On Being “Disadvantaged”

I was struck by a recent Peggy Noonan column titled The American Way. The former Reagan speechwriter wrote about her grandmother, Mary Dorian, who spent her first night in America sleeping on a cold park bench in Lower Manhattan. Two generations later, her granddaughter sat across the desk from the President of the United States, telling him what she thought he ought to do, and he was nodding his head and saying, “Yes, you’re right.” 

It is a uniquely American success story and it caused me to think about the people who are responsible for me being here.

My paternal great-great grandfather, Johann Dietrich Hollrah, and his ten-year-old son, with only the clothes on their backs and little money in their pockets, sailed from Bremen, Kingdom of Hanover (Germany) in early December 1834, arriving at the Port of New Orleans on New Year’s Eve. They then made their way up the Mississippi to St. Charles County, Missouri, the place from which Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark departed thirty years earlier on their historic exploration of the American northwest. 

They purchased a small tract of land, and with axes, shovels, and a team of mules, they turned a woodland into farmland. My great-grandfather later became a cavalryman in the Army of the West during the 1840’s, helping to establish forts along the Oregon Trail and surviving several skirmishes with the Sioux. 

Returning home, he was appointed Captain of the Home Guards (county militia). His militia unit was pressed into Union service during the Civil War and he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, executive officer of the 27th Missouri Enrolled Militia. 

He spent most of his life doing what his son and his grandson, my father, loved most. They all farmed the land, working every day from before sunup to well after sundown to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. They had little formal education, but they were honest, hard-working people, and whatever social life they had revolved around the church.

As I grew up, attending Lutheran parochial schools and the public high school, college was something that was never mentioned in our home – people of our social class, sharecroppers and factory workers, didn’t attend college – so I completed my high school education without ever burdening myself with the rigors of chemistry, physics, or mathematics. However, seven years later, after Army service during the Korean War and after five years on a factory assembly line, I decided I wanted to become an engineer. So with a wife and two children to support, no background in mathematics and the sciences, no scholarships, and no outside financial help, I enrolled at the University of Missouri College of Engineering. I was the first member of my family ever to attend college.

In order to make ends meet and make my grades, I was either in class, studying, or working at odd jobs 20-21 hours a day, seven days a week; and when I graduated, in 1962, I was just over 6 ft. tall and weighed 116 pounds. A former landlord has told me how it broke his heart to see me digging food out of neighbors’ garbage cans to feed my family.

Upon graduation, I went to work as a project engineer for a major oil company in New York. I’ll never forget my first day. As I walked down Wall Street, past the imposing facade of the New York Stock Exchange and just a few short blocks from the park bench where Peggy Noonan’s grandmother spent her first night in America, I was neatly dressed in suit and tie and I had my new (totally empty) attaché case gripped tightly in my fist. But only I was aware of the large holes in the bottom of my five-year-old wingtip shoes and the cardboard inserts that I’d cut from an empty Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box that very morning. 

The moral of the story? I’ve often been asked if I’m not angry because of what I had to do to earn my ticket to the American Dream. My answer has always been the same. I’ve replied that, if I were to be put onto a stage, standing between George Bush and Teddy Kennedy, and the audience was asked to decide which of us was advantaged and which was disadvantaged, most would say that I was the disadvantaged one. I heartily disagree. Of the three, I am the advantaged one because, like Peggy Noonan’s grandmother, I have known personal victories that people who begin life at the top of the ladder can never know.

That’s America, my friends. Love it, or leave it.