A Chicken in Every Pot, A Teacher in Every Family

My mom was a smart woman. If home schooling had been in vogue when she reared ten children, perhaps I would have been blessed growing up in a one-room family school house. I still often hear her voice in my head and thank God for everything she taught me: my prayers, how to follow the Mass, how to sew, how to bake. One phrase often comes back to me. "An educated man is an educated man, but an educated woman is an educated family."

Mom was certainly well educated. Adopted by a Cleveland lawyer and his wife, a fact she only learned as an adult, she attended law school at Western Reserve University (later Case Western Reserve), the only woman in her class. She dropped out in 1940 after two years to fly to California and marry my dad, a recent graduate of the Naval Academy. She followed him to Pearl Harbor where they lived through the Japanese attack that got the U.S. into World War II. She was pregnant with my oldest brother when she was evacuated from the island.