Work hard. Tell the truth. Cultivate a firm handshake. Look everybody straight in the eye. Dodge no problems or issues. Venerable virtues that to many have seemed quintessentially un-American since the 1960s now re-emerge as the heart of American character. So insists Tim Russert, the television personality. He does that in Big Russ & Me: Father and Son: Lessons of Life (Miramax, 352 pages, $22.95), which is destined to dominate the Father's Day market.
Russert, born in 1950, grew up in South Buffalo, N.Y. His father, who never finished high school, drove a sanitation truck for a living, later becoming a foreman. Uncomplainingly, throughout Russert's childhood and adolescence, "Big Russ" held a second job, delivering the Buffalo Evening News, in order to support his wife, Tim and three daughters. A parachute rigger in the Army Air Corps in World War II, he was injured in a plane crash but would never talk about it. His family's social focus was the American Legion post, of which he was, at one time, commander.
Russert presents his father as a classic member of the Greatest Generation, celebrated by Tom Brokaw, Russert's colleague at NBC. Russert describes it as "that brave and selfless generation of Americans who came of age during the Great Depression and then went off to fight for freedom and democracy in the Second World War."
For his own achievements, of which he is justly proud, Russert gives enormous credit to his father's example, advice and leadership -- and those values, as well as the parochial schools he attended, which instilled, he writes, discipline and focus.
His favorite grade school teacher, Sister Lucille, pressed him toward going to a more demanding and prestigious Catholic high school than the one in the Russerts' neighborhood. In that Jesuit school, Canisius High, he was pushed hard to learn and to think and to question. He was the first member of his family ever to go to college, also a Catholic school, after which he went to law school at Cleveland State University. Young Tim also had an early job as a "packer" on a garbage truck, which helped put him through college.
"I learned a few things, too," he writes of those early years. "That there is no substitute for getting up in the morning, reporting to work on time, and putting in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. That everybody has a job to do and a contribution to make, and that no matter how small that job may seem in the larger scheme of things if it's worth doing at all, it's worth done well. ... I learned, too, that having a certain job at one point in your life doesn't mean you'll be doing it forever."
