Another road trip

I'm leaving later this morning (Thursday) on a road trip I've been thinking about doing for years but never have and now since I'm retired, there's no need to put it off any longer. My final destination will be Arkansas so I can visit my boys, Michael and Will, for my birthday tomorrow but I'm going to get there differently than I have before. I taught at St. Mary of the Plains College in Dodge City, Kan., Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma before taking the job here and I haven't re-visited any of those places since I left. It's been almost forty years since I was in Dodge, 30 years since I was in Alva and 25 years since I was at Oklahoma State.

I don't know if I'll be able to find any former friends and colleagues or not since it's been such a long time. I have several names and photos from old annuals and photo albums as well as some former addresses and phone numbers so at least I won't be going in cold turkey. I also want to visit the colleges themselves and the homes we lived in while we were there. My wife and I were head residents of the girls' dorm at St. Mary's and that was an especially poignant experience. The Head Resident we replaced left under cover of night only two weeks into the semester without telling anyone she was leaving so the administration was in desperate straits and Linda and I decided to volunteer our services. Brandon was only 6 years old and Michael and Will weren't born yet so they hired us, even though they had never utilized a couple before as head residents. I believe we remain the only couple that served as Head Residents for either the men's dorm or the women's dorm.

The poignant part of the job happened after we were hired. Several administrators wanted to alert us to who the 'bad' girls were that were at least partly responsible for the former Head Resident leaving and we told them we didn't want to know. People don't react to people the same way and we knew this. Some people become best friends with a person that someone else doesn't like at all so we didn't want any pre-conceived biases going into our new job and thankfully, the administrators tolerated our decision. We decided to start from the ground floor by hiring all new Resident Assistants (RA's) and holding an all dorm meeting our very first day on the job to tell the students what they could expect from us and what we expected from them. It worked and we had a great first year. Towards the end of that year, one of the administrators who wanted to warn us about the 'bad' girls came to us with a knowing smile and informed us that three of the five RA's we hired were girls they were going to warn us about. We never had an ounce of trouble from any of the three and in fact they were three of our favorite students in the dorm. Because of that experience, I have always tried to do that and am sure I have friends I wouldn't have had otherwise because of it.

The Northwestern job was my first full-time appointment as a college faculty member and an Assistant Professor and, since you can have only one first, it was the most exciting teaching job I ever had. Unfortunately in my fourth year there, several faculty members including me discovered that public school administrators were being allowed to take classes without attending classes (what came to be known as the phantom students) and we reported this to a state newspaper. They ran a feature story on it that led to an Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) detailed investigation with OSBI officers coming on campus and interviewing anyone with any knowledge of said offense at all. The faculty members involved were warned that if no indictments were issued, we would be terminated and that's what happened when the OSBI failed to obtain enough evidence to pursue the matter in court. There were some important life lessons learned with that experience too!

Finally, Oklahoma State was the first place I ever taught a college class when I was awarded a Teaching Assistantship in the Political Science Department as I started my Master's Degree work in Political Science. That's also when I knew I had found my calling because I loved teaching more than anything I had ever done and knew that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my working life and it's what I DID do! We lived only in Married Student Housing during both my Master's program and my Ph.D. program and I've been told that all of the old Married Student Housing has been torn down and replaced by new structures. I have to drive by to at least see where we used to live, even if I can't see the actual structure and take pictures of the new O.S.U.

So that's what I'll be doing for the next few days and I'll have a follow-up report in next week's paper.