My Mom was an American of the kind we often fear they do not make anymore. I think we still have the potential to forge citizens like her, but thanks to social media and our garbage culture, the people who end up getting celebrated are the weirdos, losers, and mutations instead of the normal Americans who do extraordinary things. She passed away on her own terms a few days ago, getting her way in that she was ready to be with her Lord and to rejoin Dad and her many dogs in a place where she was not frail and losing both her sight and hearing. She told us she was ready to go, unequivocally and with no sugar-coating. That was her generation. She did not talk about feelings. She just did things.
She was tough, the granddaughter of a coal miner who brought his daughters, including my grandmother Janet, to America before World War I. Her father, Dr. E. Paul Wagner, was a coach in Pennsylvania and when World War II began, he left his wife and two girls to go to the Pacific. While Paul was overseas, she and Mom and Aunt Harriet lived in Donora outside of Pittsburg, where a giant steel mill belched smoke and made the metal that won the war and turned America into a superpower. They left just a little while before Donora became the scene of a toxic smog that killed dozens of people. Old school America was not a safe space.
Mom went on to Penn State, where her sorority sister married a young coach named Joe Paterno (My grandpa knew him and thought he was a jerk). She met Dad, and after graduation her fiancé went off to the Navy. They married when he got back, after she got her masters in social work because her father thought that no girl should go to law school. That made her mad, and it would not stand.
The social work experience made her a lifelong Republican. The experience with her father made her a feminist in the way we once understood it – not hating men but instead insisting on being able to go as far as her hard work and talent could take her. Our family ended up in San Mateo, California, in the early 1970s. Mom enrolled in law school. We watched her study for years on our dining room table. She passed the Bar on the first try and was hired as one of the first female deputy district attorneys in the county. This was a time when everyone smoked, where you guzzled bourbon at lunch, and where “me too” was not a thing. She took no guff, prosecuting misdemeanors, then felonies, including death penalty cases. It was always a little weird to have a mom dealing with sex offenders – our dinner table conversations were amazing – and she had a book on murder investigations whose illustrations still make me shiver. It had to be tough, but she was tough, and while she never hesitated to complain about people being stupid – Mom hated stupid people – she never complained about hard work.
She left the DA’s office and became a defense attorney. Once, she was in jail talking to a biker who was demanding she get him bail when she had had enough and said “So you want me to get you out so you can sell speed to my kids?” and the biker, offended, replied, “I don’t sell to kids.” She helped defend the “Barrel Murderer,” who would write stories starring our current golden retrievers.
Mom became a judge right when I deployed to Desert Storm, and refused any kind of fancy ceremony when she was sworn in since I was overseas. The sheriff’s deputies adored her from her time as a DA, and when a bunch of dirtbag Stanford jerks rushed into the courthouse to protest the war, the sheriffs removed them in an extremely ungentle manner because they upset Judge Schlichter.
Mom swore me in when I became a lawyer – it was my first court appearance. She told me two things. First, “Remember that everybody lies,” and second, “Don’t become one of those a****** LA lawyers.” So, I’m batting .500.
In 1993, my dad’s kidneys failed, so she donated one of hers, and Dad lived an astonishing 29 more years. Then one day she woke up and her hearing was essentially gone. She could hear some with hearing aids, but left the bench because she did not want to do it if she could not do it her way. She was a very tough judge. The then-adjutant general of California was a lawyer in civilian life. He saw my nametape and asked me if I was related to Judge Schlichter. I copped to it. He sighed and shook his head.
Mom loved Irina and the kids. She took Irina and the oldest in when I deployed from 2004 to 2006, even driving with Irina from Texas to LA. They sold the family house in San Mateo and moved to LA to be near my brother’s and my family. Mom’s body failed, and she went blind in one eye, but she never felt sorry for herself. She liked to play solitaire and watch Bret Baier on Fox. She had two terrible abdominal operations a couple years ago where the surgeon told us she would not likely make it. He did not know her.
She remained mentally sharp to the end. She went into the hospital on a Friday for what we thought was a routine infection and back issue. The doctor briefed me that the CT had shown hitherto unknown Stage IV liver cancer. I walked into her ward to tell her it was terminal. She greeted me with “I have liver cancer,” then proceeded to tell me that the staff was not doing what she asked fast enough. She never complained about the diagnosis. A woman of faith, she was unafraid. She passed peacefully and painlessly 36 hours later, her body worn out but not her spirit.
She was a quintessential American, daughter of an immigrant and a true patriot. She watched a father go to war, a fiancé serve in the Navy, and a son deploy twice – the woman went through twice as many deployments as me! But like millions of other Americans, she served by sending her loved ones off, by being a public servant in the best sense, and by living an upright and moral life. She experienced sexism and her answer was to show what she could do, not whine about the patriarchy. She did not ask for respect – she earned it. She was a real American, and she was my Mom.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
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