The Tough Get Going

This is a response to an editorial in the Record Searchlight of Redding:   

A word of congratulations about your recent article.  

I graduated from Shasta High in 1965, a product of Redding's public schools.  I also was, and am, a 1/16th Cherokee, that I didn't know when I was fortunate to be admitted to Stanford University on a football scholarship.  The next four years I toiled as a Stanford Indian.  And, yes, I agree that the mascot had to be changed.  Racial stereotypes, even heroic ones, have no place as a sports mascot....none.

But that is not my point.  After a 35 year long career in education, over half in administration, I look back fondly on my experience at Pine Street, Sequoia and Shasta High.  

There is a caveat to the self praise for Redding schools, when I was a freshman at Stanford there was a glaring gap in my educational background.  I was competing against the best in the country understand, both on the field and in the classroom, but there were gaps.  

But, there was something non-academic that carried me through.  That was the toughness of Redding, the working man ethic, the plain be tough or lose attitude that carried me through.  "When the going gets tough", had been hammered into us, and Blankenship was my classmate.  He had come from even more humble of a background than I.  

This sometimes manifested itself in Friday night fights, and not the T.V. kind, but people in Redding worked hard, played hard, fought hard and expected that everyone else would do the same.

And, this is political, there was a progressivism, a patriotism here, that was symbolized by the huge concrete wonder, Shasta Dam.  There was a hope for the future, a belief that education was the key for advancement.

And finally, there were roads to success all over the place.  I am afraid that today, these opportunities have declined for our youth due to the negativity of conservatism and the plain facts that the global economy has changed the game.

But I digress.  The list of my favorite teachers are the same, and Paul Hughes and his wife are personal friends.  Pam worked with me, not for me, when I was Principal at Pioneer and at Central Valley High School.

All of us who were educators, kept trying to measure up to  Richard Riis, Gordon Compton, Carl Brown, C.K. Stevens, George Economou, I could go on and on.

It wasn't so much the academic excellence that they bestowed, quite frankly I found at Stanford that other privileged students had more background than I.  It was in the toughness, the fact that almost all of them were veterans and many had seen combat; and you just made no excuses.  And it was my father and mother, who didn't have to say it, but you just never quit.   Quit was not in our vocabulary back then.

That is the academic high expectation that often is left out of eulogies and such.  We dwell on the academic and not the affect.

When Gordon Compton was dying in the hospital, I visited him.  He was barely conscious.  I went up to his bedside and whispered, "When I was most down at Stanford, barely hanging in, overwhelmed by the students who all were smarter than me, and by the football players who were all bigger and stronger, I was kept going by what you taught me; never quit, never give up, always keep working, and you may not win the game, but you will win in the end".

He got a funny look on his face, and said, "I didn't do that, you did it"  

And that says it all.  

Sent from my iPad