My grandfather, William Henry Quell (1911-1974), was a Socialist. You can tell from his picture (left) that he obviously had sinister designs on the fabric of American society at large. He and my grandmother, Esther Marie Quell, raised me. He is the only father figure I've ever known, and I gotta tell you....he wasn't very good at being a Dad. He was working all the time! He worked nights, and then he drove school buses during the day. He came home between morning and afternoon bus runs to catch some sleep, but he was always walking out the door with his lunchpail and I wanted a Dad to play catch with me. He didn't even talk that much. I thought he was....well...stupid.
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Only after he had been dead a decade did I realize that English wasn't his first language; he was urban Pennsylvania Dutch. Not an Amish black hat riding a carriage with a whip in hand and five hundred acres of planted corn, Pop Quell was a mechanic's helper at the Reading, PA, Bus Company. He never even made mechanic. He was a seventh-grade dropout, a man who struggled to read the evening newspaper and repeated himself frequently when he thought he had said something witty.
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Pop Quell wasn't stupid, rather he was in the purest sense of the word ignorant, meaning he wasn't well-educated in an academic setting and therefore had limited resourcs to understand things like American history, politics, literature, art, or philosophy. It wasn't his fault, and it certainly wasn't due to laziness. William Henry Quell left school at twelve years old to go to work, not just because the family needed extra income, but because that is what working class boys did in the factory towns during the 1920's.
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And he was definitely a Socialist. Well, to be accurate, he had voted Socialist whenever a major Socialist candidate was running for local office. In 1927 Reading elected Mayor J. Henry Stump, who served several terms as the city's only Socialist mayor. When I was a boy in the 1950's, people still spoke fondly of "Stumpy" and his pipe-smoking, common-man politics.
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Pop Quell didn't have a clue what socialism meant. I know this because we spoke about it on occasion. He simply said, "The Socialists always did more for the working man." That was his political philosophy in a sentence. He didn't care what labels people wore; he wanted to know what they would do for "the working man." Working women will identify with this philosophy, too.
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My grandfather was a bread-and-butter Socialist; he didn't know and didn't care what political philosophy motivated people. He wanted a living wage, and Social Security, and un employment insurance, and a chance to work hard and retire with dignity.
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I was moving back to Reading in June of 1974, having dropped out of seminary in Denver in the hope of finding a teaching job in my home town. While I was driving across country, my grandfather died of a heart attack on my 28th birthday, June 10, 1974. He was just shy of 63, and had not survived to collect social security.
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He had a union job and good benefits. But I wonder what might have happened if his nation had adopted universal health care as a fundamental right for all. Would our excellent family physician, Dr. Martin Luther Spangler, D.O., have been more inclined to order tests that may have discovered the blockage that eventually cause his heart attack? Who knows.
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Pop was a nominal Socialist for all the right reasons. Not for political philosophy or some vaugue idea of a workers' paradise. He wanted bread-and-butter benefits for the working man...and woman.
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Somewhere between Marxist Communism (which does NOT work) and laissez-faire capitalism (which also does not work), there must be a responsible, sober, econonically plausible middle ground that will allow the greatest nation in the world to provide health care and social services to its working people.

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My grandfather worked two jobs--cleaning city buses by night and driving school buses by day--and I never had a chance to tell him thank you. I realized recently that the reason he was working so hard was to put me through high school, a level that must have seemed like college to him. Now I have a doctorate, and America does not have universal health care. Our provided-for generation needs to step up and do something for the Pop Quells out there who are holding down multiple jobs to raise grandchildren and wondering why the politicans don't do more for the working man and woman.