Interview with Mike Lawrence # ISG-A-L-2009-005.01 Interview # 1: March 4, 2009 Interviewer: Mark Depue

Interview with Mike Lawrence # ISG-A-L-2009-005.01 Interview # 1: March 4, 2009 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 A Note to the Reader This transcript is based on an interview recorded by the ALPL Oral History Program. Readers are reminded that the interview of record is the original video or audio file, and are encouraged to listen to portions of the original recording to get a better sense of the interviewee’s personality and state of mind. The interview has been transcribed in near- verbatim format, then edited for clarity and readability, and reviewed by the interviewee. For many interviews, the ALPL Oral History Program retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. DePue: Today is Wednesday, March 4, 2009. My name is Mark DePue; I’m a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, and we’re here for the very first of the interviews that I will be doing with people from the Jim Edgar administration. Today we’re starting with Mike Lawrence, probably Jim Edgar’s most valued assistant, aide, confidant—whatever words we want to apply to him—officially the press secretary. Mike, it’s a real pleasure for me to talk to you today, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. Lawrence: I have as well. DePue: Okay, let’s go ahead and get started with a little bit about your background, or quite a bit, maybe. Tell us when and where you were born. Lawrence: I was born in Chicago, August 17, 1942. DePue: And did you grow up in Chicago? Lawrence: No, my parents moved downstate when I was two, and I grew up in Galesburg, went to Galesburg public schools, and graduated from Galesburg High School in 1960. Mike Lawrence Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-005.01 DePue: What took your parents to Galesburg? Lawrence: My dad had an opportunity to go into business as a co-owner of a package liquor store. Dad had been trained to teach history, but the economics for our family were not good at that point. I needed significant surgery when I was two years old, and Dad felt that he could not make an adequate living for our family by teaching. He was offered this opportunity to go into business, and he accepted it. DePue: Had he been teaching before that time? Lawrence: No, Dad had an unusual background. He was a high school dropout and then finished high school at the age of twenty-seven while he was working at the Larrabee—L-a-r-a, b as in boy, double-e—YMCA in Chicago. After he got his high school degree, he went to school part time while he was working full time. He attended the University of Chicago and eventually graduated from Northwestern University. DePue: What year was that? Lawrence: It would have been either in the late thirties or early forties. In fact, I’m inclined to believe it was the early forties. And he did not get married until he was thirty-eight. (DePue laughs) Mom was younger. She was twenty-four at the time they were married. And they lived for a relatively short period of time in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago, eventually moved to Lincoln Park, and then downstate. DePue: What was your father’s name? Lawrence: Mark. DePue: And your mother’s name? Lawrence: Gladys. DePue: And her maiden name? Lawrence: Birholtz. DePue: So we’ve got them in Galesburg now and [you] growing up there. Can I ask you what the nature of your operation was? Lawrence: Yes. I was born with a cleft palate, and I had surgery to repair it when I was two. The surgery did not totally repair it. As I grew up in Galesburg and went through high school and college, I had a significant speech problem; and that was ultimately corrected after I got out of college. There was a surgeon in Chicago who was doing an innovative type of cleft palate repair surgery, and I had one of the first surgeries that he performed. Well, I actually had two 2 Mike Lawrence Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-005.01 surgeries within a couple months after I graduated from Knox College, and after those two surgeries when I was twenty-one and twenty-two years old, the cleft palate was pretty much repaired. I still have a nasal quality to my voice, but it’s nowhere near what I had as I was growing up and going to school DePue: Young boys sometimes can be rather brutal about things like that. Was that tough for you growing up? Lawrence: I’ve told a lot of people, when you have a disability—and believe me, there are kids I grew up with who had much more significant disabilities than I had—you’re either going to come out of it very tough or very scarred. I think I came out of it pretty tough. DePue: Did that change or affect the outlook that you had on the rest of your life? Lawrence: I think it was a factor, because I experienced what it is like to be different from the majority of people that you’re around, and I think I’ve always had a special sensitivity for minorities of one type or another. It can be a racial minority, a religious minority, an ethnic minority, or it can be people who have disabilities and are viewed by other people as being abnormal DePue: I know that it wasn’t just the cleft palate that perhaps set you apart from others you were growing up with, but your religion as well? Lawrence: I was raised in the Jewish religion. It was in a Reform temple. And where Christianity emphasizes the salvation of the individual, Judaism emphasizes the salvation of the community; so Jewish people tend to be active in community affairs. DePue: Did that set you apart from some of the other kids you were growing up with? Lawrence: Yes. There was a relatively small Jewish population in Galesburg, so we were very definitely a minority. We certainly felt that at Christmastime, when most of the kids were talking about the Christmas trees they had at home; when the public school was preparing Christmas plays. So we felt it. I don’t think it had any negative impact on me, but again, I think it did increase my sensitivity to what it is like to be part of a minority. DePue: You’re growing up in those years that we tend to romanticize now, idealized years of the fifties, but how would you characterize your youth growing up? Lawrence: I think I had a good youth. First of all, I had great parents. Dad owned that package liquor store for sixteen years. He worked at it very hard. He spent sixteen hours a day, six days a week, at that store. He was home on Sunday night for dinner. That was the one night of the week he was home, and so Sunday dinners were a big event in our family. 3 Mike Lawrence Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-005.01 And my parents were very active in the community. Even though Dad worked long hours, he still found time to be chairman of the Galesburg Human Relations Commission. Mom was involved with the League of Women Voters. And from the time my sister and I were still in grade school, there was a lot of conversation around the dinner table about current events. My parents were not people who said, You need to do this, or you need to do that; here’s what we expect out of you. But my sister and I—and my sister is two years younger—got the message: we were to be engaged in the community. We were to be good family people, but we were to make a positive difference outside of our families. And they didn’t preach about honesty and integrity; they exemplified it. I watched my dad once chase a customer down the street from the liquor store because he had shorted that customer a dime in change. Those are situations that make an imprint on you when you are growing up. DePue: Growing up, did your parents have any reflections on what had happened in Europe in the 1930s and the Second World War? Lawrence: Oh yeah. My folks were very impacted by World War II and the genocide in Europe. My dad had been too old to serve in the armed services, but he was very much impacted by that experience and what had happened to millions of Jews under Hitler’s reign of terror. DePue: Was that one of the things, then, that got him involved with civil rights issues? Lawrence: I don’t know, Mark. That’s a good question. I’m not sure. It would certainly make sense for that to be a part of it, but I think my folks had a fundamental sense of fairness and justice, and I think that is really what got them involved in civil rights issues.

Load more