Military Movements

About twenty-five years ago this month I applied for a teaching job, at a Catholic School in New Mexico on the Checkerboard Reservation. It is part of the Navajo Nation, and excited me to go down and at least look into it.

It was a four day journey; I left Waterloo on Thursday and returned on Sunday. We flew into Oklahoma City where we picked up more passengers before we flew into Albuquerque.

One of the other passengers on that unremarkable flight was the Oklahoma Men’s Basketball Coach Billy Tubbs. I can remember a line written about him at the time. “If Billy does not stop running it up on people, no one will go fishing with him when he retires.” a writer mused. Billy responded in his arrogant, comedic way, “If they fish like they coach I do not want to be around them.”

Anyhow, I arrived about 7:30 and they took me to the reservation, where there were hundreds of cars. In a giant pole building they called the community hall, was a bingo game going on. They told me that the profits from the two days a week they had bingo was what funded the school.

I stayed in a little hotel in the small town where the res school was, and the next morning I went to the school for my interview. It was an all day affair, nothing like I would ever be involved with again.

After I talked to the priest and the principal that ran the school for about an hour they took me out into the classroom. They had four double wide trailers that they had turned into classrooms with four rooms in each one. When we came to the second building, two young high school boys’ came crashing through the door in a terrible fight. The priest I was with said “Oh, don’t worry they are just brothers.” At that point he picked them up and turned them over to their teacher.

I was then taken to a parking lot where there were five or six suburban’s. It was here I met the maintenance man. I guy that was about my age at the time (25), It was his week to do meals on wheels and I was to ride along and help. We went to about twenty places, most of them elderly people that lived in adobe huts. I doubt if I have ever been around friendlier people then those folks were. All of them were happy to see us and all of them smiled.

When we returned, it was about time that school was being dismissed, and one of the reading teachers was gassing up one of the Suburban’s. She had to take eight of the students home so I went along with her and talked to the students as they returned home. Wrecked cars and broken windows told stories that the students wouldn’t and couldn’t tell. When we had delivered the students to their home, she talked about how many of the students parents would spend their government check the first week they had it, then have to pawn things the rest of the month to survive.

That night I hung out with the young staff in the dormitories they had for them.

On Saturday one of the young teachers took me hiking on the mesas in the area. Talk about fun and great exercise. That night the priest and the principal took me into Gallup for supper and they offered me the job. It included; K-12 Physical Education Teacher, 7-12 History Teacher, Head Boys’ and Girls’ Cross Country Coach, Head Girls’ and Boys’ Basketball Coach, Head Girls’ and Boys’ Track Coach, Coordinator of Summer Camp, and last but not least Athletic Director.

They were going to pay me the grand total of room and board, and $59.00 a month for expenses. Up to that point I probably had a little socialist blood in my body. Money had never been important to me. All of a sudden it was, I do not know why I changed at that point, but I did. I worried about bills I owed, I worried about moving, and I became selfish with my time. Here were a group of people that needed me and I could not pull the trigger. It was a changing point in my life.

Accept for one year I was at Don Bosco, I have been here at Jesup ever sense.