by Gwen McMath
When I was a little girl living in the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie, I would often be in the car with my parents, brother and sister driving toward the beautiful Dallas skyline when my mother would exclaim, “Look, it’s the Flying Red Horse!” We would all gaze up on the top of the then tallest building, the Magnolia Building, to see the rotating Pegasus that was the landmark of the Dallas skyline at that time. Little did I know that one day I would be married to the grandson of the man who created that landmark and that I, too, would take flight as the Pegasus did on many grand journeys of life.
I have measured a lot of important events in my life not by chronological dates but by sound and sight. When I think of the years 1971 through 1973 the sounds that come to mind are from late night car radios playing songs such as “Imagine” by John Lennon, “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zepplin, or “Heart of Gold” by Neil Young. The sights of those years bring up movies such as the Godfather and Dirty Harry. Who could forget the first saga of Texas teenagers in The Last Picture Show or of California teens in American Graffiti? Strains of music and movies will always bring up the beginning of certain memories for me. Those years were a time of having to grow up after four years of college and leaving behind being a flower child from the movement that grew out of the Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco, and facing getting a job in the real world.
One of the things I am most grateful for that came out of that time period is that it gave us a generation of young people who were more interested in serving others than making money. I think if that hadn’t been the case my husband, Charley and I would have chosen a different career than teaching, and that would have been a waste of our talents because I am sure we both were called by God into the field of education.
Charley and I were students at El Centro Junior College in downtown Dallas, then we studied for two years at East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas. Then we were finally ready to graduate with Charley receiving a Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and a Master’s degree in Special Education and me with a Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and graduate certification in teaching the emotionally disturbed. Charley and I were two of the first six students certified to teach the emotionally disturbed in the state of Texas. We had already spent a year working in a school on the East Texas campus that was for older children the regular education system would not take. There were not very many students there but the needs were great. I learned to change a diaper of an adult male and had to “spy” on another adult non verbal mongoloid when he went to the bathroom so that he wouldn’t mess up the bathroom by stuffing the commode with too much paper. I guess those experiences showed us very quickly what kind of a work world we were getting into. Those students made their way into our hearts and I look forward to seeing them in heaven in their right minds. The special education staff at East Texas State was young and innovative and we had become two of their best students, so we were receiving good recommendations for employment.
We decided we needed a plan for applying for jobs so after much prayer, we decided we would send out applications to most of the major cities in Texas and that we would take the first job that was offered to us. This was a little naïve on our part because we didn’t realize that there were parts of Texas that would take just about anybody with a degree, but we stuck with our plan anyway. Why? Because of our prayers or naivety, or perhaps both. We sent out many applications and the first place we heard back from was in Edinburg, Texas. We were so poor that we didn’t have a car that would make it to Edinburg, so one of our special education professors, Mike Banks, lent us his car to go down for the interview. We had an appointment for Friday afternoon and it was going to take us about ten hours to get there from Commerce. We decided to leave on a Thursday night after our “hippie prayer meeting” ( a group of Bible believing, exuberant college-age Christians from the “Jesus Freak” movement of the 60’s) so that everyone could pray for us before we left. Another reason we decided to leave so late was that we did not have enough money to stay in a hotel so we had to go there and back quickly.
Thursday night finally came and after the prayer meeting we took off in our borrowed Volkswagon to seek our fortunes. Charley drove all night, he never was one to let me drive because I drove too slowly for him, and the next morning we were still driving.
Since the year was 1971, you can imagine how remote the area was after we went south from San Antonio. All of a sudden as we were talking, the car started going off the pavement. We began to swerve and I began to scream. Charley woke up and realized he had fallen asleep! He had actually gone to sleep with his eyes open and in mid sentence while talking to me! I had heard of sleep walking but never sleep driving. Looking back on it now, deciding to leave so late at night was foolish, but at that time we were all of about twenty four years old and thought we were bullet proof!
It wasn’t long after our scare that we came to the place of our first interview in a Catholic community called McCook, Texas. We went into their lunchroom and were surprised to see that it was the only public school in the state that had a liquor license! It had beer on tap for their Catholic Fellowship Hall that was also used as a lunchroom in their public school. You cannot imagine how remote this little town was. There was nothing more than the school, the church, and a few coyotes. We were beginning to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into.
The principal then took us into the town of Edinburg which was sixteen miles from McCook and much more civilized, at least it was populated by some people. We were both offered regular elementary education jobs in third and fourth grades but in different schools (relatives could not work in the same school.) We had also been offered jobs in McCook because it was part of the Edinburg School District at that time. Edinburg looked so much better than McCook and we had prayed that we were going to take the first jobs offered to us, so we signed contracts and were employed for the next school year. We were ecstatic to have jobs!!! Little did we know what the next year would have in store for us.
Our return home went without any more mishaps. Soon after our return we began to get job offers from all over the state! The places we heard from were bigger cities than Edinburg. I remember feeling disappointed because I was going to have to move five hundred miles away from my family. Charley would be moving closer to his parents because they lived in Guadalajara, Mexico at that time and were missionaries. The important thing was that we were seeking God’s guidance and were both determined to try to follow His will for our lives even in faraway Edinburg, Texas.
We had a few months before we had to move, and we had to go back to Edinburg to try to rent a place to live. My parents graciously offered to take us, because again we didn’t have a car that would make it down there. I will have to add that my parents never said anything about how far we were moving from them. As we traveled the long route back to Edinburg, I’m sure they paid for all the gas, the hotels, and the food for our trip. They were just glad that we were finally getting permanent full time jobs. They had not paid for our college expenses; we had loans and work study jobs, but I think many people along with my parents were wondering if we were ever going to make something of our lives. When we got to Edinburg we spent two days looking for a place to live with no results. Most of the rental property was way out in the barrios (dirt floors, dirt roads), and had no running water. Also, since Hurricane Celia had hit the area the year before, almost all the rental homes had hardwood floors that were warped. After two days of hunting for a place to live, we were all getting on each other’s nerves! My Dad said, “Gwen, I don’t think you have a chance of a snowball in hell of finding a decent place to live.” At this point, Charley and I really began to pray. We only had one more day to look before we had to go back home. The next morning we decided to go over to the town of McAllen, which was about eight miles away, to look for a house. I was praying under my breath the whole way, and as we were driving down one residential street and turned the corner, I saw a man out of the corner of my eye put a sign in a yard. I asked my Dad to make the block again, and sure enough, the man was putting out a For Rent sign. We hurriedly got out of the car and went in to look at the house and find out how much it was renting for. It was really a big, nice house and we could afford the rent. It had three bedrooms, one and a half baths, two covered porches, a large dining room, and a back apartment with one bedroom and a bath. Again, I thought the Lord was blessing us with a big home and He was, but he had plans for every inch of that house.
Before we even moved into the house ourselves we let a lady and her son live there for the summer. This was Mike Banks’ girlfriend, the professor who lent us the Volkswagon. We were pleased to be able to return the favor. Later on, Mike’s girlfriend went back to her husband that she had been separated from. Her husband worked in the valley somewhere, and we felt we had helped her little boy regain his father by giving her a place to stay while she worked out things with her husband.
Of course, we had to borrow five hundred dollars from my dad to pay the first and last months rent, and to turn the utilities on. My parents were Christians at this time but did not share our enthusiasm for the miraculous power of God. The day we rented the house, they began to believe. I think the miracle of finding that house wasn’t just for us but for my parents because they needed to know that we were going where the Lord was sending us and to know it was the Lord’s will because they would be five hundred miles away from me. We also thought that we would be so wealthy with two salaries that we would be able to pay my parents back in a few months. When we got our first pay checks, the first thing we did was to go and buy a new car. We bought a yellow Pinto station wagon, and the yellow stood for lemon. We paid for that car two and a half times before it was actually paid for because of the many repairs it had to have. We drove that car into the ground by driving into Mexico and to my parents in Dallas at least once a month. It took us a year to pay back my parents. It would be many years before our financial situation would be conquered. We both made five hundred and fifty dollars a month, eleven hundred dollars a month together, and $24,000 a year! Believe me; no one ever goes into the field of education for the money!
Now that I have written the preliminaries of how we got there, I must relate how the first school year went. It was one of the hardest years of my life. I taught third grade and had thirty six beautiful Hispanic children. I learned to love each one, but I did not have a clue as to how to teach them. That wasn’t the worse part, the schools had no air conditioning at that time, and there were gnats everywhere. You had the choice of opening the windows and being covered with bugs or closing the windows and burning up from the heat. My school did not have any school supplies and the kids didn’t either because they were so poor. I had a Hispanic principal that did not like white people and was so controlling that you couldn’t run off a worksheet on the mimeograph machine without him initialing it. We would have early morning duty or lunch duty where we would have to watch about two hundred students at a time by ourselves. The worst part about it was that no one gave us any training about how to teach terribly poor Hispanic kids, or any other kids, with a whole different culture than ours. One of the most humbling things to happen to me the whole year was when the school system decided all the teachers had to teach Spanish twice a week. The dean of Pan Am University at Edinburg came to my room to observe how the program was working. Can you imagine a lily white woman trying to teach Hispanic kids who already knew Spanish much better than I did how to speak their native language?
I especially remember a student that year named Arturo who was slow as Christmas, not in mind, but in getting anything down on paper and he never finished his work. I kept him in every day after school to try to get him caught up with his work but soon found out he would just as soon get negative attention from me than no attention at all. This is one of the big truths I learned about kids in general. He taught me a lot about dealing with children, mainly that you had to pick your battles with children because when you did go to battle with them you had to win. I hope that all those children will forgive me for not teaching them a whole lot that year, I did dearly love them and looking back, that was the most important aspect of my interaction with them. I diligently prayed for them and loved them.
Charley didn’t have it much better than I did. His kids were poorer than mine were and most of them lived in barrios with dirt floors. In case you don’t know what we called a barrio is it was a little colony of houses with no running water or bathrooms. There were always physical problems to contend with, scabies and head lice were some. He did have a good principal that liked him very much. He also had a teacher who helped him. When she came into his room to introduce herself, she was very overweight and she said, “Hello, my name is Ms. Pigg.” Charley did not know if she was joking or what to say. Then she said “Yes, my name is really Ms. Pigg.” She helped him a lot that year and later on when we began to have a prayer meeting in our home she came regularly and gave her life to the Lord. Later on, she lost over one hundred and fifty pounds and her name no longer fit her.
We were humbled by the children’s poverty many times that year. During the Christmas holidays, Charley told all of his students to bring something to eat to school for the Christmas party. One boy came to school the next day, stuck something in his desk, and put his head down and cried. Charley asked him what was wrong and he said, “My cookies don’t look like everyone else’s.” Charley assured him that his cookies would be fine and asked him to take them out of his desk. He had a package of saltine crackers. They were cookies to him. Charley made a big deal about how wonderful they were and that they were his favorite, but it broke his heart for the little boy.
At the end of the year, Charley talked his principal into letting him take his class to the beach at South Padre Island on the bus. The beach was only sixty miles away but most of the students had never been. The principal was concerned over the safety issue so she told Charley he could take them to the beach but the students couldn’t go into the water. Well, those kids took one look at the ocean and all ran in the water with their clothes on! They were wet from head to toe, and sand was everywhere! Charley and the bus driver had no control but the kids had a marvelous time. Luckily their clothes dried on the way home, making the kids a little more presentable.
I have gone over all of these things that went wrong our first year of teaching for a couple of reasons. The foremost being that it is still true that most teachers have a terrible first year when they teach, and that many quit and never go back. More important than this is that many people go places because they feel the Lord led them there, expecting things to work out perfectly and find that in reality it is very different. They want to give up and go home too. Everyone makes mistakes when they begin working, but in the field of teaching, your mistakes cause your students to run all over the room and drive you crazy! Believe me, classroom control strategies can be learned, just go to a teacher with a well managed class and ask for her help.
After our first year of teaching we were offered jobs with McAllen School District working with emotionally disturbed children. Charley and I got to work together and set up our own programs. We went from school to school and used play therapy and reward systems to work with children. Charley took the south side (and poorest) of town and I took the north side which was the wealthy section of town. We really learned a lot about children and their needs during this time. One of the first students we worked with was a kindergarten student who ran away from school every day. Our job was to keep him at school. The principal put us in a bookroom with the kid and he proceeded to beat the tar out of us. He choked us, scratched us, cussed us, and still ran away. From him I learned I didn’t know everything. Later on, we corrected his problem by picking him up and taking him closer and closer to school each day until he could finally go in and finally stay all day. I had all kinds of children with all kinds of problems. I had a fifth grade boy who had seen his mother kill herself, and after that event began to act out in school by turning into different things like a popcorn popper or a wolf. Each day he would come into school with his head down and his head turned toward the wall, sucking his thumb. I learned from him that the human spirit can overcome almost anything. Most of the time, love and prayer really helped these kids. I had a first grade boy who had major meltdowns each time he got anything dirty on himself and he insisted on wearing only white. He was so cute; he looked like a little John Travolta from the movie Saturday Night Fever in his white suits. From him I learned not to let small things get the best of me, that most of the time we notice things more than other people do about us. I had a third grade girl who tortured animals. She came to school one day hiding her arm from me and when I rolled up her sleeve, she had two puncture wounds on her arm from a cat’s teeth. Her parents hadn’t even noticed. This was a repetitive theme in all these students’ lives; sadly, many times their parents didn’t even notice them. I had a hugely overweight fifth grade girl who captured young boys and painted their private parts with nail polish or lipstick. She thought so little of herself and would do anything for attention. I took her faithfully to the on campus beauty school to get her hair and nails done to try to lift her self esteem, but the damage had already been done at her school from her reputation so we ended up moving her to another school. I had learned from her that you need to be careful what you do because your past can come back to haunt you even as a child. I had another student whose father had tarantulas for pets, and he would put them on his son when he misbehaved (this was before the time of child protective services). This certainly made his son comply with his father’s wishes, but it caused the son to hate his father. From the father I learned that there are no shortcuts in raising children, it is a very hard job to take on. You have to have patience, consistency, and a good sense of humor. Another student was the only adopted son of older parents, and he began to act out to such a degree that he ended up in juvenile jail at ten and the last I heard of him he had stolen a police car and escaped. This young man taught me a lot about genetic makeup and how hard it is to make a difference in some children’s lives when there is mental illness or fetal alcohol syndrome present. I don’t know how much we really helped these children, but I do know that we learned how to love the unlovely. I never kept up with any of these children after we left McAllen and only eternity will tell how they turned out.
Another incident happened while I was working with emotionally handicapped kids on the wealthy side of town. One day I was in the principal’s office looking at some files when I noticed the principal looking at me very strangely. I had on a dress that was very short. In fact, it was so short the principal had his female secretary take me aside and tell me to go home and change, which I did! Later on, that principal and I became friends and I found out that he had a special needs grown retarded son. I began to invite his son to prayer meeting because he was our paper boy, and he always came because he liked the refreshments. We were very kind to him and he most times fell asleep during the meeting because he was an early riser as a paper boy. After he had been coming for a while I talked with his father about the Lord and gave him the book, “Nine O’Clock in the Morning”, which was about an Episcopal priest, Dennis Bennett. He revolutionized his congregation by introducing small prayer groups and emphasized having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ instead of church membership. The book led the principal to become a Christian. I think this incident was a prime example of the fact that I made a lot of mistakes during this time in my life but God still worked in spite of me. I had entered this principal’s life by dressing inappropriately but God still used me. It really made me see that I don’t have to be perfect, just willing to take risks and possibly look foolish at times.
We learned a lot that year beyond how to teach and grow in our spiritual lives. We learned some common sense lessons as well. We had a cat of some sort and I had the good idea that we should make a little hole in the screen in the bathroom so the cat could go in and out. It worked out real well until one night when I woke up in the middle of the night hearing cats in our living room. I went into the living room and realized there were two cats that were having a fight! I ran and woke up Charley who zipped out of bed without putting on his glasses. He ran in the living room and picked up the cat that wasn’t ours and the cat began to scratch and bite him. He looked so shocked thinking it was our cat that was clawing him to death that I just had to laugh! I guess he learned to put his glasses on before he got out of bed after that.
There was another incident because of the hole cut in the screen idea. I was working in the kitchen one evening next to the bathroom that had the hole in the screen when I heard a noise from the window. I went to greet the cat but instead of the cat there was a giant rat in the window! I screamed for Charley and he came and picked up the mop to punch at the rat, but the rat began to climb down the mop handle towards Charley. He began to swing the mop around like a top spinning to keep the rat from jumping on him. I finally opened another window that had no screen and Charley threw the mop and rat out the window so hard it flew into the neighbor’s yard! We never did tell that neighbor why our mop was in their yard.
Another mishap occurred in the kitchen while I was trying to boil some eggs. I put the eggs in a pan to boil when some friends came to the door. I quickly forgot about the eggs. We had a swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room. All of a sudden we all heard a sound like gunshots and the swinging door flew open. Two eggs came flying through the door and landed on the ceiling and stuck there. This is one of those things you shouldn’t try at home! None of my friends could believe it and soon word spread, or should I say shot, far and wide, of my egg cooking ability.
I had a Lucy Ricardo experience while we lived there too. I came home one day from work; I was about seven months pregnant at the time. I couldn’t get in the house because I didn’t have a key with me. I didn’t want to wait for Charley to get home so I decided I could climb the back fence to get in. We had about a seven foot tall wooden fence and I quickly climbed up on the fence and there was a little ledge to sit on. I made the mistake of sitting down and then looking down to the ground, that’s the first inclination I got that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. As I continued to look down I could barely look over my stomach to see the ground! It looked like seventy feet to me instead of seven. So I sat on that little ledge about an hour and a half until Charley came home. He had to go get a ladder to get me down. It was a good thing this was our first baby and that his dad told him I would probably do strange things, because I know Charley was shocked to see me up on the fence, however, he handled it with grace. He did ask me how many of the neighbors had seen me up on the fence.
Another thing that didn’t work out for us during this time was church. We had decided to go to the Methodist Church and we wanted to become involved in helping the youth. We met another couple, Charlie and Mary White, who were a few years older than us and had two children, they also wanted to help. We were used to having a hippie prayer meeting at our house without any adult help so to say we could be a little outspoken at the methods of the church was putting it mildly. I am sure we lacked wisdom in a lot of areas, like knowing how to talk out problems with humility or trying to prove ourselves before we started to throw stones. We were not very patient with the way the church did things, and as a result we didn’t last there very long. Charlie and Mary White continued to be our friends and we began to have payer meetings in our home with them. They both sang and Charlie played the guitar. The meetings were not successful at first and we spent months evaluating our lives by how many people came to prayer meeting or didn’t come. We hadn’t learned much humility at the time either. But through God’s will, over the next two years these meeting grew until we probably had fifty people a week in attendance and people were coming to know the Lord weekly. Most of them were teachers. One teacher would become a Christian and they would begin to bring their families and it wouldn’t be long before they would recognize the change in their family member and become a Christian themselves. One such family were the Burches.’ Vida was an English teacher at Edinburg high school and she brought her husband Kenny and daughters Wendy and Kim and son Jerry and they soon came to know the Lord. She witnessed and won many of her students to the Lord.
Another lady who we called Aunt Betty came to us through her niece, Nancy Borden, who we had known in college. Betty ended up staying in McAllen for a winter in a trailer because she had asthma and needed the mild weather. She had been a Christian most of her life but suffered greatly on an emotional level because of guilt over having to abort a baby because of her health. We had prayed for her many times about the baby but she still had mixed feelings about it. A few years later she died from respitory problems. I was up early one morning praying for her families’ loss when I had a vision in my mind’s eye. I saw Betty in heaven with such a look of pure joy on her face and she was talking to a young woman. I asked the Lord who the woman was and he whispered, “Her daughter who died in the abortion.” I was shocked because I had never thought through the issue of what happened to babies that had been aborted. God makes a place for all of his own.
More important than the meetings, were the relationships we developed with Charlie and Mary and their children. They were both wonderful parents and their example taught us a lot about children. They were also substitute parents for us. We spent so much time with their family I am surprised they didn’t’ run us off. Mary worked full time as well as having two children, and with us hanging around she had four kids. They are still good friends of ours, their children have grown up and they have children that are almost grown. Also, there to help us and be an example for us was Charley’s sister Gwen and our brother-in-law, Jim Davidson, as well as their daughter Heather. They were teachers who had lived on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Grants, New Mexico for many years teaching. When we visited them in New Mexico, Jim got interested in teaching emotionally disturbed children by hearing our stories so he got his certification and they moved to McAllen. Jim joined us at McAllen ISD the next year. Because they had been Christians the majority of their lives, especially Jim, who was brought up with an Assembly of God background, they had very balanced lives and a zeal for the mission field. They helped us tremendously to become more level-headed, to grow daily by seeking God daily, and to help out the missionaries any way we could. They also helped us with the prayer meeting.
Another aspect of outreach for us during this time had to do with Charley’s parents, who were missionaries in Guadalajara, Mexico. In those days you had to come out of Mexico every six months to renew your citizenship. Our house became the way station for many missionaries. They would come and stay with us when they had to come to the border. Most missionaries at that time also bought all their supplies in the states and brought them back to Mexico every six months. We had the benefit of having missionaries stay with us and share their ministries with us and our prayer group. I know that they helped us to grow and mature much more than we ever helped them. This concept was becoming a pattern for us, we had learned from the students we taught, and now we were learning from the people we tried to help. Was the Lord showing us some things about humility and learning? I think so.
During this time we made numerous trips to Guadalajara to visit Charley’s parents and their lives left a lasting impression on all who met them. My sister Shirley and her husband and son Chris traveled with us and their lives began to change to include a better relationship with Jesus Christ. My brother David and his wife Erline and their two children Greg and Stacey came with us with the same outcome in their lives. We made two trips with all our friends we had made in college, where we had to stop at the border and cut the guys hair before they would let us in the country. We had to show them we had money and we traveled by bus, which was very harrowing. It was harrowing because the bus drivers drove too fast and didn’t take rests but drove twelve to fifteen hours at a time without breaks, and buses had the right of way and thought nothing of pulling out in front of cars expecting them to get out of their way. The trips changed all of the students lives for the better. We also took people who attended our prayer meetings as well as Charley and Mary White and their children. We all learned so much about how missionaries lived and worked and served the Lord with all their might. We even took our boss from McAllen ISD and her family which resulted in one of her children becoming a missionary.
One more significant event happened during this time and that was the birth of our first daughter, Vanessa. She was born in the only hospital in McAllen and I was in labor for thirty-six hours. The doctors waited so long that I had a dry birth and they bruised Vanessa’s face horribly with the forceps they used to get her out. But irregardless of the backward condition of the hospital, we were thrilled. I felt like a missionary giving birth in a third world country. Little did I know through that period of joy that Vanessa’s life would bring us to another journey in our lives that would be so different.
We had accomplished three years of teaching and had learned things in all areas of our lives. I did not plan to teach again because I was going to stay home with Vanessa and Charley was looking for a job that would pay more money. He heard of a job opening at Judson High School in Converse, Texas as a Special Education teacher, and was offered the job. He took it and we were ready for our next adventure together.