CHAPTER 19: Relevance, Motivation, and Encouragement: An Educator’s Transformation Origin and Beginnings

I was born during the late fall of 1950 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the firstborn of four children. My father grew up in Milwaukee. He came from English and French descent and was the youngest in a family of five siblings. His description of growing up was grim—mostly avoiding gangs. After quitting school at the age of 14, he worked two jobs. His only refuge was leaving the city to hunt and fish further north.

My parents met in Milwaukee and married there in 1950. When my mother met my father, he worked as a machinist, and she worked as the assistant to a business owner. My mother was born in Ironwood, located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Her mother was of Finnish descent, and her father was of Swedish descent. When she was a child in the 1930s, her parents moved to Mullan, Idaho, near the Montana border where her father worked as an underground miner in the silver mines. Mullan and Ironwood were both mining towns, and as mining towns, they had a culture that fostered drinking, fighting, and gambling. My grandfather frequently gambled away his earnings, and my grandmother eventually left him and took my mother and her younger brother and moved to Redlands, California. They later moved to Milwaukee, where many of her brothers had migrated from Ironwood. In 1948, my mother finished high school in Milwaukee, moved to Ironwood, and completed a two-year Associate degree in business at Gogebic Community College. She moved back to Milwaukee and found what she described as a great job working for a business owner. When she took my father to Ironwood to meet her relatives, he fell in love with the area, ideal for hunting, fishing, and other outdoor activities. I was about a year old when my parents moved from Milwaukee to Ironwood. My father initially found work in the iron ore mines and construction and after a few years was hired as an underground miner at the White Pine copper and silver mine, where later he became a mine foreman. Growing up in a mining community with nearly all my adult male relatives working as miners, I think it was natural for me to assume I would be a miner too. When I was about 14 years old, my father attempted to discourage me telling me that mining was dangerous.