The job started
in the middle of the year. It wasn't until later that I realized it
was because they had already lost so many teachers that year. It paid
two thousand dollars for the semester, big money to me. It was sort
of a bits and pieces job, just fill in where a teacher had been
destroyed and quit, where a senior sponsor had been run off, where
another just couldn't take it anymore and walked. It didn't seem to
matter that the subject matter didn't match my degree, my area of
expertise. But really, at that point I had no area of expertise,
although I was pretty well convinced I knew it all. I did get one
physical education class, in my field, and that actually turned out
to be my salvation at St. Paul
.
I knew the
coach, Billy Max, an old A&M grad himself. He invited me to share
his trailer. I went along with him to lots of his games. His senior
boys team was very short, no good, and would pass up a layup any day
for the glory of gunning a thirty foot shot. Just quite naturally,
they won no games that year. His junior boys showed promise, and the
girls teams were fair.
I was nearly
out of transportation, having problems with my old Chevy. The fuel
pump shut down on me on University Avenue in Little Rock one day, and
a cop showed up and helped me get it towed back to a station.
Fortunately, my brother Harold, who I had bought the car from for
several cows, had saved an old fuel pump in the trunk. Said it would
work in a tight. Well, I was in a tight. I had it put on, and Harold
was right. It did work in a tight. Long enough for me to get back to
the spot where the first one quit, and it quit too.
As soon as I
got a paycheck, I sold it and headed to town to decide between a
1966 Corvair and a 1966 Mustang. Wouldn't you just know it, I picked
the Corvair, brand new, two thousand three hundred dollars.
Teaching went
pretty well, everything considered. I had a hard core group of
hillbilly boys in my PE class, but I was a hard core hillbilly too.
Some of these guys, I knew, were at the forefront in running off
teachers, so I put in a little segment on distance running right off.
Since I had just come from being a college distance runner, I led
them out on a two mile route. They were determined to not let a
teacher outdo them in anything physical, and they kept up until they
just, one by one, collapsed. They respected physical things much more
than teaching ability, fortunately, and we got along OK. One of my
boys collapsed to the point that I had to load him up in my car and
take him to the doctor in Huntsville, twenty miles away. We were late
getting back, he was still pretty much out of it, so I drove him home
and milked his goats for him.
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