News |

VALUES

Jackie Mueller’s mother gathered the neighborhood boys, a butch-cut group of young lads who wore hand-me-down blue jeans and T-shirts. Mrs. Mueller’s mission was simple–build her wheelchair-bound son, Jackie, a swimming pool.

Mrs. Mueller’s will in these regards was notorious. After all, it was she who took a sledgehammer to their two-bedroom house while her husband toiled as a local bank teller. Her expansion plans were revealed to her husband only when he arrived home and saw a gaping hole in an outside wall.

So the neighborhood boys, who ranged in age from 8 to 16, grabbed shovels and, as true believers in the powers of Mrs. Mueller, began digging a swimming pool.

For days they toiled as Jackie, a victim of muscular dystrophy, played the role of project manager and supervised their digging. The lads’ fathers would finish the work, supplying the carpentry, concrete and fences to complete the pool for Jackie’s therapy.

This was Bob Dole’s Kansas. The one he talked about last month when he ridiculed Hillary Rodham Clinton’s view that it takes a village to raise a child.

The problem for Dole is that he still believes those Kansas neighborhoods exist. The problem for the Democrats is they talk like it can be replaced with something else.

The neighborhood where Jackie Mueller grew up, until his death at age 16, wasn’t much different from the Russell, Kan., neighborhood Dole came back to with war injuries.

It was the mid-1950s in a semirural area of Kansas City, Kan. It was a working-class neighborhood where, if you were lucky, your husband made $2,000 a year. A mortgage payment was $99 a month. Mothers stayed home with their children.

And the neighbors were more than close friends. They lived and struggled together, sharing their thoughts and the food from their gardens. Hand-me-down clothes went from one family to the next. Men came together to perform construction projects on the homes.

On certain days, numerous families would gather to share meals in back yards during the humid Kansas summers.

Jackie Mueller was always at the epicenter. Not because he was wheelchair-bound, but because he had a certain power to bring everyone together for the common good and because his powers of persuasion were more adept than any Baptist minister.

If Jackie wanted a trip to the drug store soda foundation, the gang would push his wheelchair to the Kinney’s, about a mile away. If he wanted a log cabin to play in, the scruffy boys built one. When he wanted to play hide-and-seek, someone was always his escort.

At the center of his world was a sandbox, where the neighborhood kids gathered to brag, get dirty and pass the time.

Jackie was convinced that one could climb to the top, and with the aid of an umbrella, float gently to the ground. After all he had seen it on television.

So Mike Nowak climbed to its apex, opened the umbrella, and leaped into the sky. He suffered a broken ankle, but the fall didn’t destroy his confidence in Jackie.

Those 1950s values have disappeared like teenage innocence. Partisan political talk isn’t going to revive it.

Most Americans no longer have that neighborhood esprit de corps. Forget those annual block parties where everyone stumbles out to frolic within barricaded streets.

Most of us are lucky if we even know our neighbors.

We are lucky if we even talk to our neighbors and know who they are, let alone share our inner-most thoughts or work together to rebuild our homes.

Working mothers leave their children with child-care providers. Commute times and working hours have grown to where families spend less time with each other.

So to the politicians, repeat after me: “There’s no place like home anymore. There’s no place like home anymore.”