The first American election I followed closely was the Harry Truman upset of Republican Tom Dewey. My father voted Republican by devotion. Mom adored my dad even in politics. We lived in a newer, but very modest section of St. Paul, Minnesota. Protestants were minority to Roman Catholics in number. Jews were the only minority generally outside the neighborhood culture of the day, both prewar and postwar.
Always invited to the Spring and Fall neighborhood picnics, none would show up although always invited….I know, for I delivered the invitations personally for all neighbors in our two block area beginning before the end of the war. Roman Catholic children disappeared from the local public elementary school the moment St. Leo’s Church and School was built right also at war’s end. That left about five to six Jewish kids among 36 to 40 students per each class at our Horace Mann Elementary School.
Most Jewish classmates were in-one’s-face students, proud of their heritage, loud in their scholarship, and, to be truthful, extremely arrogant and exclusive. The remaining majority, a wide variety of Protestant tribes, all but Baptists, were taught to be quiet and exceedingly polite about their Jesus. Everyone seemed God-fearing….a great blessing. Baptist kids apparently were taught to evangelize at an early age.
Jews voted Democratic Party…..a bit more conservative than today’s Paul Ryan party….(We don’t yet know how conservative Mr. Trump will become.)
The best known Twin City gangster of the day was Isadore Blumenfeld, ala Kid Can …a Minneapolis Jewish hoodlum well known for his crookedness. Jews then appeared to be born Democrat….it went with the culture of feeling superior in learnings. culture, and business. Others, the Protestant yokels, were destined to be laborers, poor, and ignorant of the better things in life.
I was dyslexic, I suspect seriously. I couldn’t read. I knew the alphabet, was good with numbers, but I was a noted backward with no reading ability….Our Jews in class read like the hums of machines. I won an announcement by second grade teacher Miss Bell Swanson to the class reveling that I no longer printed my Gs and Rs backwards….and the class should give me an applause (of derision for being so retarded). I noticed the Jewish kids were leading the volume of noise…..of derision, not celebration.
I loved schooling. I loved these old maid school marms…. I wanted to know where they got to know so much. I wanted to be just like them….knowing answers to mysteries.
In third grade, the class of my favorite teacher of all time, Mrs. Lucille Jaeger, I caused a revolution among my classmates which elevated me from bottom to near top among the class learned….although I never overcame the reading liability.
Mrs. Jaeger had learned I could draw maps, trees, landscapes, and read encyclopedias….and remember all sorts of innocuous information. I didn’t know I was such a loner. Why should I? I was always busy being occupied away from Mother’s reach.
Mrs. Jaeger had never called upon me before this scholastic revolution of my life. “Glenn Ray….is it true you like to draw maps?”
Even then I had full confidence in myself knowing my stuff…..I had become a loner. I was loved far more at home doing things by myself and doing them well….drawing, reading atlases and encyclopedias….things ‘real’ like drawing maps, learning arithmatic and later, math. Although I couldn’t read, I was a top speller from first grade on, but that didn’t do much to gain Jewish buddies.
“Yes, Mrs. Jaeger”, I answered with confidence.
“Could you draw a map of the United States on the blackboard for our students?
“Yes, Mrs. Jaeger”…..and celebrated the moment rushing to the blackboard to do my stuff for the very first time….for I had over two years of practice at home, tracing maps from the atlases I got for Christmases.
I always started at our Minnesota Angle, then to the state of Washington’s Puget Sound…went south along the Pacific Coast making sure I positioned San Francisco Bay accurately, the south to Baja, Mexico, and super easy from west to east, lines to the Rio Grande, then to Louisiana’s Lake Ponchartrain, over to the Florida peninsula, up the Atlantic coast to Maryland and Chesapeake Bay, to Maine, then the Great Lakes, and back to Angle Minnesota…..in about two minutes.
The class was stunned, but it was when I asked Mrs. Jaeger if she’d like me to draw in the state boundaries as well, when I crossed the bridge into the Jewish land of friends….
Naturally, I drew the states West to East, the easier to the more difficult…..when I reached the Mississippi River, Mrs. Jaeger proudly thanked me and asked for an applause from my classmates.
I had made it into this somewhat foreign American classroom society totally unaware at that time. All I remember is that suddenly I had Jewish friends, mostly boys which lasted into high school….except in English classes where reading the classics was required.
Jews have voted leftwing forever nationally around 70% . Today, they occupy a major role in propagandizing things leftwing on every conceivable front. Good old Debbie Wasserman Schulz….and countless others like Hillary’s sleaze workman, Sydney Blumenthal and others in ‘news’ selling leftism on television and in Hollywood.
And then there is radio ace, lonely politically among this leftism population, precious conservative, Dennis Prager, one of the finest reporters of things great in America ever.
P.S. I am glad to see he is beginning to notice the better Donald Trump from the one he has earlier described and denounced. Mr. Trump is a very bright guy, not a politician, but filled with a winsome personality and love for his country….rare combinations these Obama-Hillary days.
Filed under: American Culture, Conservatism, Dennis Prager, Education, History, National Politics | 1 Comment »
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