defined, unfortunately, as simply having more things. In fact, some of my generation felt increasingly entitled to more things, and then demanded more things.

  Of course, there was much that was wrong with America in the sixties, but there was more that was wrong with the world. America could always be better, but the United States has always been a force for good. Yet by the end of the sixties, the American framework that had nurtured me had been shattered, ripped apart by the Vietnam war and its protesters, several tragic assassinations, racial concerns, crime and strife in the big cities, and, strangely, sometimes-violent protests staged by some of our most privileged young people. I can remember puzzling over some of those protests at universities. How did they think it would help to throw insults and rocks at the police?

  When I think about America, I think about making it better. And I think of Melchior and Martha Monsson, who led their family to a new promise in a new land. Or of Halvor Munson, who volunteered to fight in what is still the bloodiest war in our history. Or the Sullivan brothers. Or my grandparents, who worked hard all their lives, gave a lot more than they received, and yet never complained.

  I don’t mean to sugarcoat this history. None of these folks were perfect; they had foibles and flaws. But if it’s adversity that reveals character, then they all look pretty good. They never gave up, and the proof of their work remains with us to this day. My grandparents—Oscar and Laura, Jesse and Anna—are all buried in Iowa. My roots are with them. There could be no other way. Wherever I go, my Iowa childhood will always be a secure grounding for me.

  And the same is true for my three brothers: David has had a great career in corporate finance; Gary is currently a television meteorologist for KCTV5 in Kansas City, Kansas; and Paul, having earned his MD, is now a forensic psychiatrist in Connecticut.

  But please don’t mistake my happy memories of growing up in Waterloo for a pining for the past. I know it’s impossible to turn the clock back. Always mindful and respectful of the past, I want to move forward, maintaining trusted principles while reaching out for new possibilities.

  The official state motto of Iowa is “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” Those words are always worth hearing, and yes, the principles they embody are worth fighting for. But a newer slogan for the Hawkeye State is worth hearing too: “A state of minds.” Those words are a tribute not only to such great Iowa scientists and inventors as Norman Borlaug and Lee De Forest but also to such wonderful artists as Grant Wood and Glenn Miller. Those great Hawkeyes and their achievements are an inspiration to the next generation of Hawkeye achievers. The meatpacking jobs may never come back to Waterloo, but there’s something new and even better in my hometown’s future. I am sure of it—if we continue to encourage innovation and transformation.

  We can do it. It just won’t be easy, that’s al
l. The American Dream is not a sure thing; it is a well-founded hope. Yet I believe that if we are mindful of all the hard work and sacrifice of our ancestors, if we keep faith with the hopes of those who came before us, then with God’s grace we will see an even greater America in the twenty-first century.

  So as we take the bumpy ride into the future, we might seek comfort in these words from the Epistle of James: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” James concludes with a note of hope: “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.”

  Yes, wisdom will be given to us. And from there we must add our own perseverance. Because as a great president once said, “Here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Minnesota to Israel to Winona

  ONE day when I was twelve, as I was playing in the basement of our home in Cedar Falls, Mom came down and said we were moving to Minnesota. Dad had gotten a good new job in Minneapolis.

  From a logical point of view, this was good news for the Amble family—it meant more responsibility, more money. My father was, after all, smart and talented; the first in his family to attend and graduate from college, he had worked his way through school, and now, having earned his engineering degree, he was ready to move ahead. A white-collar job at Honeywell, a big multinational company. A bigger piece of the American Dream.