Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) (4 page)

In those meatpacking days, Waterloo was a tough town full of tough men. Tough men who never ran from a fight. And when the
real
fight came, Waterloo men were ready.

So we come to the legendary Sullivan brothers, Waterloo men whose heroic spirit abides with us to this day. My father always spoke with pride when he told us the story of the courage and sacrifice of this marvelous family.

Back in the 1930s, many members of the Sullivan clan worked at Rath. But when a friend of the family's died at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the five Sullivan brothers—Albert, Francis, George, Joseph, and Madison—all enlisted in the navy. But they joined under one condition: that they be allowed to serve together. One of the brothers wrote, “We will make a team together that can't be beat.”

So they all served on the USS
Juneau
, a light cruiser fighting in the Pacific. In November 1942, a Japanese torpedo struck their ship. Almost the entire crew died, including all five Sullivans.

Hollywood made a movie about their lives, including scenes in Waterloo as the five sons were growing to manhood. Watching the film on TV years later, I still remember the scene inside the Sullivan household, as a little flag featuring five blue stars rests in the window, signifying the five sons away in military service. Then comes the fateful knock on the door. The women at home know what it means—bad news from Uncle Sam. “Which one?” they ask. And the representative from the Navy Department answers grimly, “All of them.” At the end of the movie, we see the five Sullivans striding into heaven, trailing clouds of glory on their path to the Almighty. The Sullivans were home.

Most remarkably, the rest of the Sullivan family—their five blue stars now turned to gold—became active in war-bond drives, raising money for the ships and other weaponry needed to avenge their sons' deaths and win the war. Two navy ships since then have been named
The Sullivans
; in Waterloo today, the Five Sullivan Brothers Convention Center dominates the downtown.

Five children taken away. It's hard enough for me to picture Martha Monsson thinking she would be separated from one child, Halvor, on that dock in Norway. Now to think of all five gone. As the mother of five healthy biological children, I have had occasion to reflect on what it would mean to lose any one of them, let alone five. Others have faced that same sort of painful reality, of course, and sought to make sense of such loss.

I learned of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to a Mrs. Bixby in 1864, after the president saw a military report that all five of her sons had died fighting in the Civil War. “I pray,” Lincoln wrote, “that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”

Later it was discovered that three of Mrs. Bixby's sons were only missing, not dead. But the Sullivans were real. All five gone. Their sacrifice was a demonstration of the Holy Scriptures: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Sometimes, I have realized, no matter what the risk, no matter what the odds, it is necessary to fight. And to take comfort in the faith that a grateful nation, and a Heavenly Father, judges our sacrifice worthy.

As a kid in the living room listening to the grownups talk about World War II, I heard nightmarish tales of death camps in Europe, where millions of Jews had been killed. I remember thinking to myself, How could people be so cruel, so horrible? In my young mind, I could not plumb the depths of absolute evil; only years later could I fathom the full extent of the Holocaust. Then and now, we must ask ourselves: Are we ready to confront evil? Will we seek to look the other way, or will we stand up and fight? These are enduring questions for Americans to answer.

In the fifties and sixties, every adult had a World War II memory. Some were tragic, but others were poignant and sweet. My grandmother recalled receiving a Western Union telegram telling her that her son would soon be in New York City, as he was being shipped overseas to the battlefront. She always kept her spare change in a big glass jar, and when she received the telegram, she scraped together nickels and dimes to buy a train ticket to New York, fearful that it might be the last time she would see him. Happily, her son came back home.

World War II was only history to me, but my parents lived through it.

My mother was born in Mason City, Iowa, in 1931. Yes, that was the hometown of Meredith Willson, the creator of
The Music Man
, who modeled his fictional “River City” after Mason City. And yes, one of my aunts was named Marian and worked as a librarian, just like the famous character in the famous musical. But for the family, Mason City was a hardscrabble place. Marian's father, my grandfather, was an alcoholic who lost his butcher shop during the Depression; for a time his wife, my grandmother, worked as a cleaning lady for that same library. Indeed, back then, the Johnson family survived on food scraps such as neck-bone soup. That was the way it was back then.

And that's how my mother, Arlene Jean Johnson, the seventh and youngest child, grew up. When she was still in elementary school, the Johnsons moved to Waterloo, where things were a little better—but only a little. Jean, as she was called, grew up in a one-bedroom house with no indoor plumbing. The boys in the family, my uncles, had no choice but to leave home at age twelve or so, dropping out of school and looking for work. My mom and her two sisters, Marian and Bonnie, had to share a double bed, even as late as high school. They would steal each other's bobby pins so they could pin their hair up nicely to look pretty for class.

My mother got a big break in life when a Lutheran couple, O. K. and Malina Story, who did not themselves have children, fell in love with her. And why not? Jean was sweet and demure, a good little Norwegian girl, all blue eyes and yellow hair. So she stayed with them on their farm during summers, becoming an unofficial foster child. Jean helped out by working in the family's kitchen, but then she was given a special opportunity: The Storys arranged for her to attend Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Thanks to their Christian love and good-hearted charity—the Storys were a blessing, a true “point of light”—Jean was assured a better future.

If little Jean was adorable, teenage Jean was beautiful—slim and cute, like a model or a movie star. Boys at East High School liked her; she always had dates. But there was one boy she really liked.

That was David John Amble, born on a Minnesota farm in 1929, just days before the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Depression. When he was a baby, the family house burned down and the Ambles lost everything. These were hard times; nobody had much to spare. So the Ambles moved to Waterloo, where David's father got a job at the Illinois Central rail yard, while his mother found work as a commercial seamstress sewing upholstery. I grew up visiting that old house they lived in, over on Lafayette Street; to say it was modest would be an understatement. The Ambles always had to scrimp, living on the first floor of their house with its one bedroom; they rented out the second floor. My dad too went to East High School, and he and Jean were soon an item.

As David was going into the Air Force, he and Jean married. Mom earned a one-year teaching certificate from Luther College and then left school, following David to Lowry Air Force Base, near Denver. Dad was only in his early twenties, but he was smart; he taught electronics on the base. Mom got a job as a secretary at a nearby company called Red Comet, which made fire extinguishers. One time, President Eisenhower came to visit the corporate headquarters, and Mom had the opportunity to shake his hand. She was a Democrat, but she was thrilled to meet a great hero of World War II, now the leader of the free world.

My older brother, David Jr., was born at nearby Fitzsimons Army Hospital, in 1953. After Dad's military service, the three Ambles ambled back to Waterloo. Dad took a full-time factory job at Chamberlain Manufacturing, an ordnance maker for the Pentagon, working a lathe to pay the bills. Meanwhile, he used his GI Bill benefits to attend Iowa State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Iowa. The first in his family to go to college, he studied engineering, aiming for a white-collar career.

The family moved into a tiny house at 210 East Ninth Street. As a piece of real estate, it wasn't much, but it was their own little piece of the American Dream. Like my grandparents, my parents lived on the first floor and rented out the second floor; they even rented out the attic. On a bright spring morning in 1956, my mother was planting tulips and went into labor. My dad was at school taking a test, so a distant relative, Elmer, who was renting upstairs, drove Mom to the hospital. Dad was at the hospital by the time I was born; he was the first to tell my mother, “Honey, we have a little baby girl!”

My first memories are of that house, sitting in the kitchen, watching my mother as she canned tomatoes. We had a black-and-white TV, and I remember watching President Eisenhower and thinking to myself,
Mommy knows
him!

But we didn't watch much TV, because Mom was a reader, and she wanted all her children too to be readers. She was—and still is!—a classic 1950s/1960s mother. She has always been feminine, gracious, ladylike, and totally devoted to her children. Soon there were four of us; Davey and I were joined by little brothers Gary in 1960 and Paul in 1962. Yes, I had the privilege, if that's the way to say it, of growing up with three rambunctious brothers, and I knew what it was like to compete with the boys; I learned what you have to do to fight back. In other words, it was great training for politics.

The six of us lived near a Dairy Queen, but it was a rare treat to go there. The more usual food was a Wonder Bread sandwich with a slice of lettuce and a layer of mayonnaise. We never ate fancy, but we were happy and we had freedom to play outside without the need for adult supervision—and that was the greatest wealth.

In addition, we had our extended family. It seemed that just about every weekend we would drive out somewhere to visit with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or close family friends. We would sometimes cook out, but I don't really remember food being the focus of our lives; the focus was our family and friends. We would go to church together, then maybe go for a drive to visit relatives; we did everything together. When I needed a new dress, my mother or grandmother would sew one for me. It wasn't the posh life, but it was the good life.

We also listened to the adults talk politics.

Let me tell you about my grandmothers. My mother's mother was named Laura, and she was a New Deal–style Democrat. She had worked hard all her life, but she also believed that FDR was a great president, that he had saved the country back in the thirties. She loved me and all of her other grandkids, and she let us know that she did. In my heart, she will always be just one thing: pure love.

My father's mother, Anna, was the Republican in the family. She would read
Time
magazine cover to cover—it was Republican back then—and she would devour too the
Wall Street Journal
every weekday. Then she would be ready for a lively discussion and, if need be, a spirited debate. She was a thorough reader, an intent listener, and a terrific conversationalist, although she always argued from principle. She loved to talk, and she loved to put pepper on food, and so on weekends she'd do both. I'd listen to her as she talked, added some pepper, then talked some more, then added more pepper. Her dishes had a
lot
of pepper. To this day, I like pepper so much that I usually remove the top of the shaker!

One day, sometime in the mid-1960s, I stood in my grandmother's kitchen on Lafayette Street, listening to my dad and my grandmother argue politics. Dad, always a Democrat, was talking to his mother, the family Republican, about what was happening in Washington, D.C. Dad said that President Lyndon Johnson was doing a good job pushing Great Society social-welfare programs. And my grandmother said, “David, it won't be you who pays for all these programs, it will be Davey and Michele.”

At the age of eight or nine, I knew more about Barbie dolls than about fiscal issues, but that scene has stuck with me ever since. Government programs with nice-sounding names may seem like a good idea, but someone has to pay for them. And as we have learned in the decades since, Grandma Anna's prediction has come true. Indeed, I don't think that even Grandma Laura, the staunch Democrat, if she were with us today, would believe that the welfare state still works for working people—or anyone else. Indeed, I am sure she would be shocked and troubled by the degree to which governmental “help” has become, instead, a crushing burden on all of us.

Moreover, I know both grandmothers would say that all of us must be restrained and prudent in our spending. That's the way they got through their own lives; why should it be any different for the nation as a whole? Reckless people don't survive; neither do reckless countries.

Yet for all the spice of the food, and the spice of the argument, things never got too hot for us back in Waterloo. We were family. And that was everything to all of us, no matter which party we identified with.

I thank God for the loving framework that nurtured me. Faith, family, friends—we all need those. On Saturday night, we would take our weekly bath, put on our jammies, watch dinosaur cartoons on TV, and then go to bed early. The next morning, we would go to the early service at First Lutheran Church of Waterloo; later we went to the Nazareth Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cedar Falls. My father's mother was an adult Sunday school teacher at the church, where she taught the Bethel Bible Series. And every summer, we went to two weeks of vacation Bible school. It was a life of comforting routine and simplicity, and it was all we wanted. To me, growing up, those familiar rhythms meant that I had everything.