What My Father Taught Me
“I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week.”
-Mario Cuomo
Things are not always what they seem. Remember this as you travel life’s pathways, and even as you choose them. I will always remember one particular occurrence in reference to these words of wisdom. I was a teenager, sentenced to help my father, along with a crew of about a half-dozen men from our church, as we spent a Saturday afternoon fixing a few things around the church.
The men were mulling several topics of conversation, most of them too adult for me to care. On one particular discussion, my father, who tends not to talk as much as some people do, interjected a comment that the other men found enlightening. A few minutes later, as my father was off retrieving a tool from the car, one of the other men made a comment about my father to this effect: “You know, he’s pretty smart for a factory worker.”
My father spent the better part of his livelihood working in a union machine shop, and to most of these men, that must have seemed like working in a factory. After all, the other men besides my father were working in executive positions for some major companies like GM and Boeing; they drove brand new full-size, if not luxury, cars. My father and I showed up that Saturday in a beat-up Chevy Nova. I’m sure to the man who made this remark, it must have been something of a mild shock to hear intelligent commentary from someone with my father’s humble appearance.
My father, who had graduated 9th in a high school class of over 300; the same man who graduated almost as close to the top of his class in college, and then taught high school for a couple years before deciding he preferred to work with his hands. I don’t know exactly what some of these men thought of him, but what I had already learned about my father led me to believe he may have been the most intelligent person in the group that day.
Certainly, in my own experience since that day, I have come across many people who are much more cerebrally gifted than their job description might require or suggest. I have come across “factory” workers with MBA’s and law degrees, and the only reasons they chose work that was so “beneath” their academic credentials was that they enjoyed it more than working as executives or lawyers. And I’ve even met people of obvious intelligence in such working conditions, but with no impressive academic honors to speak of.
To flip the coin, I’ve also encountered corporate environments where people are hired or advanced based solely on academic credentials, without any serious thought as to whether the job candidate can think critically, or in some cases, even use simple reasoning skills.
Thinking back, I tend to believe my father would have been a fairly intelligent man even if he hadn’t honed his skills in the formal setting of a high school or four-year university. I can always seem to remember him reading or doing word or logic puzzles in his spare time, whatever spare time he didn’t spend on helping people around him. He didn’t concentrate on projecting a prestigious image to those around him. I remember him chafing as my mother practically had to drag him to the dealership where they ended up buying their first new car in almost 30 years. He simply never seemed to care about impressing people with outward appearances. It’s a trait of his that I’d like to emulate more effectively. As I become incrementally older, I see a quiet genius in the example he set. He didn’t concern himself with style, or self-promotion. As I’ve observed in his life, you’ll impress enough people by living right that you won’t have to worry about vindicating yourself in the eyes of fools.
…but back to that sweaty Saturday afternoon behind the church:
In the few brief moments between the ill-informed comment about my father being “pretty smart for a factory worker” and my father’s return from the car, another one of the men who had known my father for many years said, “Some of the smartest people in the world wouldn’t be caught dead going to work in a suit and tie.”—a comment that I thought was solely for my benefit at the time, which I later learned to be truer than most people probably think.
I guess that’s what comes to my mind when I think of the old axiom about judging a book by its cover. There’s a lot to be gleaned from sources that fewer and fewer people tend to notice. If we look closely enough, we sometimes find that the books with the plainest, most ragged covers are the ones most worth reading.
