Straight Talk From a Straight Shooter

Parental Advisory: The following story contains mature themes and language that may be inappropriate for children and adolescents. Or not.

After deciding to include Dr. Joycelyn Elders in our summer-long series on the American family, we began to get uneasy. Pam and I are hardly prudes. But we are protective of our children’s innocence.

So as we ripped across Arkansas for Little Rock, we worried that we might be about to subject our kids to a creepy crash course on a certain polysyllabic M word--the word that led President Clinton, in 1994, to ask for Dr. Elders’ resignation as the United States’ highest ranking public health official.

I’d decided to contact Dr. Elders after bumping into her autobiography on a preparatory expedition to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. “Joycelyn Elders, M.D.” (written with David Chanoff; William Morrow & Co., 1997) is like a bookend to retired Gen. Colin Powell’s “My American Journey” (put Elders on the left, please) and, in a way, is an even more amazing success story.

A couple of hours before our dinner appointment, we’d reached the former U.S. surgeon general and current University of Arkansas med school professor of pediatrics, to tell her we were running a little late.

“To tell you the truth,” she says, “I completely forgot about it. That’s OK, though. I’ll scrape together some leftovers.” Now, just before dusk, we pull our RV into the circular driveway of the Elderses’ 15-acre suburban estate. Wearing a house dress, the doctor greets us at the door.

Our kids--Ashley, 12, Emily, 10, and Robert, 7--immediately feel enough at home to grab a ball and head for the basketball court where Dr. Elder’s husband, Oliver, a retired coach, still shoots hoops from time to time.

As Dr. Elders putters in the kitchen, Pam, a temporarily retired public health nurse, and I talk with her about her career and her childhood as the daughter of sharecroppers. The oldest of eight children spread out over 18 years, she was reared in the very rural Arkansas town of Schaal (population: about 100).

Each morning at dawn, she and her growing brood of siblings would build a fire in their three-room home and then go out to slop the family’s half a dozen hogs and fetch the cows from the pasture for milking. Then came fieldwork, done with a mule and babies in tow.

The family ate what they grew or hunted, including opossum and raccoon, which Joycelyn learned to skin and cook and eat with gusto.

The nearest doctor lived 12 miles away and most people never saw him. ‘The beginning and end of my understanding on the subject was that if you got sick or something happened to you, either you pulled through or you died. There wasn’t much else,” Dr. Elders says.

At the all-black high school, the white school superintendent would come around and say, “Now you be sure to train your girls to be good maids.”

But the teachers also taught about George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass. Joycelyn took it to heart. She graduated as valedictorian and received a full scholarship to Philander Smith College in Little Rock--working only one summer as a live-in maid to help pay her way.

She excelled in medical school, went on to do research for the National Institutes of Health and, with Clinton as governor, became director of Arkansas’ public health agency. Touring the impoverished Arkansas outback reacquainted her with the interconnected and rapidly growing problems of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, abuse and ignorance. She fought back by advocating school-based health centers, the distribution of condoms and mass doses of education.

*

With dinner just about ready, the kids burst in, their eyes aflutter with pure wonder.

“Guess what?” says Ashley. “We caught fireflies!”

“They light up! They’re all over the place!” Robert chirps.

This is the sort of awe that Pam and I see disappearing from childhood, and in a way, as our conversation navigates the interlinking roles of family and community and government, we keep coming back to it.

The Elderses each say a quick grace, and we dig into a buffet-style feast of spaghetti with meatballs, fried chicken, sauerkraut with ham, corn on the cob, salad and barbecued pork (left over from a funeral, Dr. Elders says).

Eventually, of course, the discussion arrives at Dr. Elders’ role in the Clinton administration, where she stood out as a left-leaning lightning rod at precisely the moment when the Republicans’ less-government revolution looked unstoppable.

“People [in the administration] were always telling me I shouldn’t do this, I shouldn’t do that,” she recalls. “I just blew it off.” Then came the remark that turned into a landmark flap of Clinton’s first administration.

At this point in the conversation, Oliver intervenes.

“Would you kids like to go swimming?” he asks.

They’re gone in a flash and she continues.

She was on a United Nations panel. Representatives from various African nations were talking about the AIDS epidemic. Searching for innovative approaches, a psychiatrist asked if encouraging masturbation might not provide a safe sexual release and thus reduce the spread of AIDS.

“In regard to masturbation, I think that is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught,” Dr. Elders answered, and that was the last straw for an influential Clinton contingent intent on bolstering the president’s popularity by celebrating his centrism.

It hasn’t taken long for Pam and me to appreciate the integrity of this doctor’s impatience with the public-policy pussyfooters who place poll standings above efforts to save lives. But our admiration for Dr. Elders’ courage doesn’t mean we’re ready to turn our kids’ sexual education over to her or anyone else.

The notion that masturbation could be a silver bullet is intriguing, I say, and Dr. Elders smiles. “On the other hand,” I continue, “we don’t want our children’s teachers to be the dominant influence in their lives, especially in those areas.”

“Nobody needs to give anyone a demonstration,” she replies. “What we need to do is stop telling them you’re going to go blind, you’re going to go crazy. We need to be honest and tell them, well, it’s a normal part of sexuality, and if you’re going to do it, do it in private.”

“Is that the parent’s role or the school’s, though?” I ask.

“It depends,” she says, her voice picking up an edge for the first time. “If you have good parents who can do this well, that would be wonderful. But we know that most parents never even talk about [sexuality] to their children. . . .

“I think the more your children know, the more information they go in with, the better they’ll be able to accept whatever the teacher says, come home and discuss it with you--and if it’s different from what you’ve been teaching, they’ll just throw it off and go ahead on.

“The problem we have in our society is, we leave the teaching to the streets and TV.”

*

Earlier, Dr. Elders had told us she had just sent the medical journal Lancet her commentary on a recent study showing that girls are reaching sexual maturation earlier and earlier each year.

“The mean age onset of menses used to be 17 years. Now it’s 12.1 years,” she says. “We don’t know why--if it’s estrogens in the environment or better nutrition [or] more exposure to light. We just know it’s happening.”

I asked if our hyper-sexualized culture might not be a triggering factor. “What turns this on, tells the brain it’s time, we don’t know yet,” she answers. But, she adds, “I’m one of those people who really feel that knowledge is good. There’s a great difference between educating children and exposing them to trash.”

Shouldn’t we be cleaning up the trash too, though? Kids are exposed to crass, ugly, soul-depleting images and language on billboards and bumper stickers, on every channel and at every checkout stand, and only the religious right seems concerned about countering it.

“How do you get rid of the trash?” Dr. Elders counters. “It’s out there in society, it’s going on every day. . . . You can educate children an awful lot easier than you can get rid of the trash.”

*

Through a picture window we glimpse the kids, cannonballing off the diving board and careening down the twisting slide. But soon the sound of thunder rattles the windows, and they scramble in.

The talk by now has shifted to marriage and family. Oliver says the Elderses’ philosophy rearing their two sons boiled down to “be supportive. Little League? Be there screaming and yelling. . . . Our Kevin was in the band with a tuba bigger than him. We were having a fit. But when it was over, he came beaming down the aisle, and his mother was all over him: ‘Oh you were so good.’ ”

But there are forces that can work their way into a family, no matter how it has fortified itself.

The Elderses’ hardest jolt came just before her confirmation as surgeon general when it became public that their youngest son had an alcohol and drug problem. By all indications, the young man is doing well now, Joycelyn says. Still, the subject gentles her voice and brings a look to her husband’s eyes that maybe only parents get.

“We thought we were the world’s best parents,” he says.

“Everybody does,” she adds softly.

“But strange as it seems, as hard as you try to do what you feel is right, things don’t always come out,” he says.

We fall silent for a moment. Then I say that I doubt any family in America has escaped such problems entirely.

Oliver quotes something that Joycelyn’s brother, a preacher, often says from the pulpit: “ ‘If those storms have not come to you, just wait around.’ ”

As we’re leaving, Oliver shakes our hands and says kind things about our children. Joycelyn hands us a jar of plum preserves she’d made a few days earlier and wishes us a safe and healthy trip. Then we sprint across their drive, arriving at the RV sopping wet from the downpour.

It’s the worst storm Pam and the kids have ever seen. Relentless thunder makes us feel like we’re inside a kettle drum. Lightning blisters the tops of neighbors’ trees.

“It’s like the sky’s a big strobe light,” says Ashley.

“I want to go home,” whispers Robert.

Hoping hard that someone has kept the roads in shape, maintained the drainage and made sure the stoplights work, we slam the door and start the engine.

Then we aim our boat into the storm, humble and a little bit afraid.

* Monday: In the Ozarks, a river full of Sniders.

ON THE WEB

Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https://www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.