WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Gary L. Wamsley
I remember walking uptown with my friends and being mortified when he
would show up in filthy clothes and hat driving our battered and decrepit milkdelivery
truck. I would run to get in the truck as quickly as possible, all the while
wondering what my town friends were thinking.
A LONG, TWISTED ROAD TO COLLEGE
I stumbled into college. As I mentioned earlier, my father had completed
high school and my mother had gone only through ninth grade, but that did
not mean they considered education unimportant. They encouraged me to read
and made me do my homework (which I did only under pressure). Reading for
pleasure was not an issue, because I had always been curious and liked learning
new things. I remember poring over Reader’s Digest, The Nebraska Farmer,
Wallace’s Farmer, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Colliers, and anything else I
could get my hands on. Because my grandmother was a teacher, this meant she
had completed all the grades in a rural one-room school and then been “certified
to teach” by attending a summer session at a small state teacher’s college 30 miles
away. When we lived in her house, she read to me constantly and took me to the
library weekly.
Although I had not followed the path many farm kids did in taking the
agriculture curriculum, furthering my education past high school was not
something I gave much thought to nor had much interest in. Farming was what
I knew, and it was the life I assumed I would have. No one in my extended
family (except for Uncle Duane) had gone to college, nor did anyone encourage
me to consider doing so—with one exception. That came in an unexpected
remark from Duane, and it may have planted the seed in my mind, if only at a
subconscious level.
I was about 13, and we were performing one of the most miserable daily
chores of a dairy farm—scooping soupy, steaming cow manure from the gutters
of the barn. I must have had an unhappy look on my face, for he said, “You don’t
like this very much, do you?” When I grimly shook my head, he surprised me by
chuckling and saying, “Well, you’d better get your ass out of here and get a good
education or you’ll be doing it the rest of your life.” I probably dismissed his
words at the time. I greatly admired my uncle, and he was a farmer. I wanted to
be like him.
What I did not know then was that my uncle had never wanted to be a
farmer. My grandparent’s farm had been granted to my great-great-grandmother,
whose husband died in the Civil War. It subsequently was passed through the
generations to my grandfather. The prevailing custom was that the eldest son in
a family was expected to stay and help his father maintain the farm; this duty fell
92 Journal of Public Affairs Education