KENT M
Hi, Mark,
Things have been a bit crazy lately, so I haven't been able to respond. I was actually in the Chicago area yesterday -- I did a memorial service for my late aunt, Mary Longbrake, at the chapel at Lake Forest College. But it was running down on Monday, picking my son up at the airport in Milwaukee, staying overnight in Elmhurst, then picking up my daughter from Elmhurst College, running up to Lake Forest, doing the service, running back to Elmhurst, then running up through Milwaukee to get my son on a plane back to Boston, then getting back to Minnesota after midnight. I had another funeral this morning and have two church committee meetings tonight, so I'm just trying to catch my breath.
Thanks for sharing your faith story. We hear so little about the liberal branch of Islam today. The phrase "seal of the prophets" I learned in my "Religion in the West" courses in grad school. I believe the idea was that God had indeed spoken through many prophets but that orthodox Islam holds Muhammad to be the final and greatest of the prophets. Jesus is considered the next greatest prophet (not divine, of course). I'm not up enough on Qur'an to say what passage this might be based on (it may be in the Hadith rather than Qur'an; or it might be in the Second Sura).
In some ways, your views remind me of either the more theistic side of Unitarianism or Ba'hai without the authoritarian leadership. As I think I noted earlier, I try not to tell God who God can or can't talk to, and I try to learn from others.
I heard somewhere that there is conversation about having a multi-year reunion. Have you heard anything?
Hope all is well with you.
God's Peace,
Kent
Mark Raymond Ganzer
Kent, I am 250 e-mails behind, and doing about 50 a day - which is barely treading water ... I felt guilty for not having responded sooner to your question - you were just pretty far down on the queue (then, I started working from the LAST page of my e-mails.
I attended a memorial service at the Lake Forest College Chapel for the wife of my dearest friend, Kenneth Bennett, emeritus Chair of the Department of English Lit at Lake Forest. His wife DJ was a world renonwn crafts person, and wrote two books (the definitive ones) on stitchery and using the sewing machine to design your special order clothes. DJ, as a graduate student in English Lit did some original Blake scholarship (bragging - my 25-year old nephew is a graduate teacing assistant in Pullman, WA, at Washington State University, the only one of the 13 school to which he applied for grad school that would take him AND give him a full ride ... this past April he headed an international Blake symposium in Trenton, NJ, at which he was the Key Note Speaker!!! Not bad for akid who had not worked a day in his life until he began his teaching career last September). The chapel is so beautiful, and not at all somber ... I hope that the phantom bag pipe player showed up on time - there were some concern in the area at DJ's service.
I think God all the times sends messengers to all peoples of the earth .. Jesus, for my money, was sent, not for the Jews, of which he was one, but for the gentiles ... and Jesus, did not hold gentiles (white people) in particularly high esteem (cf - Turn the other cheek .... EVEN the gentiles love those who love them)
If ever again you will be in the Chicago area, and have sometime, my cell is (xxx) yyy-zzzz ... I would love to show you parts of "my" world - e.g. in particular - The Crabtree FarmS in Lake bluff - 1000's of acres abutting Lake Michigan - just an incredible place, free and open to the public!
I hope you are aware how much our correspondence means to me ... and yes, my spiritual beliefs align pretty strongly with Unitarians / Universalits / Bhuddists and .. of course, the B'Hai faith (our neighbors Kathy and Koichi Yamamatah were of the Ba Hai faith, and I have read "The Lughing Bhudda" ... there is a web questionaire, and I can probably find it, that asks questions and then matches your answers with various "generic" faiths (e.g. - liberal Christian) ... on that test, I align 99% with "liberal Christian", about 34% with Muslims, and 100% with Quakers .. rofl ... the one quaker I know of in our family is known for refsing to bear arms for the union ... the LT ordered him to be executed. The firing squad fired, but, mirable dictus ... not a bullet got him! .... S O ... the LT put him to work as a field medic, a taksk at which he performed both fearlessly and quite competently
The messages of (almost) all the worlds religions / faith traditions / spiritual belief systems teach pretty much the same message - Do for those who cannot do for themselves, and all will be revealed, from what I have been told.
With Love to You and ALL YOU LOVE
Mark Raymond Ganzer
KENT M
Thanks so much! My aunt was very involved at LFC and was a life trustee. I had never been in the chapel before. I noticed there was a plaque to Irvin Young, who was a close friend of my father. Both my parents, my older brother, and one of my nieces graduated from LFC. I was accepted but decided to go to Mac instead. Aunt Mary had quite a life: in the first class of WAVE officers in WW II, lost most of her hearing when she contracted mumps on a flight back to Chicago from DC. Taught herself to read lips. She became the first woman to be an officer of the Northern Trust and then the first woman to become a vice president there. She was involved in multiple charities and was an avid supporter of the arts. She never married and never felt the less for it. She did have her "beaus", the last one had been a junior physicist working on the Manhattan Project. She had visited all 7 continents, including Antarctica. She had three degrees from LFC -- BA, LLD, and an MA in Liberal Studies which she earned at the age of 67. She was 97 and had been suffering from dementia for about 8 years, so her passing was a release for her and her family (I believe there is a book titled "The Long Goodbye" about losing a loved one to Alzheimer's -- it is indeed a "long goodbye").
I love the story of your Quaker ancestor. My great grandfather on my mother's side was a surgeon in the Army of Northern Virginia. After the war he settled in Ohio where my grandparents met.
God's Peace,
Kent
MARK GANZER
WHAT an amazing woman! I had the good fortune to work for Bankers Life & Casualty Company after John D. MacArthur "found religion" and the company elected to clean up its past "questionable" practices. John's wife, CT Highland with the corporate secretary and treasurer, and his chief counsel, dating back, I believe, to the 1940's was Zita Stone, who could make a longshoreman blush with her command of the English language, was known for being earthy in other ways which I shan't discuss, because it was passed on to me anecdotally, and had the dirt on ALL of the state insurance commissioners, so, when they were reluctant to approve a new policy, she'd call them on the phone, and, ahem, use some leverage to expedite the process.
MacArthur was also a very forward looking man who could see that a consequence of the civil rights movement would be for the US government to force companies to hire black minorities, SO, John with that midwestern practicality that borders on the verge of intuitive genius instructed his personnel department to start hiring black people, and to make sure that they hired the best ones available. And thus, we had a number of very talented, very articulate, black people working at Bankers.
MacArthur was very much an anti-union man. The BL&C corporate strategy was brilliant: hire the best talent available and pay them 25% more than they could make at any comparable job in the Chicago area.... BUT ... never give them the opportunity to advance behond the level of manager, reporting to a vice president (and back in the day, there were only six VPs, for aocompany with 5,400 home office employees and 10,000+ insurance agents; this would all change after MacArthur died, and the company devolved into a Charitable Trust, responsible for divesting itself of 80% of its assets within five years after MacArthur's death - they started handing out VP titles as if they were 3rd place ribbons in a state wide band/orchestra concert; not at all the way it used to be, and a LOT of big salaries, in comparison to the days of John MacArthur and his Risk Committee (of six)).
So, when the teamsters came on campus passing out their literature in an attempt to get the clerical workers to unionize, MacArthur assembled his division heads, and his Personnel people and said, "If this company goes union, I'll shut the office here down and move to Dallas. What are you going to do about it?"
And so, some of the best and brightest and most talented and creative minds went to work to develop a management sensitivity and training program whose motto was "Walk in their shoes." This one full week (7 1/2 hours a day, for five days) course was first attended by the BIG 6, and then the next two ranking managerial grades. Finally, it went to my level of management (I had no one to manage, but, as a highly skilled technician, would one day). It was an incredible, fully in house designed program (many of the people had masters degrees) and all of them were avid readers of the literature. Recovering from the teamster encroach was easy enough; they hadn't done their research, and had BAD suits, steeky Ceegars, and badly written, badly edited, mimeographed propaganda. When they teamsters went for round two, they were much better prepared, but by then, so were the BL&C managers.
N O W .... as to your incredible aunt - your telling her story reminded me SO much of this lady - the mother of a socialist war reporter and independent film maker, John Pilger:http://johnpilger.com/articles/a-tribute-to-my-mother
johnpilger.com
A tribute to my mother
17 May 2004
My mother, aged 19, sold her books to pay the fare to her first teaching job in the bush. The currency of her generation was determination and courage.
Since I left Australia, one journey has remained a small dream unfulfilled. It involves going north in New South Wales, to an old frontier town called Ballina, which is an Irish corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning "abundance". My mother Elsie arrived in Ballina in 1920, alone, aged 19. It was the middle of the night. She had travelled the 500 miles from Sydney, having sold her books to pay the fare, which the department of education said was "the responsibility of those privileged to teach". This was her first teaching job; in those days, you taught where you were sent.
The railway line had ended in the bush, and the handful of passengers who had come this far were loaded on to a truck with chains on its wheels; a track lay ahead. Two days after she had left Sydney, she was awakened and told she was in Ballina. "Sorry, Miss," said the driver. "Your bag's been dropped off somewhere else."
In the same clothes and flat broke, she walked along the long dirt road that was Ballina's main street, wide enough for a team of bullocks to turn, past W J Pickering Outfitters and the courthouse and the lock-up, to the only other 19th-century sandstone building, the school. "When I presented myself," she wrote, "the principal was busily inaugurating a pub nearby." So she sat on the steps and waited until he hove to, drunk and gasping for breath; like many of that Anzac generation, he had been mustard-gassed on the Western Front.
"What do you teach?" he asked her, to which she replied, "French and Latin and, if you like, history and English."
"You might as well go back," he said. "I want a maths teacher, and I want someone who won't be terrified by the brats" - meaning a male.
She didn't go back. She faced classes of up to 70 bush kids, many of them barely literate and there under sufferance of parents who really wanted their labour back on the farm. Her wage was £169 10s a year. She was of a remarkable generation of pioneering women, who asked for no material gain, whose currency was determination and courage.
She had grown up on the Hunter Valley coalfields, north-west of Sydney, before and during the First World War. Her great-grandfather was Francis McCarty, an Irishman who had arrived on the barque John Barry on 7 November 1821, wearing, along with all the other political prisoners, four-pound leg-irons. Convicted of "uttering unlawful oaths", he had been sentenced to 14 years in Britain's Antipodean penal colony. Her great-grandmother was Mary Palmer, a Whitechapel prostitute sentenced to life in a "female factory" near Sydney for the crime of relieving a client of his spare change; she would have been hanged had she not been pregnant. She arrived on the Lord Sidmouth, packed with rats, in 1822. She was 17.
Born soon after the turn of the century, Elsie was the only one of nine children from a mining family who completed her education. Up before dawn, she would catch the coal-company train to the new high school at East Maitland, where she had won a place with the first bursary ever awarded to her tiny primary school in the town of Kurri Kurri. At night, she would read and study by the light of a hurricane lamp or a candle under her bed or beneath the water tank that stood on stilts beside the house. Her books were the first of their kind her family had seen. "My other education," she wrote, "took place in the many hours I spent in the cemetery counting the number of miners accidentally killed and questioning the justice of their deaths and of the deity to whom we all prayed under my mother's surveillance every night."
The "Great War" with Germany was fed with Australian volunteers from small frontier towns; only the French, proportionally, suffered greater casualties. Elsie sold sprigs of bush wattle for pennies, which were sent to the Anzacs; she also questioned out loud why such a blood sacrifice had anything to do with Australia. She wrote, "I grew to hate their war; it's always their war." The warmongering prime minister of Australia at the time was the effete William Morris Hughes, whose speeches about "morality" were like those of Tony Blair. In two referendums, he tried to bring in conscription and failed, thanks largely to a campaign by women all over Australia, especially the young like Elsie.
At the age of 16, she arrived at Sydney University, where she became Australia's youngest graduate - a distinction that may still stand. Her family in the meantime had prospered and moved to a place called Merewether, to a house on a hill, which had the first refrigerator I ever saw, and running hot water. Elsie never lived there. In Sydney, she had met Claude, the son of a German sailor, who had also grown up in the Hunter Valley and had left school at 14 to go down the pit. As an apprentice, he was entitled to membership of the Mechanics Institute, whose "social, political and cultural lectures" were his education.
Elsie would smuggle him into the university library, where they read together. They became socialists, and he a member of the international Industrial Workers of the World, the "Wobblies".
In the late summer of 1920, Elsie took Claude home to meet her family. On the way, she met her eldest brother. "They're waiting for you," he said ominously. Going on alone, she found a family court in session. "The source of the disapproval was clear," she wrote: "the only educated daughter had deigned to want to marry a Bolshie!"
Now excommunicated by her family, she set out for Ballina. Her clothes arrived two months later, without a note and wrapped in newspaper. "The hypocrisy!" she wrote, "what with our Irish convict background! But of course we never talked about that." When she returned a year later, Claude had borrowed £10 so they could be married. They chose the register office near the walls of the old convict prison factory where Mary Palmer had been incarcerated and had met Francis McCarty. On her wedding day, Elsie sent two one-word telegrams to her sulking family. The first, before they were married, said GOING; the second, after the ceremony, said GONE. She laughed a great deal, often darkly, though when she and Claude fell apart, that stopped.
The other day, I followed her footsteps along Ballina's main street, past the same 19th-century courthouse and lock-up. In the library, I discovered a letter from the local MP, requesting "a competent teacher of languages . . . who will allow our children in the country district an opportunity they would not otherwise have". It was dated 1919 and it was the cue for Elsie. Her power as a teacher became something of a legend; year after year, for more than half a century, her former students would meet in Sydney for dinner to celebrate her, even though she always declined their invitations to attend. "I was never that good," she would say to me, ". . . just determined."
Ballina is leafy and brisk and very modern these days, and the original school took some finding. When I found it, I peered in and saw her there.
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