Hank Schwieterman got it anyway. He's been getting it anyway his whole life.
A retired English teacher and coach from Coldwater, Ohio, Hank Schwieterman is writing his memoir at his daughters' request. What started out feeling like "a long, tedious task" became something else entirely.
Hank Schwieterman lives in Coldwater, Ohio, a town of fewer than five thousand people. He taught high school English there for forty years. He coached. He raised a family.
His daughters asked him to write his memoir, and so he did.
"When I began answering the questions, I thought this was going to be a long, tedious task," he writes. "But as time went on, I found that writing the memoir made me discover things about myself that I never realized, and I enjoyed writing the memoir."
That's most of the people who pick up a memoir prompt for the first time, by the way. They start out doing it for somebody else. They keep going because of what they find.
What Hank found, looking back across his life, was a pattern he had not entirely seen before. A pattern he can almost recite by heart.
"If you think you are beaten, you are. If you think you dare not, you don't… Life's battles don't always go to the stronger or faster man; but sooner or later the man who wins is the man who thinks he can."
— Walter D. Wintle, a poem Hank has carried with him for a lifetime
The Lost Puppy Years
He didn't always feel like the man who thinks he can. Early on, he writes, he was "a lost puppy." He had dropped out of the seminary. He had disappointed his parents. Jobs were hard to find. He was penniless. And he wanted, of all things, to go to college.
He took a job milking cows. Then a job at J&M Manufacturing. He started taking classes at night at a branch college. It was not easy, working all day and attending classes after dark.
Then he met Joyce. They got married. Joyce made a list of their bills, and one by one, they paid them off.
He never quit.
The All-Weather Track
Years later, Hank was a coach. He wanted an all-weather track for his program. A legendary baseball coach, a friend, told him plainly:
"Hank, I know you want that all-weather track. But you will not get that while you are coaching."
He could have heard it as a verdict. Most people would.
He heard it as a starting line.
"What he said made me more determined than ever, and we did get it accomplished while I was still coaching… So I guess the challenges I faced over the years can be attributed to the guidance of God and thinking I could do it."
— Hank Schwieterman
That's the gift of a memoir written late in life. Not the cataloging of victories, but the dawning recognition that the same person who got the track had once been the kid milking cows. That a poem memorized somewhere along the way had become a way of being in the world. That the daughters who asked you to write it down had been watching you live it the whole time.
Hank thought he was doing them a favor.
He's the one who found the pattern.
Every family has a story worth keeping. Memorygram helps you write yours.
Hank's memoir began with a question from his daughters. Yours can begin with a single prompt, too.