Many times we didn't know the quality of our parents and their generation.  Here is part of a letter from a Sea Cliff woman whose son and daughter were in school with us.  She is talking about one of the most literate men in Sea Cliff, a man who arrived as a poor Irish immigrant.

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Having our driveway put in the week.  Feel very rich.  Sat and talked with Jimmy O'Donnell well his men worked.  He's done all right for a fellow who came here from Ireland at 14 as a stable boy for Jock Whitney.  He was delivered with a horse and never went back.  Worked like a dog till he could buy a truck and then earned his construction business by delivering manure in the truck.  Whitney manure no less.  He's an avid reader and memorizer.  Can do the Irish and Scotch poets by the hour, when he and dad fished together they always took Jim's tenant who at the time was a reporter for the Newsday (newly formed then).  The tenant would ask for any act of Shakespeare and Jimmy would start in, taking all parts.  Lady of the Lake, Ivanhoe, anything, Jimmy could do.  They would fish and listen to Jim all night.

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footnote: my own grandfather arrived in the US first as a track walker for Union Pacific in Texas, then after returning to England to recuperate from typhoid fever, he returned and went to work for Townsend Scudder as a stable boy.  He became a photographer and storekeeper in Roslyn, a civic activist, and an avid reader and antiquarian.  

Moral of the story: you can't tell a book by its cover or a person by the work they do.  Most Americans know this.  Maybe it's why one of our writers famously remarked, "I'd rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard."