Over the years of moving from one end of Texas to the other and back again, I had gotten used to moving every few years. I think our family just adjusted to the saying, “home is where you find it.” We had found good friends and homes in lots of Texas communities and now, while living in Rosebud, it was time to move again. Most of the time when we had moved we moved wherever the better job was that paid the most money. But this time, as Charley began the interview processes, we began to try to decide what part of Texas we would want to retire in. I had always thought that we would want to retire in the Dallas area because that is where we grew up. But over the last few years the traffic and crowds of Dallas made it less appealing to us. Charley asked me one evening where I would like to live in Texas if I could live anywhere in the state I wanted to and I answered, “I think I would like to live near the beach.” That started the ball (as in beach?) rolling toward a new journey in our lives, a wonderful journey that is still evolving.
To understand a little better the life of a school superintendent in Texas schools, you need a little explanation of how a superintendent search goes. You essentially put your application in with a few hundred other applicants. Then, out of that pile about five men are picked to be interviewed. Out of the five two are picked, so now you have a fifty fifty chance of being hired. The two men are interviewed, then one is extended a contract. Charley used to say he could line the walls in his office with all the rejections he had gotten over the years, but at the same time it kept him humble. All of the hiring normally occurs in the early spring for the following year and the new superintendent usually goes to work at a new district on July 1. It is a pretty long process.
London was a small school district outside of Corpus Christi that backed up to the King Ranch. When Charley first started interviewing there I didn’t go with him because I was still teaching in Rosebud. When he would come home from the interview he would kind of shake his head and say, “it’s a small district Gwen, I don’t know.” The rest of the family thought it sounded great so we kept urging him to pursue it. When it came right down to it he was offered two jobs, one about half way to Houston that was a much bigger district or taking the smaller district close to Corpus. Before he signed the contract I came with him to Corpus to meet the board and look around. It didn’t take long for me to decide that I loved that view of the water! Charley had pity on me and took the smaller district because I liked it so much. I told him it was the last move I was ever going to make, after all I had moved nineteen times in our marriage. Usually when a superintendent is hired and his wife is a teacher, the wife is promised a job. However, there was very little turnover at London, so I didn’t have a job lined up. I ended up working for Corpus Christi Independent School District while I waited for a job opening at London. I had a special education unit of about sixteen boys with ADD or ADHD all at the same time. It was the hardest year of teaching I ever had. To add to it, their special education program was scripted if you can believe that, and you can just imagine how successful a scripted text was to a bunch of ADHD boys. My principal was mentally ill. You could talk to her one time and she would be all sweetness and smiles and tell you one thing, then she would scream at you and tell you something else completely different the next time. The district retired her and lost me as a teacher after one year.
It was during the spring of that year while I was teaching in Corpus that Charley started mentioning a new friend he had met from London, Juan Castro. Charley had never been very interested in doctors and preventative care but Charley had developed tennis elbow that was really bothering him so he called Juan to make an appointment to look at the pain in his elbow. Juan knew that once he got him in the office he should do all the testing he could because who knew when he would ever get him back in the office again. Charley was only forty-eight and at that time they didn’t usually do prostate tests until you were fifty. Juan decided to run a PSA test and a few days later the test came back at a level higher than it should have. Juan had him wait for three months and have the test made again. The second test was also elevated. He waited a month and made another test and it was a little higher. Up until this time we were absolutely sure that there was a mistake with the testing. At this point our world was beginning to crumble, there was no more denial, something was wrong. We found out that when a young man gets prostate cancer it is usually very aggressive and deadly, unlike being slow-growing in older men and not usually the cause of death. We found that it is a cancer with no symptoms until it goes into some other part of your body. We decided to call around and get the best doctor we could in Houston and go from there. A good friend of ours, Robin Polk from Rosebud knew the best doctor for this in Houston, and was quickly able to get us in.
Of course, as medical people do, Houston made all the tests over and we had to wait again. The tests again came back positive for prostate cancer, and Charley needed to have surgery as soon as possible. We were told that if the tumor was encased in his prostate everything would be okay, but if even one cell had spread to another part of his body, chances were not very good for him to survive it. The type of surgery that Charley had at this time was very revolutionary because they actually removed the nerves from each side of his groin and took out the prostate gland, then reattached the nerves. We were told that it would take up to two years for them to grow back to normal. This was another dreaded thing about prostate cancer, if you had the surgery it left most men incontinent or impotent, or both.
By this time in life, Charley and I had been Christians for most of our adult lives, and we had always believed in supernatural healings. But when you are faced with a situation in your own life at such a young age and with three children to support, it is scary, even if you have great faith. We knew we served a God who had never failed us, but were we ready to face cancer or death? We didn’t have much of a choice, we were on our way to Houston for surgery.
On the way to Houston it began to rain heavily and I remember feeling that the storm was the reflection of how I felt inside that morning, fighting dark thoughts and clouds of questions. Charley had insisted on driving himself to the hospital (in control to the end). He looked outwardly calm but I knew he was afraid too. I looked back to the back seat and saw my three daughters, Vanessa, Amber, and Robin struggling with their own fears. It was one of the longest trips of my life. His surgery was scheduled for 12:30. Over the previous months, Charley and I had grieved together over all the what ifs of our lives and had easily communicated to each other how we felt about each other. But really, how do you even begin to tell someone that you have loved for so many years what they have meant to you?
I had been praying for some time about the surgery. I wanted to hear the words, “the tumor was encased in the prostate gland.” Charley went off to surgery and the rest of us went to the waiting room. Charley’s sister Gwen and her husband, Jim came to be with us in the hospital. They are some of those people who are always there when you need them. We waited for about four and a half hours when the doctor said the wonderful words that they thought they got it all and the cancer was contained! Relief flooded our souls and how we rejoiced that God had seen us through.
When we got home from the hospital, the London family took care of us so well, with food, flowers, and words of encouragement daily. Charley was going to be out of work for six weeks, but began sneaking up to London as soon as he could drag his body up there. I couldn’t quite understand the concept until I worked at London myself and learned how much the people cared for each other and the children.
Though the surgery and outcome looked good, having to wait to find out what kind of side effects remained was terribly hard and took about a year and a half before everything was normal again. I would not write of these issues at all but I want people to understand how the after effects of the surgery were as hard to deal with as the cancer, and that since Charley had this cancer I know a lot of couples that went through this that ended up getting a divorce. Charley and I were fortunate to survive it. I often think back to this time in my life and thank God that I had Charley for another fifteen years after this, I could have been a widow, and then lost a child.
Charley got well, and we both had many enjoyable years at London School before I retired in 2003. I taught third, fourth, second and special education during my time at London. I had always taught poor children and my whole life I had wanted to teach a class that was not economically challenged but that the district had enough money to buy supplies. I found that at London. It was the other extreme, very wealthy. One day I asked one of my classes how many of them had swimming pools in their backyards, and all but two raised their hands. Another one of my favorite stories about London children was that I overheard two boys talking one day. One of them said to the other that his wallet had been washed in the washing machine. The other one said, “Don’t you just hate it when the maid does that?” Another time I was helping a little girl write a paper on Christmas traditions in her home. I said, “Oh, I know what you can write about. Tell about how your father puts out the Christmas lights every year.” She looked at me kind of quizzically and said, “We hire someone to do that.” One more story in that vein was when one of my second grade boys came in one morning and came up to my desk to ask me if he could bring his pet kangaroo to class. I said, “What? You don’t have a kangaroo.” He assured me that he did and asked me again if he could bring it to school. I said, “Well, if you’ve got one you can bring it to school.” The next morning I heard a big commotion going on in the hall when all of a sudden here came that little boy, with you guessed it, his pet kangaroo.”
Another minority of students at London were the Mennonite children. There was a colony of Mennonites in our school district that German was their original language. They also had lived in Mexico so they spoke Spanish as well. The children were all fair haired and beautiful and the girls wore plain dresses made by their mothers and the boys wore jeans and homemade shirts. They saw no reason for their children to go to school after the eighth grade so we lost most of them at the end of junior high. These children’s lives impacted the wealthy kids greatly for the good. They were always included in all the outings and birthday parties for the kids and if the Mennonite kids were in need of anything material some parent would always supply it for them. I had a brother sister pair of Mennonites in my class one year that never did their homework. I kept them in to finish their work but nothing seemed to compel them to do better, so one day I was fed up and sent them to the principal’s office. The principal wasn’t there that day, so the secretary sent them to Charley’s office. They came back later and it didn’t seem to affect them at all. When I saw Charley later he said, “Don’t ever send me that sweet Hansel and Gretel again!” How could you be mad at them for anything?”
I was fortunate to teach the same class for two years in a row, third grade and then fourth grade. We really had the time to become a family. A few weeks after school started there was a terrible car accident on one of the farm roads and one of my students, Rachael Thurman was killed. I learned a lot about grief that year from helping the kids in class cope with loss and trying to be helpful to her parents. A few months after she died and the kids were still grieving her death, a cat showed up at our portable building which was our classroom and would not leave no matter what. Rachael had been a real cat lover, and all the kids felt like Rachael had sent the cat. What could we do? We kept that cat until the kids were in the fifth grade and then it disappeared the same as it had appeared. It was nice to have a cat in the classroom and it was good therapy to have a cat to love on when they were missing their friend.
Not only did we learn about death from Rachael, but in this class was a boy who found out that his parents were getting a divorce. All the families in the area knew each other and the boy’s parents were the first ones to get a divorce of that well knit circle. We all watched the agony this little boy experienced as his mother left home. He became so angry that one afternoon he just pulled one of the notebooks out of his desk and started ripping it apart all the while sputtering angry words about his parents and crying. No one in the class moved, and no one said a word, we all just let him have his meltdown. When he was finished his classmates helped him clean up the mess and he came up to me and I just held him for a long time. We learned a lot about the pain of divorce from this child.
Added to these two events that year, the worst was yet to come. I had another young boy whose mother committed suicide. She drove herself down the street to a new empty house in the neighborhood (the same neighborhood my students lived) that hadn’t been completed yet and shot herself. That sweet little boy cried every day for months, he missed his mother so much. His father, of course, was going through tremendous pain as well and the London neighborhood took care of them until his father remarried. These three events were terrible to experience for anyone, let alone a child, but we persevered as best we could and no doubt none of us have ever forgotten that year.
Because London was so small at that time, we could do a lot of things that larger schools didn’t have the ability to do. One of them was a yearly trip for the eighth graders to Big Bend National Park. The park is a beautiful setting of mountains and wildlife, hiking trails, and beautiful scenery that makes you feel like you just stepped back in time to when there weren’t so many people. My husband was good friends with the superintendent of the school for Big Bend and they put together an educational trip that included river rafting, hikes, wildlife teaching, and a dance for the combined schools. We would be gone a week at a time, and travel via school bus. Charley and I always stayed in the lodge, but the kids and most of the parents camped out. We actually had more adults go sometime than kids. The bonding that occurred between the parents and their children, the teachers and parents, and teachers and students was unbelievable. Each year we went we would have the opportunity to bond with another group of parents and kids. We went for eight years in a row and I would not have taken anything for the experiences it brought.
My husband, Charley was a big history buff and especially a Texas History buff so every year he would take all the seventh graders on a few days field trip to San Antonio to learn about the Alamo and all the missions. I’ll have to say that the history aspect of this trip was not as fun as Big Bend after a few years of hearing it, but it provided the same idea of bonding that Big Bend did with the extra promise to the seventh graders that they had Big Bend to look forward to for the next year. These trips were very helpful in corralling the errant children (of which there were only a few over the years) for they knew if they didn’t walk the straight and narrow they wouldn’t get to go.
Going to Washington, D.C. was another annual trip for the London eighth graders. Charley went a few times but I never went with him because I had been to Washington a few times before and didn’t want to leave my students for another week of the school year. The best year of that trip was 2007, when Queen Elizabeth II was visiting Washington at the same time the London kids were, and a group of London kids and parents were waiting on a street corner for the light to change when a motorcade of cars came down the street and stopped in front of them. It was Queen Elizabeth and she waved and acknowledged them.
These are but a few of the highlights of my years with the London School District that ended when I retired in 2003. Now, I am proud to say that my daughter Amber teaches second grade there; and that my two grandsons, Charlie and Tom are blessed to be attending school there. I pray that the London staff will always be there to love and encourage students and their parents to follow their dreams and give their hearts to the one and only God of the universe. Though I may have forgotten some of the students stories each and every child I taught at London I loved and will always care about.