GIVE ‘EM HELL, EMMY

It’s May, and graduations are in the air.  At high schools around the country, young men and women will don caps and gowns, walk across the stage to the sound of applause, shake hands with a bunch of old people, then head back to their seats carrying brand-new diplomas.

It’s been going on for years—just do what you’re told, work hard, complete your work, and you graduate.  And with graduation, comes that shining moment on stage.

But it wasn’t always that way.

In 1970, at my small-town high school, three of my senior classmates were pregnant.  I doubt if this was confirmed by any district wide school pregnancy test, but they all had recently gotten married, and in rural Missouri, a high school marriage was basically synonymous with pregnancy.  And pregnancy was synonymous with sex. 

It was all too much for the school’s administration.  Shortly before graduation, they informed the three girls they could not participate in graduation ceremonies.

That’s right.  Even after completing all of the course work, and, in the case of one of the girls, doing so with honors, they wouldn’t be allowed on stage.

Whether this standard would have been equally applied to male students is highly questionable.  Most males in situations like this were older and had already graduated.  Or in some cases, completely vanished.

Regardless, the school was clear in its refusal to permit the girls from participating in the ceremony.

But one of the girls’ mothers made a last-ditch effort.  She called the one person she felt she could trust, a long-time friend who’d just been elected to the local school board.  Emma Margaret Frey.

That’s right.  She called my mother.

I’ve already written about my mother’s stoicism in caring for my meningitis.  But here’s a more complete picture.  Earlier in life, she’d worked as a teacher in everything from a one room schoolhouse at the edge of Kansas City (where she’d once found a dead body in the coal shed) to our local high school.  She had a penchant for taking jobs no one else really wanted.  She’d even coached the girls’ high school basketball team to a conference championship.

This latter event must have shocked everyone in town.  Not only was my mother not a trained coach, she’d never even played organized basketball.  In fact, she was barely five feet tall in high heels.  When I later asked her how she did it, she just shrugged.  “We trained hard,” she said.

I doubt if the Guinness Book of World Records has a listing for the World’s Shortest Championship Basketball Coach, but if they do, my mother would probably be in the running.

So when my mother got the call about the three girls’ predicament, she swung into action.  These girls were going graduate, one way or the other, even if she had to go up against the school’s administration alone.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to.  She had a friend and ally on the board.  Donna Harpst Baker.

At first glance, Donna Baker would have seemed the polar opposite of my mother.  Tall, blonde, and athletic (she’d actually played for my mother on that championship basketball team), she had an outgoing personality that allowed her to easily strike up a conversation with anyone.  But she also carried with her the grit and determination of her German ancestors who’d carved farmland out of a Missouri River floodplain.  She wasn’t one to back down, either.  And she had no difficulty speaking her mind

Neither one had ever dreamed of being on the school board.  But after much urging, they’d both thrown their hats into the ring against two incumbents.

They won in a landslide.  The first women elected to the school board in over forty years.  Barely a month later, they learned about the three girls’ dilemma. 

To this day, I don’t know how the whole confrontation went down.  Most everyone who was a part of it is long gone.  My father, who generally avoided getting involved in such matters, apparently offered my mother only this bit of advice.

“Give ‘em hell, Emmy.”

The most likely scenario I can imagine is my mother calmly but clearly stating the case for allowing the girls to graduate.  At that point, she likely paused.  Then Donna must have hit them like an avalanche.

But whatever happened, when the dust had settled, the three girls walked across the stage, shook hands, and received their diplomas right along with the rest of us.

The story should have ended there, but of course it didn’t.  Several local citizens were outraged that the girls were allowed to participate, especially when school officials had been over-ruled by two brand new school board members who were women, for God’s sake!!

Both my mother and Donna got their share of angry complaints, with plenty of references to loose sexual morals and the shame of condoning sin.  Both women stood their ground.  After a while, the whole thing died down.

Three years later, they ran for re-election.  This time, they won by an even wider margin.

But I do remember one phone call my mother received around the time of graduation.  I was in the next room, but could still hear the angry voice raging on the other end of the line.  My mother would calmly interject “yes,” “I see,” and “all right” from time to time.

Finally, the ranting paused, and my mother spoke.  “Well, sir,” she said.  “All I can tell you is that I have three sons.  And any one of those boys is just as capable of getting someone’s daughter pregnant as anyone else.  So I don’t think I have any right to sit in judgement of these young women.  And neither do you.”

The phone call quickly ended.

All of that was a long time ago.  At their hearts, my mother and Donna were both just conservative Baptist farm girls who nonetheless had a strong sense of fairness and decency in how others should be treated and respected.  I’m sure they’d both be heartbroken to see how those qualities have nearly vanished in America today, especially in terms of respect for women’s rights.

I won’t go into detail.  You can fill in the gaps yourself.

My mother loved to raise flowers.  All summer long she’d cut flowers from her garden and arrange them in a vase in our living room.  We never ordered flowers to be delivered.  To a Frey, that would’ve been both an extravagance and a redundancy.

But each May, right around graduation, my mother would always receive a bouquet of flowers from the local florist.

I never knew who sent them, but that’s OK.

Because my mother did.

Post-Script: Next week I’ll be back with a much different post—a White House Announcement from an alternate-reality America.  Don’t miss it. It should give you plenty of food for thought.