A lesson in three words

 Had he lived, my father, Heber Taylor II, would have been 100 today.

When I was 14, he was a tenured professor at a state university. He also was adviser to the student newspaper. It was the end of the ’60s, and the student editors were covering protests and writing editorials about the Vietnam War. A university regent launched a public campaign to get my father fired.

My father hadn’t had the money for a college education. But he was drafted as a teenager, fought with the Third Army in Europe and survived the Battle of the Bulge. He got a Ph.D. on the G.I. Bill and became a Fulbright Scholar. 

When the regent campaigned against him, my father didn’t respond, other than say that he would support the student journalists and their right to free speech.

I asked him what it took.

I didn’t frame the question well, but he understood it and said: “Equanimity and magnanimity.”

That was it.

Maybe that brief lesson is still sinking in.

I was lucky in many ways. Today is going to be a quiet day.