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Jerry Kaiser
I’ve enjoyed reading the posts on our quality education. Mellie Mooshie instilled a love of history and the dignity of teaching in me, which led to 40 years in high school and college classes.
Virginia Elson’s English class made me a time and space traveler, where I could know other people and places through literature. That same class opened us to creative writing. A classmate and I wrote and sang a song in that class. (Rich, I still have that 1960 Gibson guitar).
Hard to believe that we’re now so much older than those teachers were then.
We were lucky. Most of those teachers lived through much different times, as did our parents. They experienced the hardship of the Great Depression, the horror of war, loss of loved ones through diseases which no longer affect us. My wife still has her “Polio Pioneer” vaccination card.
They were the “Greatest Generation” and we rode on their backs, gathering possessions they never knew, the luxury of “free time”, and the opportunity do pretty much whatever and wherever we wanted. My mother worked in a department store in Buffalo when she was thirteen.
Perhaps the “spoils of war” were less what the allies won and more what our generation gained by doing nothing more than being born to our parents.
We’ve suffered our losses, too: friends in Vietnam, others taken too young by disease or accident, a President assassinated while we were in school; but compared to other generations past (and, in my opinion, present), we are the most fortunate to have ever lived. We’ve had the opportunity of quality education, of a world made smaller through affordable travel and cheap communication. We’ve gone from waiting for the party line to clear before we could make a phone call to carrying more computer power in the phones in our pockets than existed on any of the Mercury and Apollo flights.
We were at the right place at the right time.
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