Dear President-Elect Trump:
My dad grew up shoeless and penniless but not hopeless in South Eastern Nevada. My mother’s circumstances were no better in her tiny Central Utah hamlet. Their lives intersected at the local college in Southern Utah. He made it to college on an athletic scholarship. She got there from money her mother earned plucking feathers at the local turkey plant. My mother was a knockout in the dress cut from turkey feed sacks that her mother had sewn at night after work plucking feathers.
They married and moved into a camp trailer with the public restroom just down the road a bit. In time they had earned enough money for a house, of sorts. They found an abandoned one bedroom house for sale in Panaca, Nevada—about 100 miles from the plot of land where they had chosen to make their living. They bought the house, poured a cement basement on the lot and moved the home 100 miles and across state lines from Nevada to Utah.
They peeled the floor tiles from the basement of the home in Panaca and reapplied them in the basement of the house in Cedar City, Utah. Children of the great depression, they learned to survive with the motto to use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.
My father is now 87; my mother, 84. It’s been 66 years since he dazzled her with his jump shot and she wooed him in the turkey feed sack dress. The American dream promised prosperity to all who were willing to work their guts out to get it. They followed that recipe, and American prosperity indeed followed.
The other day, we met for dinner. Hobbled by eight decades of life, they don’t walk as briskly as they once did. We waited for them at the door of the restaurant and watched them make their way through the parking lot. An accessible parking spot sat vacant immediately in front of the restaurant door. “I’m sure you could park in the handicap spot if you got a permit. You ought to get one,” I proposed. They each looked at me with a puzzled look and retorted “Handicap spots are for the handicapped. That’s not us.”
“I’m just saying: You could get one.”
“Why would we do that? We don’t need it.”
There’s a generation of people just like my mother and father in every city and town across America. They collectively built America. They don’t necessarily know how to text, but they know how to get things done, nonetheless.
We all could learn from their examples.
My parents have remodeled the house they moved from Nevada several times to accommodate changes in family size and circumstances. But they still live there—the same house. Move? Why? It’s not worn out yet.
You made big news a few days ago with your suggestion that the government should cancel the order for a new Air Force One, 747 airplane. That’s a great idea. The plane that flew Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan, can just as easily fly you.
That would set a great precedent. America would be so much better off if the government lived by the same philosophy that made America great– use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.
Sincerely,
David O. Leavitt
