My Father, My Country
With this Father's Day I'm taking a few moments to thank my father for his role in my being an American, the reasons I choose to be a Republican, and why they are so closely linked.
My father, Henry Nehring, was born and raised in a poor farm town in rural Germany during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Receiving only the equivalent of a 10th grade formal education, he made up for it in the determination to see that his children would have a better life than he did.
It was that determination that led him to finally escape his rural home town by joining the German merchant marines, traveling the world for years on board one cargo vessel after another, and in the process picking up the skills he would use later in life as a mechanic on both land and sea.
His travels also allowed him to experience a world that he would otherwise have never seen outside of books, magazines and television. After six years of traveling the globe, then leaving the merchant marines and meeting and marrying my mother, my father determined that of all the places he saw, he wanted to raise his family not in his native land, but in the freedom he saw in the United States of America.
For years my parents worked in a German food store in New York lived in a small apartment above a garage in the back. After the requisite seven years, citizenship classes, and learning English (much of it from cartoons on television and interacting with customers), they very proudly became American citizens. I was born a few years later.
My father joined the Republican Party on becoming an American citizen because he believed it was best suited to protect those qualities in America that brought him here: individual liberty, freedom, and a free enterprise system that allowed people to reach their full potential. He was equally drawn to the strong leadership Republicans demonstrated during the Cold War, and the passionate belief in the American system over the alternative offered by the socialists and communists during that time.
Although he is no longer with us, I remain thankful to my father for giving me the gift of being an American, and the foundation to conclude that I, like he, would find a home in the Republican Party as the best defender of those special qualities that make America that "shining city on a hill."
My father, Henry Nehring, was born and raised in a poor farm town in rural Germany during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Receiving only the equivalent of a 10th grade formal education, he made up for it in the determination to see that his children would have a better life than he did.
It was that determination that led him to finally escape his rural home town by joining the German merchant marines, traveling the world for years on board one cargo vessel after another, and in the process picking up the skills he would use later in life as a mechanic on both land and sea.
His travels also allowed him to experience a world that he would otherwise have never seen outside of books, magazines and television. After six years of traveling the globe, then leaving the merchant marines and meeting and marrying my mother, my father determined that of all the places he saw, he wanted to raise his family not in his native land, but in the freedom he saw in the United States of America.
For years my parents worked in a German food store in New York lived in a small apartment above a garage in the back. After the requisite seven years, citizenship classes, and learning English (much of it from cartoons on television and interacting with customers), they very proudly became American citizens. I was born a few years later.
My father joined the Republican Party on becoming an American citizen because he believed it was best suited to protect those qualities in America that brought him here: individual liberty, freedom, and a free enterprise system that allowed people to reach their full potential. He was equally drawn to the strong leadership Republicans demonstrated during the Cold War, and the passionate belief in the American system over the alternative offered by the socialists and communists during that time.
Although he is no longer with us, I remain thankful to my father for giving me the gift of being an American, and the foundation to conclude that I, like he, would find a home in the Republican Party as the best defender of those special qualities that make America that "shining city on a hill."
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