My Freshman Job Interview at SAGA Food Service - my first week at Carleton College 1980: Part One

My father and my mother were the first people in their high schools (graduated 7 years apart, my dad was older) in Taney County, Missouri. 

My father was raised in a very self-educated household. William E. Freeland, his grandfather, and wife Minnie Freeland (Pawpaw and Mawmaw) whom I lived with for a few months every year, as a child, had hundreds of books he purchased on a government salary stationed in Four Corners - Shiprock, NM, today - before it was the USA state, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Where there wasn't anyplace to spend your federal paycheck, and nothing to do, so he and Minnie his wife (another family icon) spent their time reading and learning. 

* Pawpaw and Mawmaw Freeland were lifelong letter writers and retired with their friend John G. Neihardt in Branson, Missouri.  Black Elk Speaks was a seminal book I read and re-read in high school and afterwards, only later learning I'd sat on Neihardt's lap as a child... my Dad asked me what I was reading and I assumed he didn't know anything about Black Elk and was surprised when he pointed to the sofa where he and Pawpaw used to talk.

Pawpaw thought welfare and charity were corrupt and corrupting, and in the end thought BIA did more harm than good, "turning a culture morally opposed to hand-outs and charity upon its head".

My mom was raised on a subsistence farm in Taney County - Ridgedale, half a mile from the Arkansas border (she was born in Harrison). Outhouses using Sears Roebuck catalog pages for toilet paper. 

Premise: I was raised by people who didn't beg, borrow, or take family debt. And when I was admitted to Carleton College, the 1980s were when the colleges were absolutely soaking up debt like today's federal deficit. 

The financial aid officer at Carleton told me (and thousands of others) that there is "good debt" and "bad debt" and that a college education was the former.

Not convincing, as I was raised. I asked where the most work was on campus, and was told food service - SAGA. It didn't stand for anything - it was Saga Food Services, a chain providing college and institutional "turn key" cafeteria management.

In Part Two, I'll connect these dots.

Interview with Ghana TV Repair Veteran, and Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

A Great Gift - The Ability to Interview Elders

Why do some of us become very attached to our grandparents, and others of us secretly dread the holiday base-touch?  Why do some of us spend thousands of dollars per year flying back and forth to visit elderly relatives, and others don't bother to make a ten minute drive, more than once a year?

The gift of boredom.  It's something perhaps lost on the current generation of non-fisher, non-hunter (I'm neither, either), non baseball-watcher generation.  The ever-ready internet is at our fingertips. The cell phone has balmed our boredom so thickly that even minutes lead to fidgets.

Will this reduce book reading?  Great books have made me better than who I am. Could I have finished reading them if I'd had internet in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s?  I appreciate many people who know history and still read books (many far more often than I do). But in wondering at my own weakness for distraction, I fear that great books will not die in fire... but in ice.

Master Baba of Tamale Ghana, retired Tech Sector, on the history of West Africa Television