Lawrence Hodapp

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Biography

Lawrence Hodapp is a member of the US Southern Colonies Project (Colony of Virginia Team).

Lawrence Martin Hodapp was born in Harvey, Illinois, on 22 January 1948 to Lawrence C. Hodapp, Jr. and Martha (Maddox) Hodapp.^[1] His parents met after his father returned from serving in the Army for 3-1/2 years in the South Pacific during World War II. They chose the middle name "Martin" for their son because "Big Larry," as he was later called, rejected the continued use of his father's and his own middle name "Charles" for "Little Larry," as it would created a pretentious "Lawrence The Third." Also, "Martin" was sort of like "Martha," working both parent's names into their first child's name.^[2] Larry's sister, Elizabeth Ann Hodapp, was born on 6 July 1949.

Religious Influences

The decision of Big Larry and Martha to settle in Harvey, Illinois, to raise their family involved far more than a simple choice among Chicago suburbs. Larry had been raised without consistent religious guidance in a suburb a little farther north. His parents' house was only a few miles away from the brothel run by his aunt Gertrude. He had been baptised when an infant as a Catholic, but his parents' primary religious observances were Protestant tent meetings. In contrast, Martha was a devout Baptist, raised in a church in Harvey where her father was a major influence by virtue of his doctorate from the University of Chicago and position as an administrator in the local school district. Big Larry's conversion and immersion into the Baptist religion of her church in Harvey was a pre-condition, probably implicity understood, to their marriage.

Big Larry was very willing to accomodate himself to the Baptist regimen. Although he had previously enjoyed some of the "sins–of–the–world" (E.g., he wrote to his mother on 26 September 1945, when he returned to the states, that he had avoided getting "pie–eyed" by drinking only four beers at the P.X.), he gave up drinking, smoking, gambling and movies to marry Martha. (He would have been required to also give up dancing, but his letter to his mother states that he didn't dance, even before his conversion, and so had left the Service Club, where the girls from Tacoma had come to dance with the returning G.I.s, to drink at the P.X.) He was baptised as an adult and took up multiple weekly church services, daily Bible–reading and prayer. For several years, he also took night courses at Northwestern University, but discontinued under the burden of raising a family and serving in the reserves to make ends meet financially.

Education and Family

Little Larry did not thrive in this environment. His first grade teacher rated his writing unsatisfactory for the first grade period that he was in school and gave him more negative than average ratings for the year. He did not learn until over 50 years later from his father that she had also told his parents that there was something wrong with him and insisted that they take him to a doctor for evaluation. The doctor did not find a problem with him, but rather asked about the teacher and attributed her critique to the views that some old, single female teachers had of active young boys. In fact, decades before, Larry had learned from a friend at the same church, Bobby White, who had been her student the year before, that she had also rapped him on the knuckles with her ruler for not paying attention. Bobby had by that time begun to doubt that he could do well in school. He ended up being expelled from high school and working the docks in Los Angeles. By contrast, the consequences of Larry's mediocre performance over eight years of grade school were benign.

Larry was aware that an effort to correct his academic trajectory was needed because he knew that the tests given students in eighth grade determined their track in high school: the top students got the best teachers and most competitive classes. He knew this, or at least that bad things happened if you didn't do well on these tests, because his grandfather, Clifford Rhea Maddox (1894-1965), had designed the testing program over his 19 years as Thornton Township High School freshman class principal, which ended with his retirement five years before Larry entered high school. ^[3][4] Larry managed to do better in high school and then entered college: first Monmouth College; then, Wheaton College in Illinois. Given a leave-of-absence after being ratted out for drinking at Wheaton College, he enlisted in the Army and afterwards returned to finish college at Wheaton. Ironically, he, his father and his sister all graduated from college in 1971, after his father was required to finish his degree at Northwestern to qualify for a job as Controller of the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Larry entered law school at the University of Illinois and graduated in 1974. After graduation, he became a trial lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. At a Halloween party in 1974, he met Sue Staton, and they were married on 14 August 1976 at the Fairfax Presbyterian Church, Fairfax, Virginia. ^[5] They had two children and, at present, four grandchildren. Perhaps as a result of their adult, parental perspective they became active in the Westminster Prebyterian Church in Alexandria, Virginia, serving together as Sunday school superintendants; also separately: she as an elder, he as a deacon.

Litigation

During Larry's career, he appeared in over 15 different Federal judicial districts. His first argument in Federal Court was in the ceremonial courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, before U.S. District Judge Albert V. Bryan, Jr. Like many of his cases at the FTC, that was a case to stop a fraud and recompense its victims. The Court rejected the attempt by the perpetrators to use bankruptcy to evade trial over their sale-leaseback scheme to drain the equity in the homes of Black residents of Washington, D.C., who had received foreclosure notices.

While most of Larry's cases were civil injunctive cases, he was also part of an FTC team that convicted 50 telemarketers working out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, for defrauding elderly victims. The team obtained sentences averaging over 38 months per defendant and in 1996 received a John Marshall award from the U.S. Department of Justice for its work. Larry also served in other capacities with the FTC, including the initial chairman of the Bureau of Consumer Protection's Litigation Coordinating Committee, and received other awards from the FTC, including the Brandeis Award, its top litigation award. He retired in 2011.

Retirement

Since retirement he has taken Spanish, French, and Colonial History courses at George Mason University. He has also resumed hiking: doing multi-day hikes on the Appalachian trail (especially the area serviced by Appalachian Mountain Club huts in New Hampshire), rim–to–rim and back in the Grand Canyon, the Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier, and multi-week hikes on the John Muir Trail in California and with REI in New Zealand.

Genealogy

As this profile shows, one of his interests is also genealogy. After working backwards in time to accurately identify his ancestors, he enjoys working forward to identify patterns of influence from one generation to the next. His father and grandfather had theories about such familial cultural transmission that are ironic in light of their ancestry of which they were unaware.

His father often repeated the proverbial phrase "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." The phrase is usually taken to mean that the wealth gained by a second generation that has risen out of the first generation's poverty is lost in the third generation, and that the third generation is to blame for its carelessness, laziness, and profligacy. For Larry's father, it also carried the implication that the second generation was to blame for its failure to transmit its good work ethic and values or for its subtle transmission of moral flaws that it had inherited from the first generation.

The irony is that, as laid out in Lawrence C. Hodapp's profile, he chose to serve in the Army during World War II and join a fundamentalist religious community without any knowledge that these choices fit a profile from his grandparents and earlier ancestors. The pattern had only taken a break during his parents' generation. For him, the familial cycle might be a more positive cycle of khakis–to–khakis in three generations, or faith–to–faith in three generations.

Larry's grandfather, Clifford Rhea Maddox (1894-1965), also had a theory of cultural transmission that he laid out in a school paper written during the 1910s decade, when he was in his late teens or early 20s. Silent Influences stated:

The habits of our forefathers have been handed down through child and grandchild until we are the slaves of antiquated customs and ideals as old as the nations themselves. Unconsciously, habits have been grafted from the lives of these forefathers into our lives until we have become the creators of a civilization which is the worshiper of past ideals and past associations.^[6]

The irony here is that, while he was aware of the customs and ideals passed down to him by his Kentucky, Baptist ancestors, he would make life choices that bore as much, or more, resemblance to the possible "Silent Influences" of more distant ancestors of which he does not appear to have been aware. His choices to move his family out–of–state, obtain a Ph.D. while working, join a fundamentalist religion, and dedicate the last decade of his life to teaching similarly religiously–minded youth appears to fit with the ideals of these forefathers who he would have been unlikely to disavow:

• John Alden (abt.1598-1687) and Priscilla (Mullins) Alden (abt.1602-1680) of the Plymouth Colony.
• James Keith Sr. (abt.1643-1719), who was educated at Marischal College, Scotland, brought to America by Increase Mather in Puritan response to Anglicanism, and served as minister in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, for over 55 years.
• Ebenezer Byram Sr. (1692-1753), who left Bridgewater over the established churches' opposition to the dynamic preaching of George Whitefield and founded the Hilltop Presbyterian Church in Mendham, New Jersey.
• Martin Tichenor (1625-1681), who joined the Puritans who fled the New Haven colony and established Newark, New Jersey, rather than acquiese in the imposition of the Half-Way Covenant.

Sources

1. ↑ Illinois Department of Public Health, Certificate of Birth, dist. 174, no. 49, for Lawrence Martin Hodapp. Certified copy dated 21 Jan 2005 in possession of Lawrence Hodapp, Catonsville, Maryland.
2. ↑ These and other unsourced, and often unverifiable, details in this profile are the recollections of the subject from conversations with family members.
3. ↑ Undated and unattributed newspaper column, Personality of the Week, about Dr. Clifford A. [sic] Maddox, suprvisor of instruction at Thornton Township High School.
4. ↑ Dr. Maddox died during a trip to attend the Educational Testing Service annual meeting in New York City; Dr. Maddox, ex-Educator in Harvey, Dies, Chicago Tribune (7 Nov 1965).
5. ↑ "Virginia, Marriage Certificates, 1936-1988," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QK9D-MV8T : 8 April 2020), Lawrence Martin Hodapp and Sara Sue Staton, 14 Aug 1976; from "Virginia, Marriage Records, 1700-1850," database and images, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : 2012); citing Fairfax, , Virginia, United States, certificate 76-035412, Virginia Department of Health, Richmond.
6. ↑ Original in possession of Lawrence Hodapp, Catonsville, Maryland.