Stand for Something

by John Kasich

  Case in point: As a young teenager, I was in the habit of calling the local talk radio stations to speak my mind on various issues of personal interest, and as often as not my views tended to land on the conservative side of the spectrum. My mother was well aware of my leanings, and she often listened to these same shows, although she had no idea I was an occasional caller. One afternoon, she was downstairs in the kitchen, listening to the radio, when she heard a well-spoken young man sound off in a way she thought I might find interesting, so she set off looking for me. She hollered, “Johnny, turn on the radio!” Then she burst into her bedroom—only to find me on the upstairs phone, doing the sounding off.

  Another case in point: I had a math teacher named Ed Gregga. Mr. Gregga turned out to be a tremendous, upstanding guy, but at the time I didn’t think he was a very good math teacher. I actually tried to get out of his class, but eventually he and I became friends. He told me a story I’ve never forgotten. It seems Mr. Gregga’s lifelong dream was to be the head football coach at McKees Rocks High School. He’d been an outstanding college player—an All-American at Juniata College—so he was certainly qualified for the job, and it finally came his way. He was like a kid in a candy store, he told me many years later, finally realizing a long-held goal. And he was successful. For a couple years, he did a great job with the McKees Rocks varsity, and then out of the blue he was visited by one of the town leaders, who wanted Mr. Gregga to start ordering the team’s equipment and uniforms from a friend of his who owned a sporting goods store in town.

  Now, Mr. Gregga was inclined to do no such thing. He ordered his sporting goods from Honus Wagner’s, a competing store, and Honus Wagner’s had been good to Mr. Gregga and to McKees Rocks High School. When the school was in financial trouble, the good people at Honus Wagner’s carried them for a couple seasons, and Mr. Gregga wasn’t about to forget it. He said as much to the town leader. He said, “Sir, I might buy my shoelaces from your friend’s store, if it means that much to you, but I’m buying my helmets and shoulder pads and all that other equipment from Honus Wagner’s.”

  The town leader said, “I’m afraid you don’t understand. You’re gonna buy the equipment from me, my friend, or else—”

  Mr. Gregga didn’t wait around to hear the or else. He said, “Well, then I guess I just quit.” And he did. He walked away from his dream job—a job he was good at!—because he would not be pressured in this way, and because he would not turn his back on people who had not turned their backs on him.

  That was McKees Rocks for you—shot through with graft and corruption and shady dealings, but at the same time filled with principled people like Mr. Gregga, people who weren’t afraid to stand for something. I mean, here’s a guy who gave up his dream job for something he believed in. His values meant more to him than worldly success—and to him, being head coach of the high school football team was worldly success. But he wouldn’t play ball, so he had to give up his dream and redefine what it meant to be successful.

  MY FATHER

  Here’s my father for you, in a nutshell. I was about eleven years old, and one by one my friends were being asked to play for this or that team in the local Little League. There was a massive tryout, and a series of lesser tryouts, and some sort of disbursement draft, and when it was all said and done a few of us kids had managed to fall through the cracks and not get selected at all. I was skinny, small, and too easily overlooked. Nowadays, you’d have to look long and hard to find a youth sports program that doesn’t make room for all interested participants, but things were different back then. Parents weren’t tuned in to buzzwords like inclusion and positivity, and playing fair was an oxymoron; getting “cut” was an accepted part of the deal.

  In any case, I was a huge baseball fan, and like every other kid in McKees Rocks I dreamed of someday playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and yet there I was, missing out on my chance to play any kind of organized ball. I was a smart kid, and a decent enough ballplayer, and it took about a heartbeat for me to see what was going on. No, I wasn’t one of the strongest players in town, not by a long shot, but I wasn’t one of the weakest, either. Some of these other kids were getting picked for teams because their fathers were coaches, or because their fathers were friendly with the coaches, or because they knew the guy who was sponsoring the team. And yet there I was, overlooked again and again and again. Even at such a young age, I could see that life and Little League were all about connections, so I went up to my father one evening and made my frustrations known. I told him I was as good a ballplayer as Jimmy or Jeffrey or Jerry, and that he needed to go and talk to somebody and get me on a team. He knew everyone in town, I reminded him. He delivered their mail, and chatted with them on their doorsteps. Surely, I suggested, there was someone he could talk to about getting me on a team.

  My father saw the situation a bit differently. He said, “Johnny, I’m not going to owe anybody anything. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to earn your way on to one of these teams.”

  Let me tell you, that was a tough lesson for an eleven-year-old kid, but I tried to swallow it. I wasn’t mad at my father, and I don’t think I begrudged him his position, but I did have a hard time understanding it. All I could see was that these other kids were playing ball and I wasn’t. That was the long and short of it. My friends all had their uniforms and their team practices, while all I had was my pile of disappointment, and it got to where there wasn’t even anyone around for me to have a catch with, but I kept at it. As I recall, I did a lot of tossing the ball high up into the air, over and over, or practicing up against a wall. My father would throw the ball around with me, every chance he got, and even as a kid I could tell it was tearing him up inside to see me so distraught, but he held fast to his principles. He would not go with his hand out to anyone, for anything—certainly not for something like this.

  A couple weeks into the season, some kid broke his leg and I got my shot, which I guess means that in the end I got to play without my father being beholden to anybody in town, and it’s a shame it had to happen as a result of someone else’s misfortune even though at the time I didn’t spend too much time worrying about the poor kid with the broken leg. I just grabbed my glove and raced to the field for my first practice, thrilled to finally be getting a real uniform, and the chance to play for a real team. And no one was happier for me than my father, in part I suspect for the way it got him off the hook, but mostly because he knew what it meant to me.

  I don’t know that I would have handled the situation the same way if I had been in my father’s shoes, but this was his principle. This was his stand. And, in the end, what did it accomplish? Well, for one very important thing, it made an impression. Here I am, a lifetime later, still telling the story. Here I am, still thinking about the lesson it carries, the values it upholds, the example it sets. I read the great Czech playwright and leader Václav Havel, who suggests that it is arrogant to believe a single righteous act can’t change the world, and I find my own father between the lines.

  “A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness,” Havel writes in Disturbing the Peace. “It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.”

  Was there greatness in such a small act as this? No, probably not. Was there even a clear-sighted awareness on the part of my father, that his principles were not only his principles but that they might soon become mine as well? That they might set an impossible standard? Again, probably not. He was doing what he felt was right, and just, operating within his own moral code, and he expected me to shoulder my situation and move on. And that might have been that, but for the fact that his principles continue to resonate, all these years later.

  MY MOTHER

  Here’s my mother for you: One afternoon, she took me to a fair at the schoolyard. Some kid had brought a pony to the school and was offering rides for 10 cents apiece, and I stood dutifully on line with my mother and waited my turn. The kid who was
running the rides wasn’t much older than me, and he looked down on his luck. His clothes were a little too torn and tattered, his face a little too smeared with sweat and effort, his demeanor a little too hangdog to suggest prosperity. There was even something off about one of his eyes, it left him looking one way when he meant to look another, and I may have only been six or seven years old but all these things registered. As excited as I was to ride the pony, that’s how sad I was at the sight of this kid.

  Sure enough, my turn came and my mother handed the boy a dollar for the ride. That was a lot of money to us, back then. I don’t mean to portray us as impoverished, but as I wrote at the outset we didn’t have a whole lot, and we certainly didn’t have enough to pay a dollar for a pony ride. That was a real extravagance. I tugged on her dress and said as much to my mother. “It’s only ten cents for the ride,” I whispered, when she stooped to hear what was on my mind.

  “Quiet now, Johnny,” she said, in a whisper of her own. “Can’t you see he needs it more than we do?”

  And he did.

  My mother was a keen and compassionate observer of the world. She took things in, like no one else I’ve ever known. Nothing escaped her attention, or her concern, and it had me thinking she was always one step ahead of everyone else. There could be an edge to her, and you wouldn’t want to be on the opposing side of an argument at a PTA meeting or family discussion, particularly on a substantive matter that involved real principles and ethics. Her greatest concern was for her own children, for helping us to find and embrace whatever joys might come our way, and her extra efforts in this regard were everywhere apparent. When the Pirates won the 1960 World Series in stirring fashion, for one memorable example, my mother knew what it meant to me to take the bus downtown to be a part of the celebration. I was all of eight years old, and we muscled our way through the crowd and even managed to get Bill Mazeroski’s autograph on a baseball, creating a memory I didn’t think I had any right to seek. That trip to downtown Pittsburgh that evening was hectic and chaotic, but it was a trip my mother was only too happy to make for her baseball-mad son. It didn’t mean a thing to her, but it meant the world to me—and that, to my mother, was everything.

  They were simple people, my parents. Good, honest, hardworking, God-fearing people. Call-it-like-you-see-it, tell-it-like-it-is-type people. My father was easygoing, got along with everybody, and he just loved his job like crazy. It fit his personality. He was charming, and somewhat gregarious, which in many ways ran counter to his own backstory. His parents had struggled mightily. My grandfather was a coal miner in western Pennsylvania; he eventually died of black lung disease. As an immigrant, his employers often took advantage of him, and he was so beaten down by his situation he didn’t feel he could make a stand. They were dirt poor, my grandparents, and I guess that kind of upbringing instilled in my father a clear sense of station. In his mind, success was reaching to the next rung on the economic ladder. It was lifting yourself up and out and onto something better. Success was owning a car, or keeping ahead of your debt. It was raising a family, and going to church, and being a good neighbor and living a decent, purposeful life. My mother shared this view. Her family was also extremely poor, and her parents barely spoke English. And yet they never lost sight of their principles and believed deeply that having compassion for others was one of life’s great treasures.

  Together, upon these mighty foundations, my parents made a fine home for their three children, and filled it with object lessons on faith and decency, common sense and compassion, integrity and hard work. I don’t know that they would have ever put it in just these terms, but they dedicated themselves to improving their children’s future and creating a great American legacy.

  There was no stigma to being a mailman’s son, back in McKees Rocks, the way there might be today in so many parts of the country. Everyone was the son of a mailman, the son of a mill worker, the son of a policeman. Delivering the mail was honorable work, and at the end of a long day that was all that counted. There were no shortcuts to success in my parents’ estimation, no back doors to opportunity. Hard work and character were key.

  GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  I grew up with great compassion for the underdog, perhaps because I came from a family of underdogs. Nothing was ever handed to us; we lived and grew in the reaching. There’s a wonderful maxim—“To whom much is given, much is expected”—only my parents seemed to want to turn the message around: “to whom nothing is given, everything is expected.” My parents set the bar high, and I aimed to clear it. When I was old enough, I borrowed a page from my mother and stood tall for what I felt was right. There was a race riot in our school. There were precious few blacks among our student body, but there was enough tension to get a full-fledged riot going, and I took the microphone at a school board meeting and berated the community for not doing enough to ease that tension. I didn’t think about it; I just stood and said my piece. And do you know what? Folks listened. I was barely seventeen years old, confronting several hundred adults in a real crisis situation, shining what I hoped was a positive, hopeful light, and I somehow got to the heart of the matter and stilled the crowd. Why? Because I’d seen my mother argue with anybody about anything—as long as she believed in it. Because it seemed to me to be the right thing to do. Because it was in my bones. Because it needed doing.

  It was always a given that we kids would go to college. That was another measure of success, to my parents, to ensure that their children had more opportunities than they had themselves. I can still remember driving to my Aunt Betty’s house on Sundays, past the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, and my father leaning over the front seat of the car and saying, “Johnny, is that where you’re going to college?”

  The message was clear: If I remembered where I came from, and focused on where I was headed, anything was possible; dream big dreams and they just might wind up turning true on you.

  When it came time for me to move on I didn’t stray all that far. Lewis and Clark went clear across the country to realize their dreams; I went just 180 miles to the west to Ohio State University to discover mine.

  There were 48,000 students at Ohio State in 1970 and I found myself in a dormitory that was twenty-three floors high and filled with eighteen-year-old freshmen and women. We lived in a common suite that was about the size of a couple elevator cabs. They stuffed sixteen of us in this tiny little suite. I swear, whoever designed it wanted to flunk us all out. To make matters worse (or, better, depending on your perspective), right next door was a duplicate tower, also twenty-three floors high, also filled with eighteen-year-old freshmen and women. Let me tell you, those dormitories were like two giant Petri dishes for every imaginable type of human behavior—and some unimaginable types as well. If there was trouble to be made, these young dormitory residents were on it, and under it, and all over it. In downtown Columbus, the locals used to refer to these towers as Sodom and Gomorrah, and back then there were hundreds of undergraduates determined to justify the name.

  Naturally, in that kind of setting, there are countless rules put in place to keep order and sanity. One of the big rules in those high-rise dorms was that you couldn’t open the windows. I guess the “men” and “women” who came before me liked to throw things like water balloons from those upper floors, and I guess, too, that this practice was generally frowned upon. I was in my new suite with my fifteen new roommates for about fifteen minutes before every single one of these rules was broken, and the thing of it is not one of them was broken by me. I was terrified of being away from home at this point, and terrified of stepping out of line, so I went by the book.

  GO BUCKEYES!

  Ohio State University, like most big institutions, relies on its rules in order to keep thrumming—and this was especially so during my tenure, as American college campuses became a flashpoint for protest, unrest, and social change. Somehow, second or third week of school, I allowed myself to get so worked up about all these rules that I wanted t
o talk them through with someone in charge—and it seemed to me the only place to get a meaningful hearing was in the office of the university president. That’s how I thought back in those days, and I guess that’s how I still operate, reaching to the very top in order to get to the bottom of things. And so, fueled by a series of now forgotten frustrations, I reached. I worked my way through layer and layer of Buckeye bureaucracy, all the way up to the president, Novice Fawcett, and it just so happened that Dr. Fawcett had a secretary who did a pretty good job running interference. I called to ask for a meeting, and she put me off. I called again, and she put me off again. I must have called about fifteen times before she finally said, “You’re driving me crazy, young man.” To which, of course, I could only reply, “Ma’am, I mean no disrespect, but I’m going to keep calling your office until you put me on the president’s calendar.” I was polite and courteous and all those good things my parents had taught me to be, but I was also persistent. I even said something about coming down with my sleeping bag and camping outside the president’s office door, if that was what it took to get a meeting with him. I was nice enough about it, but I pressed the point.

  Well, this last must have struck some kind of chord. That, or she finally realized what she was up against. Anyway, she said, “I’ll tell you what. Forget the sleeping bag. You just come on over tomorrow morning and we’ll see if we can’t get you in to see him.”

  And that’s just what I did. I put on my best blue jeans and my best blue jean shirt and my best (and only!) necktie, and I stuffed my hair up under my hat and walked over to see the president. Novice Fawcett was a very big, tall guy. About six foot five, in his socks. I’d seen him before—welcoming new students from the podium at Freshman Orientation, striding purposefully from one administration building to the next, looking positively presidential in his head shot on the front page of The Lantern, the student newspaper, but he cut an even more striking figure up close. He had a beautiful office. Big desk. Big wooden chairs. Big tables. Fancy artwork decorating the walls. Very impressive. Really, it was almost overwhelming, that’s how imposing it was, and the combination of this giant, formidable man, with this giant, formidable name, sitting behind his giant, formidable desk made quite an impression on me, and as I sat and lodged my complaint and offered my observations I couldn’t shake thinking that I had stepped into the headquarters of accomplishment and power.