The Seventeen Traditions (6 page)

W
aste was anathema in our household. Despite their comfortable middle-class income, my parents followed a policy of scarcity that went beyond even the calls for sacrifice that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made during World War II. My parents took wartime measures like rationing and recycling in stride—and found that they provided an occasion to teach us the value of scarcity. My parents planted their Victory Garden and raised chickens during those years of food rationing, and during the war my father kept up his long-standing practice of saving
string, winding it into ever-larger balls for reuse. He recycled paper and walked instead of driving, so that he could save his gasoline coupons for more necessary purposes. Mother could get more out of a bag of groceries than nature seemed to permit; she was a very imaginative kitchen manager. My parents kept the indoor temperature in our house between sixty and sixty-five degrees during the winter, to save on heating oil. Father wasn't shy about saying he didn't mind denying the oil companies a few pennies. The fact that we lived among thrift-conscious New Englanders didn't hurt.

We children learned early to shop for bargains. We watched our parents, who were both careful shoppers, and when it came time to spend our own nickels and dimes, we tried to follow suit. Of course, we did have one advantage over other children: Since Dad sold ice cream and candies at his restaurant, we never had to spend our own money on such things. When Dad opened up the spigot of his ice cream machine and let the freshly mixed chocolate or strawberry ice cream (made with fresh strawberries) spill onto our dishes, it gave off an aroma and taste I can still recall today.

Our parents taught us, in countless little ways, to control our cravings—from children's toys to household utilities. We learned to keep the lights off unless they were needed. That way, they told us, we could have brighter bulbs when the lights were on. Careful use of resources was the rule even when it wouldn't have cost us to use more. Our town's municipal water system
was abundant and cheap. There was a water bill, of course, but (in those days) no meter on the amount that a home uses; we could have let the faucet run while we brushed our teeth, or used a gallon of water to wash a dish or two—but we avoided such waste as a matter of family habit.

A new toy was a special occasion, and most of them were the kind that could be used again and again—tops, crayons, picture books, puzzles, and dolls. Today's homes are often overflowing with dozens of complex, often violent electronic plastic toys, and yet children soon grow bored with them and demand the latest upgrade or fad. Bombarded with dazzling advertisements and irresistible messages, they nag their parents to buy. The result—to say nothing of what it does to our children's behavior and character—is this avalanche of things, of stuff that's soon discarded or left to clutter basements, attics, and garages.

That was the point of my parents' emphasis on deliberate scarcity: It taught us to value things, to preserve things, to attach our imaginations to what we had rather than to the unquenchable obsession with more, more, more. Our tradition of scarcity encouraged us to be creative. My sisters busied themselves knitting some of their own clothes, and sewed other pieces of their wardrobe with my mother. In this they were following the tradition of our aunts in Lebanon, whose skills at sewing and embroidery showed such exquisite artistry that today they might make a modest fortune as clothing and linen designers. Scarcity is far less time-consuming than abundance.
Saving time for creative pursuits is a continual dividend of not owning so many things that they eventually own you. More, we learned, was really less.

One day after he retired in the early 1970s, Dad observed that “thrift” and “thrifty” were words he used to hear all the time, but that he was hearing them less and less. Thrift and other related principles—frugality, economy, scarcity—were once a part of America's shared value system, and they were certainly part of our family's frame of mind. Today, however, millions of children are growing up with the opposite attitude, with a diminished sense of the work that goes into material things. And with such feelings grows a tolerance for wasteful economic systems, for wasteful technologies, for gas-guzzling SUVs, designer cell phones, and disposable products of all kinds.

Such designed-in waste may be profitable for manufacturers, for fuel and electric companies, and for retailers. But it hardly benefits our families, who every year hand over more of their money to the disposable economy, even as their children grow more distracted and more demanding.

As the household goes, so goes the nation.

D
uring our appearance on Donahue in 1991, Phil asked Mother how she responded when her children asked, “Which of us do you like best?” Mother replied by recalling how Bedouin mothers answered that question: “I like the one who is farthest until they are near, the youngest until they grow older, and the sick until they are well.” In other words, It depends on the situation. Children understand that, in any given circumstance, their parents might need to show one of their siblings special treatment. What they can't accept—what can scar them for years—is
when a parent shows repeated favoritism. This can lead to terrible consequences—withdrawal, chronic sadness, shattered self-confidence, and bitter resentment.

As the fourth of eight sisters in Lebanon, my mother learned from childhood the importance of treating every child equally. When the eighth sister was born, some neighbors and friends came to commiserate with her parents for having all girls and no boys. My grandfather was having none of it; before the Turkish coffee and sweets were served, he shooed them away with a friendly “scatter from here, scatter from here!” He would not entertain such regrets for a moment. Both of my mother's parents were champions of equal treatment for their children, and for them having eight girls was no less a blessing than having eight boys.

Children early on do sense unequal treatment by their parents. Not surprisingly, this was one of my first awarenesses as a little boy—my mother especially went to great lengths to ensure that her four children never felt they were being treated or spoken to as inferior (or superior) to one another. How did I discover this? Simple: Whether she was admonishing or praising me, she never measured me against my sisters or brother. Not once do I recall her saying, “Look how much better behaved they are,” or “He's so much smarter than you.” Nor did she set rules based on the idea that one of us was more or less capable or deserving than another. The only exception had to do with age: Mother did insist that the younger
children should show respect toward their older siblings. As the younger brother she very much wanted me to learn from my older brother and sisters. That sibling hand-me-down learning process, she believed, would be an important source of nurturing during our upbringing. It also saved her time. Mom and Dad even welcomed my eight-year-old brother Shaf's offer to name me himself, saying that I would be his new companion.

This equality of rearing extended to the level of daily detail. That was what made it routine and therefore normal. None of us received special gifts denied others without understanding why. Similarly, at a time when more boys than girls went on to college from immigrant families, my father and mother expected us all to obtain a higher education; my two sisters each obtained a Ph.D., and the boys went on to law school after college.

As a result of this equitable treatment, we children grew up with little envy or egocentricity to come between us. The older ones helped the younger ones when we needed it—and, oh, do I remember one time when I needed it.

For my eighth-grade graduation, I was chosen to make a speech before several hundred parents and friends in the school auditorium. But as I sat in the living room a few hours before the evening festivities, I developed a terrific case of stage fright. I had planned a presentation on the life of John Muir, the great American naturalist responsible for the creation of Yosemite
National Park in California. My brother, Shaf, had recently returned from the navy, and he came over and asked what was wrong. When I explained, he sat down next to me on the sofa, and put his arm around my shoulder.

“Have you ever heard of Stravinsky?” he asked.

“Who?” I replied.

“Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer. He wrote The Rite of Spring,” he added. This piqued my curiosity, so I perked up, and he continued.

“The Rite of Spring was a very unusual composition. It opened in Paris in 1913, before a large and skeptical audience. Three or four minutes into the symphony, the crowd was grumbling; some of them started expressing their revulsion out loud. Soon there were catcalls, and that led to shouting, and then a few people even started throwing debris onstage. Others rose and stormed out of the hall. The orchestra found it impossible to continue.

“Now, Ralph, when you stand up and start describing the work of John Muir before your classmates' families and their friends and neighbors, no one is going to grumble. No one is going to speak against you. There'll be no catcalls, no shouting, no throwing tomatoes. And, certainly, no one is going to march out of the room. So what are you worrying about?” With that he rustled my hair and left the room.

Was I nervous when I finally spoke that evening? Sure. But Shaf was right: There were no catcalls, no jeering, nothing but a
respectful audience and one relieved speaker when it was all over.

Was it all harmony between us? Not for a day. We argued and kidded and cajoled each other all the time. But our parents had taught us to respect each other, and we did—every day.

O
ne day, when I was about ten, I came home from grade school. When my father saw me, he asked a simple question: “What did you learn today, Ralph? Did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?” For some reason, that question was like a bolt from the blue. It has stayed with me ever since as a yardstick and a guide. In my adult life, I have thought back on it countless times: Is this new movement or politician trying to make us believe, by
using abstractions and slogans or advertising gimmicks, or inviting us to think through the issues, using facts, experience, and judgment? It has helped me to interpret people's styles of persuasion in normal conversation—whether they are sharing how they think, or merely what they believe. And it has helped me find weak spots in countless arguments I've entertained through the years—whether in real-time debates on radio or television, or in the more thoughtful forum of the printed word.

This is not to discount the importance of belief, without which, after all, we couldn't hold to the principles and ethics that shape our daily lives. Rather, my father's point was that we should reach our beliefs by thinking them through. In public school we received instruction, which was largely a matter of belief; it was at home that we received our real education, which had more to do with thought. There was nothing wrong with this combination: Both instruction and education were the better for it.

For one thing, our parents did not draw strong boundaries between the two spheres. Over dinner, they often asked us how school had gone that day, challenging what we were learning by posing broad, open-ended questions, rather than quizzing us on matters of fact. Once, my mother and father were in the backyard with my two sisters and me. When Mother asked us how much a dozen eggs cost, or a bushel of apples, a dozen bananas, a head of lettuce, a pound of butter, and so on, we knew the answers—as children of a restaurateur and former grocer, we
had a head start. For my mother, though, that was merely the foreground for her next set of questions: What is the price for the clean air today? she asked. What about the sunshine? The cool breeze? The songs of the birds and the shade of the trees? Each new question was greeted with silence, driving home her lesson—which was that what is so valuable in nature has no price, and therefore is not for sale. Later we were to learn the importance of ensuring that other elements of a just society—such as politicians, elections, and even teachers—should never be for sale either.

Such exchanges, however brief, honed our minds to be more mentally alert, to go beyond the ordinary challenges of our rote learning in school. From time to time, though, my teachers reinforced my parents' lessons. For instance, our parents were always warning us about procrastination, putting off chores that should be done on time. Then one day I walked into my fifth-grade classroom and saw my teacher, Ms. Thompson, writing something on the blackboard in her big, bold chalk letters:

Wow! That's about the most memorable episode of my entire fifth-grade education—and of my sixth-grade education, for that matter. Though I surely lost many sixty-second periods
in the years that followed, never to recover them again, those words on the blackboard never left me.

My parents put a premium on our education, both at school and at home. One of the reasons my father moved us to Winsted was that the schools and library were just a few minutes' walk from home. My mother, who'd been a teacher before she married, knew full well that the likelihood of getting in trouble increased with the distance from school and home. She also liked being near our teachers. If they ever complained about our schools, their concerns focused on how much progress we were making and what our teachers thought about our performance. Were we attentive in class or distracted? Helpful or unruly? Our parents were not interested in putting us under undue pressure, or in monitoring us too closely, but they were keen to be kept informed about more than just our grades. As my father once said, “One reason so few educators pay attention to the quality of our children's education is that quality doesn't cost enough.” In other words, money alone can't ensure a quality education; only deep care taken by the teachers themselves can make the difference. (Those were the days before constant multiple-choice standardized testing began restricting teachers' judgment, forcing them to “teach to the test.”)

The Beardsley and Memorial Library was the perfect complement to the educational encouragement we received at home. We almost devoured that library, with its enticing variety of books, its so-appealing open stacks with their musty smell, and its helpful librarians. We could borrow three books at a
time and they were treated with something close to reverence until we finished reading them and returned them for another lot. “Imagine what a bargain books are for readers,” father once observed. “The author spends months or years writing a book. You reap the benefit of all that effort in just a few hours.” I liked books about the Wild West and the struggles between colonizers (the pioneers, as they were called) and the Indians (whom even our esteemed Declaration of Independence referred to as “savages”). History books, books on geography, on the great inventors (Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Edison) and explorers, ancient plays from Greece and Rome and modern classics by the legendary American muckrakers (Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and Ferdinand Lunberg). These books weren't assigned by our teachers; Shaf read them all on his own (at fifteen, Tarbell's book on Standard Oil was tough going), and I followed suit. There was school time and there was library time, and not until high school, when we went to the library to research our papers and work on class projects, did the two come together.

We were not shy about bringing our newfound knowledge home, including the difficulties we had with some authors. Our father had a different take on things. If we ever came home saying we couldn't understand a certain writer or philosopher, he would respond by suggesting that perhaps the authors themselves weren't writing clearly. He was not making excuses for us; he was merely making a perfectly plausible observation that our teachers never mentioned. Excuses were a subject of passionate
aversion for my mother, who was always bothered by the sight of parents trying to explain away their children's misbehavior. She always advised her friends not to make excuses for their children, for she felt that making excuses deprived children of the incentive to improve. My father used to say, “Your best teacher is your last mistake.” This was a bundle of wisdom we took to heart: Like all children, we made plenty of mistakes, so therefore we had lots of teachers.

We were never able to impress our parents with the number of books we read. They were interested in what we derived from their pages, not just how many pages we turned over. They were too busy to dote on trivial benchmarks or childish academic bragging. When it came to teaching us, Mother preferred indirection to lecturing, but she wasn't above issuing a direct riposte when needed. The moment one of us began showing signs of overconfidence, she was ready with her response: “You better be a genius, because you've clearly decided to stop learning.”

Many of our dinner-table arguments concerned matters of social justice at home and abroad. Often these conversations were kindled by our parents, and we were usually eager to take the bait, raising some controversial issue for discussion—such as, were unions paying as much attention to consumer prices as they did to wages? Some of these points of contention were evergreens, none more so than my father's idiosyncratic proposal for a just society based on what he called the “limitation of wealth.”

For many years my father wrestled with the tension in
American society between greed and need. To address the problem, he proposed a system of unlimited income with limited wealth. Under his proposal, anyone could make and spend as much money as he or she was able, but whatever money they accumulated in savings, above a threshold of $1 million per person (in 1950 dollars), would be taxed, after a reasonable homestead exemption. To my father, this system was a reasonable way to maintain a prudent balance between economic incentives and economic justice. The very wealthy would become more interested in donating their money to community betterment (after all, how much could they consume?) or spreading the wealth among more people. Together with a progressive sales tax (with exemptions for the poorer classes) to fund governmental services, my father's wealth-limitation plan would have redirected people away from accumulating wealth toward community generosity.

Whatever their actual merits, my father's ideas had one inestimable side benefit: They kept us debating. We children spent years challenging him on its particulars, speculating out loud about how it might be made to work or why it was doomed to fail. Isn't it too idealistic, Dad? we would ask. Couldn't rich people avoid the taxes by taking their wealth abroad? How could such an idea ever get through Congress? What would the limitation of wealth contribute to the resurgence of communities? Would it cause people to have warmer feelings toward one another? There would be fewer spoiled-rotten descendants of wealth, we felt sure. Would this increase
private investment? Savings? How much would the surge in private community giving reduce public spending? If it's so logical, why hasn't this idea caught on with some honest politicians or national citizen groups? And how do you define wealth, anyway—sure, it should go beyond cash savings to include land, buildings, stocks and bonds, but what about jewelry, rare collectibles, insurance policies? How would the progressive sales tax work?

Dad always took our responses seriously, and we would respond to his answers with new questions. But he always focused on the bigger picture—that history shows that economies with more equitable distribution of wealth were far more prosperous, with bigger markets. They were more prone to deal with the needs of tomorrow, not just today, like healthful surroundings and a better future for our children and grandchildren. “Either we spread the wealth in a country where millions of humans go without,” he would say, “or we spread the misery.”

In retrospect, it was like arguing with an ever-resilient law professor. He took great enjoyment from these tangos of minds. Father's limitation-of-wealth idea offered us a constant flow of discourse; like Aladdin's lamp, it needed only to be rubbed to work its educational magic. And it wasn't just at home that he would put forth these ideas, but in the workplace and anywhere he thought there was a possibility for discussion.

You may be wondering: Was there any plain old small talk in our family? Sure, there was plenty. But it was put on hold whenever we got into one of these serious discussions. At home
we had the sense that there was a time and place for everything. Somehow we were never bored. When my parents had guests over, we would sit on the rug on the side of the living room and listen; every so often one of the grown-ups might make a passing reference to us, but these adult gatherings never centered on us preteen children, who were usually to be seen and not heard. By the same token, we never expected to perform or preen for the guests; instead, we listened and learned a lot about worldly matters. Looking back on these get-togethers, I marvel at how wide-ranging and informed the conversation always was: My parents and their friends traded political opinions on world and national news events, historical allusions, proverbs, and even poetry.

That was the way our “education” went: Our work at school was supported by what we learned at home, and vice versa. When I got deeply interested in stamp collecting, it was because it helped me remember the names of countries all over the world. And when I got deeply interested in my classes, it was because of a special teacher who valued spontaneous discussion over rote memorization. Many of our teachers were from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and they took their lifetime work quite seriously. There was no “gifted students” category then that allowed advanced students to take their own courses. All the students were in the same category, which in retrospect only helped our socialization as a group, while still allowing the more energetic students to excel. (On the other hand, our school buildings had no accommodations for stu
dents with disabilities, who were thus prevented from attending their area public schools. In some ways, those were years of low institutional expectations.)

Many years later, the prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, who lived in Winsted as a youngster, wrote a feature article about these teachers for the Boston Globe; his piece did not reflect well on contemporary urban schools by comparison. Around the same time, I was rereading John Dewey on moral education. Eureka, I thought: That's what my parents had given us at home. At school, we had learned facts. At home, my parents had taught us “character,” which the ancient philosopher Heracleitus called “destiny.” For us, they gave new meaning to the word “homework.”