 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
More About Mike
Peace Corps and After
Questions and Answers
Thoughts at Large
Principles
Platform
The Environment
Quotations
Take A Poll
Message Board
Song and Dance
|
|
| More About Mike |
 |
| (...more than you probably want to know, but here it is, anyway.) |
| ||||||
| I was born in Auburn in the winter of 1947. My parents were Carl and Mary Lu (Kiplinger) Walter. They brought me home from the hospital in a 1937 Plymouth. The pictures they took that day show the trees bent with ice overhanging South Van Buren Street. My mother had a black cocker spaniel named Flossie. I don't remember Flossie, but Mom said the dog used to lick my feet as I sat in my highchair. Flossie got hit by a car, but our neighbor's collie Mishie moved in with us. It's Mishie I remember. Her name was the first word I spoke. She died in 1957 at age 18. Of course, we also had cats -- Horace, Henry, Herman, Timothy and Benjamin. There was also a goldfish named Clementine. If there was anything the Walters and the Kiplingers had in common it was a passionate love of animals...and an equally passionate commitment to the Democratic Party. My parents met at a Young Democrats convention. They idolized FDR. I remember my Dad holding me up to see Harry Truman standing on the back of a train in at a whistle stop in Garrett in 1950. At age three-and-a-half, I knew he was the President. We still had the old Plymouth. Later that year we got a new one. Dad served in World War II, an armor man, a veteran of the Bulge. I saw the snapsnots he took of the Nazi concentration camp his divison liberated at Mauthausen, Austria. This was a just war. Our enemies deserved to lose. If America had never accomplished one other thing as a nation, lancing the ghastly sore of Nazism was itself enough to make us the greatest nation in history. The Brownie camera my Dad used to photograph the horror at Mauthausen was the same one my folks used to snap my baby pictures. Dad ran a gas station. Mom was a legal secretary. She valued doing things according to the rules. That had a lot to do with the way I turned out. I was educated in the public schools of Auburn. I was in Scouting and 4-H. I learned to play the cornet. Early on I developed a great love of science. I had a telescope. I collected fossils. I wanted to be an astronomer. I remember sitting at a drafting desk in junior high shop class while we listened to radio coverage of Alan Shepherd's first suborbital flight. I can still feel the corners of my mouth breaking into a grin as the flight progressed. I was thrilled. I remember some other things about junior high, too. I remember the Auburn police coming on to the school grounds and shooting two dogs -- one a beautiful collie that belonged to a neighbor of mine. The dogs were harmless. The school administrator who called the cops was an idiot. So were the cops. 1960: JFK's election. January 20, 1961: The Kennedy Inaugural. I was home for lunch and heard it. I still hear it. My Dad died during my first semester in high school. JFK was shot during my fifth semester. I was intensely idealistic in high school. I was active in Methodist Youth Fellowship, played in the band, wrote for the school paper and served on the student council. I was student body vice-president my senior year. My greatest achievement was starting a local chapter of the American Field Service foreign exchange student program, which later brought several exchange students to DeKalb High School. The late Don Kastner, vice-president of Auburn Foundry, and the late Don Ruesegger, owner of Wakefield's in Waterloo, made the thing go. Ian Rolland, now retired as chairman and C.E.O. of Fort Wayne's Lincoln Life, helped us get off the ground. 1965: graduation, college at Indiana University. The late 1960's have been extensively covered by other commentators. I was there. No, I wasn't at Woodstock, but that didn't matter. I campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968. That did. I graduated from IU in 1969 with a degree in government, volunteered for Peace Corps and was assigned to a program that took me to the University of Utah and the Navajo Reservation for training, then folded. I came home and taught adult ed classes in Fort Wayne until Peace Corps came through with -- SURPRISE! -- exactly the assignment I wanted: Teaching English in West Africa!  |
| Auburn, | IN | 46706-0267 |
|
. |