16  My Parents

Although technically the Baby Boom lasted for a few years after I was born, I never felt like a boomer. The “in-between” demographics of my family might explain why.

Both of my parents were born just before World War II, barely. My father, born in March 1940, had just started school when the war ended. When Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941, my mother was not yet a year old. Neither of them remembers the war, except in the inevitable first-hand stories they heard from returning veterans. My grandmother kept wartime ration coupons in an old box she would show us sometimes, like museum pieces.

If the “Baby Boom” is a mindset of children born into a time of a rapidly growing young population, then my parents belong to that generation more than I do. Although their own parents and relatives weren’t themselves returning from WWII, they directly benefited from the American optimism and economic expansion that followed.

Both grew up on dairy farms in north central Wisconsin. As teenagers in the 1950s, they were old enough that they could tease friends who had only recently installed their first telephones, indoor plumbing, or electricity. Although they never flew on an airplane themselves, they knew people who had. They can remember their first TV sets.

16.1 Donald Eugene Sprague, Jr.

My father was an only child, in a rural community in northwestern Wisconsin full of big families. He had many aunts and uncles who bred dozens of cousins, many of them living close enough to play with regularly. Despite that, he remembered his childhood as a lonely time, of a constant struggle to overcome his natural shyness.

The first of his family to attend college, he entered the nearby Eau Claire state college, intending to collect enough units to transfer to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, majoring in engineering. It was at a basketball game during the fall of his sophomore year that he met my mother for the first time.

The two of them saw each other throughout the school year until he left for Madison in the Fall of 1960. But the much bigger campus was a lonely place, and he missed my mother. When he found the engineering classes more challenging than he expected, he dropped out, working part time in a photography studio until the end of the semester.

By winter (early 1961), he was back in Sheldon, continuing to see Patsy Pulokas until they were married in July 1961. “After I was married, I never got less than an A in a class”, he recalls.

Although his mother raised him as an upright Lutheran, he didn’t take his religious upbringing very seriously. Although he was close to his evangelical grandparents, his own father (my grandfather) rarely attended church. It may have been partly due to his lonely time in Madison, partly due to the regular talks with his favorite uncle Art, and partly the result of a young man beginning to take seriously his obligations as an adult, but sometime around then he joined his grandparents and uncle to become a “Born Again Christian”.

He remained an enthusiastic believer for the rest of his life. In fact, I have never met a more sincere, devoted Christian than my father. His religious conviction was the absolute center of everything he did, and in all my years of knowing him, I never once saw him waiver. A devoted student of the Bible, he read, memorized, and prayed over the Scriptures every single day.

In his younger days – though this was before I was old enough to pay attention – he might have lived up to the caricature of an in-your-face evangelizer who requires everyone around him to listen. He genuinely believed the Gospel was the solution to all problems, so naturally he wanted to spread the word. Raised by his mother to be a staid Lutheran, I can imagine he might have over-corrected after converting to become an evangelical early in his 20s.

The man I knew was always polite about his Christianity. Even if at some level he sympathized with those “The End is Nigh” placard-carrying demonstrators you’ll see in urban crowds, he would have thought their approach was counter-productive. My father lived his beliefs, as best he could, through his actions. Living the Christian life wasn’t difficult for him, because at every level, through and through, he believed it.

16.2 Patricia Ann Pulokas

My mother shared many of the same experiences growing up in dairy farm Wisconsin, but as the oldest daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, her family values and expectations were even more traditional than the Spragues.

She attended a one-room school house in elementary school, until middle and high school when her parents enrolled her in St. Hedwig’s Catholic School in nearby Thorp, Wisconsin. Her childhood was typical for farm girls of her time: she assisted her mother with household chores, helped with other farm duties like milking the cows or gathering eggs from the henhouse. She was also expected to be responsible for her younger brother, Paul.

She and her best friend left high school hoping to become flight attendants (called “stewardesses” back then). She failed the height test – at 5’8” she was too tall – but a career was the last thing on her mind when her parents enrolled her at the Eau Claire State Teachers College. In theory this would qualify her to become a schoolteacher – a reasonable and respectable job for a woman – but like all of her friends, her real goal was to find a suitable husband (an “M.R.S. degree”, they quipped).

16.3 Marriage

And so it was that, just after her 20th birthday, my mother was engaged. Married that July, they set out on a life together that by all accounts was perfectly normal.

And it was. That fall they moved into a small apartment off campus, where Mom took care of the cooking and cleaning while Dad finished his degree. Within a few months she was pregnant with my brother – who was born the following Spring.

By today’s standards, they were married at an unimaginably early age, but back then it was normal. My mother had attended as many of her friend’s weddings before she was married as after. Many of her high school friends were mothers by the time she had her first baby.

In fact, if anything the norm was to want to be an adult: to own a car, buy a house, have children. The concept of living as an unmarried single during your 20s would have seemed, well, lonely.

And very quickly, by the time my mother was 25 she already had three children. Nobody was lonely in our family.