The first nine years of my childhood were spent in some pretty tough neighborhoods of North Minneapolis. I was born in 1930, during the depths of the Great Depression. Except for odd jobs he could find, my father was unemployed for eight years. The family moved often and by the time I was in fourth grade, I had attended four different elementary schools. But then we moved to a big old house in a safe middle class neighborhood in South Minneapolis. All those school changes put me behind in just about everything but reading. My math and spelling were far below grade level; I didn’t know at that time that years later Microsoft’s spell check and a smart phone’s calculator would make up for those shortcomings.
My mother was from a small town where most of the adults cowered under the thumb of the local Catholic priest. She couldn’t wait to leave—the town and the church, not the religion. My father never spoke of religion. He was an atheist. Science was his only religion. So I grew up with one foot in religion and the other in science, or at least a healthy skepticism of religion.
After high school I worked a year to earn money for college. No one in my family was a college graduate, and although I had never met a lawyer, I knew as early as high school that I wanted to practice law—if I could make it. The Korean War started in 1950. One of my brothers joined the navy right out of high school. I was in my second year of pre-law at the University of Minnesota and decided to let my college deferment lapse. I couldn’t see my brother going to war and myself sitting safely in a classroom. I was drafted in 1951, and sent to combat engineer training. My brother’s ship sailed to the Mediterranean and I was sent to Korea. Fortunately, by the time I got there, the “forgotten war” had settled into a stalemate and my unit was not needed at the front.
After two years in the army, I returned to college and graduated from law school. There was only one young woman in my law school graduating class. Now, over fifty percent of law school graduates are women. And they are darn good lawyers, including my youngest daughter.
I’ve been very physically active all my life. When I was younger I played a lot of tennis, and enjoyed hiking in the Rockies with my family. I still go to a health club and ride a bike a lot. But now I use electric assist going up steep hills. Okay, small inclines, too.
In a previous Episcopal church I served on the vestry, and as junior and senior warden. I was also a Sunday school teacher. Despite my skeptical side, I saw no conflict. I have always enjoyed teaching kids. After retirement, I volunteered as a tutor to second and third grade public school kids who were having trouble with reading.
When my kids were little, I used to go into each of their rooms before they fell asleep and say the Lord’s Prayer with them. I can’t say that I really believed that prayers are answered but I knew that there would be times in their lives when there was nothing that could be done except pray. I was going to say that I only pray for others now, never for myself, but that’s not true. I still say a silent prayer of thanks for my blessings. I enjoy going to church. I feel I need the weekly fix I get from the sermons. It’s important to me that I spend at least a small part of every week concentrating on more philosophical things than the daily routines of life. So I guess, after ninety years nothing has changed. I still have one foot in science, and one in faith.
(as told to Gary Johnson)
