The Happy Democrat

by Donna Schoenkopf

I was driving down my gravel country road on my way to the Democratic Club meeting when I saw the mail lady’s car heading toward me. I was wondering if she was new and had gotten lost because she had already passed our little stand of mailboxes, so I slowed down and stopped and rolled down my window to talk to her.

She looked at me inquisitively and said she was looking for Schoenkopf.

“I’m Schoenkopf,” I said cheerfully and she smiled and handed me a square Priority Mail box, very heavy, through the window.

Well, that’s a happy surprise, I thought. She seemed to be as curious as I was as to who had sent it and didn’t drive off immediately so I looked for the return address and told her it was it was from my new friend Sally. The mail lady smiled and said how nice that was and I agreed and because I was cutting it close as far as getting to the meeting, I put the package on the passenger seat and headed off.

I pulled onto Killer Highway 177 and drove through the bright and already hot Saturday morning. Every now and then I’d glance over at the package as I drove. Having to wait to open it only made the whole experience of getting it more exciting.

So who is Sally? And why did she send me a package?

Shall I begin at the beginning? It’s as a good a place as any. To do this we shall go back in time.

I am eighteen years old, fresh out of Shawnee High School. It is 1961. I am a brand new freshman at Oklahoma Baptist University, our local branch of higher education. I am sitting in class. There are large, south facing windows, filling the room with light. We are on the second floor. It is a government class.

The professor is Corbitt Rushing. He has a friendly demeanor and a witty style, and is very smart. Nobody is bored in that class. There is discussion and banter. There are principles explained and debated. Think Golden Age of Greece, Shawnee, Oklahoma style.

(I MUST digress here. Did you know that these days it is considered VERY bad manners to speak out in class? What a foolish, foolish place we’ve come to in this culture. No discussion? THAT’S what makes education exciting and meaningful! But back to the matter at hand.)

Corbitt Rushing was a lefty. And a sharp intellect. And a beacon in the wilderness. And a hope to mankind.

I suppose I should have had a romantic crush on him. I certainly have had them in my later years in college. But I did not—not in the classic sense. What happened with me was the thrill, the THRILL, of thinking and ideas and connections happening in my head.

Every one of us in that room felt the same thing. Not all of us agreed with each other, but we all felt part of the discussion and the discovery of thought. Those were the days that set me on the path of politics—life-giving, raucous, joyous, POLITICS.

Time passed. Changes happened, forks in the road carried me out of Oklahoma to New York and then to California. I had marriages and divorces and kids and eventually a life as a teacher, which led to retirement and the path back to Oklahoma on thirteen beautiful acres, to my wonderful Housie, doing whatever I damn well felt like doing. And because I lived alone far from the crowd, I had been drawn more and more into my computer in order to keep my connection to humanity.

(When I’m on the computer I imagine myself as a cell in the Body of Man, feeling the chemical impulse of the synapses between me and the other cells in the Body. Connections, connections.)

So ...

There I was messing around on Facebook a few weeks ago when I began an offhand conversation, I don’t remember what it was or with whom, but I had probably made one of my thoughtless offhand comments that I don’t seem able to keep myself from making and it was probably political, because that’s the kind of person I am. A woman I didn’t know responded that she agreed. That, in itself, was pretty interesting. She seemed to know some of my old Oklahoma friends from days gone by. She was smart and funny and she liked what I said about things and I liked what she said about things and then, over the course of a couple of weeks, we began to find so many connections between us that it began to be truly bizarre.

The first thing that jolted me was that her dad was Corbitt Rushing. Corbitt Rushing.

Well.

No wonder.

Her take on politics was mine. I knew what she meant about things. Her heroes were my heroes.

Now here is where I make my confession.

In our conversations she mentioned that she had read something I had written about tort reform and that she had liked it so much that she had shown it to her husband, a fabulous labor attorney. (How cool is THAT! My two favorite things, unions and attorneys. I regularly have fights with people about politics being noble and attorneys being the one group of people who protects our civil rights.) But, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember ever writing anything about tort reform.

Did I say this to Sally? Did I tell her that I thought she was mistaken? No. I just accepted her compliments and acted like I knew what she was talking about. I kept trying to remember writing anything like it.

So now, I confess to you, my new friend, Sally, I don’t know if I ever wrote the words you thought I wrote.

So. On with the story. Because there is more.

It turns out that we both loved men who were brothers. They were our first loves. We never knew about each other.

We both have been really active politically in marches and protests and pushing to make things right.

She described herself as spunky. To me that is the one true quality that makes things move. A person with high energy AND courage (which to me means spunky) changes things.

I thought about all this as I drove over to the Democratic Club meeting. I still hadn’t opened the box. I was running a tad late, so I figured I would quietly open it at the meeting.

When I entered the room the meeting was just getting started, so I began opening the box quietly at my table. Then, as though on cue, just as I began pulling things out of the box, our illustrious chair announced that our dear darling Democratic Club had just gotten a donation (a goodly one) from, you guessed it, Sally! And Sally was giving it to us in her father’s name, the one, the only, Corbitt Rushing! People at the meeting began talking excitedly about him and how they had either had a class with him or that they knew him socially and they all liked him and held him in great esteem and fondness.

By now the package was open. And I began to pull things out. On top was a beautifully hand written card. Green ink. The letters of the words perfectly, artistically formed, her language friendly and generous and exuberant.

There were scanned pictures of her grown siblings, her dad, her children and their families. There was a picture of her in a fur coat at an “Out of Iraq” protest in 2003, carrying a sign. She looks fabulous. She had handwritten on the picture: “Important advice: NEVER, EVER wear a fur coat to a protest rally. (Even if you bought it 2nd hand for $50 and it’s 1,000 degrees below zero—don’t do it.) I laugh out loud.

There was a picture of her in the 1970s, standing with a black man. The picture ran on the front page of a North Carolina newspaper years ago. It has an iconic appeal. He’s signing her petition. She’s young and blonde and pretty. He’s handsome, in a suit with vest, his hair afro style.

Yeah. Very cool.

And there, on the bottom of the box, are three, count ’em, THREE Molly Ivins books.

All this stuff is on the table in front of me as people are talking about Corbitt Rushing. Eventually I raise my hand to tell everybody that I had just gotten this package from Sally, Corbitt’s daughter, and that I’d like to share something from the package. It’s a picture of a tombstone. It reads:

BILL KUGLE

JAN. 20, 1925 - DEC. 27, 1992

HE NEVER VOTED FOR REPUBLICANS

AND HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH THEM

Everyone erupted with laughter. That picture summarized something Corbitt Rushing told us all those years ago—that people who say they voted for the person and not the party were deluding themselves, because no one can know what’s truly in a person’s heart, but we CAN know what party they belong to. And this one fact is what tells us what their values are.

The meeting adjourned soon after on a happy note.

And now as I sit here in my Housie writing this, my eye falls again on the card she sent. The one written with the green ink and beautiful penmanship.

She’s signed it,

“Sally Rushing Collins—The Happy Democrat.”

And she is.

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