Doc Slik: Not A Life Of My Own

By Jack Van Der Slik

This is the memoir of a teacher who was born an undistinguished kid in the Midwest. Nurtured by Christian parents to have a faith of his own, he pursued a professional career in higher education. Along the way he overcame challenges concerning family and academia. The issues in Doc's life include American politics and nurturing democracy both at home and abroad. Too bad he could not head off a Trump presidency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098323516

Book preview

© 2020 Doc Slik. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-09832-350-9 eBook 978-1-09832-350-9

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. Carbondale -- Where is that, Lord?

Chapter 2. Family Matters

Chapter 3. Kid’s Stuff

Chapter 4. From Family to Mentors

Chapter 5. Becoming a Life Partner

Chapter 6. A Blessed Beginning at SIU-C

Chapter 7. To Calvin College and Back to Southern Illinois

Chapter 8. Building a Family of Our Own

Chapter 9. The Trinity Venture

Chapter 10. Paradise Lost

Chapter 11. Springfield and a New Venture at Sangamon State University

Chapter 12. Ups and Downs at Home and in the University

Chapter 13. Middle Years are for Persevering

Chapter 14. Peripatetic Adventures

Chapter 15. Venturing to China and South Korea

Chapter 16. Closing the Circle in Springfield

Chapter 17. Retirement Means Breaking Out!

Chapter 18. Using God’s Unretired Gifts

Chapter 19. A Potpourri of Late Life Doings

Preface

Just one, and only one, profession has filled my life. It cheers me to say I am a teacher. Teaching has filled my days with joy for a long time. Mentioning time, I mean a lifetime. I began being a teacher, actually a Sunday School teacher, when I was a teen. The kids I taught, all boys, were preteens, not a lot younger than I. Yet their worldly experience was clearly more limited than mine, so I did not feel out of place being their teacher. Sunday school was simply a once-a-week assignment, not a heavy burden. As a teacher I was privy to a teacher’s guide. It provided all the details necessary to make a particular passage of the Bible clear and understandable. The Bible, filled with well-told stories of interesting people and exciting episodes, let even a beginner at teaching get the attention of youngsters brought up to know Bible stories were not only true, but God directed. Teaching brought me attention and respect from both kids and adults. Those rewards drew me into a lifetime engagement.

The career of a teacher is a dynamic one. To teach one must first learn. Learning, of course, has the likelihood of an endless journey. There are obvious steps to take. It was an enduring privilege of my life to move through grades and classes – elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate. You will see in my story that, despite the fact that the paths were well worn and widely experienced by others, I entered them freshly, just one step at a time, without deep or visionary calculation. For me, life has entailed a series of discoveries. Often a good way ahead was pointed out to me by providentially appointed wise mentors. From the vantage point of my present age I can perceive and appreciate the models from whom I was able to learn to do what able teachers ought to do for their students.

Teaching mostly takes place in institutional settings. As my classroom teaching career matured, I found ancillary activities. A legitimate, indeed, essential part of my teaching tasks was doing research. One type is discovering and adding new knowledge to one’s expertise. For me that entailed getting close to the practice of politics and closely observing the key players as they engaged in their work. I sought out opportunities to see governors, legislators, lobbyists, staff members and journalists pursuing their purposes and doing their daily work.

Another kind of teaching comes about after studying the research of others to perceive patterns and generalizations in phenomena of interest. My activity as a classroom teacher led me to take up writing textbooks for students such as my own. Textbooks constitute a significant genre of scholarship for both learners and teachers.

Regard that came my way because of my engagement with teaching led to my becoming an educational administrator. I was blessed by being selected for stints as chairman of a political science department, associate dean of liberal arts in a large university, dean of a small Christian college, and director of a research center in a small state university. The skills gained as an educator led to responsibilities in churches and related religious organizations that have deepened my faith and enriched my walk with my heavenly Father.

I would be proud to say I successfully followed a carefully planned life of Christian service. The truth is quite different. I bumbled along one step at a time, moving forward and backward as God opened and closed doors. Key people pushed me and bumped me this way and that. Seen from my current vantage point I must liken my life to a voyage of discovery. I thank God for his abiding presence as I ventured through calm seas, turbulent storms, tempting islands, narrow passages and snug harbors.

Thank you to each reader who gives my story consideration. Not a Life of My Own reveals what in my journey I have to be humble about. But in contrast to that consideration, I want to express my heartfelt thanks to God for the treasure he provided me in the person of my wife, Bonnie. She has blessed me with ideas, encouragement, needed criticism, faith support, companionship, hope and love. By God’s unmerited grace Bonnie and I have enjoyed the privilege of parenting three special gifts – Franci, Gary and Randy.

Lord, help us to live lives of thankfulness and praise to you forever.

Lord, did I hear you say, Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you? See Genesis 12:1.

Chapter 1.

Carbondale -- Where is that, Lord?

March 1, 1967, a Wednesday, was a blustery, gray day as I debarked from an Ozark Airlines prop plane on a windswept runway at the regional airport outside of Marion, Illinois. The plane was on time, to my relief. It was a few minutes before three in the afternoon. With an overnight bag in one hand, my precious briefcase in the other, wearing a suit and a topcoat – it was frosty when I left Lansing, Michigan early in the morning – plus a felt Homburg on my head, I was presenting myself with a touch of formality. It was good to stride fully upright across the tarmac in the mild air of southern Illinois after enduring scrunched knees in the backseat of a commuter plane from St. Louis. For these low ceiling commuter planes Ozark hired stewardesses no more than five feet tall.

The Lord provided a familiar face to greet me on the ground. Norm Luttbeg, the only person I knew personally at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, had been delegated the task of picking me up, registering me at the Holiday Inn and bringing me to SIU-C’s Government Department. Norm and I had been political science grad students together at Michigan State. Ahead of me a couple of years, he had joined the Government Department at SIU-C in 1965. I knew Norm as much from our racquetball rivalry at MSU as for our shared teaching and research interests in American politics. Norm prepped me with thumbnail descriptions about the people I would shortly meet and a bit about the campus setting. The thirteen-mile drive to the campus with Norm would be the last of my comfortable time during this campus visit. From then on, I would be on edge, under close and constant scrutiny from the more than thirty faculty members of the Government Department and sundry graduate students.

Arriving on the campus, Norm ushered me up to the third floor of an impressive, new classroom-office building. First to greet me was Professor David Kenney. I knew him only from correspondence and a couple of long-distance phone calls. A full professor in the Government Department, he was chairing the search procedure and had authorized my campus interview. In addition, he was the director of the Public Affairs Research Bureau. The job I was candidating for was half-time in the department and the other half in the bureau. Obviously, he would be a key person in the hiring decision. David promptly put us on a first name basis. Gracious, with a mild regional southern accent, he reviewed the agenda for my visit. The most important item on the list would come first. I would make an hour-long presentation about my dissertation research to about thirty faculty and several advanced graduate students and then undergo whatever sort of grilling they wished to impose. Then there would be social events, supper with selected faculty and an open house at the chairman’s residence. On Thursday I would meet with the chairman and the department and some senior faculty, then the Arts and Sciences Dean and finally the Graduate School Dean and an Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs.

Fortunately, I had a topic that any political scientist who taught American students about politics would consider accessible—how members of Congress vote on public policy. But I had some unfamiliar, cutting edge methodology for explaining roll call voting behavior in the U.S. House in 1963 and 1964. If my computerized methodology was complex – scoring multiple roll call votes on measures called Guttman scales – I could make the results understandable to my listeners because the data revealed patterns of liberal-conservative legislative voting on familiar topics like civil liberties, spending, social welfare and party loyalty. Then I correlated the Guttman scale scores with measures of constituency variables. These were statistical data drawn from the U.S. census on items such as median income, housing, percentage of foreign stock in the population, and educational achievement for each of the four hundred and thirty-five congressional districts of the country. Although my findings were less than stunning, I explained them in a way that made intuitive sense to my listeners. They seemed impressed by my application of statistical tools that exceeded the sophistication of most of the listeners. I finished up with commentary about the roll call voting behavior by recognized House party and regional leaders as well as the congressman elected from the local Illinois congressional district, Kenneth Gray. Congressman Kenny Gray was a folklore figure in southern Illinois. Particularizing my findings to him seemed to clinch the meaningfulness of my analysis because it was consistent with the impressionistic thinking of the audience members about Gray. They were the people whose scholarly approval I needed.

The question-and-answer time went well, and Steve Wasby, a second-year faculty member who had previously interned a year as a Congressional Fellow, was especially complimentary about my methods and findings. Steve, I would later learn, was often quite contrary towards and critical of others. Thus, although he was not necessarily an opinion leader in the department, an absence of criticism from him – actual praise, in fact-- allowed a sort of favorable consensus to settle over the listening audience. The person who could well have been my most penetrating critic, Norm Luttbeg, maintained a quietly supportive smile as I held forth, commending me later privately for handling the presentation and the question time effectively and with good humor.

Thereafter a swirl of meetings over food and drink went by pleasantly. The evening social at Orville Alexander’s home was a relaxed affair. Department chairman for more than twenty years, Alexander also had a lot of experience at lobbying the Illinois legislature in behalf of the university. As one junior faculty member cautioned me, Orville pours those drinks with a heavy hand. I took care not to embarrass myself at the bar. The senior faculty were especially gracious – Jack Isakoff, an expert in Illinois state and local government; Max Sappenfield, deeply experienced in public administration; Jack Jacobini, noted for expertise in international law; Frank Klingberg, a courtly scholar recognized in international relations. The younger faculty saw me as a breath of fresh air, as a behavioral political scientist with a methodological bent and suitably articulate in the language (jargon?) of the behavioral approach to political inquiry. By the time I was delivered back to the motel I was overwhelmed with a giddy sense of success.

The morning meetings on the second day went by quickly and almost free from stress. The department members liked my work and how I presented it. It was evident that the academic administrators were mostly there to convince me that this was the university I should want to join if I were someone that the department wanted to appoint. Computerization of social science research was at an early stage at SIU-C. Being someone from Michigan State, where resources exceeded those at Carbondale, I could push for more and better at SIU-C in the very direction the administrators knew that they wanted to go. I had a welcome sense that they felt I would fit in well at this university.

When my hosts gave me a bit of free time, I explored the student center. I stopped some university undergrads to ask where they were from and what their opinion of the university was. Many were from Chicago and the metropolitan suburbs. Most expressed satisfaction about life on campus and were glad to be known as Salukis. (A saluki is a handsome breed of dog that originated in Egypt and was the chosen university mascot.) Students considered SIU-C as an up-and-coming place and they were proud to be there. Interesting to me was the fact that the students were better dressed than the ones I was teaching at MSU, where grunginess was a growing phenomenon of student dress in the mid-1960s.

Norm Luttbeg returned me to the airport, heartening me with positive feedback he had heard in the chatter from his colleagues about my presentation, demeanor and qualifications. It was late Thursday night when Bonnie, my wife, picked me up at the Lansing airport. I made my three connections – Marion to St. Louis, St. Louis to Chicago, and Chicago to Lansing, but it was after eleven o’clock when we returned to our cozy, married housing apartment and shared a glass of wine. I was still high as a kite and babbling about the trip, the people, the campus, and the students. She calmed me down with some wifely questions. What benefits will go with the salary? Is reasonable housing available? Is there a church there for us? Do you think you will get an offer? Of course, I did not know the answer to any of those questions. What I did know was, if SIU-C would make me an offer, I was hot to take it.

The previous year had been a wonderful but awful time – dizzying, demanding, exciting, scary, expensive and exhausting. A huge issue in Bonnie’s and my expectations was getting and deciding on an academic job offer. My invited trip to Carbondale was the latest high point so far, of course, but gaining a professorial position--that would be the culmination Bonnie and I wanted out of this arduous process. I had put myself on the market beginning in the fall of 1966. The MSU political science department was generously helpful. In September it paid the way for me and another grad student, Eric Carlson, to attend the annual American Political Science Association meeting in New York City. For most of the people in attendance the annual meeting was all about presenting and listening to professional papers, finding books and publishers and building collegial relationships with people in the discipline, that complicated but subtle process of academic networking. But Eric and I were ABDs, shorthand for all but dissertation. Doctoral candidates who have completed their doctoral course work but have not fulfilled the dissertation requirement are ABDs. For Eric and me, the most important area was the job exchange. Representatives of various colleges and universities handed out job descriptions for potential openings a year away, gathered curriculum vitae from hopefuls such as Eric and me, who expected to be available for appointment and engaged in speculative conversations about possible future connections. I say potential openings because departmental budgets are rarely determined a year ahead. University administrators allow searches to begin but they hold off on authorizing vacancies for actual appointments. Green candidates like Eric and me could find the search process ambiguities maddening. Rarely did anything definitive come from these exchanges, but the good news was that challenging jobs were going to be available and behavioral political scientists such as myself were evidently in some demand. Eric and I celebrated our encouraging prospects by taking the subway to Shea Stadium in Brooklyn for a night game. The Mets dutifully lost to the Atlanta Braves by a score of eight to three. Joe Torre hit a home run for the Braves.

Back on campus, I worked with Harold Johnson, a junior professor tasked by MSU’s political science department to help market prospects including myself. Each of us lined up professors who would write letters of reference for us. He collected the letters in behalf of the candidates and put them together into a modest dossier that included our curriculum vitae. I could request packets about me to be sent to schools with vacancies or, if any department asked for someone of my academic likeness, Harold would send one out in my behalf. I had never prepared a curriculum vitae before. Mine was not very impressive. It needed more hints of possible greatness to come in my future career. Eric Carlson and I decided jointly to write a paper about legislative reapportionment, which was a hot topic in the mid-60s. We presented the paper at the Michigan Academy of Arts and Sciences, a minor league academic forum, in March 1966. Delivering the paper yielded a small mark of scholarly accomplishment for both our vitae even though the paper never saw the light of day in published form. At least the paper’s title and our names were duly noted in the published meeting program.

A bigger issue for Bonnie and me was family finances. With a baby coming (more on that later), we were allowed a two-bedroom married housing apartment. When we moved from a one bedroom to a two-bedroom apartment our rent went up from one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month to one hundred and fifty. Bonnie would become a stay-at-home mom, no longer a salaried schoolteacher with tenure, several years of classroom experience and decent benefits. By the fall of 1966 I had run out of eligibility for my graduate assistantship that I had since 1963. Our plan (hope?) was to survive the year on savings and then for me to get a paying job as soon as possible. The good thing about the plan was that I could devote myself full-time to my dissertation. I was grinding out computer runs, scrutinizing data, drafting tables, refining footnotes and my bibliography, compiling findings and filling reams of paper with text. I took the university bus to the campus early each day and came home for supper. An hour and a half later I would go back to the office for two or three more hours of work. I only took half a day off on Saturday and all day Sunday for church and the intimacy of home life. MSU sports were our usual Saturday afternoon or evening activity – football, hockey and basketball home games. I was getting my exercise in a couple of weekly sessions of racquetball with Eric Carlson at about four in the afternoon.

Living on savings did not work for very long. Bonnie warned me that the money was going faster than we anticipated in our sketchy budget forecast. In late November I went to Charlie Press (more about him later). He was the department chair as well as my dissertation chairman. I was singing the blues about my lack of income. Charlie came to the rescue. By the grace of God, Charlie had a peculiar staffing problem. The newly elected mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanaugh, had hired the person who served as director of the Michigan legislative intern program, an MSU department of political science enterprise. Charlie needed someone who could promptly be up to speed for teaching about legislative politics in the immediate context of the Michigan legislative bodies. It is not arrogance for me to say I was more suitably prepared for the job than anyone else conveniently available to Charlie. Moreover, he trusted me. So, very promptly he made the appointment, giving me that job as a temporary replacement. Technically he titled me as an MSU assistant instructor beginning in January. It was the first year of the legislative biennium, so my job was to shepherd a dozen practicing intern staffers and lead the academic part of the program until the legislature adjourned in the summer. It was not until much later that I recognized what a career break this was, but in the moment the reward most relevant to Bonnie and me was an actual income on a regular basis for the next six months.

Running the intern program for Charlie Press seemed easy at first. True, it intruded on my time and my rate of dissertation progress, but I had an interesting class of a dozen sharp people, all college grads, including a couple who also had law degrees. My task was to lead a seminar that would expose them to academic perspectives about legislatures, just the sort of seminar I looked forward to teaching once I got a real job. I was well up on state and local politics as well as congressional studies, so it was not a burden to teach a graduate seminar in my own academic specialty – in fact, it was another curriculum vitae credit.

Just when things seemed to be swimming along smoothly for me, I was taken aback by a political problem in the legislature. The Speaker of the House, Democrat Joe Kowalski, died on March 18, 1967. He represented a blue-collar district in metropolitan Detroit. A date was promptly set for a special election primary to fill the vacancy. To my great consternation, one of the interns, Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., decided to run for the vacancy. Yes, this James Hoffa was the son and namesake of the renowned (then still living) president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Jim promptly rented an apartment in the legislative district and declared for office. According to a House rule Jimmy had to resign the legislative internship in order to run, so he did. Two or three of the other seminar members began spending their off time walking precincts and knocking on doors for Jimmy. Our intern program was suddenly conspicuous to the legislative members and the press for all the wrong reasons. Fortunately for my interests, Jimmy Hoffa lost the primary and the waves of concern settled down considerably. But the issue did not quite go away at that point. Hoffa then wanted back into the intern program. Having been assigned previously to Senate Democratic duties, the main question was would the Senate Republicans consent to allowing Jimmy to return to the status of legislative intern. The intern program, financed by a Ford Foundation grant, was subject to bipartisan oversight. Senator Robert Vander Laan, from Grand Rapids, was the Republican minority leader. He could have objected but he chose not to and, of course, the Democrats consented to Hoffa’s return. So, Jimmy was welcomed back and served out the semester as an intern without further incident.

Let me add some words here about the rest of the story. It was related to me years later by Robert Vander Laan himself. During the Nixon presidency in 1974 Gerald Ford became Vice President, then the first person ever to fill a vice presidential vacancy by appointment. That created an open seat in the Grand Rapids congressional district. Vander Laan was still an incumbent state senator. He entered the special election, fully expecting to win a normal electoral victory in what for decades had been a safe Republican congressional district. Except for one thing: an encroaching national storm cloud over which Vander Laan had no control. The Watergate scandal had befouled the electoral waters for Republicans across the country. Vander Laan lost the special election quite contrary to his initial expectations.

Nevertheless, there was a curious little matter having to do with his campaign contribution reports after he lost the election. Vander Laan was surprised to find that his campaign fund had received a campaign contribution of five thousand dollars from the Detroit Teamsters, an unlikely gift for a mainstream Republican in central Michigan. Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. did not forget the favor that Bob Vander Laan had done for him back when Jimmy was an intern in 1967.

Charlie Press provided another unexpected perquisite for me due to my appointment as the temporary instructor for the Michigan legislative interns. He took me along to a joint meeting with the interns and director of the Illinois legislative intern program. Professor Sam Gove from the University of Illinois cohosted the event with Charlie Press. If my memory serves me correctly, I think it took place in Chicago. I recall that Gove had invited a veteran Illinois House member, Representative Al Hack Hachmeister, who explained to our interns the mysteries of cumulative voting for the Illinois House elections, as well the political realities of the at-large election of the Illinois House in 1964. With Charlie Press as my mentor, I became familiar with Professor Sam Gove, a leading political scientist at Illinois’ premier, Big Ten University. At the time I had no reason to expect that I would spend an academic career in the state of Illinois and that Sam Gove would become a professional friend who would help me gain entre to inside Illinois politics in the years ahead.

During the dark days of winter, I was anxiously sending out inquiries about job vacancies. There had been some nibbles for me. Calvin College, my alma mater, expressed some interest but a full-time position was uncertain. In January the University of Toledo invited me for a visit. I drove there by myself in snowy weather. The head of the political science department met me, and we had a brief shakedown conversation about my visit. Then I was handed off from person to person among the department faculty and a few administrators. Eventually most of the group came together for a collective time of give and take with me. I did not get a clear feeling that they liked me very much, but what came through starkly was that all the department members had heavy teaching loads, so the department was obviously understaffed. The prevailing consensus was that they all wanted somebody to come in and assume a chunk of the teaching load. Department members were housed in a former single-family home adjacent to the campus. If appointed, I would get a refurbished attic rendered into an office with sloping ceilings. Research support, including computer services? Not much available at that time, but they were working on it. The matter of a new colleague doing research and scholarly writing received lip service but did not seem to be a matter of departmental priority. The job would be mostly about filling the classroom.

I went home to Bonnie a touch depressed by my interview experience. A week later I was mildly surprised that they sent me an offer of appointment. Bonnie was delighted. It was all about a real appointment with a salary and benefits. My fellow jobseekers at MSU were impressed with my good fortune. But I was ambivalent and so I stewed about it for some time. Then I boldly wrote a letter of refusal. I just could not put myself into that setting and believe I would thrive there. At first Bonnie was aghast but then trustingly supportive. My friends were dumbfounded, thinking me foolishly optimistic about my marketability.

On the first of February a letter came to me from David T. (for Templeton) Kenney, inviting me to interview at SIU-C. Harold Johnson had provided Kenney with my dossier and Kenney judged me as a fitting candidate. Kenney included some details about the university and noted that the envisioned salary for an assistant professor with a fresh Ph.D. would be eight hundred and fifty dollars per month. Would I come to Carbondale for an interview? Immediately I wanted to leap for the invitation.

The next day I got a second letter – the invitation was unchanged except it said that Kenney was mistaken about the salary. It would be nine hundred and fifty per month. I responded by telephone and we settled on some travel details. I investigated some library information about the university and went to work on my formal presentation for the department faculty. I would sketch out the methods and findings from my still unfinished doctoral dissertation. Meanwhile I had an inquiry from Earlham College, a quality small college in Richmond, Indiana, marked by a Quaker religious heritage. That had possibilities that I would think about.

I opened this memoir with details about my candidate experience at SIU-C. A week after my visit to Carbondale David Kenney called to make an offer. He put it in writing on March 8, 1967. There was an update on the salary, now to be a thousand and fifty dollars per month upon completion of the Ph.D. He said he would try to get the appointment on a twelve-month basis rather than the typical nine-month academic year. Kenney was as good as his word. I was jointly appointed to the Department of Government and to the Public Affairs Research Bureau (PARB), of which he was the director. My teaching load would be one course per quarter and, until my Ph.D. was final, the salary would be one thousand dollars per month. If I was available, I could begin my appointment on July 1, 1967.

Of course, I was ecstatic. The position was as perfect as anything I might have hoped for. To be put on the university payroll beginning on the first of July was an incredible and unanticipated financial windfall of two and a half months of income. Indeed, it exceeded my fondest hopes. If I had a concern it was, will I be in over my head at this major, research-oriented university? But at the time that did not give me much pause. Thoughts about Earlham College evaporated. I was all about accepting SIU-C, setting aside the job search and getting on with completing the dissertation.

Bonnie was not without misgivings. She grew up in Denver, taught in southern California, Chicago, Germany, Kalamazoo and Lansing. What would it be like to be a stay-at-home mom in a small town deep in southern Illinois? Fortunately for me she was an ever adaptable and trusting adventurer. We prayed about it. I thought God had already given me an answer to my prayer. After some time for judgment Bonnie gave me her considered approval, so I accepted the offer by telephone on March 14 and in writing on March 15.

In April Bonnie and I set aside a few days to look for housing in Carbondale. Thanks to a hospitable invitation from Norm and Alice Luttbeg, we could stay with them in their small Carbondale home for a few days. We had no idea what buying a house was going to take. Renting might be the better option. I even thought it might be possible that we could land in university housing for a year or so. When we arrived at the Luttbeg’s place, there were real estate signs in the neighborhood from a local realtor. We called the phone number and agreed to go house hunting the next day. I recall the realtor only as Ernie.

Ernie showed us several places ranging from awful to not bad. There was little choice for under fifty thousand dollars, to me an unthinkably large sum. Rental prospects were shabby and dim. In an overcrowded university town, the market only served people who wanted to start paying rent now, not months from now. University housing was not an option. It was reserved for graduate students and visiting faculty.

Having little cash for a down payment, whatever we would buy would need to be nearly entirely financed. Having a contract as a professor at SIU-C was, however, good as gold with the local banks. The search with Ernie revealed that the most promising prospect for purchase was a house just downhill from the Luttbegs, only a few doors away. Norm and I had talked about that house prior to Ernie’s showing. Norm warned me that the low lot location collected water from the neighborhood whenever rain was heavy, a typical weather happening in southern Illinois in the spring. When Ernie pitched that house to us, I pressed him particularly about the drainage. No problem, said Ernie. That muddy area in back is because a workman left a watering hose on too long. Forewarned is forearmed. From Ernie’s glib answer I knew that his word was not to be trusted. We told Ernie we would be looking further with somebody else.

That evening we discussed our prospects with Norm and Alice. Norm had already agreed to a teaching contract with Temple University in Pennsylvania beginning in the fall of 1967. They wanted a more urban life than was available in Carbondale. Their house was for sale by owner and, at that time, unsold. It was eight hundred and fifty square feet on one floor, with a dry full basement underneath. With three bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen and a living room, it was sufficient for us. The nominal price was thirty-five thousand dollars, but Norm would take six hundred down and we would assume his FHA mortgage at five percent interest. For their convenience the Luttbegs would leave their furniture, except for the bedroom and baby’s room, until the end of August. They were going to travel in Europe for the summer and move their things to Philadelphia after that. We agreed and together we wrote by hand an agreement on a legal pad. The mortgage company willingly accepted our assumption of the loan with monthly payments that were about two hundred and twenty-five dollars. The arrangements could not have been better for us. We could only say the plan was not ours. It was the Lord’s.

There is a follow-up anecdote. For their own reasons the Luttbegs did not stay long in Philadelphia. The next time they wanted to finance a house purchase, their lender detected that their name was still on our mortgage in Carbondale. At Norm’s request Bonnie and I signed the necessary papers to take full responsibility for the loan on 613 Owens Street. That freed the Luttbegs from a credit liability and allowed them to finance the house that they wanted.

Upon agreeing to the SIU-C offer, I became monomaniacal about the dissertation. I composed six chapters in conventional dissertation-speak. Chapter one was a theoretical overview and review of research relevant to my topic. The second chapter was about methodology and how to do roll call analysis. Chapters three, four and five were all about findings. I was looking for correlations between constituency characteristics and roll call voting behavior. In chapter three my findings were that all the relationships were rather weak but in the right direction. Chapter four had a bit stronger stuff, relating roll call voting to the party affiliation of the congressmen. Chapter five looked at patterns in the separate party caucuses. After that was a finale: Summary and Conclusions, including some needed modesty and self-criticism.

I had a helpful dissertation committee. That was despite of the fact that Robert Scigliano, my original dissertation chairman, bailed out on me when he took a cherished professorship back home at Boston College in the fall of 1965. Robert Horwitz, an early faculty friend that I assisted for a year, would have been on it but he had gone off to be the department chair at Kenyon College. Charlie Press, who had already agreed to be on the committee accepted the dissertation chairmanship when Scigliano departed MSU. (I have more to say about Charlie Press later.) One at a time Charlie read all my draft chapters promptly, commented helpfully and moved matters along. I accepted his suggestions and criticisms. When he was satisfied, I passed the completed drafts to Joseph Schlesinger and Harold Spaeth, the other readers. They too were constructive. The outside committee member was a demographer from the sociology department. He liked my work. In my files I have a brief, undated note from Schlesinger to Press. Despite mild caveats, the last line said, on the whole this appears to me to be quite acceptable. Faint praise, but from the department’s princeling, it gave the other two members permission to acknowledge that I was done. Now I could schedule my oral defense.

The defense took place on Monday, June 26. It was a public event. To my surprise my Aunt Win and Uncle Bill Hiemstra brought my mother from Kalamazoo and added to the audience. Bonnie was there too. The family supporters just sat in the back of the room and smiled encouragingly. The committee and I dutifully filled an hour and a half with discussion. Other than some nervousness on my part at the beginning there was no great tension in the room. The committee had approved my methodology and findings and they all knew I had a better-than-expected job to go to. I had surpassed all the hoops except the formality of bound copies of the dissertation which could not be prepared until the committee gave approval. They gave me their blessing and congratulated me. Charlie Press promptly wrote David Kenney telling the folks at SIU-C that I had passed the oral and that the degree would be conferred on September 1, 1967, at the end of the summer term. All that needed to be done was to submit bound copies to the Dean of the MSU Graduate School.

Within a week I finished my last edits and turned the corrected drafts over to my typist. She was the wife of a graduate student and was a secretary in a research bureau office. She was excellent and dependable. She had done my previous papers and dissertation drafts on her IBM Executive model typewriter, so things were in able and reliable hands. Before leaving for Carbondale I scraped together three hundred dollars and for that she did the revisions and updated the text, had the manuscript bound and turned it in to the Graduate School. Two months thereafter I was officially a Doctor of Philosophy in political science.

Thursday, after the oral exam, I rented a U-Haul trailer. Our only furniture was a bedroom set, a baby crib and a rocker. The rest of our property was clothes and kitchen things, mostly Bonnie’s shower and wedding gifts. My books, journals and research documentation filled several ponderous cartons. That was the sum of our possessions along with our automobile. It was decent, a 1966 Plymouth, capable of pulling the trailer and carrying the baby with her stuff including a crib in the back seat. We hit the road Friday morning, June 30th, arriving in Carbondale late in the day to a partly empty house. The Luttbegs were off to Europe for their family excursion. On Saturday we unburdened the trailer, unloading the household things first. The master bedroom and the baby’s room were ready for our furnishings. The rest of the house was well appointed with the Luttbeg’s things, a pronounced matter of convenience to us. I filled the Plymouth with my office materials and returned the trailer to the local U-Haul dealer. On Monday, July 3, I was welcomed at the PARB and ushered into a small, windowless inner office. It was not all mine. I had to share it with a graduate student named Peter Aranson. (Peter, by the way, became a distinguished scholar known for innovative work in public choice theory.) But by the end of the day I was operational. With the Fourth of July holiday the next day, I could help Bonnie settle into the small house at 613 Owens Street, on the northern edge of Carbondale.

There was a family named Van Der Slik, of a Dutch heritage. They were devout and God-fearing. They gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly. Paraphrased from Acts 10: 1-2.

Chapter 2.

Family Matters

My heritage is Dutch, and my surname is van der Slik, as the Dutch write it. My name gives me good reason to be humble. The name is a prepositional phrase and literally says, from the Mud. In my imagination I think that my seventeenth century forbears were farmers on land reclaimed from the North Sea by the ingenious Dutch water engineers. I will say more about the spelling of that name later. The first Dutchman known by it was Cornelis, who died in 1666. Six generations later Johannes van der Slik was born in 1796 in Middelharnis, Netherlands. As an adult he had a small bakery in the town. He lived in a period of political, economic and religious unrest. Napoleon and the French had control of Holland at the turn-of-the-century, but Napoleon’s empire crashed at Waterloo in 1815. William of Orange returned from exile in England to the Dutch throne. His family theology was Reformed, but doctrine was less important than a need for national unity. He addressed that need by instituting a state establishment of the Reformed Church at the Synod of 1816. From then on church ministers served at the King’s pleasure and were salaried by the state. William undercut the doctrinal authority of the Synod of Dort (1619) and eased the distinctiveness of the historic Reformed confessions. The state church was to be inclusive, tolerant of Arminian and enlightenment rationalists of the era.

A conservative movement of religious resistance that opposed the King’s liberalized state church came alive to bring about the Aufscheiding (the separation) in 1834. By that time Johannes was thirty-eight and had two children. The Aufscheiding divided churches, people, villages and towns. The great majority of the Dutch people stayed with the state church. The seceders were largely the working poor – laborers, small farmers, tradesmen and the like. Evidently Johannes sided with the seceders, a move that made living in his hometown difficult and penurious. The state church members shunned Johannes’s bakery business, depriving him of his livelihood. Regarded as a political outcast, his children may even have been denied education. By the 1850s Johannes and his nine children decided to emigrate to the United States. Johannes was fifty-nine when they arrived in 1855. They settled in Forest Grove, Michigan, not many miles from the prominent Dutch colony of Holland, Michigan. When Tunis, the second son, still single, was twenty-eight he bought a farm on the border of Ottawa and Allegan counties. That farm would be the home for two generations of Vander Sliks (spelled here as my father signs his name). My father, grandson to Tunis, records the following unedited account about the family in an unpublished memoir.

On the 15th of September, 1866, he bought the property from Riley and Lori Standish and Isaac and Marietta Church, co-owners. He paid $400 cash. Under glass I have mounted the warranty deed describing the sale. Jason Skeela, Justice of the Peace, wrote it. It describes how the justice of the peace talked separately to the wife of the one couple and the husband of the other, then the other man and spouse of the second man, probably to see if the parties involved were all in agreement about the sale. I have a tax receipt that shows that in 1895 Grandpa Teunis paid taxes of $29.26.

Immediately upon buying the land he built a log cabin as his first house. He married Johanna Doren on January 29, 1871. Johanna was born July 3, 1847, so she was 10 years younger than Tunis. I do not know how long they lived in the log cabin, but they built a beautiful brick home at the top of the hill overlooking the country lane. If you see pictures of the house, the brickwork was in different colors and showed a beautiful design. The house had large windows so Johanna could see the entire farm, an area of 80 acres.

She was handicapped and could not move well. How she became handicapped, I do not know. My father never told us anything regarding her handicap. Typical farmhouses of the time had a path to the bath, meaning the outhouse. However, because of her condition, they built a toilet facility at the back of the kitchen. The commode was built over a large tank and that was on track. When it came time to empty the tank, a horse pulled it out on to a stone boat, really a large skid with wooden runners. The tank was pulled out on the farm someplace and emptied and then returned to its operating position. I remember that they always had a Sears Roebuck catalog for toilet tissue. It must have been rough when you came to the harness section.

There was a half-circle driveway so that a carriage could come very close to the front entrance. I suppose that made it convenient for Johanna. She died in 1914, so I never saw her myself, but Teunis lived until 1921. I remember having our family pictures taken. When he died in 1921 I was six years old. I remember seeing him laid out for all the mourners on some type of sofa. It was black, flat and rose at one end.

We have an oval, glass-covered picture of the two of them, plus the warranty deed and also a triple silver sugar container that was given to them at the time of their 25th wedding anniversary. My Uncle Henry (Hendrick), the youngest son, gave it to me before his death in 1973. As an adult he lived in Croswell, Michigan, where he died.

Let me share some things that I remember about our family. My father, Edward, told us very little about his home life. He went to the Franklin public school, which was two miles from the farm, probably a one-room school that covered grades one through eight. There was no kindergarten. To go further in education he would have had to walk to Burnips Corners, about 6 miles from home. He did not choose to go and they needed the boys on the farm.

Dad had a sister three years younger than he was. Her name was Cornelia. She married Henry Smalligan, who owned a general store in Forest Grove. This is where the family purchased all their groceries and supplies. The general store carried everything a customer could need.

Dad had an older sister Jannetje (Jenny), born in 1874, eight years older than Dad. She married an older man, George Love. As a young man he traveled to South Dakota and North Dakota. He came back home with several arrows that he picked up. Supposedly they were from the Battle of Custer’s last stand. He gave two or three of them to my brother Thomas, who cherished them. I remember that Thomas had them at our home on Pine Street.

Later, when I was a kid it was great fun to go to George Love’s small farm in Burnips Corners, not far from Grandpa’s farm. He let us climb his fruit trees. For another entertainment at the farm we kids would put a hole in a kernel of corn, tie a string about 4 feet long through the hole. We would let a chicken swallow the kernel and then we could have the chicken follow us around all afternoon. When we were ready to go home, we just pulled up the kernel of corn and let the chicken go. No chicken ever told us that it hurt to do that.

On Grandpa’s farm every trip to the barn for chores, milking the cows or caring for the horses, they had to walk down the hill 300 yards away and 300 yards back when they were done on what was not a very fancy path.

After the boys grew up, two of them left