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
convienced 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 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..
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