Civic Virtue: A Family Value

Mathieus are a fish-eating people. We take our meat from the sea, from Morro Bay oysters to farm tilapia to Maine lobster to Italian anchovies to delicate nori and dashi of Japan. The first meat Lyra ever tasted was her mother’s pan-fried salmon. We both grew up in a little drinking village with a fishing problem where every restaurant except the Chinese place offered clam chowder and the soupe du jour.

I love a good rare steak as much as the next man, and as much as my father does, but we live on the sea.

Mathieus are an educated people. My mother, Nancy Castle, went back to school at 38 after she bore me, and the memories of sitting next to her as we did our homework together are a bulwark of my childhood memories. Her library card was open to me to evade school board censorship. Even my father, Steve Mathieu, a proud working-class hippie who missed his college years counting parts for Control Data, is worshipful of Jack London and a handful of writers of the 60s, and watched my grades like a hawk.

Mathieus are a civic people.

Let me tell you some of our stories and myths, some of the stories we tell to explain who we are. These are the stories I will tell Lyra, to show her what kind of people she comes from.

My grandfather, Miles Castle, came from Queen Victoria’s England. When he acquired an acre of land in Morro Bay, he settled down and built the adobe house my mother grew up in, and I grew up in, and where Lyra goes to play. And he became a fixture of the community – attending St. Peter’s-by-the-Sea with his wife, my uncle, and my mother (who now sits on the vestry board).

He met a local girl, the daughter of California Valley gold miners, Jean Bennett, and married her a month later. She became a librarian in our local public library. That library still stands. Both my parents were Friends of the Library as I grew up.

When I was five years old, I enrolled in preschool, with Teacher Sue. And my father was always there. He was the only father in the PTA in those days, derisively called “Mr. Mom” when he wasn’t driving a tow truck. He was there every recess, assisting in every classroom, putting his directorial talent and his strong back at every event, all my years of grade school. He was a fixture of the school, Mr. Mom. And I’d go home, and sit next to Mum, doing my homework while she did hers.

My mother organized a live chess game at the first Morro Bay Harbor Festival. I do not remember a time when the first weekend in October wasn’t the biggest weekend of the year, with Pops and Mum throwing their all into the event they’d spent six weeks preparing. As I grew older, they became bulwarks of the Car Show in May and the Fourth of July down on the Embarcadero. Because they love Morro Bay, and because it’s a beautiful damn thing to get everyone together for a festival.

When I was six, I helped get out the vote. My parents were out there, offering clipboards and asking people to sign up to exercise their civic right and duty to participate in the city government – where twelve votes, twenty four, or (once) 112 votes decided everything, where every vote counts, even in your city. I was out front, the adorable six-year-old dressed like Uncle Sam, huckstering, calling folks in as they walked into or out of the grocery store, out at the park where other days I had played on the slide, on the street corner at the Harbor Festival. That November, I joined each of my parents in the hushed sanctity of the voting booth, listened to them commiserate in the car over why and how they had voted as they had, watched with them at the party as the local election results came in.

When I was eight years old, the tow business had left town and my father was a shadetree mechanic. He’d pick up the Easy Ad every Thursday and snap up broken-down junkers for a song, fix ‘em up out under the big gnarled oak out front, and sell ‘em for Kelly Blue Book price. He called it M&M Motors, for Mathieu and Mathieu, and we watched a lot of Sanford & Son on Nick-at-Nite. The old man’s got a checkered history and I long ago gave up trying to place any of my parents’ stories between 1968 and 1984, and was under the eye of the police and even had his own parole officer. “The Officer” came round one day, and found that in addition to the half-disassembled Chevrolets, Dodges, and Toyotas (Pops sneers at Fords) were a good dozen bicycles. Pops thinks with his hands, and had taken to rescuing bicycles and tuning them up when he wasn’t replacing transmissions, as a hobby and a mania. The Officer told him in no uncertain terms that it was illegal in the City of Morro Bay to own more than six bicycles and he’d better have them out in two weeks.

The next day, I saw something I had never seen before.

My father was reading a book.

He was reading Robert’s Rules of Order, and it would be followed by Morro Bay’s city codes, and the codes of San Luis Obispo County, borrowed from the legal library or the public library that Jean Bennett Castle had helped found. He went to the City Council and the Planning Commission, and argued his right to have seven or a dozen bicycles, if he so chose. This leather-clad hippie with his wild beard and his live-in girlfriend and his young son taking his three minutes at the public podium and speaking respectfully and adroitly to the suit-clad Council and the Hawaiian-shirted mayor.

And they let him, The Officer be damned…but he looked around the Vets’ Hall that Monday night. And he saw he was the only working-class man, the only ordinary citizen, alongside two bored journalists and four sober-faced functionaries of the city.

He came back the next week. He brought two camcorders and a VCR that he bought from my father-in-law’s business and my Game Boy, which he wired in to control which camera fed the VCR. He videotaped the meeting, and when a functionary objected, he cited California’s Brown Act, which recognizes every Californian’s God-given right to know what their public officials are up to at public meetings for the good of the public. In his the back pocket of his jeans, next to the Swiss Army knife every Mathieu boy carries as a matter of course since we crossed the 49^th Parallel, he still carried Robert’s Rules for reference. He was the walking, breathing Jack London hero, the working-class man with a book in his pocket, defending his mates and his class with the strength and wits he had.

Mum, finishing up at college, drew on her learning of psychology, professional vocabulary, and experience with movements, marches, and the Harbor Festival, and wrote up a non-profit organization protecting Pops’ new mission. When it fell apart, she quit her job working for the county and opened up a woman-owned business, teaching herself to write grant proposals and wrest the cost of tape, equipment, and a growing bookish and gregarious boy from the government they were recording.

A lemon-faced member of the Council, facing down both barrels my parents had aimed at them up on their previously-impregnable dais, sneered that if they underwrote these two hippies and their cameras, it would open the door to “anything goes.”

Mum named the business AGP: Anything Goes Productions. And she won the grant, and the contract. The cameras would stay, the last hard-bitten winter soldiers of the non-profit enrolled as the first video crew and camera jockeys of the newborn business.

When I was nine, the new mayor made a clean sweep of the appointees. The purge was dirty pool, but not unforgiveable. In Morro Bay, there are no Democrats or Republicans, that would be unseemly – but everyone seems to congregate toward the Chamber of Commerce or the environmentalist Big Chill cast of the Associates for a Better Community. Each one put two of their own on the new Planning Commission – but who would be the fifth? And my father’s name came up, essentially because each side eyed the other and went “Is he one of yours?” “No…one of yours?” “No.”

They wanted to totally overhaul the city Planning Code, make it friendlier to new hotels and new developers. And my father sat down, and struggled with the first five pages of the revised code. Pops did his homework alongside Mum and me! And at his first meeting, this unexpected outsider sat there and, in his words, “Colombo’d” the Hell out of them. Everyone was ready to pass the new code, based on the summary the Chamber of Commerce man offered them, with newfangled PowerPoint slides and all. And Pops pulled out Robert’s Rules and the Code and went “now, just a minute, just a minute, there’s one thing I don’t understand…”

He started on page one. He questioned everything. He uncovered some slimy things under rocks, some questions no one wanted to answer. Not in public. Not with the cameras running.

And by page five, one of the Associates for a Better Community called to review the code, in excruciating detail, over the next few months. Pops seconded the motion.

The revised code had provisions for protecting views, for protecting residents, for protecting the environment and the silly drinking-village-with-a-fishing-problem character of my little town.

He told me later that he was sweating bullets, because if they got to page six, he had nothing!

When I was ten, they proposed a bike path from one end of town to the other. Part of it would have to be hewn out of the wetland wilderness next to the power plant. With a functionary for a guide, my family pulled up to the plant, and, as far as I was concerned, went and cleared the jungle, the “forest primeval” I had read of in Evangeline. What fun that afternoon was! I was Indiana Jones, in my little fedora, brushing away wetland branches and crunching over Eucalyptus leaves as Mum and Pops talked costs and construction. When we came to the creek, it was a rushing river to me.

And when they built the bike lane at last, it passed my grandfather’s adobe entirely. On my bike, it was six of one or half a dozen of the other to take the bike lane at either rend. I asked Pops why he voted for it, made it his project, marched out on his busted legs to explore the land when it didn’t benefit us any. And he laughed and went

“Because it benefits all the rest of the town, Bub! All your friends can race from downtown to the high school and North Morro Bay without having to go through traffic. It’s safer and it’s pretty. And that’s a good thing, even if we don’t get anything out of it.”

His policy, incidentally, was to always immovably vote his conscience. No one could change his mind once his heart was in it. And he made it known that if his conscience didn’t prick him, he was willing to trade. Even his enemies respected him, and still do, because he could play the game without compromising his (inarticulate, but powerful) morals.

When I was twelve, my father ran for City Council, as an independent (though we had an awful lot of diner breakfasts and evening cigars with the Associates for a Better Community). I walked up to doors he knocked on, watched him and my mother smile and ask what was bothering the neighbors, and called him “the Channel 54 guy” (Channel 54 being the public access channel we aired the meetings on). He stood for reasonable growth, local control, and public openness. He lost (by twelve votes) and had me climb on his denim-clad lap that night and told me it was for the best. God showed him he wasn’t supposed to be up on the dias.

He belonged behind the camera. That was where he could do good.

He always put on a Chicago accent and called it his “mission from Gawd”. But it was no joke. When my father gets a passion – and he’s had a passion in his day for my mother, for El Caminos, for me, for bicycles – he gets a fire in his eye. He believes. I’ve had my issues with “the business,” my “annoying little brother,” over the years. Plenty of them. But I have always believed in the mission.

My father, at his best, is a prophet. He makes you believe.

And over the years, between my father’s God-given faith in Bringing Government To The People and my mother’s educated acumen for organization and adroit paperwork, they built AGP into a million-dollar business, our cameras nosing into counties, cities, commissions, and the workings of the government of California like a camel under the tent. Do you want to know what your elected officials are getting up to behind those closed doors, California? SLO-SPAN and CAL-SPAN are bringing government to you.

When I was eleven, I asked my old man why we always run mike to the public podium, the rostrum where members of the public can address the council or the board or the assembly or the committee or whatever public officials they are for three minutes at a time on any issue they please, last.

“Because it’s the most powerful mike in the room.”

He’s right.

Time and time again, I’ve watched some little old lady come up and say there’s an awful lot of fender benders on her corner, and some political animal seize on it and sees a stop sign put there. I’ve seen men step up and tell them that they’re wrong about this issue, he’s seen it with his own eyes, this is how it really works out in the field and their proposed new bylaw doesn’t address that.

When I was thirteen, I did it myself.

It was the last meeting of the County Board of Supervisors of the millennium, the very last item. Aside from the cameras, there were three people in the room. I was one of them. I’d been homeschooled for a year and a half (with my mother defending my choice from my father and all comers, citing her own mother’s library and the independent study program the county offered as education enough for a bookish, gregarious boy like theirs). She always did her reading, too. So every Tuesday, I spent all day sitting in those chambers, drawing, reading, doing homework, talking to lawyers and camera crew and mess workers and clerks and convicts and the accused on their way to court. And in those glorious years, I discovered Ray Bradbury and the Kids’ Whole Future Catalog and I discovered writing ‘zines and I discovered American civil religion.

And the Board of Supervisors were voting to take my rights away.

They wanted to go into our libraries, into my grandmother’s library, and limit “adult materials” to library card holders sixteen or older. R-rated movies. Certain visual artists. Controversial books. To save the children, of course. It was the last day before the biggest winter break of everyone’s lives at the County, there were three people in the room. And I was one of them.

So I asked Mum how to fill out a card properly, and filed to speak.

I’m a short man, shorter then, I needed a box to stand on to reach that sacred mike. And with all the fervor of a thirteen-year-old libertarian and all the politesse of a boy who’d spent five years watching how the sausage is made, I quoted them the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. I told them about the National Geographic filmstrips I, as a homeschool boy, needed from the public library, bare breasts or no, that this would deny me. I cited all the book bans that Bradbury warned me of, that Bradbury himself had been banned, and how they would leave me exposed to the whims of parents far worse than mine. And I pointed out that I had my mother’s card, and my mother’s permission, to study whatever I damn well pleased, because she believes in the power of the public library as an unalloyed good for the community, the same as her mother before her.

They’d been four-to-one in favor before I spoke, the only member of the public to speak to them about it. They were three-to-two against when I was done.

I made that happen in three minutes, the last speaker of the last issue of the last meeting of the millennium.

When I was fourteen, I came down with whooping cough before it was cool (two years later, it would stage its antivax-powered comeback tour through San Luis Obispo and the nation). I was out of high school for three months after only a month back in, and the administration dicked with me. I could have had homework sent home, could have had school-sponsored tutors, but that would cost money, so they forgot to tell us about it. There was no way I could go back to high school with the rest of my friends with that kind of handicap. We had to go back to the independent study program, back to the homeschool. And even here, the administration dicked with us, blocking our appeals. Finally, my parents and I sat down in front of the principal, explained our case. At last, he purpled and exclaimed:

“Why, you people, you’re just…using the system!”

And we looked at one another, silent complicité of “well…yes? What else is the system for?” We’d been on food stamps. We’d been on WIC. My father had been on disability when he broke his back. My mother got loans and grants to help get AGP off the ground. My parents have had all kinds of help from “the system,” help they acknowledge and are grateful for. Because what else is the system for, if not to use when you need it?

But we got our permission, and I kept laying microphone cables with my father, filling out paperwork with my mother, while my friends were in calculus class and gym. I was working a camera the night the county School Board voted to Draconian cuts across the board (by sheer coincidence, a few years later, many of them were involved in a scandal about how some of the savings were used…). The high school students, in particular, were hard hit.

The students at San Luis Obispo High planned a walkout, and I caught wind of it from friends who attended. I talked to some of the kids at Morro Bay High, which was still two blocks from my grandfather’s adobe. I wasn’t allowed on campus anymore and the police would be called if I was found (that principal saw to that) but I had plenty of experience sneaking in and out to visit my high school girlfriend for her lunches and breaks. I’d stolen the high school’s copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and  read it cover to cover, and invited my friends over to my house.

And we planned direct action – a walkout, in solidarity. To save guitar class. To save yoga. To save AP math. To save Latin, where all the disaffected intellectuals who smoked pot wound up (including the teacher!).

On Monday morning, before the first class, we posted posters I’d printed on company time all over the school, announcing the walkout to the student body. I alerted the local newspapers what was happening while my friends stood and made their Desmoulins speeches and led their first periods out onto the quad. And I voted on a name of a member of the student body to speak to the School Board the next Tuesday night.

They kept their Latin class. My girlfriend was extremely pleased.

And my parents could not have been prouder. Rare was the day I heard a kind word from either of them through my teen years (they were busy with the business, and anyway saved their praise of me for the ears of others), but that stands bright in my memory: my father clapping my shoulders with tears in his eyes, my mother’s deep, powerful hug.

Because I drank deep of the values they lived by, and when faced with injustice, I pitched in with my share of organizing, of speaking, of helping my friends and neighbors even when I got nothing out of it myself. Just like Pops had done with the bike path.

Many years later, I met the retired principal at a Chamber of Commerce mixer. He remembered me, ah yes the son of the AGP Video people!, and shook my hand. I gripped, and held his hand, and told him all the times I snuck onto his “secure” high school, how I’d hosted and planned the walkout in our living room, how I’d made it happen. And watched him turn purple again.

When I came home on vacation from China once, it was to the surprising news that my mother had decided, in one of the darkest periods of her life, with health problems and acrimonious personal business that had driven her to live with her priest “for the duration,” had looked around, and noticed all the people on the street. Her sense of justice offended, she called the people of the Harbor Festival – the Catholics, the Lions, the synagogue, the Rotarians, and, oh yes, the Episcopals. She organized the Monday night supper feeding the homeless. When once Mondays at the Vets’ Hall hosted the town’s movers and shakers (before they moved to Tuesday nights), now they hosted the derelict and unfortunate from all over the county, desperate for a hot meal.

And rather than sit back, and congratulate themselves on a job well done, Mum and the rest sit with them, eat with them, talk with them. Give them not just bread, but kindness. Mum had a checkered history, too, had her own struggles, worked at the county rehabilitating alcoholics, she can speak to their condition. And it never occurred to her not too.

I told her,

“Mum, you do realize you’re the Bishop of Digne, right?”

It’s now one of the biggest free meals in the county, helping hundreds who need it most make it another day. Week in, week out.

When I was thirty, and back from China for good, I was appointed to the Citizens’ Budget Oversight Committee. I wore a suit, and affirmed (as Quakers famously do not swear, and in fact enshrined religious tolerance into American law) to uphold the Constitution and serve the interests of the people of Morro Bay. I sat up on the dais, looking down into my father’s cameras (he was in the next room, editing and beaming from ear to ear). My sister-in-law gifted me Robert’s Rules of Order and it sat at my left elbow, the agenda and the budget proposal opened in front of me. I’m more comfortable with books than my father. I read ten pages.

Three months later, I had to withdraw from the Citizens’ Budget Oversight Committee (as well as my place on Quaker committees). A deep sickness had taken in my blood, a sickness we’d take three years to identify and treat, and the rigors of a part-time retail job left me exhausted. I withdrew, because I could not serve to the standard that Morro Bay should expect of its public officials in my weakness. I fell into a depression at the time, but now realize, like my father losing the election back in 1996, that I was being led on another path.

But it will not be my last. I’d hate to waste the examples of civic virtue set before me.

Oh, yes.

When I was fifteen, I read Machiavelli’s Discourses. The Prince is a short satire about kingdoms, The Discourses is a long earnest tome about republics. And that was where I first met the concept of “civic virtue,” the counterpart of “civil rights.” The duty of any citizen of a republican government to participate in that government, to take part in their community (local, state, national) for the good of the community, whether it benefits themselves personally or not.

And when I read the words “civic virtue,” I think of the public podium. I think of my grandmother’s library. I think of my father’s mission from God. I think of my mother’s chess game. I think of Robert’s Rules of Order and the twelve votes that swing every election in Morro Bay. I think of Mum feeding the homeless. I think of giving blood. I think of my own testimony to save my First Amendment rights.

We are not the only ones with civic virtue. My father-in-law is a lifelong Rotarian, was District Governor, helping eradicate polio all over the world (sometimes in person). It’s no social club to him, but a service organization, and he takes it dead seriously. He drags his club (sometimes kicking and screaming), into pitching in wherever they can, through invested auctoritas or his own personal dignitas. Dad is a lifelong Chamber of Commerce man, and he and I disagree on plenty, but I have always respected his power to truly forgive, his willingness to help anyone who asks, and his dedication to the truth – whether for or against him.

Melissa learned her stubbornness, her sharp principles, and her righteous anger from her father. It’s because of these shared virtues that the two clash so much.

He’s the son of an amiable WWII vet and a Polish immigrant, runs an ordinary little chain of electronics stores he and his family built up himself. He’s another citizen, same as we are, same as his daughter is. Same as Mathieus are. The same as you are.

We Mathieus are a civic people. Aye, and the Castles who helped make Morro Bay in the first place. We are not unique. Proud, but not unique. Anyone can do what we’ve done, if you do what we’ve done. If you step up to podiums when the politicians start making decisions that affect you, if you cast one of those twelve votes, if you organize the march or the walkout when they won’t listen. If you act on your conscience and your interests. If you do as little as read the agendas of your local city council, to keep an eye on what your public servants are up to.

We are one local family, who understand in our bones what “think globally, act locally” really means. And we feel the duty to act on it, because, as my father puts it, “that’s just …what you do!”

This is what we are passing down to Lyra. That house. Those institutions that my grandparents built. The stories of what we’ve done, for the good of the people and to use the system. The family values behind the stories. The civic virtues.

We Mathieus are a fish-eating people. We are an educated people. We are a civic people.

Who are you?

And what do you stand for?