The Dawkins grew up knowing serious mental illness.  Our Grandmother across the street tried suicide a number of times and had raging, maniacal, episodes a sad number of times, but she had brilliance and plenty of the right kind of passion too.  She was a political organizer and friends with Anna Spies (a Wobbly whose husband was hanged as a Haymarket Riot co-conspirator) and Ralph Chaplin (the Movement Balladeer, author of the organizing anthem “Solidarity Forever”).  And she was the one who got me and my friends to drive McCarthy delegates downtown on the back streets to the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 when Mayor Daley blocked all the major arteries from O’Hare Airport, the cabbies and bus drivers were on strike, and the foul-mouthed Mayor (as seen on national TV) got Humphrey delegates rides in police vehicles.  She was also the brains behind my Grandfather’s making a fortune.

Grandpa Rinkema was a Dutchman who immigrated to the US with his wife and daughters after serving time in jail for refusing to fight in World War I.  He met Grandma Rinkema at a kissing booth where she was selling kisses to raise money for the stop-the-war effort.  (He got in line for a second kiss.)  Grampa Rinkema was a very large man (size 16 feet) whose first job in the USA was wheel-barrowing wet cement up the planks to the top floors of the then-being-constructed Stevens (and by 1968 Conrad Hilton) Hotel in Chicago.  As a side job he was a carpenter who helped neighbors put additions onto their small homes.  Gramma Rinkema anticipated the mass exodus of Whites for the suburbs (and the better schools for their baby-boomer kids) and used the money they saved to buy the tracts of land where Grampa later built the first million dollar suburban homes.  In fact, Grampa Rinkema built the house I grew up in as a wedding present for my Mom & Dad; and in fact, I was lucky enough to attend some of the best schools in the nation.*   Unfortunately, most the fortune was later spent on expensive mental hospitals.

Now that’s something you all can do!  Here’s The Moral to this Book of Stories:  For you teenagers reading this – if you want to imagine something any one of you could do with your life to have it well-spent, consider doing something to help the less fortunate, the mentally-ill or others living in the shadows of life, like being a mental health aide, a nurse, a doctor, a scientist or even President.  I just passed a billboard on US 20 telling us “One in Six Americans Suffers from Hunger.”  There’s Work to be Done!!

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*These were the best schools and best teachers that money could buy.  For those interested in Government 101, read my “Open Letter to Jack & Nick, Up & Comers and Fed-Uppers” which talks about “communitarianism” – an economic system to maximize the efficiencies of community values.  There was a time when the government gave-away land to pioneering homesteaders willing to encounter Indian Uprisings.  It was an early government program to make our country prosperous, unfortunately at the expense of Native Americans.  What could Government do today that could totally re-make America great??    And maybe include everybody this time!

Yet another sign of the times – this time my mom’s mom in 1970