WEDNESDAY SESSION TRANSCRIPT

AM:  Why don’t we start, actually, not with the first question on my list, but is there anything that you’ve reflected on since Monday that you maybe want to talk about?  

BG:  Yeah. In fact, I thought about it last night.  There’s a couple of things. I don’t know whether my children, grandchildren may necessarily need this, but they were important to me and so I want to convey them to you. 

One is saving money.  When I was married, the day we were married, I had $200 and my wife owed $600, so that’s the way we began our marriage and, like most unmarried kids, I spent my money as fast as it came in.  But I changed that day and I just read an article prior to that about responsibility of being married and it’s important, very important, to save. And I had read the article; it said I ought to be able to save 10 percent of my wages, and we began that way.  And along the way certain issues would arise and I would cut it back to 5 percent. In any case, it has paid me back many, many, many-fold over the years. I’ve never regretted that that we always had a savings. 

The other is a problem that I had.  As I gained confidence – I was a little insecure when I was in high school trying to learn my way in the world relative to other people, but I acquired a certain confidence in college that followed when I went into the Navy and took my commission, and when I got out of there I was ready to kill the world, and I found that I was having a problem, a people problem.  I remember when I was up in Milwaukee working for General Motors, some people started referring to me as The Admiral, and they didn’t mean that benignly.  They were being critical of me because I, evidently, had taken on an aura of — I’m looking for that word — arrogance.  Arrogance would be the word.  And it wasn’t apparent to me and I didn’t mean to be that way, but it was me.  And that persisted even into my next job.  I was having a problem with people. But the guy I worked for was about my age; as a matter of fact, he was a year younger than me because he hadn’t gone into the service.  And I knew that I was smarter than he was, a lot smarter, and yet he was the one getting the advancements and the promotions and the salary increases.  And I said, what is wrong?  Anyway, I took note of him and I noted that he – if he didn’t know something he’d say, huh?  (Laughs.)  And he was a college graduate.  And I couldn’t understand that.  But in the end, I began to see that he had some humility about him and people reflected positively, and they didn’t do to me.  I changed myself to the point that I would even take on a sense of – what do they call it? – do you know what the word I’m talking about, Andy?

AM:  Self-deprecating. 

BG:  Thank you!  Now you see, I wouldn’t have admitted doing that then – you see? – but I’m perfectly willing to accept the fact that I don’t know everything and to look to others.  In any case, I began to do that and it changed my life immediately – immediately — within months.  And I’ve practiced it forever and enjoy humility and I would hope that my grandchildren would never think of me as being a haughty grandfather, because I am not.  I like what it did; good things came to me and I gave it back as fast as I could to them.  So I just wanted you to know about that.  OK.

AM:  Yeah. OK, Aidan asks: What important lessons did you learn about parenting that you would like to pass on to family members?  

BG:  Yeah.  It’s very easy to, when you’re talking to children, to make judgments and finally you end up saying, just do it because I said to.  Children, at a very, very early age learn and make their own judgments about whether you are right.  So I just suggest that whenever you can go the extra step and not do the lazy thing and just say do it.  Try to explain best you can.  But in the end, you’ve got to make the decision.  But they deserve the benefit of your counsel and justification for your actions. 

AM:  Here’s Quinn: What family tradition or traditions would you like to see continued for years to come? 

BG:  You know, I think my family is – are all superbly practicing those kind of traditions.  They’re already doing everything I would want — (laughs) — and not that I’ve demanded that, but they just do and that’s the way they’ve been brought up and that’s the way they practice. 

AM:  What sort of things?

BG:  Well, I was just going to say:  The fact is, if you weren’t looking for something and I would like to see continued, I love our Christmas caroling.  I realize it causes people to raise their eyebrows — (laughs) — and we are all terrible as singers, but we still enjoyed doing it. So everything else, I have no – there’s nothing else that keeps it from being wonderful as it is. 

AM:  Did you ever pick the trumpet up again? 

BG:  No.  I got too cool after my freshman year in high school.  Right? Those days were gone.  (Laughs.)

AM:  Well, Lara asks:  In what ways do you feel blessed? 

BG: I am blessed by having had a good marriage.  I’m blessed by my children and my grandchildren.  I’m blessed by Peggy and my long life, and I’m financially comfortable.  I’m a happy guy! 

AM:  Here’s Aidan now:  Does life get easier as you grow older? 

BG:  Oh. Yeah.  Absolutely.  When I turned 40, I had a good and faithful wife, I had a happy — happy children, happy and healthy children, I had many friends, I was financially comfortable, and I knew that I could make it in this world.  Again, it made me a very, very happy guy and any doubts that I had before that were gone.  Smile on my face. 

AM:  In what ways, though, would you say life life gets harder as you grow older? 

BG:  It doesn’t.  It doesn’t get harder.  It’s gotten better and better since that time.  And probably — probably the loss of friends and certainly my wife and my son are difficult.  But notwithstanding those awful losses, life is good. 

AM:  Devin asks if there’s something else that you want to accomplish.

BG:  No.  It’s all done.  My financial goals for my children are almost complete.  As a matter of fact, they’re OK right now.  Everything else is done.  Just give me 10 more years with you guys and Peggy and I’m good. 

AM:  Yeah.  So Devin again:  What do you want her to remember about you?

BG:  Yeah.  Remember me as a happy, energetic man who loved being with each of you individually and together and let your memory of me bring a smile.  That would be my message.  

AM:  Trey has a question:  Do you look at life differently as you get older?  And if so, how?

BG:  Things have changed.  Society has changed.  I don’t know that it’s me.  I’ve changed with society.  When I think back – in the early ’60s, about the time I was married, our social codes, our moral codes, our society changed dramatically from when I was a child. 

A couple of examples:  As you remember, I was a landlord.  I owned several apartment buildings. And I remember a young couple coming to me – my golly, this is even later; this is in the ’70s.  And they were not married and they wanted to rent one of my apartments, and I refused to rent it to them, because, first off, it was against the law.  It was against the law! And besides that, I just had a problem doing that.  Is that the case today?  Not at all.  It’s entirely changed.  The church, the Catholic church, as a matter of fact, was — back in the era of Roman masses in Latin, complete subservience of its congregation to the church – not that way at all today; it’s dramatically different.  Some of the social codes – think about suicide.  There’s a guy named Kevorkian.  Do you remember Dr. Kevorkian?  I think he was from Michigan.  He was helping people in suicide.  Everybody wanted him to go to prison, including myself.  I don’t feel that way anymore.  If we have a person whose life is just sheer physical hell and they are strong enough to say I don’t want anymore of it – I find nothing morally offensive to that at all.  The nation after World War II, the patriotism of Americans and the complete reliance upon us with our government and belief in, look at what that’s like today.  And it affects all of our thinking – all of us.  And I have changed along with that, too, although I’m probably more of a traditionalist than you guys.

AM:  I mean, one of the big factors that’s often identified in eroding that trust in our government, in our leaders, was Watergate. 

BG:  Absolutely.  Absolutely.  It was probably the first real break in confidence in our government.  That’s right.  Yeah.  

AM:  Yeah, because I think that the way [President] Johnson sort of massaged the truth about the initial cause for that conflict in Vietnam, for the escalation, I think we found out later about the way he had lied about that. 

BG:  I suspected it at the time.  I remember Johnson standing up and talking about the North Vietnamese gunboats attacking our destroyer and it didn’t smack true to me right then.  And I know most people went on to it and he got his war rights to do that.  I knew that was wrong, and certainly we knew about Watergate and it’s gone on.  There’s a litany of these things that go on and they continue to get worse and worse, as a matter of fact. Yeah.

There was another one – in 1968, going back to Vietnam and I was here in Chicago, when they were down at Grant Park raising hell and Mayor Daley was in there trying to shoot them down and I was on the government side at the time because I was a naval reservist and certainly wasn’t appreciative of their position at that time.  But I became so later on.

AM:  Yeah.  Later on during Vietnam you changed your thinking, or later after the conflict had ended? 

BG:  I stayed loyal to the government during that period.  I did.  I was wrong; did us no good. And I’m in complete agreement with getting the hell out of Afghanistan, as we’ve just found out, because it was same thing:  They had a government over in Vietnam that people didn’t want and that’s what we had in Afghanistan.  Yeah.

AM:  Yeah.  One thing I wanted to ask you about — you made some reference to the Catholic church.  What were the nuns and the priests like when you were growing up?

BG:  Respectful, honest, God-fearing people. Yeah.  Yeah.  I wouldn’t imagine – I still couldn’t imagine a nun doing something wrong, nor have I ever heard of one doing something wrong.  (Laughs.) I’m sure they do.

AM:  Were they tough on you?

BG:  (Laughs.)  Oh, yeah.  Yeah.  From the first grade on.  We were in classes with 50 to 60 – I had as many as 62 kids in a class, and God bless those nuns; they pulled it off. But there wasn’t anybody – if I did something wrong, it’s not like today where my parents would come in – a parent would come in.  We were wrong.  If there was a problem, the sister was right and we were wrong.  There wasn’t any question about that.  They must be saintly women to be able to handle that group of kids.  And in high school I was also taught by – I went to a boys Catholic high school so I was always taught by priests, not laypeople, but there were lots of them there at that time, and it was very wholesome, very respectful, nothing ever wrong. 

AM:  Yeah.  What kind of discipline did they use?

BG:  I remember breaking a blood vessel from some sort of paddle he hit me on, but ordinarily not corporal and there wasn’t much need for it because they were in complete authority. And nobody really – nobody – I don’t remember anything ever, ever, ever being stolen by anybody. I don’t remember any conflict with any nun or priest.  They were right, we were wrong.  So any punishment was because we broke a rule, rather than any defiance to them.

AM:  Yeah. Why do you think that at that time discipline was kept so well?  You said on Monday that you didn’t recall anyone, you know, stepping out of line during those years and people were, you know, very compliant.  Why do you think that was and is so different today?  What do you think is –

BG:  Yeah.  It’s a good question.  I think then it was as it should have been.  We were just children and subject to the authority of our parents, which transferred immediately because the parents gave the teachers that authority and we knew that.  No question about it.  What really surprises me is a story that a friend of mine told me a couple years ago. It was a teacher that — she was having a problem with her ninth grader or whatever and they brought their lawyer.  They brought their lawyer to the school over a grade.  

And the prohibition of using corporal punishment – I mean, obviously that was done because there were excesses that couldn’t be – that shouldn’t have happened, but I think probably there’s nothing wrong with giving a kid a little kick in the butt when warranted, when they defied, when they defied and said I’m just not going to do that. 

AM:  So the next question I have here is, you know, a pretty standard question:  Does wisdom come with age? 

BG:  Some people are just as dumb at 87 years old as they are at seven.  They never, ever get better.  On the other hand, age does bring experience and experience should be listened to and taken from it what is valid, but just because the person is old doesn’t mean he’s wise.  

AM:  Do you think that people treat people in their 80s with the amount of respect that they should?

BG:  Yeah.  You know, it’s kind of interesting and this has just recently started. I mean, I see my kids – you know, I’m a very able person, as old as I am, but they’re very respectful, and I see it everywhere.  People in the last month, I walk into a – and I find doors being opened for Peggy and me.  And I think that’s very nice.  And I’ve never, ever been disrespected because of my age.  What did Ronald Reagan say when he was being challenged because of his age and he said that he was going to not take advantage of his opponent because of his inexperience. (Laughs.)  That was pretty well done.  But yeah, I don’t see this disrespect.  I think it’s wonderful.  And people say, oh, this new generation is this and that, but I don’t agree.  I don’t agree with them.  I think they’re just as good as ever.

AM:  When you were younger, what sort of life expectancy did you kind of expect people to have?  Because I know it’s grown over the years.

BG:  Yeah.  I  really got to thinking that anybody who was 60 was pretty much done.  And when I looked back at that, like I’ll say to Peggy about some driver, I say, boy, that guy, he must be 60 or something.  (Laughs.)  Always good for a laugh. Right?  But yeah, and many of the males in my – notwithstanding my father, they did live into their 70s and 80s, as a matter of fact. But I just expected, come 65, they’re toast.  Yeah, so. Yeah.

AM:  Cassidy asks:  What’s the most rewarding part of becoming a grandparent? 

BG:  I guess my answer’s going to be kind of corny:  More new people to love who can’t escape me.  I love to get messages from you all.  That’s my answer. 

AM:  Here’s a question from Lara:  What do people in her generation take for granted? 

BG:  I think I may have mentioned that before.  There are all sorts of things that we’ve kind of discussed – social, economic, spiritual changes.  But I don’t really see any difference in Lara and all my other grandchildren and me.  I think they have the same values that I had.  Now, there are other socioeconomic groups and they may have their own, but from my position, I don’t think I have any difference.  I don’t think they really think differently than I do about most things.  Some of the things have changed in mores; maybe I’m a little slower to get there, but I got it where they’re coming from and I don’t disagree.  I don’t see anything wrong with the young people today.  Maybe a little more selfishness.  Maybe a little more selfish, a little more “me.”  But I guess I’d leave it there, yeah. 

AM:  Well, I mean, to go back to politics, one of our two parties, the Republican Party, has really built a culture around “rugged individualism,” and unfortunately, I think, and we’re seeing this with the pandemic, there is a whole group of people in this country who don’t value collective action. 

BG:  Precisely.  I totally agree with you and it’s kind of what I didn’t speak clearly, but I agree with you.  And it is party-oriented.  It’s even the refusal to wear masks.  They think, “I’m safe,” failing to realize that what they’re doing is threatening or endangering other people, and they don’t seem to get that at all.  It’s all about themselves. And I do believe that it was enhanced by Donald Trump.  Without a doubt. 

AM:  Yeah. That’s been a real obvious problem the last year-plus.   

BG:  Yeah, and millions and millions of people buy into it, and in that respect, by itself, we are not as good as we were even five years ago.  

AM:  Yeah.  Do you remember much about polio when you were a kid?

BG:  Oh, yeah.  When I was – my brother and sister, little girl across the street got polio, infantile paralysis they called it, and we were quarantined.  You know, the big yellow sign on our door.  My father couldn’t come home.  And we were inside like that.  We feared the — I just recently saw a picture of what – they called it an iron lung.  I saw these pictures, kids in – I remember the name of the [hospital], Herman Kiefer Hospital in Detroit, where these poor children were in this it looked like a hot water tank – right? – living like that.  It was a fierce fear of this awful disease.  Oh yeah.  Everything was shut down, the swimming pools.  We didn’t have masking, though, but they just – we just didn’t go outside. 

AM:  But when the vaccine came along –

BG:  Oh, yeah.  Actually, it was FDR who had his March of Dimes and that funded a great deal of this thing, a dime at a time, and it was a wonderful day — Jonas Salk was his name and then a year later a guy named [Albert] Sabin had a different thing, but this problem was finally gone.  It still exists in the world where people aren’t vaccinated.  Now, think about that, these fools out there today, you know, that may allow this doggone thing to go on for another year or two, or maybe whoever knows. 

AM: Yeah. So here’s a question from Trey – this is the time to spill your guts, I guess:  What is one thing about you that no one knows?  (Laughs.)

BG:  (Laughs.)  Nice try, kids. 

AM:  (Laughs.)

BG:  None of your business.  (Laughs.)

AM:  You don’t want to take this opportunity to –

BG:  No, not a chance.  Let ’em guess.  (Laughs.)

AM:  Yeah. So looking back, what do you miss from childhood or other times in your earlier years?  And I have a sense of some of the things that we’ve already talked about, but –

BG:  Looking back, I miss no longer having the joy of so many friends who are just not with me anymore.  That’s what I miss.  That’s what I miss a lot.  And family, of course. 

AM:  Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things about the cycle of life is, you know, that family that you grew up with, you know, mostly gone, but then it’s replaced by all these new people, and it’s —

BG:  Yeah. I’m accepting of that. 

AM:  What do you think awaits us?  

BG:  Well, nothing.  Nothing. I admit that I lost my faith some time ago. And it was very rewarding and rich for me.  It really was.  But I’ve lost it all and when I go I go and I don’t expect to see mom and dad and my brothers and others.  I don’t think — that’s what I think.  I respect everybody else, even in my family, that they believe in that; I just don’t any longer.  

AM:   Yeah. What do you think changed over the years, just —

BG:  I do recall when I came home from the University of Michigan, my father was not happy with some of the things I was talking about because I was even then talking about agnostic-type things and he didn’t make me happy anyway.  I came back to the faith.  But it bothered me deeply within the Catholic church about what was going on among the priesthood and the acceptance of it by the hierarchy of the church. And I just went downhill from that. 

AM:  In a YouTube video that I watched, you say “most families don’t have what we have.”  What do you mean by that?

BG:  Not like most families.  We’re going to visit Uncle John and the kids roll their eyes and say, do we have to?  Not our family.  We look forward to – I mean, to them, finding their own peers within the family and that’s beautiful.  And as I have suggested to them, we have it, it’s going for us, and shame on you guys if you ever lose it. 

AM:  OK, Shayne asks:  What job or profession do you wish you had maybe gone into?

BG:  It’s said that there are two kinds of people in business, or two kinds of personalities:  the engineer and the salesman.  Now, what they’re really trying to say is that there are two kinds of people and they are either thing-oriented or people-oriented.  And I wandered into – we are oftentimes pawns when we get through with school; you think you know what you’re doing or maybe you don’t even know what you’re doing.  But in any case, you end up some place and you may spend – most people actually spend the rest of their life in that kind of a direction. When I look back at who I am and the things I enjoy doing, I probably should have been an engineer, and even though I’ve done pretty well, I learned – remember, I told you I had a problem early on – I learned how to deal with people and I was very successful at it.  But I think I probably would have been a great industrial engineer, which would include robotics and improving how you build an automobile.  I think I would have been good at it.  We didn’t even know what robots were then, or computers, really.  Right?

AM:  Although you got a jump-start on the computer age.  (Laughs.)

BG:  Yes, I did.  Yes, I did. Yeah. I was there way at the beginning.  As a matter of fact, I had submitted – I don’t think I ever thought about this in a long time – I submitted a computer program to the U.S. Navy that probably got me a couple promotions dealing with how to intercept a submarine at sea with a computer.  The only problem was at that time the computer would have been as big as the ship.  (Laughs.)  So it didn’t have any application in that sense. Yeah.

AM:  You know, I mentioned that Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn movie “The Desk Set” the other day –  

BG:  Yeah, you did.  

AM:  – which was an early computer movie, and you know, in that movie everyone felt very threatened by the computer, everyone in this company, and in the end, the computer failed and humanity “won.”  (Laughs.)

BG:  Oh, yeah?  OK. 

AM:  And I was actually wondering, back when you first were dealing with these big, hulking computers, was there anxiety among people, like, in the office and that sort of thing?

BG:  I don’t think so.  Actually, if they were there, they just had jobs generated from the computer.  It’s not the people who were going to be displaced.  But haven’t we learned that there was plenty – it created more jobs probably than it ever lost.  It’s like the old story about the guy with the buggy whip – right? – when automobiles came along.  Yeah. We have another future problem ahead of us – it’s already started – with the driverless automobile.  I mean, we’ve already – when we came into Chicago a couple weeks ago, there are virtually no taxi cabs down there; they’re all Uber, and they’re all going to be displaced within five years with driverless cars.  

AM:  Yeah. Yeah, you know, actually, when you were just saying that computers have created obviously many jobs, I was going to say it seems like we’re getting to a point now where the returns are not going to be as –

BG:  You mean in employment opportunities?

AM:  Yeah.  

BG:  Yeah, I agree.  Yeah.  Yeah.   Yeah.

AM:  Yeah, where jobs that we never thought were going to be replaced could be replaced. 

BG:  Yeah, yeah, and that’s happening.  I went out to the airport and at the United terminal there are maybe 50 of these little ATM machines there where you check in.  Every one of those was a middle-class job, the people helping you get your tickets.  Every one of them, and they’re working 24 hours a day.  In that one room, I looked at there’s 50 jobs gone – oh, no, it’s more than 50 jobs, because those people only worked eight hours and they probably work 16 hours.  There’s a hundred jobs gone right there. It’s happening in every city in the United States, yeah, all of which are being displaced.  They got 2 million truck drivers will be out of work five years from now and there’s fewer and fewer places for the uneducated or less educated people to do that.

AM:  Yeah, you’re really imperiled if you don’t have the education.  

BG:  Absolutely.   Absolutely. And there’s no place – I don’t want to say – I never try to use the word always or never – right? – but there’s millions of people and there’s no place for them anymore, other than in domestic help and personal health assistance and things like that, but – and so we’re looking at a big problem.  And the only thing we can do is to ultimately reduce the number of hours, but I remember them going through that 40 years ago thinking that people are getting laid off and there’s no room for them and we’re going to talk about a 30-hour week.  It never happened.  We’re working harder in the United States than most people are in most parts of the world. 

AM:  Well, I think we’re down to just the last couple of questions.  I’ve got here a question from the family.

BG: Sure.

AM: Quinn asks: What is the meaning behind your full name?

BG: Robert is a family name — lot of Roberts and Michaels and names like that.  The Edward – I didn’t realize this until much later.  I told you that her father was an Englishman, but our family was considered to be Irish, which it really was.  But if looked at the four children, I’m Edward; one was – took her maiden name, Spencer; third one is Elizabeth, and the fourth is Anne.   They’re all English royalty names.  That’s all I can tell you.  I expect that it was my mother’s way of expressing that part of our family.   

AM:  Here’s a question from Lara: What is one thing from your childhood that you want your grandchildren to experience? 

BG:  I’ll have to think about that for a minute. I suppose that it begins with that experience in high school when we’re trying to find ourselves, but the real lesson was one that I’ve already conveyed to you — when I went off to Michigan a couple years later, when I saw what was going on and it changed me overnight, and I guess the lesson would be to never underestimate what you’re capable of, to not be reluctant to challenge yourself and to go for it.  Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a life lesson. Yeah.

AM:  Or as Nike might say, “Just do it.” 

BG:  Just do it! And if there’s anything that I have regretted in my life, and there are several and it continues to plague me and that’s what keeps me so willing to be a risk taker and do these things because I know that if I don’t do it, I will regret it for the rest of my life, whatever it is.  And I’ve got some of those things that I look back at, and that’s a fact. So —

AM: Well, I certainly enjoyed this and I hope that —

BG:  Yeah, this is an interesting opportunity.  And my daughter has been after me for years to do this – years.  And I got that – having the voice recorded lends a dimension to it that’s irreplaceable.  I have a little maybe a five-minute clip of my own father and mother on separate occasions and he’s just saying, “Well, son” – (laughs) – it was that kind of a thing.  But I cherish it.  Yeah, so I’m happy to give them this opportunity to keep me around for longer than I am.  

AM:  Well, there was that question that someone asked earlier, what do people take for granted, you know, younger people today –

BG:  Oh, yeah.

AM:  — and you answered it, but I think one thing that, you know, whatever generation it is this is always going to be true, is that younger generations are always going to kind of take for granted just the value of life and how short our time can be.  And that’s one of the things that you start to really gain as you do grow older.  For example, when I turned 50, you know, I think even before that I was having a lot of thoughts of, you know, this — when I was 20 it seemed like I had forever in front of me, and now that I’m 50, OK, it’s not forever; it’s still a few decades, I hope, but you know, just that sense of we’re here and let’s really make the most of every day.

BG:  Yeah.  Good point.  When you’re a child, remember you said that I’m 10 and a half years old — (laughs) — and it seemed like forever to get from the fifth to the sixth grade. 

AM:  Or through December to get to Christmas.  (Laughs.)

BG:  Yeah, yeah, right.  Yeah.  Yeah. 

AM:  Do you ever think about living to 100 —

BG:  Yeah.

AM:  — and whether you would like to?  Because my grandmother, for example, said – I would say to her, well, I hope you live to 100, and she would say I hope I don’t!  

BG:  My mother said when she was about 90 — she died when she was 92 — she said, what am I here for?  Her life had become so simple and unsatisfying, I guess, that she was ready. I am nowhere near that and Peggy keeps me that way too.  And so I’m enjoying life.  I am in no hurry to get beyond it.  

AM:  Yeah. Well, I wish you both good health and a long life ahead of you.  

BG:  Thank you.  

AM:  Thank you.

BG:  OK, done deal, man. (Laughs.) All right, Andy.

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