Special Education was a new thing in many places in the 1970s. It was in the beginning of that decade that a young Hillary Clinton, working for the Children’s Defense Fund, went door-to-door in New Bedford, Mass., on behalf of children with disabilities who were limited in their chance to go to school, with what she found becoming part of rationale for establishing the state’s Special Education law and its regulations.

(I will say it for you, “I didn’t know that.”)

It was in the ending years of the decade, when Special Education was still in its infancy, that I took a job teaching Special Education Students.

The school district was in a town south of Boston that had been a rural town with a multi-generational population known as “Townies” who saw their town becoming something new where progress was erasing traditions and the status quo in favor of the 1950’s growth of suburbia and the roads to make moving there convenient. Administrators in the school district, as well as many on the faculty, began their careers right after the Second World War and while the town was still its pre-1950s sleepy self. Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmatic, shop, sports, and band were all that was needed and were taught as they had always been until the space race shook things up.

So, although I might have been ready for the job because of what it took to get my Masters Degree and my teacher certification in Special Education, I went to work for people who seemed threatened that their lack of expertise would be seen as a weakness, instead of the reality that this was all new to them, so obviously they had much to learn and could do so from working with the trained and certified Special Education teachers.

Instead, they attempted to adapt what they knew to that with which they were unfamiliar. So, for example, the person who had been teaching reading on the elementary school level and had become head of that department was placed in charge of the town’s Special Education department because Reading being a “specialty” made it in the district’s administrators’ minds the same as Special Education. The uninformed boss of the very informed Special Ed. Teachers ran things in an odd way that, while her pronouncements had to be ignored for the sake of the kids, the teachers had to find ways to have it appear, when necessary, that everything was in compliance.

Long story short, my proposal to begin a form of sheltered workshop in my class that would be used for motivational purposes and to teach the kids good work habits, math, money management, and afford them work experience they could cite when filling out job applications was a victim of this mindset. All the background work, including researching legalities and getting the assistance from the VA upon whose program mine was based, I was continually denied permission, and with each denial was given another requirement that I needed to complete before further consideration.

Eventually it became clear, especially as I was told of it quietly and aside at one point by someone in on the behind the scenes discussions, the problem was not with the proposal itself, but with it’s being something some administrators saw as something they should have come up with, and to allow such a program devised by a classroom teacher without them might make the public question them for not having come up with it. These administrators were from the era when children were taught by “school marms” who could not get married and keep their jobs because they might get pregnant and what could be worse than first graders having to see the baby bump grow, could not date in public, and, even in the more liberal places where married women could teach, they were seen as only holding a second job to supplement the husband’s real income, and were paid accordingly.

This eventually won battle, along with my other Union and political activism and eventual position as president of the town’s teachers union, was a running story in the regional newspaper.

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Meanwhile, a few towns over there was a minister who was getting a lot of press coverage for his very progressive, ahead of its time social justice activism. In the town news section of the regional paper our towns’ respective sections were near each other, so to just, visually in those days, scroll down to his town’s section was as simple as reading the next sentence in a story from my town.

So I was very familiar with the good work of this man.

15 years after I had left that teaching position and after adding more places taught and more life experiences gained such as my hay-day in Los Angeles as a cartoonist, union and Gay rights activist, and teacher,  I found myself sitting among strangers in Oklahoma City where I had recently arrived after my time in L.A.

After we discussed the political issues and related activities we were there to discuss, I was approached by another attendee whose curiosity had been piqued during the opening self-introductions before the agenda was begun when, as was the procedure, along with my name I had given a quick summary of my past.

The man who approached was named Bob. He was a local pastor who had been asked by his denomination’s leadership to go to Oklahoma to help a fledgling congregation because of his applicable abilities. He had taken the assignment willingly, viewing it as missionary work in a conservative culture as he saw his activism for social justice could be useful, and it was as his congregation had a reputation as being very Christian in its support of social, racial, and gender justice.

He was also the minister I had been reading about those 15 plus years before, and I was the teacher whose activities he had been following in the same paper at that same time.

We had finally met in a city in a state neither of us would have ever thought we would ever be in. It had never been even a half considered option. Yet, here we were 1,800 miles from where we came from, each meeting the person we knew through what of each we had read.

After attending some more meetings, when I was sketching ideas for the Christmas edition of the local Gay newspaper, I drew one and put Rev. Bob in it.

Sadly, and some may see something in this, Rev. Bob died not too long after we had met and around the time I had drawn the cartoon.

Years later when I began my own blog, looking for ideas for a Christmas cartoon. I came across the picture with Bob sitting in a loose-leaf binder of art I had done during my sojourn in Oklahoma.

So if you notice that most every Christmas this picture shows up, it is my remembrance of Rev. Bob, and a reminder that the workings of the cosmos is sometimes weirdly surprising  and much is intertwined.