Newberry

  In my effort to find a teaching position after graduating from seminary, I was sending out a lot of letters to colleges asking to teach Speech or Drama.  I had a master's degree, and a lot of experience in both subjects.  I would get the same letter back from the colleges.  It would say:  "Thank you for your interest. We don't have any openings right now, but we will keep your letter on file for six months in case something opens up."

 After the fiasco with Blue Mountain College in Mississippi, which you can read about in a previous story, I was getting the idea that no one wanted me.  I had found out that the seminary wouldn't recommend me for a job, so I had moved on to other things.  One day, I got a phone call from Newberry College in Newberry, SC.  I had sent them one of my letters but had forgotten all about it.  They wanted me to come to Newberry to teach a night class on Public Speaking.  They told me I would be an adjunct professor.  

 I was flattered by their offer.  It would be a good way to get my feet in the door, and maybe they would give me a full-time position at some point.  There was a problem, though.  Newberry was 45 miles from Columbia, and I would be going and coming in the dark to that college.  I thought about wildlife maybe hitting my car, and the cost of gas, so I thanked them and declined.  Surely, there would be another college that would ask me to come teach, which would be closer to where I lived.  No one else called.  Outside of the work I did at Columbia College judging high school speech and drama students, I haven't taught in a college.  It is what I was trained to do, and why I got my M.A. degree.  

 In looking at it in the moment, I failed at my objective to teach in a college or university.  However, I realized later on that could have been a stagnant place for me to be.  My experiences in life of doing theatre, movies, television, retail, and other jobs gave me more variety without the boredom of doing the same thing every day.  They say that variety is the spice of life.  I guess that's true.

Parking

  This story is not about my failure to achieve parallel parking.  I wrote about that earlier regarding getting my driver's license.  This is about a humid Sunday night, when I was in high school.

 My friends at Kilbourne Park Baptist Church were my world.  I had never experienced acceptance from my peers.  These people embraced me in a way I really can't describe fully.  Just to say we were a very close Youth Group.

 One night, I was driving my Mother's Plymouth Valiant.  Two of my friends were with me--Pam and Craig.  The car had a bench front seat, so we were all on the front seat together.  I really wasn't a fan driving at night, but I made the best of it.  We were just having fun riding around the neighborhoods.  

 Pam suggested that we go down a street near to where she lived.  I wasn't familiar with the street, but we proceeded down the road which turned out to be very narrow.  Because of our talking and laughing, the windows started to fog up.  I couldn't see where I was going, so I stopped the car to clean off the glass.  It turned out that we had stopped in the middle of the road. Rather than clearing the foggy glass, I got distracted by us talking.  

 A few minutes later, a police car pulled up behind us.  The officer got out and saw the windows fogged up.  He asked us what we were doing in the middle of the road, and we said just talking.  I don't think he believed us, but it was the truth.  No hanky panky was going on inside the car, unfortunately.  The officer said that someone in a house had called the police about a car in the middle of the road.  He asked if we were having car trouble.  No sir.  He suggested rather forcibly that we needed to move along.  

 We cleared off the windows, and I drove us back to the church laughing all the way.  As for the policeman, he just had a dirty mind, and he was probably laughing too.

Horse

  I loved watching westerns on TV.  Almost all of them involved riding horses.  The actors looked like they knew how to ride.  One secret about actors is that if the director asks you if you can ride a horse, you tell them that you can, even if you have never seen a horse before.  I expect that some of the actors in the westerns had no clue how to ride a horse before getting on one.

 When I was in high school, our church's youth group went to a horse farm outside of Columbia.  I don't think anybody in our group had ever ridden a horse.  The closest I had come was riding a mule down the Grand Canyon, when I was five.  Mules and horses are not the same thing.  Each of us was assigned a horse to ride.  There was a path that the owners said the horses would follow.  They had done this before.  We were given a quick lesson on how to ride a horse.  If you wanted the horse to slow down, you pulled back on the reins.  If you wanted the horse to go, you hit its sides with your feet.  If you wanted the horse to turn, you pulled the reins in the direction you wanted to go.  It seemed fairly simple.

 I got on my horse and off we went.  At first, everything went according to plan.  My horse sauntered along the path.  Then, it happened.  For some reason, my horse decided to walk a little faster.  He also decided to get off of the path and into some woods.  I was pulling back on the reins, but he didn't seem fazed by what I wanted him to do.  He was trying to knock me off by running under some limbs really fast.  It was getting a little dark, and I was having trouble ducking under the limbs.  He also enjoyed running through bushes.  I didn't share his enjoyment.  

 Eventually, one of the trainers saw my predicament and rode out to get my horse back on the trail.  He accused me of getting off of the trail on purpose.  I'm sure I heard my horse laugh under his breath.  When we got to the end of the trail, I dismounted and gave the horse a dirty look.  My butt was sore.  My legs were sore.  My head was sore.  I haven't ridden a horse since.  Years later, I had a girlfriend who loved horses.  She taught me a lot about them and what to look for in a horse.  If only she had been there the day I rode the horse with no name.

Telegram

  When I was a senior at A. C. Flora High School, I wrote a letter to the editor for our school newspaper questioning if there was such a thing as one's permanent record.  They had used those two words to threaten us from first grade.  Anything that we did wrong would go on our "permanent record".  I wanted to see mine.  My guidance counselor called me into her office and briefly showed me that there was such a thing.  My letter caused a stir at the school.

 When I got to college, I wrote some letters to the editor of our school newspaper concerning issues on campus.  I also wrote one to the local Anderson newspaper regarding water pollution at a park.  At PC, my letter writing got more intense.  In fact, it was like having a weekly column in our school's newspaper.  I caused a lot of trouble with some of my letters, especially with the administration and the football team.  The latter threatened to kill me, because of what I said, and I had to leave campus for a week or so.  Consequently, I failed two classes for missing the mid-term exams.

 As I was leaving to go to seminary, my father told me not to write anymore letters to the editor. I told him I would just concentrate on school and not write any letters.  I broke my promise to him after an incident in the news.  There was a story about a man who was holding some people hostage in his home.  He had a shotgun.  The police had negotiated with the man to let the hostages go.  They told him that he wouldn't be harmed.  He did what they said.  He gave up and came outside to be immediately arrested.  He was manhandled by the police and thrown in jail.  When I heard that story, I was appalled.  The police had broken their word to the man.  They had lied to him to get him to give up.  I had to write a letter.

 I wrote a letter to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper.  It was primarily about trusting the police.  It was about honesty and fairness.  Those are two things that I have tried to live my life by.  I was disgusted at what had happened to the man.  Today, he would have been treated as mentally ill.  In the 1970's, he was just a criminal.  The newspaper printed my letter.

 A few days later, I got an angry call from my father.  He was mad, because I had written a letter to the editor.  One of his friends in Fort Worth had seen my letter and had told him about it.  Despite the fact that my father was well-known by professors at the seminary, I was naive to think that 1000 miles between my father and me would keep the letter from being discovered by him.  No more letters.  Okay, no more letters, I said.  I kept my word, while I lived in Fort Worth.  Even with all of the persecution I suffered during my last semester at seminary, the only letters I wrote were to my parents.  Probably a good thing. 

Subscriptions

  When I was in 8th grade, my homeroom teacher was Mrs. Brown.  She taught chorus.  I remember that she was short and had very frizzy hair.  Our class competed with other classes on how many magazine subscriptions a student could sell.  The students with the most subscriptions could win prizes.  The class that sold the most won a big prize and the bragging rights that our class was better than the rest.

 Mrs. Brown selected me as the keeper of the records.  I had everyone's name on a tally sheet, and I had to notate the subscriptions sold.  It seemed like an easy task, but I just couldn't get it right.  Kids were screaming at me, saying that I cheated them out of prizes.  Mrs. Brown scolded me for doing a bad job.  I was very embarrassed.  

 During this time, I was getting beat up every day by the boys in our school.  This screw-up by me just made things worse.  Most of the girls in our class stopped speaking to me.  They had been the only support for me, as the boys beat me up.  Now, everyone hated me.  I had been a standout in chorus, but Mrs. Brown didn't seem to like me anymore.  It was a huge scandal.  I tried to rectify the tallies, but the assignment was just too overwhelming.  I realized that I would never grow up to be an accountant.  

 There was one girl who stood up for me, when all of my world was crumbling around me.  Her name was Gayle Anderson.  She recognized that I had talents in other areas besides accounting.  She suggested I go into English and the Arts.  Writing was my escape from all of this trouble.  It still is.