The Drekmeier family appreciates the assistance of Don Kazak in writing Charles’ memoir. Below is the Prelude, and a link to a full PDF of the memoir.
Prelude
On the eve of my 90th birthday, I would like to think that the “answer” and the question of my coming of age have combined. That together we are making a world in which freedom of expression and the personalities in which they find expression meld with the satisfactions that come with communal associations as we come to learn about all that we have in common and stand to gain from this commitment to keeping the planet alive.
The “drugstore days,” during which I learned so much about individual enterprise and also about cut-throat competition, have sustained me in ways I don’t wish to derogate. But the florescence of the business mentality, the “art of the deal,” the manipulation of marketing and all the rest of what I learned about drug pricing may have contributed to the values of the “founders” at one time. But no more.
And I deplore the columnists in daily newspapers who, in their turn, deplore the present ambiguities of “the system” without sticking their necks out and locating the incongruities in liberal democracies’ coziness with capitalistic self-promotional greed. We’re smart enough to know that we’re in this boat together, but not smart enough to give up our privilege among those who wish to identify with the downtrodden but not enough to make the sacrifice that honest empathy requires.
A memoir can sometimes be a stodgy thing. More often than not when the performer isn’t intimately known. Then, too, “intimacy” and other of our most interesting parts, are often omitted. Which may be just as well because when one bravely chooses to “tell all,” the actual relating of such has mysteriously lost its pizazz. Of course, we don’t want to offend the reader – some of whom may be unknown to us and may represent values and even perceptions that we cannot anticipate.
And so, we walk on stilts and the result is stilted. We are listening to imagined voices, including our own. There are also temptations to stretch the facts and other “truths” to make things interesting. Like the lineage attributed to one’s parents: was it Mark Twain who described himself as coming from “poor but dishonest folks”?
As the curtain goes up on what follows we meet my parents and theirs. There was actually an unusual beginning. My mother and father were born on the same day of the same year, March 23, 1898. That may have also been a notable year – the country readying its colonial career – but the coincidental birth continued as a reminder that even in small-town Wisconsin there can be what we all saw as a minor miracle. My father, always prepared for opportunity, decided he was the younger of the two and thus entitled to special treatment.
In 1927, between the First World War and the Great Depression, “Showboat” landed on Broadway, Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris after a solo flight across the Atlantic, and I landed in a Wisconsin hospital an hour before dawn on a 100-degree day in September.
What follows is dedicated to my parents, who made these pages possible.
Download the full PDF: Charles Drekmeier Memoir
Charles Drekmeier
September 10, 1927 – August 25, 2020
Prelude – 2
1: Family – 4
2: Growing Up – 14
3: The University of Chicago & Madison – 21
4: The Army – 25
5: Return to Madison – 30
6: Europe – 34
7: Columbia University & UW – 43
8: Boston University – 48
9: India – 50
10: Harvard – 63
11: Marrying Margot & Heading West – 70
12: First Years at Stanford – 75
13: Boston, Again – 81
14: Civil Rights, Vietnam, et al – 85
15: The Drekmeier Family Grows – 95
16: Europe with Children – 100
17: Family & Our Mountain Refuge – 106
18: Campus Turmoil – 117
19: Academic Matters – 120
Postlude – 127