Daniel: Hi Gloria, my name is Daniel.I am 73 years old, not very far from 74. I'm from Grand Rapids.
Gloria: Hi, Daniel. My name is Gloria. I am 71 years old, not too far from 72. So, we're really close in age. I am from Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was born and grew up in Los Angeles, California. Everyone around me spoke Spanish, basically. I didn't speak English until I started school. I'm the oldest of four children. And the reason is someone told my dad that if he wanted me to do well in school to start speaking English at home. So, then we switched completely to English. The funny thing about growing up in Los Angeles, I was close to a river. I thought all rivers had concrete banks.
Daniel: Yeah. And we're mostly dry most of the year.
Gloria: Exactly. And so, the first time I actually saw a real river, I was on a bus going up north to Sacramento, which was about eight- or nine-hour drive. It's like, Wow, there's no concrete. So, Daniel, where did you grow up?
Daniel: Well, I grew up in the Los Angeles area too. I grew up in Hawthorne, which is midway between L.A. and Long Beach. Right. And I didn't have the same reaction to the concrete L.A. River that you did. I had a different, somewhat similar experience. I remember reading the little Dick and Jane and Spot books.Maybe you saw those too in, I don't know, first or second grade, that's how you learned to read in those days. And I remember seeing them playing in the colorful leaves.And I thought, oh, that must be what happened in the olden days because of course that never happens now. Well, now I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan and I see all the colorful leaves. Realized that actually it's not a chronological issue. It's a geographical one. It was a very family oriented, uh, supper. Uh, when I was growing up, we had a pretty easy life. Summertime, my parents would let me leave the house almost as soon as breakfast was done and didn't really expect me back until dinner time. So, I ranged on my bike with my buddies pretty widely up and down Hawthorne Boulevard and Rosecrans (Avenue).
Gloria: I lived basically in Pico Rivera and then I went to girls Catholic high school because I wanted to, you know. And so, my mom started working when I went to high school because you had to afford the tuition even though I got a partial scholarship. So that was during the ‘60s and that's when I started asking a lot of questions about well why can't women or girls be altar boys? I wanted to be an altar boy. My mom's family came from Mexico. They came in the 1920s and they were actually fleeing a war called the Cristero War. Catholics were being persecuted and killed. There were priests, et cetera, that were being killed.
Daniel: Interesting. Yeah. I grew up a very fundamentalist Baptist church. In fact, they were called the Conservative Baptist Church. That wasn't an adjective. That was actually the name. Maybe a bit like you, as I got older, particularly as I got into college and began being confronted with different points of view and realized, okay, I have not been told the whole story. I began a process of disentangling myself, you might say, from some of the very rigid and frankly unhelpful convictions and ideas that I'd grown up with.
Gloria: Where did you go to college?
Daniel: Westmont in Santa Barbara, a small Christian liberal arts college. And it was pretty influential as a matter of fact. That's where I first began to realize, okay, it's a Christian college, but it was not a fundamentalist institution. And so, I began encountering ideas that really, definitely broadened my understanding of what it meant to be a Christian. And particularly one political science professor named Ed Loeks who loved to tweak his mostly very conservative students with quotes from the minor prophets in the Old Testament and other passages from the Bible that made it real clear God really cares about poor people, immigrants,women,and especially widows and other people that are kind of on the margins and that it's the measure of a society how well it treats those at the bottom, not how well it enriches those at the top. And you know, that was really a very uh important inflection point in my own sort of intellectual growing up.
That's hard work, isn't it? Going to college while you're working full-time.
Gloria: It took me 10 years, and this was in Southern California. So, I'd be, you know, working full-time. I remember driving those lovely freeways, drive a few feet and look down at my accounting book and then drive a little bit more.People say, why are you doing this? I go, well, I was an accounting clerk, I said, you know, I know I can do better.
Daniel: So, what career did that lead to?
Gloria: Once I graduated, I had been working for someone who I was telling him about my last Capstone business classes, business cases. And he said, you need to get your MBA. I go, seriously?I go to school at night for 10 years and now I need to get my MBA.And he said, think about it. So, I thought about it. I said, you know, it doesn't hurt to apply. So, I applied to Cal State Fullerton as well as Stanford and Harvard Business School because I thought, well, if I'm going to quit my job and go to school full time for my MBA, I did a cost benefit analysis. Where would it be worth it? Well, it's either going to school at night again at Cal State Fullerton or quitting and going to Harvard or Stanford where, you know, it would be well worth it. So, I got accepted to Harvard.
Daniel: Wow. Good for you. Congratulations on that.
Gloria: Well, thank you. And then I ended up coming to Detroit to work for Chrysler in their finance area. That's how I got to Michigan.
Daniel: How do you define patriotism?
Gloria: Patriotism is loving your country but also acknowledging its faults and working hard to make certain that everyone is able to be a part of it and to share in the benefits of living in the United States. Regardless of what's going on still, I went to a rally last night. You know, it started off with the Pledge of Allegiance, which gave me tears because it'd been a long time since I've said it. We have a promise here.It isn't always actuated. You and I went through the 60s, so we know how strange things can get. But you know, hopefully they come back to where we're able to care for each other and care for people that we don't even know, just by our elected officials who should be worthy of respect.
Daniel: Amen.
Gloria: How about you? You keep saying amen, amen.
Daniel: Well, I agree with you just entirely.I'm a historian, and so I'm afraid I'm very familiar with the darker side of American history. When I taught students, my aim was not to produce cynics, nor naive, rose-tinted glasses kind of people, but people that recognize here's a human institution with flaws, but it's also been productive of a lot of good. So, you want to put your shoulder to the wheel to encourage what's healthy and good. And where necessary, you need to stand up against that, which is not healthy, not that helpful.
One little anecdote that illustrates maybe another aspect of this. I was in Nicaragua many years ago during the 1980s, actually, you know, it was going on in Central America then. I was with a student group and we were interviewing people from all sort of walks of life and there was a real civil war going on there. And we interviewed a doctor who was treating people in a pretty shabby clinic. And somebody asked him, would you be better off if you went to the United States because this is a pretty dungle place to live. And his response was, I suppose I'd be better off myself, but who would care for these people if I were gone? To me, that is the most noble kind of patriotism. You love your country. You love the people in your country and you're willing to put aside your own most immediate personal interest for the good of the larger collective. And it's not the kind of nationalism that says we hate other kinds of people in our country, or we hate other people in other countries, it’s more I really care about this community. I was born here, and I've decided that that means it's my responsibility to contribute my gifts to this community. That's stuck in my head as the best kind of patriotism.
Can you tell me about someone who has been the kindest to you in your life?
Gloria: I remember when we were buying our first house years ago, the banker, a woman, she was very helpful in leading us through the process. And then when we went to buy our second house after that, she was very helpful and just sort of encouraged us to really dream because I'm Latina, my husband's Black, and I would always go and find the house.
Daniel: Yeah.
Gloria: Yeah, that was always in the back of my mind.
Daniel: Yeah.
Gloria: Yeah.
Daniel: My heart breaks.
Gloria: And you, Daniel?
Daniel: Well, we've received many kindnesses, but I guess the one that pops first into my mind is kind of a very sad one. The morning, I found my older son had taken his own life in our own house. We called our pastor and the news sort of leaked out real fast. And a couple that we've known for years in Grand Rapids showed up very early in the day and they played traffic cop. They brought food, they let people into our house.My wife and I, of course, were absolutely in shock. That whole day, all we had to do was stand there and thank people for showing their kindness. And this couple stayed there the whole day. I've never forgotten that. It was the worst day of my life.
Gloria: What will you take with you from this experience?
Daniel: It seems to me we have a lot of similarities in terms of our life trajectories. Talking to you, I sense, okay, we've shared a lot of the same kinds of experiences and come to some of the same kinds of conclusions generally, even if in particular cases we might have our differences. So maybe that's what I'll take away from this.
Gloria: You know, we started off growing up in the same general area.
Daniel: Isn't that interesting. Yeah.
Gloria: Yeah, with the same general influences, Vietnam War being really big during our formative years.I sense that we've ended up in similar places.