Teacher shared stewardship lesson

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Sept. 9, 2004. Jack wrote of the greatness of a generation. I would argue there was greatness in that next generation, the individuals in the room remembering Catherine Meeker and her peers. There is the potential for greatness in each generation, just waiting to be inspired.

What was it about that generation? What made them so special?

Mary Meeker and I were standing in the kitchen of her parents’ house in Portland. A few hours earlier, her mother, Catherine, had been laid to rest at Green Park Cemetery. About a year and a half ago, her father — the inimitable, colorful, sometimes outrageous J. Gordon Meeker — was buried as well.

I’ve long believed that you’re not really a grown-up until both your parents are gone. No matter how old you are, you wake up to a different day after their passing.

And when you are dealing with such rich personalities as Catherine and J. Gordon, the void left behind is enormous.

Inevitably, the talk in the kitchen turned to our parents’ generation, the one dubbed by Tom Brokaw as the greatest of them all.

What, Mary wondered aloud, made that generation so different?

The privations of the Great Depression, the challenge of World War II, the thrust of America onto the world’s center stage, and the can-do confidence that came with victory at the war’s end were all cited in that kitchen conversation. And those were probably the best answers anyone can come up with.

But then Mary asked a different question: What was it about those particular people that translated post-World War II confidence of the 1950s into so many good things in the community? The Portland Foundation, the United Way of Jay County, Jay-Randolph Developmental Services, and on and on.

Not every community was so fortunate. After all, the Portland Foundation was only the second one established in the state of Indiana; only the Indianapolis Foundation pre-dates it.

My answer surprised her.

“Angie Wilson,” I said.

It was more than a guess than a theory.

But Miss Wilson had been a teacher in Jay County and at what was then Ball State Teachers College.

My father passed through her Portland classroom. So, I believe, did Lee G. Hall, John J. Jaqua Sr., J. Gordon Meeker, Mary (Easterday) Young, W. Haynes Starbuck, and probably a dozen other figures who shaped and re-shaped this community with their lives and their leadership.

Miss Wilson, my father told me, was the sort of teacher who would interrupt her lessons to alert her students to a new bird out the window, interrupting the textbook so she could teach directly from nature.

Her greatest lesson was one of the simplest: Stewardship.

Her students learned the importance of leaving the world a better place than you found it.

And on a sunny afternoon of reminiscences, the generation which followed was both proud and humbled by how well the lesson had been learned by those who went before us.