Don't Disadvantage a Kid

A few weeks ago I was driving across Iowa and found myself passing Ottumwa, the little town where my father was born in 1921. I got to thinking about the last time my father lived there.

Carl Hull was 16 when his mother, age 35, died from sepsis after delivering her 10th child. My grandfather--a drunk and a violent man by every account I’ve heard from those who knew him--was deemed unfit. Authorities swooped in and took the youngest eight to orphanages where they were adopted by families around the United States and received new surnames.

Overnight my father, the oldest child, lost his parents, siblings, and home. He was taken in by a childless widowed aunt. He had no money, no mentor, and only a partial education. In shock and adrift, he joined the Army at 17—he lied about his age and I have the induction paperwork to prove it—where he groomed horses. He left the Army after a few years but ran down to the enlistment office after the attack on Pearl Harbor and joined the Navy, which is how he found himself dodging bullets on a landing craft at Omaha Beach. After WWII ended he reenlisted in the Army and fought in Korea, where he helped build landing docks in Busan as a SeaBee.

My dad never finished high school, though in his 50s he earned a GED. Yet he became a sharpshooter and made the Army proud as he represented it in shooting matches all over the country. He taught himself mechanics, electricity, carpentry, sheet rock installation, and furniture repair. He kept bees, grew wine grapes, taught himself to grow fruits and vegetables and to can them, and grew beautiful orchids and flowering cacti. He was religiously frugal, saving enough of his earnings as a mail carrier (and father of four) to purchase small, older, neglected homes that he refurbished himself then rented out. Eventually he sold those and graduated to small apartment buildings.

Why does my father’s story matter? No one ever told my father that he was disadvantaged or underprivileged, yet he lacked in every area used to define both: no parents, no stable home life, no education, no money, no contacts. My father truly started at the bottom with absolutely nothing. Worse, some of his early deficiencies clung to him to the end: He lacked the polish of even the middle class. He had an insatiable desire to learn; he was always reading, yet he never overcame his poor speech. I was embarrassed by his country bumpkin pronunciation (“greezy” instead of “greasy”) when I was a teenager. He didn’t know how to dress and didn’t present well, his jackets always ill-fitting and his shirt tails about to burst out of his pants. He was neither impressively tall nor academically bright.

What he did have was determination, a strong work ethic, and a desire to improve. Above all, my father didn’t think of himself as disadvantaged or underprivileged. He didn’t blame his setbacks on other people, blaming this group or that group for his hardships—a sure way to keep you entrenched in your low estate. He simply worked harder to overcome them.

Therefore I cringe when I read articles that call kids from this neighborhood or that “disadvantaged” or “underprivileged.” Often these kids come from single parent homes—that’s one parent more than my father had. They have siblings. My father had none. They have before- and after-school programs and grief counseling and social services and food stamps and AFDC. My father had none of these. Attaching these negative tags to kids defines them—sometimes forever—always to their detriment.

My father did well because he believed he could. And because he believed he could, he put forth the effort—hard work—required to get where he was determined to go. He didn’t see obstacles. He saw opportunities. He grabbed every one he could. He didn’t look inside himself and see a flawed (disadvantaged, underprivileged) person. He saw promise.

Maybe the authorities did my father a favor by not finding a home for him, because their nametags never made it into his lexicon. He never saw himself as an orphan, a foster child, a poverty-stricken kid from a broken home. No government expert told him he couldn’t do this or that because of his deplorable background, so he assumed he could do anything, and then he did his best.

So think twice before you label a child disadvantaged, disabled, underprivileged, mentally or physically challenged, deprived, less fortunate, impoverished, poor, needy, indigent, homeless, in reduced circumstances (reduced compared to what?), in dire straits, unlucky, badly off, a have-not, a minority, disenfranchised, destitute, underrepresented, diminished, discriminated against. These are loser terms. My father would never, ever have used one on himself no matter how low his circumstances when he was a youth.

Why should you?