Learning while Teaching

     The job started in the middle of the year. I had just graduated from college in January, and I felt very lucky to find a teaching job at that time of year. It was at Saint Paul, Arkansas, deep in the Ozark Mountains near Fayetteville.  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 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 conveinced 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 Arkansas A&M grad like me. He invited me to share his trailer. I went along with him to lots of his games. His senior boys basketball 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.

     Teaching went pretty well, everything considered. I had a hard core group of senior hillbilly boys in my PE class, but I was a hard core hillbilly too. 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 came from being a college distance runner, I led them out on a 3 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 pretty good. 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.

     Time for the senior play was coming up, and, as the senior sponsor had already been run off, I was the man. When we started having practice at night, I soon realized I had my hands full. Sometimes, some of them would just not show up. Those that did had not been studying their lines. I knew a disaster was in the works, and I was right. When the big night came, I posted lots of prompters around behind the curtains. It really was not a matter of prompting, often they just had to read the whole line. And sometimes, the wrong actor grabbed onto a line and just ran with it. Halfway through, a very loud alarm clock that some junior had hidden in the couch on stage went off. I still have that clock. You just can't believe how loud that clock was.

     Oh well, all's well that ends well. When it was over, they called me out on the stage, told me how much they appreciated my hard work, and presented me with a brand new fly rod.

I was returning from seeing my girl one Sunday night, well after dark. I cut through the mountains. When I passed a new Ozark National Forest sign, I saw it was on fire. I grabbed an old rag and was trying to put the fire out, when an old, beat up station wagon drove slowly by. I got the fire out and went on to St. Paul. The next day, a kid brought me a message from his grandpa. Grandpa said, “Don’t be messing in my business again.” This was along about when the Forest Service stopped allowing locals to run their cows up in the mountains. I guess grandpa had a grudge about that.

     The end of the school year rolled around. Time for the senior trip. I was again the man, with a lady out of the community agreeing to go along to watch after the girls. She really didn't do much of anything, I think she was just on vacation. I drove the bus to Little Rock and booked us into a big hotel. These mountain kids were totally awestruck. I began to realize most of them had never been to a city before.  Many of them just wanted to ride the elevator, up and down, as long as I would let them. Some of them were older than me, and a few of the girls were pretty and flirty.  A twenty-one year old guy just really should not be responsible for them, that long. But my do right mechanism was turned on and kept me in good stead.

     We went on to Hot Springs. We went for a ride on a party barge. I had never driven one before, but I was again the man. As I came into a dock, I tried gracefully to shift into reverse. It would not go. I tried again, desperate this time. No luck. I yelled to the kid up front. “Hold it off, Max! Don't let it hit!” Well, I was giving an impossible assignment to that little boy on that great big barge. BOOM! Everyone came running out of cabins, and from everywhere. I had to cough up several bucks to get out of that.

                                                                                                                                                              

       I had made another big mistake. I passed out everyone's meal money for the whole trip the first day. Max, and some others, were big spenders – for about a day. Then they begged and starved the rest of the trip.

     Coach Billy Max resigned, and they offered me the coaching job for the next year. I took it.

The most noteworthy thing about my coaching time at Saint Paul was getting a personalized insult from Frank Broyles himself. After a particularly bad practice by the Arkansas Razorbacks he told newsmen, “We looked like Saint Paul out there today.” Well, I was the only coach Saint Paul had, and we didn’t even have a football team. As I looked around to see if maybe he aimed that insult at somebody else, I didn’t see anyone but me. Ironically, a couple of years later, I was coaching at Fayetteville, and two of his sons were on my football team. What goes around comes around.

     I was good at not wasting money when I started to college. Can't waste what you don't have. College had honed that ability even more. I had three hundred ten dollars monthly take-home during that teaching semester, lived, made new car payments, and still saved eight hundred dollars.

     Soon after, I brought my new bride to St. Paul. It had taken me a year, almost to the day, to persuade her I was the man, even though I had known it the first time I saw her. I took her around, showing her the housing possibilities up there. The first was a small box, right in the middle of town. She said that just would NOT do. So, I took her way up in the mountains, five miles off the blacktop, to show her the second possibility, up close to the Orval Faubus birthplace. The only neighbors were in the graveyard next door. She quickly decided that box in town was not SO bad, after all.

     When I first arrived at Saint Paul it was midwinter.

Those hardwood forests were drab and dreary. Now, spring had brought to me bright green leaves and a brand new bride, completely changing my world. We found a new, beautiful spot in those mountains to picnic almost every day. A wonderful start to our fifty years together.