Originally Posted by gblowfish
(Post 15807373)
I got married in Lexington, MO. The family that founded and administered Wentworth Military Academy was the Sellers family. One of the Sellers boys (I'm friends with a couple of them) posted this on the news of Asner's passing: I was so saddened to hear of actor Ed Asner’s death today. I, as with many of my contemporaries, knew him from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Lou Grant.” My kids knew him from Will Ferrell’s “Elf” and the Pixar animated film “Up.”
Mr. Asner and I shared a mentor, Commander Ed Ellis, who was Ed Asner’s football coach in high school in the 1940s, and my Civics teacher and golf coach in the 1980s. I’ve always felt a certain kinship to Mr. Asner because of that shared relationship. Mentors in our lives can be so important. As a young person, I had many role models. My parents and grandparents filled that primary role. But I have always so appreciated my outside mentors - those relationships beyond my family with those like Ed Ellis - teachers, coaches, family friends, and people I’ve worked with and for.
Ed Ellis grew up in my hometown of Lexington, Missouri, and attended Wentworth Military Academy from 1925 to 1929. He told me that while he was a student at Wentworth that his mentor was my grandfather, who at that time was a young staff member on campus. Ed Ellis was one of the greatest all-around athletes in school history, serving as captain of the football, basketball and baseball teams, playing tennis and running track as well.
After Wentworth, he went on to Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University), where he was a three-sport letterman, quarterbacking the football team, starting on the basketball squad, and was the star pitcher and Captain of the baseball team. He served in the Navy during WWII, and stayed in the Naval Reserves til 1967. As head coach of the football, basketball and baseball teams at Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas from 1946 to 1966, he led his squads to eight state championships. On fall weekends, he served as a college football referee in the Old Big 7 and Big 8. Commander Ed "retired" to Wentworth in 1967 and taught Civics while coaching golf up to 1990. He kept an autographed photo of Ed Asner – his old student who made good – on display in his office.
I took his Civics class as a high school freshman in 1982 when Commander Ed was in his mid-70s, but his course was about much more than citizenship – it was really a course about life - about how to comport one’s self, how to treat others, and how we build our society based on a social contract. I still remember his first day’s lesson – “Always treat others with respect: say ‘yes sir,’ ‘no sir,’ ‘yes ma’am,’ ‘no ma’am,’ ‘thank you sir,’ ‘thank you, ma’am,’ keep a handkerchief in your pocket at all times because you never know when you may need it, and never go anywhere without a dime in your other pocket in case you need to phone home. Start off by doing those three things and you’ll be well on your way to a successful life.” It was a course about responsibility, about duty, and about the common good.
In 1988, I attended a talk by Ed Asner at Harvard Law School titled, “Patriotism and Other Spectator Sports.” A few minutes into his talk, he shared an anecdote of an experience he had back at Wyandotte High School in 1946. Young Asner had been complaining about the coal miners who were striking for better working conditions (almost everyone in his community was against the strikers as Asner described the situation), and his football coach – Ed Ellis – took him aside and had a quiet conversation with him, starting with, “Eddie, you can’t take away a man’s right to strike...”
Asner said that that particular moment shocked him. It challenged and changed his worldview, helping lay the groundwork for him to become the President of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1970s. After the talk, I was able to visit with Mr. Asner for a few minutes and share with him how much Ed Ellis meant to me as well. He talked to me about his “beloved football coach” who was a “beautiful man.”
Ed Ellis was a beautiful man. It is amazing how big an impact a person can have on another just by taking a sincere and persistent interest in them. And I was not alone among his mentees; I was one among scores of others. As a high school kid, I played many rounds of golf with him on the local small town courses. Over spring breaks during both high school and college, we would find a day to attend one of the early rounds of the NAIA basketball tournament in Kansas City (with games going on from 7 in the morning until near midnight) and would bet a quarter a game on the outcomes.
We kept up a correspondence until shortly before he died in 1990, and I still have all his letters, filled with wise advice and counsel, that he wrote me. A true mentor to me and hundreds of others… As I get older, “mentor” is a role that I try to embrace as much as father, husband, son, brother and friend, thanks in large part to the examples of people like Ed Ellis… and Ed Asner…
|
