Marx and me: Getting cozy with Karl in the sixth grade

When I was kid, I dreamed of being a tycoon.
This was in the heyday of the television program “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” hosted by Robin Leach.
I was a 7-year-old with “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”
I decided I would own several large castles and cruise around the world on my yacht, an ascot puffing up from my blazer, a monocle in my eye.
I admired characters like Daddy Warbucks, the Monopoly guy and Scrooge McDuck, who bathed in gold coins.
Well, none of that has happened – yet. But I have grown to understand there is a much more complicated relationship between people and money.
It started when I was in the sixth grade and we were given an assignment to do a report on an important historical figure. We were to compile the basic facts of their lives, organize it into a report and draw a picture of the person.
Most kids chose the obvious suspects: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart and Betsy Ross.
For some reason, I chose Karl Marx. Most of the kids in my class eyed me suspiciously and said, “Who’s that?”
I don’t remember how I even knew who Karl Marx was in elementary school. It could have been at the urging of my dad, a newspaperman and jokester, who once told my brother’s high school composition teacher she didn’t know English usage from sewer usage. He would have gotten a kick out of Karl Marx being discussed in my sixth grade class.
Or, it could have been at the urging of my brother, who had inherited a streak of suggesting I do strange things in front of others for his own amusement.
Regardless of where I got the influence, I earnestly began my project. I went to the library and read encyclopedia entries about The Father of Communism.
Keep in mind, this was in the late 1980s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Communism was still very much a threat. On the evening news, nuclear missiles with red stars on them seemed to be paraded through Moscow streets every night.
Also keep in mind that I was born with a port-wine stain birth mark on my forehead, which was eerily similar to Mikhail Gorbachev’s, thus earning me the nickname of, “Gorbie.”
I’m surprised my teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, didn’t call the FBI into Grant Elementary in Livonia, Michigan and have me investigated for treason.
I wasn’t a turncoat, though.
The basic concept I could understand in the sixth grade was that socialism wanted to make everything more equal. Instead of having to drool over Scrooge McDuck’s vault of gold coins, those coins would be spread out among the poor. Scrooge could share and be brought down a little, and the impoverished would be brought up a little.
It sounded reasonable enough to me in the sixth grade, but it didn’t match up with the missiles I saw on the television.
“It sounds good on paper,” my old man and brother told me, “but not so much in the real world.”
Such a fair and peaceful idea and weapons of total annihilation seemed unlikely bedfellows. It was still years before I went to college and read about Stalin’s purges in the 1930s and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
In the sixth grade, I was more interested with the drawing of Marx, which I made from the most recognizable picture of Karl there is. All that hair from his beard merging with the hair on his head allowed me to messily scribble all over the page. It was fun.
I turned in the report and gave an oral presentation and believe I earned an A on the project.
My youthful American dream of yachts, sport cars and mansions didn’t dissipate completely, but I did have a new understanding of money and social class.
And only once did I fill up a kiddie pool with coins and try to swim in it.
It sounds good on paper, but didn’t really work out in reality.