I stared hard at the floor, the way embarrassed teenagers do. My father listened as the exasperated chemistry teacher wondered aloud how I could be so dense.

“And Mr. Rhoades,” he said, “being a college-educated man yourself…”

Of course, my father and I knew better. He had never been to college, but we didn’t let on.

He had grown up during the height of the Great Depression and college was absurdly unrealistic. As a child, he had suffered from rickets, a now obscure form of malnutrition, but he had still graduated near the top of his class. He had brains, skill and ambition, but no money. Few people did.

After graduation, he felt lucky to get into the Army, where he enjoyed three square meals and a warm bed.

But throughout his life he studied to compensate for his lack of higher education. He taught himself to play musical instruments, he became an excellent public speaker and he always carried a list in his shirt pocket of new words to memorize.

He could quote Shakespeare, recite obscure poems and recall the lyrics to old songs.

He supported a family, although never lavishly, and even ran for elective office. He was well-spoken, handsome and usually well-dressed, and many people mistakenly thought he was a college grad.

He had grown up in what George W. Bush now calls an “ownership society.” America was exactly that in the first third of the last century, in the era of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Frick – the steel, oil and coal barons.

Basically, it meant that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a very small group of people, while most others hovered in or just above abject poverty.

And there is no doubting the trend: Over the past 20 years, Americans have increasingly pooled at both ends of the economic spectrum. Small group at the top; large group at the bottom.

Two presidents in particular, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have hastened the trend. Their strategies: Grant massive tax cuts, mostly to the wealthy, bankrupt government, declare a fiscal crisis and begin cutting government services.

How else to explain the Republican obsession with eliminating the capital gains tax, completely shifting the burden of financing government from people with investments to people who work. This would be a total reversal of the income tax which, in 1913, was instituted as a tax on “excessive wealth.” Bush would make it exclusively a tax on work.

How else to explain the Republican fixation with eliminating the estate tax? The goal there being to ensure that large fortunes are transmitted even more seamlessly, and without taxation, from generation to generation?

How else to explain the conservative infatuation with the flat tax, which simply means abolition of the progressive income tax, another original tenet of the income tax.

How else to explain the cuts to Head Start, as well as to college aid to poor and minority students – two noble and successful anti-poverty programs?

I could go on, but you get the point.

On Thanksgiving, I reflected on the advantages I’ve had that my father did not. We had love and food in our small brick house back then, and my brother and I were able – partly thanks to government loans and scholarships – to attend college.

I’m also thankful that my wife and I have been able to put our two sons through college without government assistance.

Still, we are proud that they both know others deserve a hand up in the world. Our eldest son is now “walking the talk” as a Peace Corps worker in Bangladesh.

Late in life my father bought himself a large ring with a ruby red stone in the middle. It looked exactly like a ring from Yale or Harvard, although it really said “High School” if you looked closely. I found it, along with his final word list, on his dresser after he died.

He always wanted people to think he had gone to one of those places.

To me, he had done far better.

Rex Rhoades is executive editor of the Sun Journal. Readers should know that his opinions – like those of all columnists on these pages – are not intended to reflect those of the newspaper’s owners, employees or carriers. E-mail him at: [email protected].