My sister was in Arizona this week visiting our mother and me.

Holly is our family’s genealogy maven, and she brought a number of papers related to our maternal grandfather, who died in 1958 – about six weeks before she was born, and eight years before I became a speck on the horizon.

Among the papers is a typewritten address discussing prejudice that Henry Rappaport presented to the Town and Gown Rotary Club of Bowling Green, Ohio, on March 11, 1957.

I’ve always heard that Grandpa Rappaport was the epitome of a “community leader” – merchant, hospital cofounder, student adviser – but this paper enabled me to see his thinking in his own words.

I was struck by how many issues remain relevant almost 60 years later, particularly how “our very pattern of living and thinking is handcuffed by prejudice.”

He starts broadly, admitting his preference for driving General Motors products. He asks the men in his audience whether they favor an electric shaver or a manual razor, and why.

Then he gets to the harder stuff. A World War I veteran, he talks about confronting his own prejudices in business:

“In my own business, it is an unending fight between the old and the new, the proven seller and the likely change in the wants and needs of the customers. At the moment, I am trying to overcome my personal prejudice against buying Japanese imports as well as those from Italy … and Germany. We are all aware that in world affairs our government has told us that if we want other nations to trade with us, we must trade with them. Yet World Wars One and Two and the recent Korean conflict have left an indelible prejudice against those nations which shot down our own boys and nearly destroyed our civilization.”

Wow. Free trade, logic vs. emotion, experience vs. progress. All questions we continue to face today, whether in terms of sanctions against Russia, trade with China or Indiana’s so-called religious freedom law.

I’m sorry I never got to meet Grandpa Rappaport. He was a product of small-town Ohio whose thinking was way ahead of his time.

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Stu Robinson practices writing, editing, media relations and social media through his business, Phoenix-based Lightbulb Communications.

Tags: Bowling Green, Henry Rappaport, prejudice