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Let Me Tell You . . . A Memoir
between those who succeeded and those who failed in my neighborhood were those who had strong, truly loving parents who provided guidance and discipline and those who did not. By the grace of God, I was blessed with the former and their guidance and discipline still allow me to avoid life’s pitfalls, today. I have a choice.
As the foregoing demonstrates, my mother was a strong woman. Some, today, would even say, that she was hard, but that would be untrue. My mother lived a hard and difficult life and she was a realist. But, she was also gentle and loving and kind and wise, when needed; and she was the most principled and unwavering idealist I ever knew. She also had a bad temper. I loved my mother dearly. She was the most important person in my life. She taught me never to compromise on principle; to fight for what I believed was right; to help others in need; and to always be true to myself. She also taught me how to work. "Whatever you do," she would say, "do your best. If you are sweeping the floor, be the best floor sweeper." It has been the best work ethic I was ever taught. It has taken me a long way.
Being from the "old country", my mother’s mother believed in arranging her children’s lives. It was her right. In my mother’s case, this extended to arranging her marriage to an older man, a farmer from southern Ohio, who abused her on their wedding night and from whom she ran away. My mother was in her teens. As with most families’ secrets, I didn’t learn this until late in life and then only by accident. After my mother’s death, I claimed two things: a Mother’s Certificate, which I used as a birth certificate for many years, and a dime store piece of discolored stationery containing two names which I could not pronounce with addresses in Yugoslavia. These, I was told, were the names and addresses of my mother’s sisters in Yugoslavia who had been left in Europe with her mother’s brother when she came to America and whom my mother had never seen. Serbia had become part of Yugoslavia after World War I. I carried this piece of paper in my wallet for more than twenty years and was about to discard it when my wife rescued it from the discard pile in which I had placed it while transferring documents from an old wallet to a new one in 1979. This paper rescue resulted in a life-saving rescue many years later. The Mother’s Certificate contained a name other than Sovich, my mother’s maiden name, which led to my discovery of my mother’s first marriage which had prevented my parents marrying in the Catholic Church until shortly before she died. Truth is stranger than fiction.
My father was one of the smartest, most honest, and most ethical men, I have ever known; and I have known many. Being of
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