Learning from My Father
A "Last Lecture" at the Athenaeum
March 7, 1989
by John J. Pitney, Jr.
I’ll start by telling you what this lecture is not. It won’t be an examination
of contemporary politics; in fact, I’m not going to talk about politics at
all—which may please some of you and distress others.
Here’s why:
By the time I actually give my last lecture—well into the 21st century, I
hope—today’s issues and personalities will be long gone. By then, doing a Reagan
imitation will be like doing a Millard Fillmore imitation. In years to come,
I’ll have a new repertoire of imitations, perhaps based on CMC students who go
on to high office.
The other thing I’m not going to do
is talk about grand abstractions. Now, abstractions are important. If I didn’t
believe that, I wouldn’t be a college professor. But I always think of what
Thomas Jefferson said: “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The
former will decide it as well and often better than the latter, because he has
not been led astray by artificial rules.” By the way, that’s a handy quotation
to have, if ever you disagree with one of your professors.
Tonight I want to talk about what
really matters in this life. I want to talk about things that you don’t need a
PhD to know or to teach. I want to pass along some lessons I learned from a man
who never had a chance to go to college, much less earn a PhD. I want to talk
about my father and what I learned from him.
By using the word lessons, I don’t mean that he gave me lectures. Dad
never aspired to be Ward Cleaver. He was not the kind of man to say, “Well,
Jack, this is what we’re going to learn today.”
No, my father didn’t teach me that way. He taught by example—by the way he
lived, and finally by the way he died.
John J. Pitney. Sr. was born on September 14, 1922. He grew up on his father’s
farm in Saratoga Springs, New York. At the age of two, he contracted rheumatic
fever. That’s a disease that some of you may not have heard of; today’s doctors
can stop it with antibiotics. But there were no antibiotics in 1924; penicillin
was still four years in the future. And so the illness caused severe heart
damage, which would have consequences for him in the future.
He didn’t go to college. Opportunities were limited in rural upstate New York.
Besides, his father wanted him to keep working on the farm. In 1941, when
he was 19 years old, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Like many young Americans, he
tried to enlist. But because of his heart condition, he was 4-F. During
the Vietnam War, a lot of people would have seen such an exemption as cause to
celebrate. But in 1941, with America under attack by the Axis, people gave stern
looks to young men who didn’t go to war. My father was a proud man, so it was
hard on him.
He stayed at home and worked on his
father’s farm. From there he started a milk route, and he spent most of his life
as a milkman. That’s a tough life. Some of us may have romantic images of a
milkman as a figure out of a bygone day. Well, I helped him on the milk truck
when I was a teenager, and, believe me, there was nothing romantic about it.
Most mornings he would get up at 1:30 a.m. He put in 60 to 70 hours of work each
week. That’s not 60 to 70 hours sitting down in an office. That’s 60 to 70 hours
driving a milk truck, rain or shine, sick or well. The job meant hard physical
labor. Ever try to lift a case of milk cartons? My dad would carry four at a
time. He kept on with that work well into his fifties.
Today it’s hard to imagine people
living that way. It’s almost something out of Dickens. But that’s the life my
father had: seven days a week, 365 days a year, no breaks, no vacations, no days
off — not even Christmas. A lot of times on Christmas Eve, our family would
gather to celebrate, and then a call would come.
The restaurant down the road wanted a milk delivery. He wanted to stay home with
us, but he was devoted to doing his job. And so he’d go.
In 1976 his heart got worse, and he had to give up his milk route. Later that
year he had open heart surgery, which would give him eleven more years of life.
Meanwhile, he had taken a job at the local water filtration plant, where he
often had to work the night shift. That’s okay if you’re in your twenties, but
it’s not so good if you’re in your fifties and have a heart condition.
What’s more, he had always worked for himself and valued independence. Now he
not only had to take a sharp pay cut, but he had to answer to people half his
age. He never complained—even when he was temporarily laid off and had to go to
the unemployment office.
In the autumn of 1986, eight days before he was going to retire, he suffered a
heart attack. He was bedridden for months and gradually declined. On June 13,
1987, he died.
I go through all this not to tell you the sad story of one man’s life— and, as I’ll explain, I think it is ultimately not a sad story. I talk about my dad’s life because it teaches some lessons.
The first lesson is suggested by something that Harry Truman once said: “A lot
of people in this world spend their time doing work they don’t much care for.”
As usual, Truman was right. The lesson is to remember how lucky we are: lucky to
be here at college, lucky to enjoy the choices we have. Often, when I’m consumed
with the worries of academic life and think I have it really tough, I look back
at my father’s life, and my troubles don’t seem so bad.
I reflected on that lesson this past weekend when I was interviewing some
prospective students with Ric Quinones. We asked them, “What really bothers you
in life?” Some mentioned such problems as prejudice, poverty, and war. But one
fellow said, “It really bothers me that my sister gets to drive the Maserati,
and I have to drive the beat-up, old Subaru.”
Somehow I don’t think that my father would have considered that a compelling
problem.
The second lesson is this: When talking about luck and advantage, remember that
much of our luck involves the parents we have. Despite his hard times, my father
had a hope: that my two sisters and I would have a better life than he had, that
we would have the opportunities that he and my mother had been denied. They
wanted us to go to college, to have freedom, to have choice.
Their emphasis on personal freedom was something special. Parents often push
children into certain professions just for the sake of making money. My mother
and father never did that. In their eyes the most important thing they could do
was to make sure we could do what we really wanted.
They succeeded. The three of us got the educations we sought. One of my
sisters is a registered nurse. The other has a master’s in educational
psychology. And as for me, the proudest moment of my life so far came in 1985,
when my parents could see me get a PhD from Yale.
My sisters and I got through school because our parents sacrificed. And through
their sacrifice, they inspired us to work, to study, to make something of
ourselves. Not everybody has that advantage. I recognized that at an early age.
When I was in high school, the family next door to us was on welfare. Their
children didn’t do well because their parents did not inspire them and show them
a good example.
That, not poverty, was their real disadvantage.
And I’m not talking about a problem that only afflicts poor people. You can just
as easily see the same pathology among people who are well off. Think about the
people you know in college. Many of them come from affluent families, but some
have parents who don’t give a damn about them. It doesn’t matter how many nice
cars you’ve got; if you’ve got parents who don’t care about you, you’re lacking
something important.
That’s why this milkman’s son considers himself more advantaged than many of the
sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers.
The third lesson: my parent’s sacrifices were acts of love. Now, my dad never
went around hugging us or saying “I love you.” He just wasn’t that kind of
person. He was reserved in showing his emotion. The Leo Buscaglias of this world
might say that’s a bad thing, because they claim that you need to show your love
with embraces and kisses and warm language. I think that such an attitude
contains dangerous nonsense. It’s dangerous because it puts too much emphasis on
trivial expressions of affection. If you worry about whether a person hugs you
or says “I love you,” you might ignore that person’s true acts of love. Dad
didn’t hug us, but he got up at 1:30 every morning to provide for us. That was
an act of love.
There’s a quotation that puts it best. It’s by Mario Cuomo. As many of you know,
I don’t agree with Governor Cuomo’s politics, but he and I both come from
working-class, Catholic backgrounds, and we see a lot of things the same way.
One time he described his father in words that apply to mine:
"I know him only as a person who
worked 24 hours a day.... He never took me for a walk. He never had a man-to-man
talk with me. ... I think of him as being very affectionate, but I don’t
remember him putting his arm around me. You always had the sense that he had
great feeling for you. You saw him providing for you, at enormous pain to
himself. You saw him doing nothing for himself.... So the overwhelming
impression we got was that this man was offering us his life; he didn’t have to
put his arm around you."
That was my father.
And here is the last and hardest lesson that I learned from his life: The books
don’t balance in this world. Good people can suffer while bad people live in
comfort. Look at my dad. He was a good man. He believed in God, prayed, went to
church. And yet he led a Dickensian life and was struck down just before he
retired. In his last weeks sometimes he would slip into delirium. He would try
to get up from bed, thinking that he was still working on the milk truck. I was
with him. I would try to tell him that he had to stay in bed, but the hard years
were so deeply imprinted on his mind that he kept saying, “I have to go to
work.” So, even at the end, he didn’t have the rest that he had earned.
There are some television preachers who say that if we pray their way, we will
get material rewards in the here and now. That’s an evil teaching. When people
try it and find that the rewards don’t come in this life, they have no faith to
fall back on. At the close of day, you can’t expect justice from this world.
Rewards in this life are not the reason to do good. We should do good because
that’s what God meant us to do.
Several months before my father’s final illness began, I started going to church
again. For years I had stayed away, thinking that I was above all that, because
I had things all figured out. Then in early 1986 I just had a feeling that I did
need faith. So I went back, and I’m glad I did. It’s tough to lose a parent. It
would be even tougher without God.
I don’t want to end this by talking about death. My father was not a morbid man.
Though he was shy about showing his feelings, he could be cheerful and funny.
One time I happened to be holding my camera in the garage, and he started
clowning around with a hatchet. I shot his pose, and the picture now hangs in my
office over the caption: “WE PITNEYS ARE HATCHET-MN.”
So I think not only of the sad parts of his life, but the good times. I also
hope that my Sisters and I provided him with some consolation that his
sacrifices had not been in vain.
That’s looking back. Now I want to look ahead—to my own wedding, just eleven
weeks away. The lessons I’ve just sketched for you are the lessons that I’ll try
to pass on to the children that Lisa and I will have. I want to pass them on not
just by preaching them, but by living them. If I can be half the man my father
was, I will have had a well-spent life.
I mourn my father’s passing, but in a sense he is not gone. He is with me and
every member of my family.
So on May 27, when I take my wedding vows, Dad will be there.