The Weight of Being a Role Model

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to write about George. He said many things to me in our decades’ long relationship, but the one I remember most was this: “I never asked to be anyone’s role model.”

Everyone looked up to George. A former priest, he’d become an engine of anti-poverty research and program development. He went everywhere with his shirttail hanging out, a Marlboro between his lips. His office was tiny, made smaller by the enormous stacks of books and papers, a typewriter sat on a metal stand with wheels. There was his desk and an office chair and then a single straight-backed chair for visitors. That’s where I sat while he told me what was what. I had never met anyone like George – tireless, principled, totally committed to the war on poverty, personally committed, like that was his life.

George hired me when I was a graduate student. He immediately gave me a project that was way beyond my ability, teaming me up with a Black Korean War veteran who accused me of hating veterans because I had probably been against the Vietnam War. We were to write a proposal together, requesting funds from the National Presbytery to support a local Black veterans association, and then we were to travel to Kentucky or Tennessee, I can’t remember, and make the pitch in person. I can’t remember ever being so scared. I hadn’t worked for George for more than a month at that point.

He believed in leapfrogging. Or maybe a better word is slingshotting. Or catapulting. There were too many places for George to be, too many projects, too many ways to fight poverty, so everybody had to be enlisted whether they were ready or not. I was newly divorced, had a small child, could barely make rent, and had no idea what I was doing. So, he sent me to represent the Black veterans, and after that, he told me to plan a conference on desegregating the Milwaukee Public Schools. And because he made these assignments knowing I was incompetent and knowing I was likely to fail, and because he had a wildly misplaced faith in me, I worshipped him.

We worked together on an off for many years. I went off and got a Ph.D., ran my own business, worked for local government, and actually became very competent. Our last stint together occurred at the same anti-poverty agency where we began as a team. I’d come back because of my nearly unquestioned loyalty to George. But by then, the organizational environment had grown complex, competitive, and often toxic. He became the leader of the organization, sometimes making compromises and taking positions that seemed incongruous with the George I’d known as a graduate student.

He’d stand in the doorway of my office and tell me what he planned to do. I wasn’t a graduate student anymore. I was a member of the executive team, part of the management of a very large organization but I still looked to him to be the moral compass for the organization. At one crucial point, I said, “George, you can’t do that. People look up to you.” And that’s when he responded, “I never asked to be anyone’s role model.” He said this knowing that he was my role model. It felt like he was resigning from the position.

That was the end of worshipping. That wasn’t a bad thing, but it was an important thing. A thing to remember all these many years later.

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Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash