Living History (3 page)

My brother Hugh was even more adventurous. As a toddler he pushed open the door to our sundeck and happily tunneled through three feet of snow until my mother rescued him. More than once he and his friends went off to play in the construction sites that had sprung up all around our neighborhood and had to be escorted home by the police. The other boys got in the patrol car, but Hugh insisted on walking home beside it, telling the police and my parents that he was heeding the warning never to get in a stranger’s car.

My mother wanted us to learn about the world by reading books. She was more successful with me than with my brothers, who preferred the school of hard knocks. She took me to the library every week, and I loved working my way through the books in the children’s section. We got a television set when I was five, but she didn’t let us watch it much. We played card games―War, Concentration, Slapjack―and board games like Monopoly and Clue. I am as much of a believer as she is that board games and card playing teach children math skills and strategy. During the school year, I could count on my mother’s help with my homework, except for math, which she left to my father. She typed my papers and salvaged my disastrous attempt to make a skirt in my junior high home economics class.

My mother loved her home and her family, but she felt limited by the narrow choices of her life. It is easy to forget now, when women’s choices can seem overwhelming, how few there were for my mother’s generation. She started taking college courses when we were older. She never graduated, but she amassed mountains of credits in subjects ranging from logic to child development.

My mother was offended by the mistreatment of any human being, especially children.

She understood from personal experience that many children―through no fault of their own―were disadvantaged and discriminated against from birth. She hated selfrighteousness and pretensions of moral superiority and impressed on my brothers and me that we were no better or worse than anyone else. As a child in California, she had watched the Japanese Americans in her school endure blatant discrimination and daily taunts from the Anglo students. After she returned to Chicago, she often wondered what had happened to one particular boy she liked. The kids called him “Tosh,” short for Toshihishi. She saw him again when she returned to Alhambra to serve as Grand Marshal at their sixtieth high school reunion. As she had suspected, Tosh and his family had been interned during World War II, and their farm had been taken from them. But she was heartened to learn that, after years of struggling, Tosh had become a successful vegetable farmer himself.

I grew up between the push and tug of my parents’ values, and my own political beliefs reflect both. The gender gap started in families like mine. My mother was basically a Democrat, although she kept it quiet in Republican Park Ridge. My dad was a rockribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it. He was also tight-fisted with money. He did not believe in credit and he ran his business on a strict pay-as-you-go policy. His ideology was based on self-reliance and personal initiative, but, unlike many people who call themselves conservatives today, he understood the importance of fiscal responsibility and supported taxpayer investments in highways, schools, parks and other important public goods.

My father could not stand personal waste. Like so many who grew up in the Depression, his fear of poverty colored his life. My mother rarely bought new clothes, and she and I negotiated with him for weeks for special purchases, like a new dress for the prom.

If one of my brothers or I forgot to screw the cap back on the toothpaste tube, my father threw it out the bathroom window. We would have to go outside, even in the snow, to search for it in the evergreen bushes in front of the house. That was his way of reminding us not to waste anything. To this day, I put uneaten olives back in the jar, wrap up the tiniest pieces of cheese and feel guilty when I throw anything away.

He was a tough taskmaster, but we knew he cared about us. When I worried about being too slow to solve math problems in Miss Metzger’s fourth-grade weekly math contests, he woke me up early to drill me on my multiplication tables and teach me long division.

In the winter he would turn off the heat at night to save money, then get up before dawn to turn it back on. I often woke up to the sound of my father bellowing his favorite Mitch Miller songs.

My brothers and I were required to do household chores without any expectation of an allowance. “I feed you, don’t I?” Dad would say. I got my first summer job when I was thirteen, working for the Park Ridge Park District three mornings a week supervising a small park a few miles from my house. Since my dad left for work early in our only car, I pulled a wagon filled with balls, bats, jump ropes and other supplies back and forth. From that year on, I always had a summer job and often worked during the year.

My dad was highly opinionated, to put it mildly. We all accommodated his pronouncements, mostly about Communists, shady businessmen or crooked politicians, the three lowest forms of life in his eyes. In our family’s spirited, sometimes heated, discussions around the kitchen table, usually about politics or sports, I learned that more than one opinion could live under the same roof. By the time I was twelve, I had my own positions on many issues. I also learned that a person was not necessarily bad just because you did not agree with him, and that if you believed in something, you had better be prepared to defend it.

Both my parents conditioned us to be tough in order to survive whatever life might throw at us. They expected us to stand up for ourselves, me as much as my brothers.

Shortly after we moved to Park Ridge, my mother noticed that I was reluctant to go outside to play. Sometimes I came in crying, complaining that the girl across the street was always pushing me around. Suzy O’Callaghan had older brothers, and she was used to playing rough. I was only four years old, but my mother was afraid that if I gave in to my fears, it would set a pattern for the rest of my life. One day, I came running into the house. She stopped me.

“Go back out there,” she ordered, “and if Suzy hits you, you have my permission to hit her back. You have to stand up for yourself. There’s no room in this house for cowards.”

She later told me she watched from behind the dining room curtain as I squared my shoulders and marched across the street.

I returned a few minutes later, glowing with victory. “I can play with the boys now,” I said. “And Suzy will be my friend!”

She was and she still is.

As a Brownie and then a Girl Scout, I participated in Fourth of July parades, food drives, cookie sales and every other activity that would earn a merit badge or adult approval.

I began organizing neighborhood kids in games, sporting events and backyard carnivals both for fun and to raise nickels and dimes for charities. There is an old photograph from our local newspaper, the Park Ridge Advocate, that shows me and a bunch of my friends handing over a paper bag of money for the United Way. We raised it from the mock Olympics our neighborhood staged when I was twelve.

Surrounded by a father and brothers who were sports fanatics, I became a serious fan and occasional competitor. I supported our school’s teams and went to as many games as possible. I rooted for the Cubs, as did my family and most folks on our side of town. My favorite was Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks. In our neighborhood, it was nearly sacrilegious to cheer for the rival White Sox of the American League, so I adopted the Yankees as my AL team, in part because I loved Mickey Mantle. My explanations of Chicago sports rivalries fell on deaf ears during my Senate campaign years later, when skeptical New Yorkers were incredulous that a Chicago native could claim youthful allegiance to a team from the Bronx.

I played in a girls’ summer softball league through high school, and the last team I played for was sponsored by a local candy distributor. We wore white knee socks, black shorts and pink shirts in honor of our namesake confection, Good & Plenty. The Park Ridge kids traveled in packs to and from Hinckley Park, swimming in summer in the cold pool waters and skating in winter on the big outdoor rink. We walked or rode our bikes everywhere―

sometimes trailing the slow-moving town trucks that sprayed a fog of DDT at dusk in the summer months. Nobody thought about pesticides as toxic then. We just thought it was fun to pedal through the haze, breathing in the sweet and acrid smells of cut grass and hot asphalt as we squeezed a few more minutes of play out of the dwindling light.

We sometimes ice-skated on the Des Plaines River while our fathers warmed themselves over a fire and talked about how the spread of communism was threatening our way of life, and how the Russians had the bomb and, because of Sputnik, we were losing the space race. But the Cold War was an abstraction to me, and my immediate world seemed safe and stable. I didn’t know a child whose parents were divorced, and until I went to high school, I didn’t know anybody who died of anything except old age. I recognize that this benign cocoon was an illusion, but it is one I would wish for every child.

I grew up in a cautious, conformist era in American history. But in the midst of our Father Knows Best upbringing, I was taught to resist peer pressure. My mother never wanted to hear about what my friends were wearing or what they thought about me or anything else. “You’re unique,” she would say. “You can think for yourself. I don’t care if everybody’s doing it. We’re not everybody. You’re not everybody.”

This was fine with me, because I usually felt the same way. Of course, I did make some effort to fit in. I had enough adolescent vanity that I sometimes refused to wear the thick glasses I had needed since I was nine to correct my terrible eyesight. My friend starting in sixth grade, Betsy Johnson, led me around town like a Seeing Eye dog. Sometimes I encountered classmates and failed to acknowledge them―not because I was stuck-up, but because I didn’t recognize anyone. I was in my thirties before I learned to wear soft contact lenses strong enough to correct my vision.

Betsy and I were allowed to go to the Pickwick Theater by ourselves on Saturday afternoons.

One day, we watched Lover Come Back with Doris Day and Rock Hudson twice. Afterwards, we went to a restaurant for a Coke and fries. We thought we had invented dipping the french fries into ketchup when the waitress at Robin Hood’s told us she never saw anybody do that before. I didn’t know what a fastfood meal was until my family started going to McDonald’s around 1960. The first McDonald’s opened in the nearby town of Des Plaines in 1955, but my family didn’t discover the chain until one opened closer to us in Niles. Even then, we went only for special occasions. I still remember seeing the number of burgers sold change on the Golden Arches sign from thousands to millions.

I loved school, and I was lucky enough to have some great teachers at Eugene Field School, Ralph Waldo Emerson junior High and Maine Township High Schools East and South. Years later, when I chaired the Arkansas Education Standards Committee, I realized how fortunate I had been to attend fully equipped schools with highly trained teachers and a full range of academic and extracurricular offerings. It’s funny what I remember now: Miss Taylor reading to my first-grade class from Winnie-the-Pooh every morning.

Miss Cappuccio, my second-grade teacher, challenging us to write from one to one thousand, a task that little hands holding fat pencils took forever to finish. The exercise helped teach me what it meant to start and finish a big project. Miss Cappuccio later invited our class to her wedding, where she became Mrs. O’Laughlin. That was such a kind gesture, and for seven-year-old girls, seeing their teacher as a beautiful bride was a highlight of the year.

I was considered a tomboy all through elementary school. My fifth-grade class had the school’s most incorrigible boys, and when Mrs. Krause left the room, she would ask me or one of the other girls to “be in charge.” As soon as the door closed behind her, the boys would start acting up and causing trouble, mostly because they wanted to aggravate the girls. I got a reputation for being able to stand up to them, which may be why I was elected co-captain of the safety patrol for the next year. This was a big deal in our school.

My new status provided me my first lesson in the strange ways some people respond to electoral politics. One of the girls in my class, Barbara, invited me home for lunch. When we got there, her mother was vacuuming and casually told her daughter and me to go fix ourselves peanut butter sandwiches, which we did. I did not think anything of it until we got ready to go back to school and were saying goodbye to her mother.

She asked her daughter why we were leaving so early, and Barbara told her, “Because Hillary’s a patrol captain and has to be there before the other kids.”

“Oh, if I’d known that,” she said, “I’d have fixed you a nice lunch.”

My sixth-grade teacher, Elisabeth King, drilled us in grammar, but she also encouraged us to think and write creatively, and challenged us to try new forms of expression. If we were sluggish in responding to her questions, she said, “You’re slower than molasses running uphill in winter.” She often paraphrased the verse from Matthew: “Don’t put your lamp under a bushel basket, but use it to light up the world.” She pushed me, Betsy Johnson, Gayle Elliot, Carol Farley and Joan Throop to write and produce a play about five girls taking an imaginary trip to Europe. It was an assignment from Mrs. King that led me to write my first autobiography. I rediscovered it in a box of old papers after I left the White House, and reading it pulled me back to those tentative years on the brink of adolescence. I was still very much a child at that age, and mostly concerned with family, school and sports. But grade school was ending, and it was time to enter a more complicated world than the one I had known.

“What you don’t learn from your mother, you learn from the world” is a saying I once heard from the Masai tribe in Kenya. By the fall of 1960, my world was expanding and so were my political sensibilities. John E Kennedy won the presidential election, to my father’s consternation. He supported Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and my eighthgrade social studies teacher, Mr. Kenvin, did too. Mr. Kenvin came to school the day after the election and showed us bruises he claimed he had gotten when he tried to question the activities of the Democratic machine’s poll watchers at his voting precinct in Chicago on Election Day. Betsy Johnson and I were outraged by his stories, which reinforced my father’s belief that Mayor Richard J. Daley’s creative vote counting had won the election for President-Elect Kennedy. During our lunch period we went to the pay phone outside the cafeteria and tried calling Mayor Daley’s office to complain. We reached a very nice woman who told us she would be sure to pass on the message to the Mayor.