Part 2: Tadpole Hunters -- Friends for Life

Hello, this is Dick Boath and I'd like to welcome you to known stories to make sense of it all. And these stories are found in walking books, that is real-life people in different places, of different ages, in different cultures. We want to have these kind of conversations across disciplines and generations and cultures in order to encourage a kind of knowing that gives us fresh lenses through which to see the world. One of these lenses will be that of scripture and in particular, Jesus of Nazareth, whose life changed the course of human history. We're so glad you're here. Thanks for listening yet. This is Dick Boath with Known and I have as my very special guest today, a very special friend. My name is John David Ashcroft John delighted to have you here. Well we know we've been friends for a long time when we work on the middle names. Yes we do. I drop the middle name. I don't know when but I dropped it a long time ago. I knew you was John David when we were eight and we lived on William Street in Springfield, Missouri and you became in that year you became what I considered my best friend but also my first friend. So I just want to talk about that because we've already I've already reflected a little bit on that year but I just want to talk about what what is it like to be eight years old in 1950 in the Ozarks and you know what we thought was important what we did for fun. Just talked to me a little bit on that. You know I think we were pretty absent. I was absent a worldview. Now you probably weren't having your background but my family moved to Springfield when I was six years old. My mother told me I'd have to find my own way to school because it was just up the hill and I marched up the road till I got there and was told when and tell him you won an education. How far was this from your house? Oh it's probably a little over a half mile or something and you were six. Well I was my brother was going to the same school and she told me originally to tag along with my brother but you know how three three years separates brothers and my brother didn't want me tagging along so he missed you. He ran me off. I went home crying to my mother and she said now you're gonna have to you're gonna have to do this on your own. Forget about following your brother just go up that road there's a schoolhouse up there and when you get there go in and tell him you're there to get an education and don't take care of you. So so I've I found over the last 67 years that we've been friends that you're a relatively independent thinker. You think not by yourself but on your own. You think it started there. Now I was a cry baby I still am but I've been able to ask it. I've been able yeah that's the right word and mask it. I wear a mask beneath the mask. The tears are pouring down my cheeks because I had to go up and find the schoolhouse by myself. Obviously there is such a different world in which we now live. Right. We took our first child Janet and I took our daughter to school. We went with her to the bus stop, watched her get on the bus then race to the school to get there before the bus and watched her get off the bus and watched her walk into the school building. There was a kind of innocence and almost a naïveté although maybe it was a justified innocence. There wasn't the kind of threat to sending a six-year-old to just keep walking for a half a mile. As a matter of fact before we lived in Missouri I lived in Connecticut and one time on the way home from kindergarten I got interested in other things and I was a couple hours late coming home from kindergarten when the police found me and I couldn't understand why they were so upset. I had interesting things to do. So maybe there's something to it but it was a it was a wonderful place to grow up. There wasn't much complexity. It was what did they say about computers, whizzy wig, what you see is what you get. Really? Is that what they say? I don't think it is. What you see is what you get. Yeah. Garbage in. Garbage out. I was going to say. I know that one but it was a way. Okay. So anyhow it was that was the world in which we lived and when I when I saw you move into the neighborhood that was a great thing to me because most of the kids were older than I was and lots of times they didn't want the little guy tagging along and you're a full six weeks older than I am so at least every year for six weeks you're an old man and I'm a youngster. The only place I've ever been ahead of you. So so that the and the you know I remember this this thought passed through my mind. I think the biggest communications deal or media deal in Springfield, Missouri in 1950 was a radio program called Ozark Jubilee. It was sort of their version of Grand Old Opera. Oh yeah. You remember that? Well red Foley was the star. Really? And it was on ABC as a matter of fact it was televised. Really? And there was a time when that was more well known and more watched and a group of the individuals who were at that in that involvement went to Nashville. Pat Boone married Red Foley's daughter. Okay. Pat Boone in the 1950s was a Booner of a Kruner man. He could he whether it was love letters in the sand or whatever it was longs were. Yeah. Yeah. That was and so there was this kind of would you say it's idyllic sort of almost a pastoral country approach to Springfield and it was a railroad town. You were either involved with the Frisco railroad. Okay. They were the largest railroad shops east west of the Mississippi and they did repairs on railroad trains there. The railroad yard is largely abandoned now. Right. But still there's a significant presence but it's burling to northern now. Okay. That has been a successor to what was then the Frisco railroad and kids if they weren't involved like our parents were in church work. Yeah. Most all of them were railroad people. Yeah, the railroad people and there was a huge whistle that blew every morning. I think the wake everybody up latest at seven and then in the area afternoon there was a huge whistle that I can still hear echoing through my the empty chambers of my cranium. That signal this is time for people to grab their lunch buckets and walk home. So these three institutions that historically played a role and maybe in other places in the world still do and they play a role here but the the family the religious institutions and the school and you you can throw industry into that. But those institutions have by and large lost their place in the in the waky way that they were in play when we were eight year olds in 1950 and spring for the Zora haven't they? Oh, I think so. There was if you know maybe the and this is obviously we're not rehearsing this is what I'm coming up on the spot but it occurred to me while you were talking about that if there's been a big change it's been in the in the durability or persistence. The durability and persistence of marriages has been substantially truncated right industry used to a person got a job at the Frisco and they worked for the Frisco for as long as they were alive. Right. And and and the church is undergone some real transition in terms of the kind of commitment. I think the increased transportation a variety of things doesn't send people necessarily to churches that are proximate to where they live like it used to. Yeah. People are driving for your 50 miles if they go to church and some people aren't driving anymore. They're just using the remote control. Yeah. Yeah. And they're watching on television television has had a significant impact. I think at some of those some of those times we were running through the weeds and doing various things either in mischief or in constructive things. Now we would be maybe just using video stuff either video games or watching TV. We didn't have TV in my home. My grandfather was even into the 60s. My grandfather had this sense that TV was evil. And my father was very generous to provide a place for my grandfather. His father in law to live. So this is Kaplarsen. That's right. He was a Regent Seafaring man. Yeah. He eventually was a captain on the Great Lakes. Great Lakes. Yes. Rand tugboats in and around Chicago through the Chicago River and all that business. But he was of a mind that television was evil. And I don't think it was but I think it is. But it hasn't stopped me. It's evil as it is. I've got a couple of 55 inch screens in my house. So I'm getting a good look at least ESPN and a few other things I tolerate. But so we were forced out. I think there was an out-of-doors component. There was a natural world component. I was in Detroit up up on the Detroit River some years ago doing an executive leadership thing broke up into small groups. And one of the questions I asked was of these folks in their large ethnic population. So you got some Polish guys, some German guys, so forth in this group. And I said what did you do for fun as a kid? And most of them were our age or perhaps just a little younger. And they said, well, we played outside. I said, why did you play outside? Because today so many kids play inside because you got room, you can have 26 kids in your basement. But in our houses, when we were going, you couldn't have 26 kids. You had to go outside to change your mind. And this whole business about leadership is you'd go out and you'd play Sandlot Ball or whatever you'd play and you'd choose sides and you'd choose captains. And that's how leaders kind of pop to the surface. So it was an organic process. And I don't think this is just 2075 year old dudes reminiscing and being nostalgic about what was. But I think it was a true dynamic about how leaders came into into play. Talk to me and talk to our audience just a little bit about your your grandpa, Cap Larson. Talk to us about who he was besides thinking television was correct. He was he was born in Norway and he was tough as a boot. He was very tough. During his time on the Great Lakes, he had three small stones that were next to the wheel of the tugboat. And he got on the tug in the morning and he he'd throw those stones in his mouth and he sort of chewed those stones all night serious. I don't know whether it was fluoride or what. But he never went to the dentist until he was about 65 years old. And in part, I think he had been kicked by a cow when he was a boy in Norway and he left Norway at 13 years of age. So it's not like he was old. And so he had some teeth that never worked quite as tight as he wanted to be. And I think he was always biting on the stones to keep him in to send him back up there and open they'd be reinforced. But he was he was a great guy. He he went through. He was a guy with a chip on his shoulder a lot of his life before he got an awareness of God in his life. He he was converted to Christianity at the grave side of one of his sons who died of an infection. And then he became a rather devout guy. Until then I think he was kind of a rough house around there. But he was only about 58. So he wasn't a big guy. He wasn't a big guy, but he wasn't a guy who backed away from things. And of course, if you if you earned the first couple years of your life's earnings by being a deckhand on ships sailing at the in the last part of the 1800s, you know, he had a variety of experiences. I think there was an explosion on the boat one time blew him right out of the end of the water. Wow. But you know, it didn't what would what would be a couple of his core values apart from following Jesus later in his life. I tell you what one of his core values was that the kids obeyed the grandfather. There you go. Well, he was the patriot. And obviously he was a person who had a high level of expectation for integrity. And respect. I think there was something old world about respect and respect for people who are older. I think we have in some ways cheated ourselves by suggesting that people of earlier times didn't have much awareness and didn't have much wisdom and didn't have much intellect. And he didn't have much schooling, but he was pretty crafty. And he was pretty proud of the fact that he could do a arithmetic and some, you know, higher mathematics processes. Well, you know, he could do square root. He taught me how to do square roots. He thought, you know, how you find the square root of an item is a process in air mathematics. That not everybody comes up with. And somebody who probably quit school in the fourth grade is pretty good. Well, then didn't he stay in your room for a time when I was yeah, he stayed and I slept with my grandfather in a in a double bed, which, you know, one of the things that's grown big in America is beds. But a double bed used to be for two people is scarce to find any two people that want to get in the double bed together. Queen size and king size is taken over, but that's right. This was in the pre can queen era. Yeah, yeah. And he was a my brother, my older brother was not as respectful as he should have been. So it wasn't uncommon for my, me to go to bed and my grandfather said, I'll be in bed in a minute, but I've got to go administer some, some justice, some justice. The minister, the board of education to the seat of learning, my brother Bob. And very frankly, I don't think it any way injured my brother Bob. He needed discipline as much as I did. And although he exhibited the need more frequently than I do. And he, my very, very pleased my brother's been a great individual and a good public servant and a good business man. Yeah, it was a marathon. Yeah, for a dozen years. And then he served on the junior college or community college board. He was chairman of that for I think 25 years. And people underestimate sometimes the scale that the community college districtie encompassed several congressional districts. So to be voted consistently to do that was a was a major feat. But he chose the sort of local enterprises, which takes a lot of courage because people can tell you exactly what they think because they're your friends and neighbors and they live right next story. The higher the offices are, the fewer people can actually reach you by phone. Yeah. Talk to me just a little bit. And we're going to take a few more minutes here. Talk to me a little bit about your parents, whom I knew, I knew your dad as a, as a professor, as a minister, as a college in university president. When I became president of a small college, he, he had been president of a couple of colleges by that time. And he became kind of a mentor to me in those years because I was pretty, pretty wet behind the years, as they say. But I knew him as Dr. J Robert Ashcroft and your mom was grace. And talked to us about them because you're in, in my mind, you're a composite of them. And I know you have leadership skills. I mean, I mean, that time we had that time we had a sleep storm. I storms are big and Missouri, at least in that part. And then got a little snow on top of it. And you said, let's go sledding. And there was a hill by the houses there. And we went over it. You said, Dick, why don't you just lay down and guide this thing. And I'll sit on you. We'll go down the hill. I shouldn't know. And then you would have been governor. I just didn't pick up on it right away. Well, you know, but just look at it this way. You were in on the ground floor of the sledding operation. There we go. That's great. I've always, I've never done well with that staff. I'm your guy. Well, you know, we played a lot of games. You know, I remember going out of the house. I think the sweetest sound for me was the screen door slamming behind me and my mother, Yellen, I've told you 10,000 times not to slam the door. But, you know, screen doors hardly exist anymore. It's a great sound. And we played kick the can. And we actually got into mischief once in a while. But my father was, my father was a conceptual person. Yeah. He would always have the almost uncanny ability to look at the same circumstances everyone else was looking at. And to have insights that no one else was thinking about. And I respect that profoundly. I mean, frankly, your ability to make a contribution in the world is very limited is if only thing you can bring to people is what they already know and what they already think. And I think the real fact of education is the idea that educators all see what everybody else is seeing. But some of them can interpret it differently and they can draw conclusions that are valuable. My dad was that way. And he was committed to a calling that he felt God had given him to be involved in Christian education. So he was not a home body. And he wasn't, you know, making sure he was at every ballgame. I had six high school letters, varsity letters. And I think he ended up at two games in the in the of the six. And you didn't feel slighted. You know, I always felt my father was doing what he should do. And I thought it was a little bit of a waste of his time to watch me do something that was frivolous like playball. I played football and basketball and ran track. And, and I also also felt a slight added pressure if my dad was in the stands. You know, sort of what happens if I foul this up? Here's my dad. He really thinks a lot of me cares for me. And I better not, I better not foul this up. So my dad, it didn't bother me that he was doing what I thought God called him to do. And I said, I've said it over and over again that the most important thing my father ever taught me was that there were more important things than me. There are some noble things that people are called to do, especially if they feel God has come along them to do it. That it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not wrong for a person to devote himself to those. Now, I think the key is my father used to take me with him when he went and did a lot of things. And instead of him becoming a child with me, he sort of wanted to usher me into being an adult with him. And I think that's the right direction. It was for us. You know, that, that, the, the largest selling book, religious book in our lifetime, maybe ever was Rick Warren's book, The Purpose Driven Life. I think it's so like 40 million copies, some humongous number. But the, I think the first sentence in the book is something like, it's not about you. And when I hear you talk about your dad, he's sort of bringing you into his world, rather than you him going into your world in that way, he was in your world in a lot of ways, but not necessarily in that way. That's fascinating. You used to, I know you've told me this, Patilla or listeners, if you don't mind, that you would go with him when he spoke places. And then coming home, would it be in the car that you would sort of distill and dissect and analyze or, yeah, he would invite me to signal what I might have cleaned from what he said. And then he would ask me questions that would lead me to other perspectives and the light. You know, my father was an educator. And it's, it's the best education comes when people ask you the right questions, not when they give you the right answers. Because the right answers don't force you to do any processing in any analysis. The right questions force you into processing and analysis. And analysis is the heart of what an educated person does. He sees the world and says, now this is how we can interpret that. And this is what it's going to mean to us. And how we're going to capitalize on it. Yeah. You can memorize the answer. Right. If they just gave you the answer. So even when I teach at the law school at Regent University. Right. And, and my, I tell the students, I'm not there to answer their questions. I'm there to question their answers. Because if they've had the right questions posed for their answers, they'll come to the right answers on their own. Your dad, to me, was not a pious person, but he had a deep piety. That is, he wasn't, to me, he wasn't stuffy. He wasn't sort of pontificating. But I've, I've, I've referred to him a number of times over the years as a practical mystic. I defined that as a person whose, whose two inches off the floor, but not off the wall. And his, his sense of richness of both of scripture and of who God is, was communicated to so many of his students, I've traveled the world as you have. But I run into people all the time or have over the last 50 years, who, who have asked me because you and I are friends, well, did you know John's dad? And I say, yeah, I know John's that, and then they will go on to tell me the profound impact that he had on their lives. And I know you've had some of that. What do you, what do you feel and think when you, when you hear people say things like that about your dad? Well, it reminds me that my father tended to have a foot in a different dimension, if you will. You said two inches off the floor. I think he had a foot in eternity. He always had this idea of the spiritual aspect of, of our existence, being so important and so present in his life. And when he died as a matter of fact, he walked into the hospital having an attack and he said to the doctors who started trying to, you know, massage his heart or do whatever. He said, take your hands off me. You're helping, you're hurting me more than you're helping me. And he died that night. And it wasn't something my father just, he didn't, he didn't have a sense that life was all about the temporal things. He had the sense that life was the eternal. So this spiritual perspective that he had, which some people would use the word like you did mystical, related to things that were conceptual, things that were unseen, there were of sort of eternal values, the nature of God, rather than in the sort of nuts and bolts of this. What we think reality is. And that was very, he loved young people, though, invested in young people all the time. From his days as a pastor, he was a youth group pastor. I mean, he was the primary pastor for the congregation, but that didn't keep him from being involved with young people and all kinds of activities and things. And I think his ability to shape the future was understood by him as his ability to, to be involved in the lives of people who would indeed live in the future. So, so was your mom conceptual? No, my mom was like her father, you know, he was a disciplinarian. She didn't hesitate to demand, and she didn't wait for, you know, an adjudication of the issues. She just took care of it. She this, this will settle this. And if you don't get this settled, I'll make an appeal to your father, which he never had to do. She was strong enough on her own. But I, I don't want my mother to appear on kind. She was one of the kindest people I ever knew. And our house was full of guests all the time. She had the gift of hospitality. Yeah, you called a gift of hospitality, but it's not a gift. It's the hard work of hospitality. That's what I was thinking, hard work and hard work of hospitality. Yeah. And hospitality today is sometimes corrupted by getting together with people. I like to say house patality. Well, there you go. When you have people over to your house, it's different. You can meet your friends at a restaurant. But if you want to sing a song at the restaurant, you can't do it. One of the, one of the things that I've over the years that I've sort of distilled about hospitality is that I like to define hospitality as letting inviting somebody into your space. And hospitality, as you frame it, fits that. I always like when people say stuff that fits my ideas. But I can remember that that adjudication, as you say, even being applied to a friend to two of yours on occasion. Yeah. Well, you know, she was no respecter of persons. No. But you know, you called me John David to start our little chat. Yeah. And I was known as John David to all the mothers on that street. And they none of them hesitated to take care of it. Yeah, it's just just to help shape my behavior in a way that was agreed upon and constructive. Yeah. And believe me, there was no sense that anybody who corrected me for rudeness or for inappropriate behavior, that wasn't interference. That was part of a team effort. And I appreciated it. I remember all the folks from that neighborhood. And frankly, I think most everybody ended up making significant contributions to the credit, not just of their own parents, but other folks who were sensitive to the fact of the need of a culture that had a civic-minded responsibility. Yeah. I'm going to unwrap this particular part of our conversation up here. I don't do rap. Well, I do. And we're going to put a ribbon on it. We're going to want to wrap it up this way. And we'll talk about other stuff and we'll have other podcasts. But you have a tremendous love for Scripture. One of the things when you came to DC in 94, we had been there about a year or 15 months when you showed up as a senator that you started doing is you would have there is that you would have devotional times for anybody who wanted to come before work started wherever you work, whether it's the senate or justice, whatever, but it was prior to work and all that. But just if you were to choose averse or a passage that has contributed significantly to your life and there are a bunch of them. And I know you know a bunch of them. But just to wrap this piece up, why don't you share that with us and then if you have a comment or two about it. Well, I'm just totally drawn to the nature of God. Uh-huh. And the hundred and third Psalm, which is a long Psalm and I've had to memorize it three or four times. But it starts out, bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me, bless his holy name, bless the Lord O my soul and forget not all his benefits, who forgiveeth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction, who crowneth thee with loving kindness and tender mercies, who satisfyeth thy mouth with good things so that thy youth is renewed like the eagles. And that's the first five or six verses in men. If you don't want to get a relationship with a God like that, I don't know. I like the forgiving, the healing, the redeeming, the framing and his satisfyeth thy mouth with good things. I'm not against eating a good meal or two, although satisfying your mouth with good things may not just appear, may not just refer to what goes into your mouth. It may refer to what comes out of your mouth. There you go. Well, what's what's come out of your mouth in these last minutes has been great. I just like to say John David, my friend, you've learned a lot in the last 67 years. I love this. We'll come back again. Thanks for being here with me. Well, we didn't do a rap, but as they say in the movie, because that is a rap, we're done. We'll be back with John in the later podcast. If you, in listening to this, want to explore the ideas surrounding known, I invite you to grab the book or ebook or audio book, either online at the known website or at any of your local bookstores on sale this week. Till we're together again, please understand that to know or to be known is a profound thing. And that at the heart of that experience is somebody's story. See you later. You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with progressive save over $900 on average. They make it super simple. 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