Claiborne Pell lived in a waterfront house in Newport, R.I. The Princeton-educated senator came from such old money that his people once owned much of New York’s Westchester County and the Bronx.
Among my favorite tales told about the quirky politician was the time he dispatched an aide to buy him some emergency rainwear. When the aide rushed back with galoshes from Thom McAn, Senator Pell remarked: “Well, do tell Mr. McAn that I am much obliged to him.”
I grew up in a roach-ridden house. When it rained a lot, a sticky mildew seeped through my bedroom walls. I could have used a pair of Thom McAn’s myself.
Pell and I didn’t seem to inhabit the same universe. But when I learned of his death on January 1 at the age of 90, I gave thanks — again — for our unlikely link.
I am descended from a long line of renters and house painters in small-town Ohio, men who pissed away their paychecks in VFW bars on Friday afternoons. Not a senator in the bunch. My mom finished high school, but my dad dropped out in the seventh grade. The only Princeton my people knew about was a small city in the neighboring state of West Virginia — not that our car could ever make it that far.
The first time I heard about Pell Grants, I was a high-school senior. A clueless guidance counselor had assumed I would go to college because my grades were good.
But college was out of the question; no one in my family had ever gone. My people worried about heating bills and repo men, not college-savings plans.
The guidance counselor finally noticed my holey Chuck Taylors and handed me a stack of financial-aid forms. I applied to exactly one college — Bowling Green State University, about two hours away — because I had a friend there who said the parties were great and he’d show me around so I wouldn’t feel out of place.
It didn’t matter. When I arrived at college, in 1982 — on a full menu of Pell Grants and other need-based aid — I felt like a food-stamp recipient at Whole Foods.
But I got over it. And, like tens of millions of other promising poor kids who hit the lottery the minute they plunk their duct-taped suitcases down in their dorms, I thrived.
Fifteen years later, I was a married homeowner with two sons and two college degrees. During the day, I wrote newspaper articles and essays, and at night I taught remedial writing to community-college students. Most were first-generation college students and Pell Grant holders, including a 40-year-old mechanic who didn’t know to put periods at the end of his sentences. “If I get me a computer, won’t that put in all the periods for me?” he asked.
My students made me realize the enduring importance of need-based aid, something I began to write passionately about, including for this publication. The Christian Science Monitor called me “Pell’s poster child.”
I spoke at events honoring the retired senator in 1999 and the following year led a College Board conference panel about how to get more poor kids on the college-prep track. To help me prepare for that, the College Board had sent me to interview the senator in his understated, elegant home in Rhode Island.
I wanted to understand how the Northeastern blue blood had pulled off the radical idea of making college accessible to all. I wanted to know how the polite senator had bulldogged into law the most sweeping aid-to-education bill ever passed.
Pell was 80 at the time and suffering from Parkinson’s disease. His longtime assistant sat next to him and helped translate his warbling speech.
He told me about the winter of 1969, when the solution of how to administer the sliding-scale grant occurred to him — while skiing down a mountain in the Swiss Alps. He sketched his idea for a formula on a ski-lodge place mat: Needy students would be entitled to a set amount of money, minus the amount of federal income tax paid by their parents.
Pell pitched the bill hard on both sides of the aisle, calling it the “GI Bill for everybody.” It was practical, straight-on stuff from a senator previously known for such obscure issues as metric conversion and banning nuclear weapons on the ocean floor.
He spent the next three years of his life bringing those notes to fruition, compromising gracefully but never backing down. Although he ended up forgoing some of the original ski-lodge details to bring the Republicans along, Pell’s brainchild would eventually lead to the creation of what is now the dreaded, 159-question Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known by beleaguered parents of high-school seniors as the Fafsa.
I’m not rich now by any means. But on the night following Pell’s death, I stared into my fireplace and wondered where I’d be without him: scrambling to pay my bills, like so many in my family? Stuck in a bad marriage or an addict?
The year I was born, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote: “At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems — the answer for all the problems of the world — comes to a single word. That word is education.” Call me corny, but it’s a sentiment that still chokes me up.
As our president-elect talks about rebuilding national infrastructures and creating new technologies, I hope that Pell’s promise of an established right to postsecondary education isn’t forgotten. If new ideas are key to buoying our tanking economy, we need to first build an intellectual infrastructure to spark them.
With college tuition increasing at a rate more than double the rise in need-based aid, I have often wondered what would have happened if I’d tried to go to college 20 years later than I did. Ask my mom to cosign for a loan?
It bothered Pell that the grants that bore his name were never given entitlement status. It worried him that grants had taken a back seat to student loans. Pell understood that loans aren’t a substitute for grants for poor kids; they’re barriers. That, to me, was his real legacy: his ability to see beyond his own ZIP code.
He may not have known who or what Thom McAn was, but he could walk a mile in his shoes.
Beth Macy is a journalist in Roanoke, Va.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 19, Page B16