www.WrensJournal.blogspot.com

Herbert Hoover was born on this day, and he died October 24 in 1964 when I was a Senior at Thomas Jefferson High School here in Denver. That summer I’d been working for my dad in his business during the day, running and lifting weights at night getting ready for the football season that was about to start, and taking my girl friend Mary Maxwell to Red Rocks on the weekend.

I can’t remember reading Hoover’s obituary, but I might have; I was a true believer in the philosophy of life expressed in it. Along with most of the rest of the country I was a fan of Vince Lombardi, the NASA space program, and I very much wanted to become a high school English teacher and a coach to help promote the values express in Hoover’s obit. Here is part of what it said:

“Need for 'Uncommon' Men

“Mr. Hoover, born in an Iowa village, the son of a Quaker blacksmith, was an exponent of a credo of personal initiative that he summed up as "rugged individualism," and his life exemplified it…

“Mr. Hoover's values were rooted in uncomplicated Quaker values of thrift, hard work and self- dependence, and he deplored a departure from those values in which he disparagingly termed "the century of the common man."

“He said the nation imperatively required "the leadership of the uncommon man or woman." And he cited his own life as proof of the validity of the American dream of achievement by effort, not grant.”
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0810.html

What I’ve learned since then is that no man is an island. We each need God and the people who are put into our life to be happy.

Yes, the values of rugged individualism are necessary, but they are not sufficient. If I would have listened to God and the people in my life back it 1964, things would have been very different for me, my family, and my friends. For me, rugged individualism turned into selfishness and self-centeredness, something I still fight and for which I continue to make amends.