Fifty years ago, this very day, I stood with my family at Logan Airport in Boston prepared to board my flight to California where, after finishing my college course work a semester early by taking summer and evening classes as well as my daytime ones, I had a permanent substitute teaching position in Richmond that I had arranged in lieu of the final semester student teaching period assignment as I would not have that semester.
I had gone through a Catholic elementary school with the old style nuns, went on to a junior seminary, novitiate, and two years of Philosophate (major seminary with an attached accredited college where Philosophy was the major) all of which were heavy on judgment, and, knowing that student teaching involved constant and minute judgements, I chose the permanent sub route where judgment may be constant, but you are left on your own unless you really screwed up. Less overt judgment.
The school was a private Catholic school run by an order of priests and brothers with whom I was very familiar having attempted to join the order but found it was not for me.
Richmond is across the Bay from San Francisco, but in those days I had yet to connect the dots and San Francisco was a place of tourism and wonderment, not a place for the partying I could have gotten involved in without the knowledge that came a decade later about AIDS. Being there when I had just recently rejoined the world after the seminary and, although having a vibrant social life during the period between leaving the seminary and this point, my time was taken up with college, a job in a liquor store, trying to learn what life was like on the outside, and learning who I was beyond all previous expectations of mine and others that had brought me to this point while experiencing teaching in a classroom for the first time.
Although I assumed I would follow the norm, i.e. job, marriage, house, kids, etc, and assumed my thoughts regarding sex were the same as any other male, I was unconsciously dealing with the acceptance of my true self and realizing that some of what comprised my assumption that my thoughts were the same for all males that would have me find the right woman, were actually the unrecognized signs this was not meant to be as those thoughts were not universal but were indicative.
For me, the City by the Bay was tourist attractions on Saturday. I saw them all and then some as my location made me not a tourist.
I was a working tourist and saw much of the Northern part of the state as well as the Southern.
During the Dust Bowl, many Oklahomans who went west ended up in Richmond in their own enclave like any group of people migrating to a new place in large numbers, so my first classes of my career included a number of descendants of those people who still harbored the assumption that they would eventually go back. Many of my students were the children of the little “Okies” that had come to the Bay Area with their parents. They only knew the stories.
Thirty-eight years later my teaching career came to a close in Oklahoma, ironically after that initial need for self discovery, living on my own a continent away from family and friends that began with Okies at the beginning of my career and me not knowing who I was yet learning, and me leaving the profession sure as hell knowing who I was.
Book-ending by coincidence as, what happened between, was often a matter of rolling with the punches, especially those self-administered by conscious and unconscious decisions, actively or passively brought about.
I have to admit, in all honesty, I committed every mistake a first year teacher makes that semester, and in retrospect after years of teaching, as I recognized then, I had made them all and got them out of the way for the most part.
That position led to ones in New York, Massachusetts, a second and better California experience in Los Angeles, and the final act in Oklahoma.
I got to institute educational programs for my students, advocated for my students and fellow teachers as a union officer in each town, city, and state in which I taught, advocated for the ignored and demeaned Gay students, became the official cartoonist of the Los Angeles teacher’s union for which I won a national award, and educated a train load of kids.
It was not always easy as the nature of school board elections introduces the possibility of educational abuse begun by those who, while not in the classroom, saw themselves as experts in what happens in one.
When allowed, most often after a battle with the adherents of the educational status quo I got to start that sheltered workshop as part of my Special Education classes in one town, began using video with my Special Education students in Los Angeles that became a city-wide program, and successfully advocated for all the letters of the Rainbow Alphabet in another, the one where “Okies” saw and had to deal with the finished product.
In the career started 50 years ago, I got to be an Assistant Band Director marching in two St Patrick Day Parades in NYC, was the Illustrator of college text on American diplomacy, the creator of a Special Education Sheltered Workshop, the first Emcee on Quiz Kids on the Boston Public School Cable TV channel, helped begin the Video in the Classroom Program for the L.A. Unified School District and, along with my students was the subject of a Case Study presented to the California legislature concerning use of video for Educational purposes, an original staff member and founding faculty member of College Academy, Framingham State College, Instituted the videotaped morning announcements at Taft Middle School in Oklahoma City, Assisted in designing an environmental curriculum for OK Dept. of Environmental Quality, and successfully advocated for inclusion of every student in the Rainbow Alphabet before retiring.
In my career I met many people in many parts of the country, not because of design, but by accident and that rolling with the punches thing.
I got to direct a church choir, be the emcee of annual community fundraisers, had a run as President of a town’s teachers’ union, was on the board of the teachers union in Oklahoma City, and in Los Angeles was chair of the Union’s subcommittee on Gay and Lesbian Issues when it became a full standing-committee and was among the few teachers who, as members of that committee, walked in the Pride Parade that year as a group for the first time with the support, both moral and financial, of the union.
I got to be a member of the OKC Gay Community band which performed at Clinton’s 2nd inauguration, was on the committee of Cimarron Alliance Group in Oklahoma that helped get a more liberal governor elected, served time on the OKC Gay Pride Committee, was a founding member of the Oklahoma Stonewall Democrats, and winner of the Irene Tyson Memorial Award for public service and the Cimarron Community Service Award. Eventually I was awarded the ACLU’s Angie Debo award for my work on behalf of the Gay students.
My teaching positions allowed me to be a member of the Gay Men’s Choruses in Boston, Los Angeles, and Long Beach CA, the last two being instrumental in my having comfortable, though not deep, friendships with political and entertainment celebrities.
I got to march and rally for multiple causes directly or indirectly connected to education and the rights of workers and students.
And throughout I did my best for my students.
Most of what happened during my career, and even now in the years since retirement that brings the total time span to fifty years, was not something that happened necessarily because it was planned.
Quite the opposite.
Never got the house. Had one once for a short time and discovered I was a horrible homeowner.
Never met the woman to marry and with whom to have children like most of the peers I thought I was just like. That turned out not to be me and the State would not allow for my getting married as myself.
Met more people than I would have ever imagined meeting and had close associations and friendships with many as opposed the few I would have gotten to meet and know if things had gone according to the general script.
And the career ended with me sliding to the base and not taking the walk.
So thanks to anyone I taught, knew, worked with, lived with, attempted a relationship with, was an activist with, sat on the bar stool next to me, marched in a parade, sang in a chorus, helped hold a huge banner, and took their lumps along with way with me or like me, and to all the people I befriended from the highest celebrity to the homeless men I discussed philosophy with at the Beach in Southern California sharing their wine about which I asked no questions.
This would include those people and places that entered my life 50 years ago, shaped me during the following years, and now have to look upon what their influence has wrought.
Little ones, do not get discouraged that things may not be going according to plan. See what you can make of what happens as you go and control that narrative as long as you can knowing you have the strength and ability to move on to the next adventure. Like any party, a pity one has to end and the clean up begin.
It was a great time, teaching and after.
Wouldn’t change it for the world.
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