As much as I’ve bagged on the press for their hatchet-jobbery as re the Emmer campaign, I’ll give well-deserved kudos to the PiPress’ Bill Salisbury for doing a fair, balanced piece that shows the reasons that a lot of us gravitated to Emmer in the first place.
Anecdote alert:
Tom Emmer’s father was struggling to keep his Edina lumberyard afloat during a deep recession in the early ’80s.
One day, his dad ordered his sons to put on their suits and ties and his wife and daughter to don dresses and climb into the family’s backyard swimming pool.
“We sat in the pool, water up to here,” Emmer recently recalled, holding his hand to his chest, “and he took a picture.”
At Christmastime, his father mailed the photo to friends and family with this message scrawled across the bottom: “The Emmers almost went under last year, but we’re coming out with a splash this year.”
Emmer, the Republican-endorsed candidate for Minnesota governor, said his father’s declaration symbolized how he learned to face adversity and obstacles.
“You need to take responsibility for those situations, stand up tall and make the best of it,” the three-term state representative said during a late-June campaign bus ride across southern Minnesota.
The whole thing is worth a read.
” that shows the reasons that a lot of us gravitated to Emmer in the first place.”
Yes, I was frequently taught how to handle adversity by taking dips in the family swimming pool.
Come on MoN, didn’t you like the John Wayne method of teaching swimming?
I like the story. Good for the Emmers!
Hey, nerdbert – that’s how I learned how to swim, and before I was 6; the difference was that I kept jumping in the water, not being thrown in. My parents got tired of fishing me out, so they put in our pool for my 5th birthday, in the hopes I’d finally get enough of it.
Then they made me learn to lifeguard so they didn’t have to spend all their time with one of them watching who was in the pool. Daily chores included skimming the pool, brushing the pool, regular pool-vacuuming, and when I was old enough, checking and adding chlorine. One of the fun parts – scooping all the frogs out before swimming, and diving down to get any lawn furniture that blew in because it hadn’t been put away before a bad storm hit. When we were older, we were on a strict buddy system – you were responsible for the other swimmer(s) and they were responsible for you (including knowing first aid, and aritifical resuscitation).
We eventually persuaded parents to allow us to count the family lab as a lifeguard, after we borrowed a couple of neighborhood kids, threw them in (pretty much like the movie) and taught him to ‘fetch’. He was great at stopping people from running around the pool (he’d jump on them and bark loudly) and at keeping the noise and splashing level to a minimum. Too much noise, too much splashing – he’d jump in, grab an arm, and drag you out, whether you wanted to leave the pool or not.
A pool can teach kids a lot about responsibility… and a little bit about the important art of delegating that responsibility!
DG, I agree. We have a pool for the kids. It gets them outside and doing things when they’re littler, and when they’re teenagers it gets them outside which an even better thing :-). The teenager still at home has to take care of it, except for the chemicals — memories of how I treated chemicals as a young adult still haunt me — but my wife and I still have to spend a lot of time out there watching the littler ones since they’re out there far more than the teenager.
Both boys we’ve nicknamed “fishboy” at some point and it’s basically impossible to get them out of the pool in the summer; they learned the same way you did, by doing. But while the girls have both liked the water, they’ve been hesitant around it despite all the encouragement we could give them. I told my wife we should have used that Hondo method, but she just rolled her eyes at me…