by Gwen McMath
Lately I have been pondering why it is sometimes important for us to look back on our lives to see how we have lived them. I think for me it really helps me to trust God now with my life when I look back and see how he has provided for me far and above anything I ever imagined. I can see how when things did not work out the way I wanted them to, that later on I could look back and see God’s wisdom in working out my life his way. My life has been in many ways simple and maybe not at all the kind of life you might want for yourself. But perhaps if you are not happy with the way that your life has turned out you could think about a more purpose driven life. A life that’s purpose is serving God all the rest of your life. Whether you are a teacher or a motorcycle gang member or a postman or an exotic dancer, God wants to use you in his kingdom and his benefits are beyond measure. Keep this in mind as you read my reflections of my years in Lake Dallas, Texas.
When my husband Charley got his special education teaching job in Lake Dallas the first thing we needed was housing, and of course we were still renting and had never owned a home. Charley went to a real estate agency that he knew to talk about renting a house. The agent couldn’t believe that we had never owned a house so she made it her personal goal to find us a house we could afford (a tall order). It just so happened that they were building two small houses in Lake Dallas that were called 245 houses, which meant that if you qualified, part of the mortgage would be paid by the federal government. Well, of course we qualified, because we had two children and were trying to live on one teacher’s salary, so we moved into the only neighborhood in Lake Dallas at the time.
Charley worked at the special education job for a semester and then over the summer a vice principal job opened up at the high school. Everyone in education knows that a vice-principal’s main job is the day to day discipline of students and Charley was still so young looking that he was sometimes stopped in the hall and asked for his hall pass. Charley got the job and was mentored by a staff that were both helpful and fun loving. A few weeks after school started Charley was walking across campus when he heard a noise in a dumpster. He crawled up to the top of the dumpster and looked in and found a student smoking marijuana in the dumpster. Charley hauled him out and brought him back to his office. He called the father and set up an appointment to see him and suspended the student until he met with the dad. He then went in and told the principal (Jim Akard) that he had busted the Von Erich kid. Charley did not know that the Von Erich kid’s father was none other than the professional wrestler named Fritz Von Erich that had the nickname “The Claw” because he finished off his opponents by squeezing their heads! The staff at Lake Dallas High School quickly picked up on it and before you knew it everyone was greeting him by making the sign of the claw! He sweated blood for two days in fear of his meeting with Fritz, but when he came Mr. Von Erich was very nice and listened to all of Charley’s council about his son. Charley had successfully conquered “the claw”! We kept up with the family over the years as they were very prominent in the wrestling field. Jack (alias Fritz) had six sons and five of them died. His first son died at six years of age from electrocution, Michael died of a drug overdose in 1987, Chris shot himself in 1991 and Kerry shot himself in 1993. Jack Jr. died in Japan of an intestinal obstruction. Fritz became an AWA World Heavyweight in the 1960’s and later died of lung cancer. Kevin was the lone survivor of the family and carried on in the wrestling business until his daughter Lacey retired in 2010. All of them were known for wrestling barefoot. I know the father, Fritz, became a Christian before he died. This family really suffered all their lives.
After getting settled in our small little house, once again I found myself pregnant and once again, Charley and I were delighted. Robin was born July 29, 1981 while Princess Diana was being married on TV! She literally made a “big splash” because when my water broke it sloshed all over the doctor’s pants! She made us the proud parents of three girls and the end of our having children. We debated about trying again for a boy but finally Charley’s granddad spoke up and said, “I pity the poor boy who would come up after these three girls”, so that kind of finalized it. Shortly after she was born, with the help of some wonderful neighbors, we enclosed our garage to make another bedroom for Vanessa and added some more updates. The first night Vanessa slept in her new room she had a dream about a man in the window with a gun so she never slept in there again! We eventually turned it into a playroom.
Lake Dallas was a small enough town that it was perfect for raising three little girls. As the scripture says, “they grew in stature and in the Lord.” The city had a great library and so I began to check out Broadway musicals and they became some of the girls favorites. They can still belt out songs from “Sound of Music”, The King and I”, “West Side Story” and “Bye, Bye, Birdie.” Each of the girls developed their own sweet personalities and were so much fun to parent. I remember Vanessa trying to learn how to skate and she kept falling down and coming back in the house crying. I told her to ask Jesus to help her learn to skate. I looked out the window and could see her bowing her head and praying, and before long, she really could skate! She also went through a stage when she was interested in disguises. She wanted me to help her make a disguise and I made her up to look like a salesman with a mustache. She knocked on our door selling toothbrushes. I greeted her and pretended I didn’t know who she was so she was beside herself with glee, she really thought I didn’t know who she was. Amber was always such a sweet little red-haired girl. She did have her limit though. I remember the girls having one ukulele between them that they had to share and Amber and Vanessa were at each other’s throats over it for several days. Amber waited for a time when Vanessa wasn’t around and took the ukulele out in the front yard and banged it up against a tree and smashed it. I guess she thought it was worth it to not get to play with it herself if Vanessa couldn’t play with it either. Robin, being the baby of the three, was always cute and ready for fun. One afternoon she came up to me and said, “Mama, I don’t feel good, my three-head hurts.” I said, “What hurts honey?” She answered by saying, “My three head hurts, my three head hurts.” I thought for a minute and said, “You mean your forehead hurts?” She said, “Yes, my four-head hurts.” Robin, being the youngest, was tormented by her older sisters for many years. She had to play school for years, with Amber as her teacher. She probably sat at the school desk in the playroom more than anything else she got to do, poor child.
One evening a bunch of us in the neighborhood were going to the Full Gospel Business Men’s Conference in Dallas. We all piled into two cars and away we went. When we got to the city of Lewisville about eight miles down the road one of my children realized Robin was not in the car. This was before cell phones so we flagged down the other car and Robin was not in that car either! In the rush to get out the door, we had left our sweet two year old at home! We flew back home in the car to find her peeking out the blinds looking for us. She had powder all over her face where she had gotten into my makeup. For a long time after that she would say, “Mommy going to get me?” I felt terrible, I had been one of those parents who had left their own child at home!
There were two other odd stories that came up about our children. When Vanessa was in grammar school she began to walk home part of the way with two girls who lived on the next block and I would meet her at the corner to walk the rest of the way home. One day she came home swearing that she and the other girls had seen an elephant and that it had jumped into one of the neighbor’s swimming pools. I thought she was lying and just couldn’t believe the story until Charley came home and asked if we had heard about the elephant that had escaped from a little circus that was in town and that the elephant had actually jumped in someone’s pool! Another time there was a darling little girl named Michelle that lived next door to us and one day her mother laid down to take a nap with the baby and let Michelle stay up and watch TV while she was resting. Michelle kept hearing some noise in the kitchen and so she got up to find a chimpanzee in her kitchen eating their bread out of the package. She ran in to tell her mother and her mother said, “Oh Michelle, you know there is not a monkey in the kitchen.” Michelle went back in the kitchen and the monkey was still there so she ran back in and woke up her mother again. Her mother reluctantly got up and went to the kitchen and there was the monkey! It had escaped from a house a few blocks away. Small towns do have their moments!
Charley was the assistant principal all that year at Lake Dallas High School and then he found out the school was going to hire an assistant superintendent. Charley had mid management certification but not certification to be a superintendent. Since we were so close to Denton and North Texas State, Charley decided to go ahead and get a superintendent certificate by getting more graduate hours. Charley went to school four nights a week the whole next year in addition to working full time, but he got that assistant superintendent job, working under Bob Jamison who was known for his ability to run a school district economically and was a great financial mentor for Charley.
This promotion, of course, helped us a lot, but in two ways especially. One was that most of the board members of the school district were Christians. They started inviting Charley and I to church at the Baptist Church and we joined. This was the first place I got to use my talents as a Bible Study teacher and I taught Bible Studies there weekly for a few years. All the couples were a few years older than us but they loved us and helped us raise our children. They invited us to go skiing for a week at Winter Park, Colorado when Robin was three and we went. Even Robin learned how to ski! This led to many family ski trips with these friends that we still keep up with today. Another plus to the promotion was that one of the board members had a house he wanted to sell and he kept trying to sell it to Charley and I. We weren’t really interested and didn’t think we could afford it but the man kept going down on the price until we bought it. It was a great house, very big with a Mexican tile roof. Charley set to work on his job and I sat my sights on redecorating the house. This was the first large house we had ever owned and the first time I could practice my hospitality by entertaining and having overnight guests. One of the most memorable entertaining ideas I had was for Charley’s fortieth birthday. I wanted to surprise him with a party and I certainly did! I planned a 6:00 a.m. party! I had made all the food the day before and hid it in the back of the refrigerator. On that morning about 5:45 I began to hear people driving up and start to get out of their cars quietly. I was so afraid someone would awaken Charley. At exactly 6:00, the doorbell began to ring. Charley jumped up, and started running down the stairs before I could grab him. I kept yelling , “Wait, wait!” He paid no attention to me and opened the front door wide with his underwear and nothing else on (some might say he had on his birthday suit)! He looked out and saw all of our friends yelling, “Happy Birthday!” He quietly closed the door and said, “You let them in!” He was the talk of the town that day. I had left a black wreath on his office door decorated with products for old people, and had replaced his chair at his desk with a wheelchair. Later on in the day, they called him over to the stadium where the band was playing a funeral march. It was a great day!
Another time the house was used to the max was when Charley’s parents still lived in Mexico as missionaries, and I had the idea of trying to get all the family together for Christmas. Charley and I borrowed a friends camper and put it in the garage, and we slept in there with our girls, and that left room in the house for Charley’s sister, brother, mother and father, and grandparents to stay. It was the first time in many years the whole family had been able to get together.
Speaking of that loaned camper reminds me that we borrowed that camper another time for a family trip to the Grand Canyon and Disneyland in California. We would not have been able to go if it had not been for the generosity of the couple who loaned us the camper, and it was a wonderful trip. Even though our standard of living had improved, we still did not have money for trips. Charley would paint houses on the side to earn money for us to go on vacation.
Time passed, and I had finally gotten all my girls into school. Robin had just started kindergarten when I decided to start subbing at the elementary school part time so I could get my feet wet again in the education field. I intended to go back to teaching at some point full time. Well, after I had subbed a few days, they had to add another second grade, so I was offered a full-time job. I really hadn’t planned to go back to work so soon, but when the job was offered, I took it. Now, another trick in the education field is that when a new class is opened, and a teacher has the opportunity to transfer about five of their students to another classroom teachers are not going to send their best students, right? They are, of course, going to send their worst discipline problems. I hadn’t thought this out before I took the job, so I ended up with a room full of discipline problems! Not only that, I hadn’t worked in thirteen years so I also had to take every opportunity to learn new teaching skills by going to workshops, etc. In addition to this, I had no energy left to manage or feed my own children! It was a difficult year to say the least. I had to depend on the Lord every day, all day, and all the time in-between. Shortly after I started to work I had a student who always came in late and looked distressed when she came in. I took her aside one morning and began to discuss it with her when she told me her older brother was molesting her in the mornings before school. In two days she was gone from her home and living with a grandmother. After that, five other girls in my class opened up about being molested. I’m sure the incidents were higher because of the teachers being able to pick the students to leave their classes, but these incidents certainly added to my stress levels. I was so glad I had certification in helping emotionally disturbed children, it helped me know what to say and how to proceed with the students.
It was during my first year back at teaching that Charley came home one day and told me that Bob Jamison, his boss, was going to take a job as superintendent of Portland ISD and that it would leave a vacancy at Lake Dallas for a new superintendent. Both Charley and I thought he would be a perfect replacement. Charley applied along with many other good candidates. We were so disappointed when he didn’t get the job! We just knew that the Lord wanted Charley to have this job but he didn’t. We even had to entertain the new superintendent and his wife and children, and show them around town. It was a great disappointment to both of us.
Later on that year, Charley kept getting calls from a former principal at Lake Dallas who had moved to West Texas to be a superintendent there. He was ready to retire and was just sure that Charley should be his replacement. The only problem was that we did not want to go to some little place in West Texas and did not feel any leading to go there. The man kept calling Charley so he finally relented and sent in an application. It wasn’t long before he was interviewed and offered the job. We went to West Texas to check out the town, community, and housing. The name of the school district was called Patton Springs ISD and the closest grocery store was 21 miles away. When we got there, we stayed in a hotel in the town of Spur, Texas and the hotel was awful! In fact, a tumbleweed actually blew into our room! Little did I know that the hotel was luxurious compared to the house that the superintendent lived in. It had two bedrooms and smelled like a dog kennel! We were given a tour by a principal and his wife who both said, “You won’t like this town, people won’t invite you into their homes.” The place was so desolate I felt like giving a good primal scream. Well, it didn’t take much for us to decline the job. We thought we were off the hook until about two weeks later when one of the school board members (a very Godly man named Gary Bridge) called Charley at work and said, “I just can’t get it off my mind that I think that the Lord wants you to come here.” Charley replied, “Well, in that case, I will have to reconsider.” I think he already knew we were supposed to go but didn’t know how to get me to go. He called his father that night and told him what the school board member had said and Charley’s father answered, “Well, praise the Lord, you will have to go then.” The next morning Charley called and accepted his first superintendent job.
According to educational systems, after you sign a contract you have to wait twenty-one days before you resign your job and leave. The next time the school board met at Lake Dallas Charley resigned as assistant superintendent. There was an article in the newspaper that announced his resignation. That afternoon a lady knocked on our door and said, “I read in the paper that you resigned your job here, do you want to sell your house?” We said yes and she said, “Well, I want to buy it.” She came in and looked at the house which I had just finished redecorating about a month before, and asked what we wanted for it, and bought it on a handshake. This was our confirmation that we were doing what the Lord wanted us to do. And more than this, it showed me how quickly things that you love like a house can be changed in a minute. It’s not all about houses or possessions, it’s about living with purpose and following God. Within three weeks, we had moved to West Texas and were waiting on the new house the school district was building for us but that is another story…