“Well, actually, I imposed on our friendship,” Betsy Ebeling explained rather matter-of-factly. And so goes the story of what can happen when two girlhood chums who grew up five blocks apart stay close as one becomes first lady and the other a mother of a graduating senior in Arlington Heights.
It pays to have friends in the right places.
On Sunday, Hillary Rodham Clinton will deliver the commencement address at Hersey High School.
Which is not to say that the graduates at Rolling Meadows High School won’t be inspired by the words of the faculty member and student who will take their spots at the podium. Or that members of the District 214 Board of Education won’t have uplifting messages for the graduates at Elk Grove and Wheeling High Schools.
And as much as Hersey Principal Donald Kersemeier humbly protests that he’s just putting together a regular graduation, albeit tending to a few extra details like setting up big-screen TVs in the cafeteria for the overflow and tightening security so no one is allowed to enter the building without a special ticket, planning for Hillary Clinton’s visit has become something of an extracurricular event.
And not just for Hersey High. About 500 people received special invitations that were frantically stuffed into envelopes and mailed off last Friday before the holiday weekend, the message changed at the last minute from an afternoon tea with Clinton on Sunday to a garden breakfast when the first lady’s changing schedule changed again.
To attend that event at the Arlington Park Hilton, which is being put together by a group assembled in one night’s flurry of phone calls from Mayor Arlene Mulder, invitees must personally deliver a response card with their name, address and Social Security number. And $20 to cover costs.
Then there’s brunch at the Ebeling home. Then on to Hersey, where Clinton is scheduled to arrive shortly before the commencement march-in, to begin precisely at 2 p.m.
Having her good friend be a part of Hersey’s graduation was actually an idea that occurred to Betsy Ebeling about a year ago, when she and her family attended the wedding of Hillary Clinton’s brother and stayed as guests of the Clintons at the White House.
“The kids brought their yearbook from Hersey, and Hillary was looking at it and she remarked about all of the activities there were for the students.
“I said, `Well, you should see our school. Why not come next year?’ “
Time passed, but Ebeling’s interest in the first lady’s visit didn’t. When it looked as if the idea was probable and not just possible, Colin, Betsy’s graduating son, took the idea for the commencement speaker to a faculty member.
“He was excited. Well, ecstatic,” said Colin, who plans to study theater at UCLA after he graduates. “I thought it was a good idea because it would create a one-time lasting memory for my class.”
Official confirmation from the White House came less than a month ago. Still, just days before the visit, Kersemeier said he has yet to “hear one syllable” from the White House about what they want done.
Not to worry. Kersemeier said he has been told to expect a Secret Service takeover of the school, probably on Saturday. And if this visit is anything like the first lady’s trip to Maine East High School in Park Ridge last February, the school will soon go to the dogs.
Literally. People at Maine East still remember how odd it was to look out the windows a few days before the first lady’s visit only to find dozens of specially trained bomb-sniffing dogs. “They were the oddest-looking dogs, each with a Secret Service person,” recalled Karen Larsen, a spokesman for School District 207. “They had these curly tails that kind of spun in. The dogs did it; that’s when it sunk in that this was something really out of the ordinary.”
A Hersey graduation is typically a tightly orchestrated production, with only eight admission tickets allowed each graduate and some 2,400 tickets that have been claimed for weeks. As for a photo opportunity with the first lady, not likely. Inside the gymnasium, where the graduation ceremony will take place, the only photographs allowed are those taken by a professional hired by the school.
John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prize winning author for whom the school is named, is the only other notable to have spoken at a Hersey commencement.Two of his books, Kersemeier said, will be presented to the first lady in appreciation of her visit, one of them “Hiroshima,” which is a part of the sophomore English curriculum at the school.
About the first lady’s visit, Kersemeier said it’s received mostly a positive reaction.
“We’ve had a few people who are concerned about the political statement,” said Kersemeier, “but that’s not what this visit is all about. She’s a friend of a family, and we’re happy to have her. I think this will be a life memory for the young people here.”
