Bob Greene once had dinner with John Glenn and asked him who had shaped his life most. Glenn was a Marine fighter pilot and the first American to orbit the Earth. Greene expected the name of a famous explorer or a general. Glenn named Harford Steele, his high-school civics teacher.
Greene tells the story on the Journal's opinion page on Tuesday, Nov. 3, Election Day. Glenn's hometown was New Concord, Ohio. It had little more than 1,000 people then. Steele ran the local high school as principal and taught civics on top of it. He died in 1991. Glenn died in 2016. In his 1999 memoir, Glenn wrote that Steele's class showed how one person could act on a belief and cause real change. The course, he wrote, “ignited a fire in me that never did go out.”
What civics meant to him
Greene's definition is worth keeping. Civics, he writes, means a citizen's rights, duties and responsibilities. It has nothing to do with belittling the people you disagree with. It's the work of handing the next generation a better country. Glenn went on to serve 22 years in the Marines and 24 years in the Senate. In between, in 1962, he circled the planet. In a short government film made after that flight, Steele said he had taught Johnny and hundreds of others that democracy is “a priceless heritage.” Greene hears no bluster in those words, and says they land well right now.
Years later Greene visited Glenn's office at Ohio State, at what's now the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. The walls were covered with photos of famous people Glenn had met over a long career. One face Greene didn't know. He asked who it was. Glenn nodded at it. “That's Harford Steele.”
Our read
This is a Career story, and it's for the teachers who read us. Many of you are in CalSTRS or a 403(b). You don't get your photo on famous walls. Harford Steele didn't either, except for one. He taught a boy in a town of 1,000 what a citizen owes, and the boy carried it into orbit and into the Senate. That's the legacy a teacher builds. Nobody can buy it or fake it. Greene's line about leaving the country better for the next generation is an estate plan in the broadest sense.
Here's the connection to your own money. A teacher's pension does quiet work for decades, the way Steele did, with nobody watching. This week, log in to your CalSTRS account, or your own state's plan, and check two things. Make sure every year of service credit is there. Then make sure the beneficiary on the account is still the person you'd choose. If you also have a 403(b), read the fee line on the latest statement. Nobody thinks about the roof until it leaks. Look at it on a dry day. If you want a second set of eyes on that statement, that's part of a review.