Every election day I think of my father and chuckle.
He was a closet republican.

"Are you kidding me???" I said when my younger sister (the one who still has my Neil Young book!) told me.

"Of course, didn't you know???" she said.

"In this country we have a right to a private vote," my father always answered when we asked him how he voted.

Living in a household with four children during the late sixties-early seventies, children who believed in "QUESTIONING AUTHORITY," it was probably safer to remain anonymous.

My father is the American dream. After the war he took a job sweeping the floor at a custom machine shop, the Herzberg Corp. in Milwaukee.

He ended up buying the company and becoming president and CEO of his own 30-employee business: Milwaukee Machine & Engineering Corp. in New Berlin.

The success of this country, he believed, was in the hands of small business owners.

"There is no difference between the guy who sweeps the floor and the president of a company as long as they both do the best job they can," he often told us.

He lived by example, a quiet man who didn't feel the need to voice his opinion, unlike his middle daughter.

Not that there wasn't healthy debate in the Roznik family. His siblings were union people, employed at Allis Chalmers in West Allis. But in those days debate was an intellectual process - there were no low blows or cheap shots. It was a favorite pastime, an oratory exercise that drew an apple pie eating audience (my grandmother's).

I recently read somewhere "There is no real liberalism or conservatism, only a high road and a low road."

My dad always lead us along that high road, to live what we believed, no matter what.

He is a hero in my heart, gone 22 years, a loss that has never lessened.