My mother was born in 1902 in Bkassine, a small village in the mountains of south central Lebanon. Her father, Ameen Saad, and his wife, Hilda, already had three children—Marium, Rose, and Tamem—when Hilda again became pregnant. Ameen desperately wanted a boy. Disappointed at the birth of his fourth daughter, he called it quits, so he named his fourth daughter Mintaha, “the end” in Arabic. Hilda died soon thereafter, and Ameen took a second wife. The oldest daughter, Marium, married a man named Thomas Boles and had a daughter, Eugenie. Tom and Marium decided to emigrate to the United States, and, as was common at the time, they left their daughter behind until they could establish themselves. In 1920, by now settled in Waterville, they sent for her. Eugenie was nine years old and could not make the trip alone, so Mintaha was chosen to accompany her. She was eighteen and had never before left Lebanon. She could not read, speak, or understand a word of English.
Mintaha and Eugenie traveled first to Marseilles, then made their way to Paris. According to Eugenie, who later described the trip to my sister and brother Paul, one purpose of the trip was for my mother to meet a prospective husband for an arranged marriage; the man was a Lebanese immigrant living in Paris where he was a practicing dentist. After the meeting, Mintaha and Eugenie traveled to Le Havre, where on June 5, 1920, they boarded the SS Leopoldina, arriving in New York eleven days later, two of 1,169 immigrants on board, part of the human tide that passed through Ellis Island. But Mintaha did not return to Paris as planned, and she never again lived in Lebanon. She did not tell Eugenie what happened at that meeting in Paris, but based on her later life and words, it’s clear that all along what she wanted was to get to America, where she would join her sisters and be free to make her own decisions. Soon after she got to Maine she became Mary, and she stayed.
After arriving in Waterville and moving in with her sister and brother-in-law, Mary found work as a dishwasher in a local restaurant. But she soon learned the trade she would ply for the rest of her working life. Throughout central Maine textile mills were running around the clock, spinning out thousands of yards of cotton and woolen goods. In the previous half century they had become, in the aggregate, the largest employer in the state, hiring thousands of immigrants. By all accounts Mary became a skilled weaver. For several decades she worked the night shift, from eleven o’clock in the evening until seven in the morning. The textiles mills of the time were noisy, the clatter of the looms so deafening that conversation was impossible. The air inside the mill was hot and heavy, dense with suffocating lint that filled the workers’ lungs, hair, nostrils, and ears and covered their clothing. The floors were slick with many years’ accumulation of lubricating oil, so the workers shuffled around, their feet always in contact with the floor so as not to slip. It was (and still is, although conditions in modern mills are much improved, particularly the reduction of lint) hot, hard, demanding work. Mary did it for most of her adult life so her children would never have to.
My father was born in 1900 in Boston. Known as “Baby Joe,” he was the youngest son of Irish immigrants. He never knew his parents and was raised in an orphanage in Boston. It was common practice at the time for the nuns who operated the orphanage to take the children on weekends to Catholic churches throughout northern New England. After Mass the children were lined up in the front of the church. Any person attending Mass who wanted to adopt a child could do so simply by taking one by the hand and walking out. In that way, when he was four years old, my father was adopted by an elderly, childless couple from Bangor, John and Mary Mitchell.
The Mitchells had emigrated from their native Lebanon to Egypt, where they lived for several years before coming to the United States. Once here they assumed their new surname. So when they walked out of a Bangor church after Mass on a Sunday in 1904, Baby Joe became George Mitchell. Soon after, the family moved to Waterville, fifty-five miles southwest of Bangor, where they operated a small store in the Head of Falls. George attended a parochial elementary school where many of the students were of French ancestry, and he soon learned their language. But his childhood was short; he left school after the fourth grade to begin a long life of hard work and low wages.
In his early teens he went to the Portland area, where he worked as a laborer on the railroad. From there he traveled to northern Maine to find work as a logger. Despite his lack of formal education he was an avid reader. A friend of his told my sister about one of their early trips into the woods. It was a cold winter. They took the train to Farmington, about thirty miles to the northwest of Waterville. From the station they walked several miles through the snow into the woods to a logging camp. Throughout the trip young George struggled with two large suitcases. One of them was especially heavy because, as his friend learned when they unpacked, it was full of books. The loggers slept in a big one-room building that held about sixty men. Near the center of the building was a large opening in the ceiling for ventilation. Because my father was one of the youngest men, he got the least desirable bunk: an upper, right under what his friend called “the big hole in the ceiling.” There he spent a miserable winter, working all day, cold and coughing all night. No wonder he so much enjoyed being a janitor in his later years. At least then he was inside, keeping warm.
Sometime between 1920 and 1924 George Mitchell and Mary Saad met, fell in love, and married. I was born on August 20, 1933, the fourth of their five children.
My mother worked at several mills in central Maine. Despite the strenuous demands of working all night in a textile mill, she was home in time to get us off to school and be ready with supper when we returned home. After putting us to bed in the evening, she left for work. She slept briefly during the day, but to her children she seemed tireless and energetic, full of life and love. My father worked too, of course, but in the manner of the time, his working day ended when he got home. For my mother home was another workplace; she cooked, cleaned, and did the wash, the daily shopping, and many other chores. She often must have been exhausted, and surely she complained in private. But none of that was apparent to her children. To us she was always there, always ready, always supportive, always loving. She was a strong and very determined woman and she knew how to enforce discipline in her children, but it was always within a context of such total love, and often good humor, that it was impossible to feel put upon or to doubt her good intentions. She was the most impressive and influential person in my life.
My mother could not read or write English and spoke with a thick accent, mispronouncing words and fracturing sentences. She especially had trouble with the “th” sound, so smooth came out as “smool” and thirty as “sirty.” When any of us kidded her about it, she would laughingly mispronounce the words even worse, for comic effect. She loved to cook and did so constantly. I can still recall the warm smell of freshly baked bread; it filled the house, sweeter than the most expensive perfume.
My mother was raised in a society in which hospitality to guests is mandatory and she carried that practice to an extreme. Every person who entered our home was required to sit and have a meal, no matter the time of day. She simply would not take no for an answer. The most modest offering—the last resort for those not able to eat a full meal—was freshly baked bread and coffee. So the plumber, the electrician, the family doctor—all sat at our kitchen table and ate and ate, until they could eat no more. I remember the plumber saying that he made a mistake on his first visit to our house because he came just after lunch; he was full, so he couldn’t eat much. He never made that mistake again, always arriving in the late morning or late afternoon.
She also welcomed complete strangers into her kitchen. One year, two young men rented an apartment in the rear of a neighbor’s house. They were Mormons, performing their service to their faith. Unluckily for them, the poor immigrant families in our neighborhood, most of them French or Lebanese, were deeply dedicated Catholics, so there were no converts. When the two young missionaries first visited our home, my mother understood their purpose, but couldn’t comprehend their arguments. That made no difference to her. She sat them at the kitchen table and fed them a full, warm meal. As they left, she invited them to return, which they did. Their visits became regular and more frequent and a ritual developed—they talked about religion, which she ignored, and she talked about food, which they ate. Consistent with her belief that everyone is a good person, she liked and admired them. Once, when my father criticized our town’s newly elected Republican mayor, my mother reproached him, saying, “He’s a good person.”
“How do you know that?” my father asked.
“Because I see him at Mass on Sunday,” she answered. To her, that was proof enough.
She was totally devoted to her husband, but her dependence on him did not become evident until after his death, when it became clear that life had been taken from her too. She began to shrink, physically and mentally. She became irritable and unpredictable. Worst of all, my mother, who had been so open, warm, and trusting, became mistrustful. Within a few years she had to enter a nursing home. There, despite good and warm care, she declined rapidly. Seeing her near the end—pale, eyes shut tight, murmuring incoherently—was the most painful experience of my life, far more painful than her death. Gradually that image has faded and I recall the strong woman of my youth, looking across the table at me and saying, laughing as she spoke, “You want to grow up strong and smart? Drink this goat’s milk and do your homework!” She was worried about my lack of size and strength and believed that goat’s milk would help me grow faster. It became a standing joke in our family: if I succeeded in anything—a good test score in school; getting a law degree; becoming a federal judge; entering the Senate—it was the goat’s milk!
For many years my father worked as a laborer at a division of the local utility company. In 1950 the utility discontinued the division and he lost his job. The ensuing crisis nearly destroyed him. He was fifty years old and had worked steadily since he was ten. For nearly a year he was out of work. My mother’s income barely supported us. As the year stretched on, my father’s depression intensified and his mood darkened. I was sixteen, in my last year in high school. Immature, insensitive to the poison of despair that was consuming him, I didn’t comprehend what my father was going through. We argued often, to my mother’s dismay. He tried very hard, but he couldn’t get a job, and each failure drove the downward cycle of despair and deepened his loss of self-esteem. It was by far the worst year of my life. After months of discord we were both emotionally worn out, and a gloomy, sullen silence descended on us. He withdrew even deeper into himself and seemed to physically shrink as well. For a long time we didn’t speak. Our eyes rarely met. Finally, just as his self-esteem had all but vanished, he found a job as a janitor at Colby College in Waterville. For him, and for our family, it was a life-saving reprieve.
To this day I have difficulty restraining my anger when I hear someone engage in blanket condemnation of the unemployed. Having lived through the tragedy of unemployment, I know that most of those out of work would prefer to be working. Yet without precisely saying so, the message of many who seek to exploit the issue is to the contrary: they’re lazy, dependent, and don’t want to work. Those critics without any conscience equate all of the unemployed with welfare cheats. Whenever I hear such remarks, I angrily think (and often, if the situation permits, say), “My father wasn’t like that. He wanted to work, he tried very hard to find a job, and I’m sure that most of those who are out of work now are like him. They are human beings, many of them living through the despair and the wrenching and soul-killing loss of self-esteem that nearly destroyed my father.”
Fortunately Colby College needed a janitor. It didn’t seem like much of a job, but it suited my father. He loved books and magazines, so just being at an institution of higher learning all day was a pleasure for him. His intelligence was soon recognized and he was put in charge of all the janitors and maids and then of most of the grounds crew as well. As a result he thoroughly enjoyed the last fifteen years of his working life, even though he earned very little money during that time.
I learned from my father’s experience that there is dignity in every human being and in every form of work. My father took pride in his work as a janitor and as a groundskeeper. He brought excellence to the job, which in turn gave him back his dignity and self-esteem. In fact it saved his life. Once he started to work at Colby, his despair gradually gave way to optimism. After a year of slouching and stooping he stood straight again. The mist vanished from his blue eyes and they regained their sparkle. The difficult times were fewer and fewer and finally disappeared. He again laughed and joked and took an interest in what and how I was doing. I felt as though we had come out of a long dark tunnel into bright sunshine.
Although he was not a learned man, when my father became interested in a subject, he pursued it avidly. Perhaps because he could rarely travel, he was fascinated by geography. I can still recall as a small boy sitting with him at the kitchen table, poring over maps of the world. There I first learned about the Alps and the Himalayan Mountains; the Nile, the Amazon, and the great rivers of Russia; the Straits of Magellan and Malacca. Because of him I became interested in the subject. After he retired from Colby, and for the next seven years until his death, whenever I returned to Waterville to visit, I prepared a geography quiz for him. I studied maps and atlases, trying to stump him. But I never did. I remember clearly the quiz I gave him on my last visit before his sudden death in July 1972. I asked him three questions, of increasing difficulty: Which country has the most cities with a population of more than one million? How many such cities are there in that country? Name them. Without hesitation he answered: China (obviously); fourteen (not so obvious); and then, methodically, with brief pauses, Peking, Shanghai, Canton, Chungking, Mukden, and so on down the list. Perfect! I told him I’d stump him the next time. We both laughed, and he gave me a long, close hug when I left to return to Washington. I never saw him alive again.
My parents knew little of history or political science, but they understood the meaning of America because they valued freedom and opportunity. They conveyed their values to their children by example more than by words. Though it was not often expressed aloud, their message was clear. Their values were simple, universal in reach, and enduring in strength: faith, family, work, country. My mother’s faith was total and unquestioning, an integral part of her life. After she stopped working, she attended church every day. But her faith involved more than ritual, more than just listening to the gospel or reciting it; it meant living its message in daily life. She integrated faith, love, and charity into a life of meaning, even though she lacked education, wealth, or status. Often in my life, when facing a difficult challenge, I, with my college and law school degrees, tried to figure out what my mother would do. She had more common sense and good moral judgment than anyone I’ve ever known.
My parents’ commitment to family was deep and unwavering. Nothing came before their children. Ever. My father’s goal in life was to see that all of his children graduated from college. And we all did. By current standards we were poor, but we never felt poor; we lived the way everyone we knew lived. Not once, ever, did we go hungry; our home never lacked heat in the winter; though there were lots of hand-me-downs we were always adequately dressed. To us it was a normal life: family, church, school, work, sports.