A  Lesson About American Character



By Connie Corcoran Wilson

            

When I
returned home to present my family’s college scholarship to a deserving
student in Independence, Iowa on May 19th, 2004, I never expected it to
be such an emotional event. This small town, with its slogan “Our Fame
Is In Our Name,” is, in many ways, a microcosm of America and
Americans. Located at the intersections of US highways 218 and 150,
this community of 5,000 people is representative of the American
character. My parents, in turn, were representative of America’s true
character and spirit.



Save for
two trips home in 41 years to bury my parents, I doubted if I would
even recognize the surname of the student chosen as the recipient of my
family’s annual award, and, when I saw the student’s name on the
program, that was, indeed, the case. In the 15 years the award had been
given, no family member had ever been asked to attend before, so I
eagerly accepted the offer when it was extended. I thought it would be
a purely symbolic affair, and I would not know a soul.



Although
I was correct and I did not recognize the name of the student chosen to
receive my family’s scholarship, he was called up early in the awards
ceremony to receive others before ours, and I noticed that he was
Filipino. In a town the size of Independence, Iowa, this was
unusual.  I immediately asked the woman seated next to me, “Is
Gloria Martin (not her real name) this boy’s mother?”



 “No…that’s his grandmother,” the woman seated to my right in the crowded auditorium replied.



The
story of Gloria Martin came flooding back. A war bride, her alcoholic
abusive husband brought her home to Independence, where she and her
family, a four-year-old boy named Johnny and a younger two-year-old
sister, lived right next door to my parents in a broken-down rental
house on the alley. Towns like Independence did not have abused women’s
shelters in 1950. I would be surprised if they do now.  But
physical abuse like Gloria was enduring was bound to become known
quickly in a town this small, where everyone knew everything about
everyone else.



Soon,
Gloria’s violent alcoholic husband abandoned his family entirely,
leaving Gloria penniless, in a foreign land, unable to speak the
language, with no marketable skills, and no way to support herself and
her two small children. My parents had many late-night discussions
between themselves of how best to “help” Gloria.  I knew that they
both felt compelled to do so.



Faced
with a “Sophie’s Choice” of sorts, Gloria came to my father, (also
named John and the town banker), her next-door neighbor. He had been
very kind to her when their paths crossed in the yard. She recognized
that my father was a kind, loving, and generous man, and she knew that
my parents had recently lost a son. Although obviously wracked with the
difficulty of her decision, she begged my father to take her own son
Johnny, and adopt him.



In very broken English, she pleaded for help.

 

 “Please….I must try to take care of Maria…she is only a baby. But Johnny can be the son you wanted.”

 

It was a heartbreaking moment, but one that my father had anticipated.



My father—a good, kind-hearted Midwesterner and a typical American—knew how difficult asking this of him must be.



 “No,
Gloria…..I can’t let you break up your family. I know you love your
children, and I know that you think this is the only way. I won’t adopt
Johnny as my own son.  But I will help you in any way I can. I
will give you a job. You will learn the language. I will see to it that
you and your family will be safe while you learn.”



And that
is exactly what my father and mother did, financially assisting their
neighbor through some very rough times and giving her a job as a teller
in the bank he had founded in our small town in 1941. Gloria worked
there for thirty years.



After
some time…(divorce as a Catholic in 1950 required a great deal of
soul-searching on Gloria’s part)… Gloria divorced the man who had
abandoned her to such a cruel fate, and, later, found happiness with a
local farmer, whom she married. She raised her children on a farm.

 

This
night, both of her grandchildren—inheritors of the American
dream—received numerous scholastic and character awards for their
hard work and achievements. One of them was my family’s scholarship to
honor a student who represented hard work, character and scholarship at
the local high school, a scholarship which we had established after my
father’s death in1986. When my mother died in 2002, the award honored
both of my parents.



After I
presented the award, Gloria—now retired and quite elderly— came out
of the crowd to embrace me and said, simply, “Your father saved my
life.”



It was a
very emotional experience for me. I realized the difference this one
man, this one American, had made in another person’s life. Gloria was a
foreigner, alone and friendless in a small town. She asked for help
and, like many other Americans throughout history, my father responded
the way a typical American responds. He tried to help.  In this
case, it was one-on-one and a very personal story of reaching out, but
this pattern of generosity to others runs deep in the veins of all
Americans of good will. Surely John F. Kennedy knew this about his
countrymen when he founded the Peace Corps in the sixties.



As I
thought of how best to explain the character of the American people to
the rest of the world, I thought of my father, and how his actions
represent other right-thinking, kind-hearted, willing-to-help
Americans. There are occasions when America makes mistakes, but the
vast majority of us try hard to do the right thing and regret the few
who do not. We are a great land; we are nowhere greater than in our
desire to help and accept others. As Bill Clinton told the Book Expo
America audience “live” on June 10th   in an optimistic
statesmanlike be-of-good-cheer message, “America will always return to
inclusion.”  Historically, we lead the world in attempting to
extend a helping hand. It may not seem that way to the world at this
moment in history, but history proves the truth of the statement. 
We strive, always, to make the world a better place.

 

Even in
our current misguided Administration, then-Secretary of the Treasury
Paul O’Neill visited Africa (with Bono) and came back supporting a plan
to provide potable water to Third World countries. When it was shot
down by the current administration and O’Neill was fired, he announced
that he was going to do it, anyway, on his own, as an individual. Paul
O’Neill—former CEO of Alcoa—sounds very much like my own dear dad:
determined, hard-working, pragmatic, charitable, generous to a fault,
kind-hearted, truly a patriot in the best sense of the word. And even
an administration like the one we are currently enduring cannot keep a
good man, an honest American, down.



To me,
being an American and a patriot means reaching out a helping hand to
others of all faiths and creeds and nationalities, and genuinely
recognizing the worth of each human being as an individual “with
liberty and justice for all.”  While some may refute this, it is
in our national character, on the whole, to support these values.
Variations from it, whether wartime aberrations or the actions of a
misguided few, are not the norm and do not represent our national
character.



Some
might argue that Iowans are more inclined to foster a sense of
community and help those in need. It is a small state; one where you
get to know your neighbors. Herbert Hoover, the only President born in
Iowa (West Branch), is honored in the tower on the Stanford University
campus for helping feed the starving refugee children in Europe after
the war, many of whom wrote a personal “thank you” on the flour sacks
and sent them back, decorated with childishly scrawled art-work, to
thank the country that had  saved their lives.



I like
to think that every American…whether president or pauper….symbolizes
this spirit of giving a hand to those in need, whether they be Africans
dying of  AIDS or others suffering in the midst of political
turmoil and oppression around the globe. Sometimes, the good intentions
of Americans have been clouded by the misguided actions of a few, but,
in spirit, at heart, right-thinking Americans everywhere still echo the
Statue of Liberty inscription, “Give me your tired, your poor…your
huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I light the lamp beside the
golden door.”