The Rev. Happy Watkins will give the “I Have a Dream” speech at least 25 times this month; it’s been hundreds over the years. He’s so well-known around here that some school kids probably think he is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But just recently Watkins called me up to tell me about a vision or two of his own.

He sounded sorrowful. Two more black young men he knew were headed to prison on long drug sentences. He recognizes unfairness. Black kids often can’t afford the legal help that keeps so many white kids out of prison. Yet he prefers to focus on preventing kids from going astray at all.

It comes down, he says, to the power of a strong family life.

“People think they can solve a lot of problems by threatening people with the electric chair, (but) it’s got to start with the highchair,” he says.

Watkins and his wife have a fine family with four sons, but he urged me to write about his friend, Ivan Bush, and his family instead.

“They epitomize what a family is about,” Watkins says.

So I called up Bush, who works as an equal opportunity officer for Spokane Public Schools.

His wife, Fannie, is a health and fitness specialist at Adams Elementary School. They met in a small Christian college in Tyler, Texas, where Ivan played basketball and Fannie played volleyball.

Together, they wound up raising three outstanding volleyball-playing daughters.

There’s Shayla, 24, who went to Rutgers University in New Jersey on a volleyball scholarship. She set all-time records there and now works in marketing in Washington, D.C.

There’s Ivy, 19, who rode her own scholarship to Morgan State University in Maryland, where she’s rookie of the year.

And there’s Oceana, 16, now a sophomore starter on Lewis and Clark High School’s team.

They’re all excellent athletes with amazing jumping skills, and they’re fine students, too. That’s because their parents absolutely believe in education.

“If they got a 3.0, we want them to have a 4.0,” Ivan Bush says. “And if they have a 4.0, we want to invent a 5.0.”

All three were shorter than your average 5 foot 10 inch female volleyball player. Shayla was 5-foot-8, Ivy 5-foot-5 and Oceana 5-foot-7.

Their friend, the Rev. Watkins, believes it was the breadth of their family life that prevented them from being derailed by their lack of height.

As their girls grew up, the Bush family ate dinners together at least four nights a week. They loved ribs, especially, and they’d gather around to chat about their day and laugh.

Ivan and Fannie set up a system. All it took was one member of the family to announce, “Family talk!” and everyone else knew to drop what they were doing to listen.

They talked, and they talked, and they talked.

“I’ve got girls; everything is a crisis,” their dad laughs now.

But that didn’t stop him from pulling up a chair. He’d made the rules, after all.

Ivan Bush feels lucky to have had strong support from this community and his daughters’ coaches.

He remembers when Spokane was named an All-America City. He has some ideas about what that should mean. He would like us to be a city that supports all families with more viable work, more child-care, more job training, and with counseling programs that don’t require a three- to six-month wait after you call for an appointment. Spokane falls short in all those areas, he says.

Happy Watkins can also list changes our city needs. He sees single parents and dual working couples who come home at night worn out from their jobs. They struggle so hard to pay the rent, paint the house and get a family dinner on the kitchen table.

Watkins goes back to his dream. It mirrors mine, and yours, too, I’ll bet. It centers, he says, around that table.

He remembers growing up with nine brothers and sisters in the Bronx. His mother doled out nightly doses of cod liver oil and prayer. His dad helped set him up a business selling plums and melons at a produce stand. On the day Watkins graduated from junior high school, his dad gave him a watch.

The father died when his son was only 15. But his impact remains.

The man known in these parts for Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech told me this: In his waking visions, the Rev. Happy Watkins imagines highchairs and kitchen tables.

At night, though, he still sees his father in his dreams.