It Takes a Village Read Online Free Page B

I have learned from my daughter and her friends and from children all over the world. Children have many lessons to share with us—lessons about what they need, what makes them happy, how they view the world. If we listen, we’ll be able to hear them. This book is about the first and best lesson they have taught me: “It takes a village to raise a child.”

No Family Is an Island
    Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things,
but just look what they can do when they stick together.
    VERNA M . KELLY
    I WANT YOU to know a little about my family, because my experiences, like everyone’s, have informed my views. Whether or not we are parents, we were all once children, and that alone gives us opinions on the subject of raising them.
    I grew up in a family that looked like it was straight out of the 1950s television sitcom Father Knows Best . Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, my father, was a self-sufficient, tough-minded small-businessman who ran a plant that screen-printed and sold drapery fabrics. He was the only employee, except when he enlisted my mother or us children or hired day labor. He worked hard and never encountered a serious financial setback. But like many who came of age during the Great Depression, he constantly worried that he might. “Do you want us to end up in the poorhouse?” was a familiar refrain.
    He grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the middle of three boys, surrounded by a multitude of kinfolk on both sides of his family. He attended Penn State, where he was a loyal member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. He graduated with a degree in education in 1935. His first job after college was back home in Scranton, selling lace curtains, but he moved to Chicago when he was offered a better job, selling textiles throughout the Midwest.
    One of our favorite pastimes as children was listening to him tell stories of his life “before you were born.” We loved hearing how, as a boy, he would go down into the local coal mines to find mules who were blind from spending their lives underground and would lead them out into the sun. He also hopped freight trains and then jumped off as they rolled slowly along the countryside. One time, however, a train took off so quickly he wound up riding all the way to Binghamton, New York. A boy doing any of that today would be called “delinquent.”
    Another time, after he had hitched a ride on the back of an ice truck, he was rammed from behind, and his lower legs and feet were badly broken. He was taken to the hospital, where the doctors wanted to amputate both feet. His mother, a formidable woman, barricaded herself in his room, refusing to let anyone in until her brother-in-law, a country doctor, arrived. Then she ordered him to “save my sonny’s legs.” He did, and my father went on to have an active childhood and sports career, lettering in football in high school and college. Sometimes Mother knows best too!
    After Pearl Harbor, my father joined the navy, became a chief petty officer, and trained recruits at Great Lakes Naval Base, north of Chicago. He and my mother, Dorothy Howell, were married in 1942 and lived first in apartments in Chicago, where I was born in 1947. After they had saved up enough cash, they bought a house in the city of Park Ridge. My father didn’t believe in mortgages or credit, then or later.
    By upbringing and conviction, my father was a devout Methodist, who prayed kneeling by the side of his bed every night. He also was an old-fashioned Republican, who, until he met Bill Clinton, eagerly pulled the “R” lever in every voting booth he entered.
    I saw my father as the emissary from our home to the outside world, a place he perceived as very competitive. He was determined to give me and my two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony, the life tools we needed to survive and thrive. That meant, among other things, paying higher property taxes to live in a suburb that supported the schools