A Man's Life: An Unlikely Place

An ongoing conversation about what it means to be a man in the 21st century

On PBS last November, talk show host Tavis Smiley asked former Covad Communications CEO Bob Knowling ’77: 

 

“What do you draw from your upbringing that makes you the outstanding businessman you are?”

 

“The values that I picked up from my grandparents, my mom, going to church, having a faith,” Knowling answered. 

 

“I have never found anything in business as tough as growing up—as tough as not having food, being beaten by a 
principal to the point that I was numb. Everything I’ve encountered in business has been child’s play compared to that."

 

In this excerpt from You Can Get There from Here: My Journey from Struggle to Success, published last fall, Knowling also sheds light on the blessings of that childhood.

 

 

I came from a part of town that was not much associated with success of any kind. 

 

It was an unlikely place to start building a big bridge. Many of the black children born in my generation were never able to break away from that difficult, impoverished beginning. The slope outside the front door of the life I was born into was so steep it kept most people from making the climb. And once you started slipping —maybe with drugs or alcohol, crime or hopelessness —the plunge to the bottom was swift and unforgiving. It left people who may have been full of talent but short on opportunity crushed at the bottom.

 

A blessed few of us—and I use the word blessed knowingly and with intention—became exceptions because of hard work, diligence, and an unyielding focus on our goals. We had no idea in the beginning what we would be. We were just kids, black and American and as full of spunk as anyone else our age. But we were at the forefront of an era of sweeping social change that would redefine where we fit in the complicated ethnic and racial patchwork that was America. We would enter that era as an aggrieved class that could trace its injuries all the way back to the days of slavery, and we would leave it with the same legal standing, and the same opportunities, as everyone else. There was no way we could know how that period would touch our lives until many years had passed.

 

There is a protective beauty in the joy of childhood.

 

You are never really aware of your circumstances, because they are the same as the circumstances of everyone around you. We had no television, no radio, no telephone. We spent a lot of time just playing in the back yard. Mostly just kids in the family were part of that scene, because no one was allowed to visit when my mother wasn’t home. She cleaned people’s houses during the day.

 

My mother’s name is Geneva. I am one of the last six children she had. I come from a family of 13 brothers and sisters spread across a couple of marriages. We lived in Kokomo, IN, until I was in third grade, at which point my father, who worked in a steel mill and who struggled with an addiction to alcohol, went to live in Grand Rapids, MI.

 

I recognize that this might all sound chaotic and might also evoke images of a deprived, troubled childhood. True, I had floppy-soled shoes I had to hold together with my toes. But I wasn’t the only one. Most of the kids I knew had hard-luck stories. When no one you know has much of anything, there is no shame attached to having nothing.

 

It would be easy to take those circumstances and turn them into a story of deprivation, loss, and aching need. But there was something stronger at the center of my childhood. Hard times and difficulties aside, I deeply loved my mother and father. Because of that I thought I had a great childhood. I delighted in helping my mother and happily anticipated every minute I could spend with my dad.

 

Long before the era of bass boats and fish-locating sonar, there was just fishing. It was a discipline as much as it was a sport. Patience, knowledge, and yes, even strategy came together in catching fish. That was true on the Sea of Galilee in the Bible and it was true of the best places to fish around Kokomo. 

 

What could be better for a young boy than lessons from a father in reading water, in knowing where you were likely to catch crappie or largemouth bass? My father taught me everything there was to know about fishing, from harvesting night crawlers after the rain to cleaning fish. I never ate what we caught, because I have an allergy to fish, but my family did. We would head as often as we could to the Mississinewa River, Wildcat Creek, or the Wabash River to fish. Sometimes we caught so many catfish and bass that I would have to drag them on the stringer to the house. There were nine of us living in the house at that point, and the fish were important. Sometimes we would fish two times in one day, once at dawn and then again in the evening.

 

I lived to come home to see my dad. Everything about the joy of life as a young boy swirled around him. He was a soft-spoken man and rarely had much to say. But sitting on the banks of rivers, he would tell me things about life and about what was happening at home. He tried to help me understand what was going on.

 

One Saturday my father took me fishing and told me he was going to be leaving our family. I didn’t understand.

 

“Will we go with you?” I asked, and he said no.

 

“Will you be sleeping at Grandma’s house?” I asked, and he said yes.

 

Then I told him I didn’t understand why we couldn’t come and sleep at Grandma’s house, too. He explained that it was time for Mother and Father to live apart because they did not get along very well anymore. Nothing he said made any sense to me.

 

I got to see him a lot at first, because Grandma was just six blocks down the street. We still went fishing. But from Mom I gradually came to understand that he wasn’t ever coming home. He finally moved to Grand Rapids, MI.

 

I shifted all my attention to my mother. She became the center of my universe.

 

About this same time the family went on welfare, which in Kokomo meant you got some food. Macaroni. Blocks of cheese. Cans of peanut butter. Processed meat. I never thought much about the welfare food, but I thought it was strange that we had to go to this building to get food rather than to the A&P grocery store.

 

I would watch my mother make bologna sandwiches for all of us. She made certain everybody had a sandwich, but it didn’t take me long to notice that there was no sandwich for her.

 

I used to go with her to the welfare office to pick up the food. I would pull a little wagon to carry it home. We would get two boxes of flour, four cans of processed meat, two cans of peanut butter, powdered eggs, a block of cheese, and other brown boxes.

 

One day she asked the guy behind the counter if she could substitute more peanut butter for the second bag of flour. “You wouldn’t be in here begging for more peanut butter if you didn’t have all those kids,” the man said. My mother swore off welfare at that point and we never went back.

 

Even after my father moved to Michigan, I continued to catch fish to bring home. I would walk over to Wildcat Creek and catch a nice stringer of them, clean them, and watch with pride as my mom cooked them. I also helped my mother clean the house. I wanted to be a good boy. I know that sounds a little precious today, but the alternatives in that era were not acceptable.

 

I saw relatives and friends dropping out of school and using drugs. A lot of them ended up dead or in prison. And I didn’t want to be like that. Most of my relatives were not doing well. But there was one role model: my cousin Mary Lou. She was the first in our big, big family to go to college. Mary Lou was older than me, but not old enough to ignore me. I loved visiting her.

 

Mary Lou didn’t drop out of school like everyone else. She was active in her high school and church, and I could see that she had goals. I wanted to be like her.

 

When she told all of us she was going to Ball State University, that seemed like another world to me. Only years later did I realize that Ball State was only 61 miles east of Kokomo.

 

When she went off to college, I carried her senior picture around in my wallet and showed it to everyone. I had a cousin in college!