Unlikely Journey

By Clark Watts

These stories of hope and dreams became a story of one man’s life, taking all that one man dare claim for himself and for those who placed their trust in him and for him to work as the alchemist who makes what was impossible possible. So please settle in and read for yourself these dreams of this unlikely journey and dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796022384

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Copyright © 2019 by Clark Watts.

Library of Congress Control Number:        2019903295

ISBN:                    Hardcover                        978-1-7960-2240-7

                             Softcover                          978-1-7960-2239-1

                             eBook                                978-1-7960-2238-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Cover photo by S. Page Neville.

Rev. date: 09/19/2019

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface

Prologue

Part 1: In the Beginning

Part 2: On My Way

BOOK ONE NO LOOKING BACK

Chapter I Is a Penny Found No Longer Lost?

1. mining gutters

2. little things (can) mean a lot

3. for want of a (penny) nail …

Chapter II An Orphan’s Excuse (with Apologies to Charles Dickens)

Chapter III A French Lesson

Chapter IV The Tattoo

Chapter V As to Student Loans

a. the case for work

b. with time for play

Chapter VI A Back Rub

Chapter VII The Value of Errors

1. the prep

2. a sponge too many

3. a greenstick

Chapter VIII Opening Day

a. our literary legacy

b. the class of ’62

c. did my future lie here?

d. an encyclopedia

e. where are all the girls?

Chapter IX My World: A Mirage in Black and White

1. the color of water

2. not at our lunch counters

3. no beds in this inn for mama

Chapter X Dr. Ben

Chapter XI What’s in a Name?

BOOK TWO

WHICH HAT TO WEAR TODAY?

Chapter XII A Pit without a Pendulum

1. the attack

The knife

2. a cut

3. the boot

4. cells were the heart should be

Chapter XIII An Unwise Question

Chapter XIV And the Indian Came

Chapter XV They Only Wanted to Help

1. the chauffeur wore blue

2. the belles of Bellevue preferred gray

Chapter XVI Namesake

Chapter XVII Golf Stories

story #1

story #2

Chapter XVIII A Miracle Rescinded

Chapter XIX To Oxford for B&D

Chapter XX Pigtails on the Mountain

Chapter XXI The Pain of Pleasure

Chapter XXII A Dawning

BOOK THREE

THE STARS ARE BRIGHT

Chapter XXIII Yes, You

Chapter XXIV Christmas in Berlin

Chapter XXV Death and I

Chapter XXVI On a Clear Day

a. boys need a creek to grow up in

b. a feeling of immortality

c. does the count really count?

d. the artist and the decision

Chapter XXVII Flight Training: Army versus Navy

a. naval officers are (presumed) gentlemen

b. classroom in the sky

c. surviving the 9D5 dunker

Chapter XXVIII En Plein Air

Chapter XXIX Faux Pas

Chapter XXX Consultations in Briefs

Chapter XXXI An Arresting Tale

Chapter XXXII Limousines and Box Braids

Chapter XXXIII Heroes in Repose

BOOK FOUR

THE WONDER OF WANDERING

Chapter XXXIV Dreams Can Become True

a. sand in her shoes and mine

b. the crossing

c. the pilgrimage

d. a bus ride of miles and generations

Chapter XXXV Safari

1. curtain call

2. a good death

3. restricted access

Chapter XXXVI A Catharsis of a Vet

Chapter XXXVII A Matter of Conscience

Chapter XXXVIII Vows

Chapter XXXIX Pets Are Family, Also

1. Tao

2. Big John

3. a feline soap opera

4. the last cattle drive

Chapter XL A Postcard from Cuba

a. clothes are dull, kids are bright

b. a borrowed dad

c. the clue is the children

Chapter XLI Banquets and Laboratories

Chapter XLII My Lips Are Sealed

BOOK FIVE

WHERE DID THE TIME GO?

Chapter XLIII Oops

1. for the birds

2. Dr. Apgar, we read your book

3. to schedule a heart attack

4. hormone cocktail

Chapter XLIV After the Wall

1. the teenage entrepreneur

2. the minister

3. the poet

Chapter XLV Read My Lips

Chapter XLVI Unsettling Unsettled Cartography

Chapter XLVII Chopsticks

Chapter XLVIII The Fiftieth

Chapter XLIX To Fly

Chapter L Menus, S’il Vous Plait

Chapter LI Should Not the Past Be Relegated to the Past?

Chapter LII The Brightest of the 1000 Points of Light

Chapter LIII His Moment

BOOK SIX AT JOURNEY’S END

Chapter LIV The Oath (Did We Matter?)

Chapter LV Closure

Chapter LVI Metaphor

List of Illustrations and Clarifying Notes

Author’s Biography

Passports

for the

UNLIKELY

JOURNEY

Doctor of Medicine (MD), 1962

Doctor of Jurisprudence (JD), 1989

Military Service, 1963–1998

(BG, MC, USAR)

DEDICATION

T his book , which holds so much of my life and my dreams that have a peculiar habit of reappearing from time to time, I dedicate to two whom I could always call upon to provide guidance to me in my darkest hours because of their propensity to have a particular influence upon the psyche and the energies that are so necessary to the soul of the creative man .

To Dr. Lito Porto, Barranquilla, Colombia

The Indian came.

He called me brother.

He introduced me to neurosurgery

and gave to me my first lessons.

From thus was struck the keys to this

unlikely journey.

- and -

To Fern Clark, Dallas, Texas, United States of America

This gracious lady of my conscience

who since my first excursion with ink and pen

has encouraged me with her attention

to that which I took to my desk and to my pew

her assuring presence announced by the

faintest taint of a quantum of her timeless wisdom, lingering,

as the sweetest of the ambrosias

or the favored nectars of celestial vines

A personal note to the reader:

These stories of hope and dreams became a story of one man’s life, taking all that that one man dare claim for himself and for those who placed their trust in him; and for him to work as the alchemist to make that which was impossible, possible. So please, settle in and read of these dreams of this unlikely journey, and dream yourself.

photo-1.jpg

CLARK WATTS

PREFACE

I have entered the blessed and much anticipated state of retirement; and yet as I set back to remember, I could not have chosen a more satisfying journey than the one that marked my life’s work, a vocational trek a young lad could only hope to find in dreams. Pleased with the course of this journey, I believe myself most fortunate to have been its pilgrim. There were times when the journey resembled a fire sale: chaotic, unscripted, and fast-paced, with great expenditures of energy. At other times, with a less frenetic pace, the journey took on the characteristics of a personal odyssey. Slow meandering days transitioned gradually into memorable adventures involving unforgettable people and places, and pets. Some of these encounters, regardless of the pace at which they developed, resulted in substantive and foundational changes in the course of my journey. Others simply improved days not going well or made better those that were.

I have been fortunate over many fruitful years to meet a number of talented and accomplished human beings. These beautiful and caring people have built fabulous institutions, created lovely parks, written and published scholarly treatises and entertaining pulp, and protected our shores and way of life. Acclaim and honors have been bestowed upon them; you will meet a few in this book.

But I have also met those who labored to build the roads that take us to those institutions, to those parks, to the libraries that hold the books, and to our safe shores. These people have often gone unrecognized for their individual efforts because their accomplishments have been obscured by a veil of fog, a curtain of dust, products of their own energy. In my universe, they appear to me through this befogged shroud as discrete and individual luminaries, each as unique and colorful as remnants of a rainbow through a blender. In this profile, they guided, inspired, and provided comfort to me. It is for this reason I have featured the stories of these people in this kaleidoscopic cornucopia of tales. They have earned their places in the sun and their stories recounted.

In the course of my careers, I have practiced medicine and law and served in the military as a medical officer and a general officer. I have taught in universities, in medical schools, in law schools, and in major military hospitals around the globe. I have taken care of ill patients in many of these same hospitals. I have represented the legal interests of the rich and well-off as well as the down-and-out. In a month, I could exit my house each day wearing a different hat that would signify my responsibilities for the day. My collection of hats would not be exhausted. So a note of caution is extended. The reader, searching for a good book at the end of a day to bring some sense of order into a life frustrated by inconsistencies imposed by institutions as well as families, will probably not find it here. With each story, the reader will meet a new cast of characters and a new set of circumstances that will test the reader’s tolerance for change. My hope is that the reader will be entertained by the stories and perhaps sufficiently motivated by the efforts of some of the actors that he or she will be encouraged to challenge fastballs delivered by an uncompromising life.

A number of special people move in and out of these stories over time; they deserve recognition and applause. Constraints of time, space, and privacy permit only a most heartfelt thank-you to all. I hope all have a chance to read this book and recognize their individual profiles and contributions. In these stories, they retain their identities. The flow of events in a few cases has been altered in the interest of privacy, but the facts supporting their appearances are as accurate as memory permits.

Yes, in most stories, I am included as the principal or an intimate observer, my professional title merely coincident. If I had not been there, there may not have been a story for me to tell. But this book is not a celebration of me or accomplishments attributed to me. Rather, it is a tribute to those who supported me in my endeavors or, just as important, served as wily, even Machiavellian, or antipathetic bearers of potential doom if my decisions were improper or without merit. In their contributions to the stories, these individuals are laudable and notorious, sublime and profane, eclectic and refined. In other words, quite human, with the spots and the scars of human effort recognizable.

I have collected these stories over many years, returning to them to learn and understand more from experiences. My memory of events is the chief historical file that I have consulted. It is my unrecorded claim of uncontestable validity. Dr. Sal Fiscina and his wife, Jo-Ann, longtime close friends, have heard most of the stories. By their questions and their awareness of the backgrounds of many of the participants, they served as important resources of truth and contributed in many cases to a clearer presentation of the basis or the origin of the response of participants.

Support of another dimension was supplied by Dr. Stewart Reuter and his wife, Marianne. Stewart, an early principal in a well-recognized program of professional ethics that developed at the University of Texas School of Medicine in San Antonio (professionally, he was an award-winning professor [in teaching] of radiology at the school), was an artist who, along with Marianne, an artist of note in her own right, provided a dependable sounding board regarding the primary nuggets of human interest yielded by many of these stories. Stewart’s loss to cancer several years ago was, for me, a loss that transcended the bounds of this project.

As to its beginning, early drafts of a few of these stories appeared in other venues. Bobbie Nell (Batchelder) Richardson, an alumnus of the association of graduates of the high school at Buckner Orphans Home, Buckner Academy, read some of the preliminary drafts in the alumni’s periodical, the Buckner Extra. She inquired about the availability of these stories as a separate collection. The editor, Hal Golden, called me; thus, this project was born.

A person who needs special recognition is S. Page Neville, a nurse anesthetist, recently retired from the Nurse Corps of the US Army Reserve as a colonel with three tours of duty in the Persian Gulf conflict, for which she was decorated with the Bronze Star (for merit in a combat zone). She provided invaluable help in keeping me rightly informed on military culture that changes without notice, on a moment’s notice. During her final tour, she achieved a distinction few nurses have; she was given command of a surgical unit attached to a hospital on an active battlefield, the Thirty-First Combat Support Hospital, a position she held for fifteen months.

A couple of final notes for the careful reader who uses the table of contents as a map or as a recipe. First there is little that is chronological in this script. The text seems to begin reasonably so. While I was acquiring my initial experiences in schools of higher learning, my life’s moments were being supplied by the school calendars and their seasons. But as I gained experience in my careers, I began to develop my own sense of time and its importance, adjusting my days to that sense and less to that of the clock.

A final note with regard to the subplots which comprise each chapter, those identified with numerical digits are thematically related but each a separate and fully matured story. Those identified alphabetically are collectively a full story.

PROLOGUE

Part 1: In the Beginning

I was raised in an orphanage in East Dallas County, founded by a large religious family from Tennessee in the 1880s. The institution was supported by multiple Baptist churches that followed the various doctrines of Presbyterian origins within the Southern Baptist Convention. One of its largest periods of growth occurred in the years following the devastating hurricane that struck Galveston in 1900. The doors were open to approximately 150 children within days of the disaster, with dozens to find their way to the entrance of the Farm, as the large section of fertile blackland was initially referred to, a slip of the tongue that momentarily embarrassed Father Buckner.

His plan had been to make the institution into a recovery enterprise that would offer space to those physically fit to work and create a self-sufficient institution where young boys could live and work. In time, these young men would acquire the social and practical skills necessary to make them honored and productive citizens. It was from the experience of which he was well aware, the success of the Carlisle Indian School, the name that made the institution famous along with the Indian Jim Thorpe. But Pastor Bucker was in time encouraged to alter his plans for the institution. He was persuaded to visit Galveston following the hurricane of 1900. After viewing the devastation, he changed his mind and took the steps necessary to convert the institution into an orphanage, admitting the 150 orphans from Galveston as an initial first step.

My siblings—one brother, Clyde, and three sisters, Anne, Orene, and Eva—were taken into the Home, as it was referred to by its inhabitants. My youngest sister, Paula, was less than six months old when we entered the Home—too young, so my mother thought, to be placed in an institution. She was raised by an aunt and uncle—Ila, the biological sister of my mother, and Johnnie Bateman, who lived in Fort Worth. My mother, no doubt living with all of the maternal guilt she was able to carry with her each night as she tucked each of us in bed, was most reluctant to trust the care of her youngest to anyone besides herself. However, she was finally persuaded to leave her with a couple who could provide her with all the love a traditional family would be able to provide.

Our journey to Buckner took a short, but rather circuitous route. It began in Fort Worth, Texas. The initial first steps of the short trip to the front gates of Buckner and my entrance into Buckner were not long or complicated. As brief flashes of the standard Kodak 8 mm movie camera, similar events are found in the record of nearly every child admitted to Buckner. In 1943, my family numbered six (6): my parents, my younger brother, two sisters Anne and Orene, and me. In 1943, my father—with no marketable academic or physical skills, having left school after the second grade—decided to take us to California. It was in the middle years of the Second World War, and the rumor was that jobs were plentiful, for the taking. When we arrived, the truth was anything except that, which we discovered. My parents presented the family with two additional girls, Josephine and Eva (Josephine died from pneumonia at the age of three months), before my father concluded the matter of raising a family was not in his skill set or his future; he abandoned the family in Fresno.

My mother, pregnant with Paula and with a limited education herself (she was in school through the ninth grade), was able to find the money to return us to Fort Worth by bus, where my journey begins. In the meantime, my mother was calling on all her resources in a game of hide-and-seek. Her first task was to try to keep us together, a chore she began immediately. She spent much of each day clinging to a plan that was infused with a heavy dose of trust and, at the same time, a healthy streak of skepticism. She began taking secretarial courses in her pursuit of employability. But that was not enough. During this short segment of our odyssey, roughly two years, I was placed into two orphanages in Fort Worth, the Lena Pope Home and the All Church Home, while the other children were moved back and forth between the homes of supporting family members.

Eventually, we settled into Buckner Orphans Home. (This story is recounted in my childhood memoir, All I Wanted Was a Home: Raised in an Orphanage, AuthorHouse, 2009). My brother and I entered in early August, followed in two weeks by my sisters Anne, Orene, and Eva. My belief for this different timescale was that to divest herself of all of us at the same time would have been too hard even for a woman of her proven strength. Her arrangements for our youngest sibling, Paula, must have been extremely difficult to effectuate—not because of any questions of the outcome, but because my mother had to accept the simple truth. She was unable to care for those given to her; she had failed. Fortunately, fate had not totally abandoned her. My mother’s oldest sister had married a man of a strong work ethic and, if possible, a stronger back. Ila and Johnnie, however, were barren; they had no children of their own. They offered to raise Paula, promising to tell her the entire story as she developed. In time, she was given the full story and united fully with her siblings.

My mother obtained a job at the home. She had argued the case for our admission into the home with such passion that the administrators of the home were favorably impressed with her concern for children. She worked taking care of the preschool children in a building called the Sunbeams. Of the friends she made at Buckner, one was especially important to my future.

Very early, in the first months of her employment, my mother met a woman who worked in one of the buildings that housed the younger girls. Mrs. Elise Ratcliff was a widow with one child, Gordon John Ratcliff, who was placed in the home by his mother after his father had died.

The two mothers developed a quick and strong relationship because they both had sons of similar ages—Gordon John was ten years old, and I was nine. And more importantly, we both were performing classwork at an acceptable level, but not at the level of which our mothers felt we were capable. They spent time discussing how they could inspire us to better performances in school. But they spent much of their time together discussing Christian conclusions regarding their giving up their children to others to develop and influence.

Mrs. Ratcliff was a strong supporter of the church, as was her husband, who had been the breadwinner in the family and required and desired no help from his wife; and on more than one occasion, he became rather depressed at the suggestion that his wife take a job outside the home. Thus, although Mrs. Ratcliff was more educated than my mother, she had acquired no more practical work-related experiences than my mother had. Mrs. Ratcliff strongly supported the decision to place us in the home and especially my mother’s decision to stay close to us by taking a job in the home. With this advice, Mrs. Ratcliff may have saved my mother’s psyche; for she gave her a means of letting go of the past, permitting her to frame the future to her liking.

It was through this relationship that I became acquainted with Gordon John Ratcliff. His mother was the one who initially looked upon our relationship as a good one, one that would have many mutually inclusive advantages. She had become convinced that without additional challenges, Gordon John would not obtain the full and comprehensive development that she was convinced was his right to have and her responsibility to obtain for him. He was the first of our group with similar interests to strike out on a pathway of a successful postsecondary educational desire. He began taking piano lessons. My mother encouraged me to do the same, which I did. But it was in the classroom where the impact of our relationship was on display.

We became the most aggressive and intense scholastic competition seen by the teachers in quite a spell. We began acquiring the annual awards for scholastic performance that once had been the purview of the older students. I took a lock on the annual awards for mathematics and for science, with Gordon John consistently taking the medal for overall performance. Once we received our first medals, we heard from the more senior students who had been the recipients of these medals in the past that they were not happy to have to relinquish them to us, especially to a piano player with glasses and a freshman football player who was backup to the best athlete that Buckner could place on any field of competition.

The closer we scored together, the closer we seemed in our goals and our outreach for excellence. This friendly, but very intense competition was witnessed by other students in our classes. Often, when a paper was given back to us in one of our more competitive classes, the two mothers heard of the outcomes before we had a chance to reveal the score to them. And this was not limited to the sciences in which we consistently obtained scores that would destroy any curve, if we had one for our classes. We took typing together. We tore the course apart with our speed and our dexterity on the keyboards. We set unbelievable scores and finished the course essentially tied for the top spot.

This competition was not lost on the teachers either. They very early determined we were headed for major academic environments. So the teachers in whose classes we chose to study went out of their way to provided us with challenging and provocative projects to work on, and they often took their own spare time to see that we were well prepared for strong colleges.

A trying and suitable example was the support supplied by Ms. Mildred McCullough (one of the most popular teachers in the school), who had closely followed our high school progress. She determined one semester we had a deficiency in math, which might place us in an inferior position as we began to apply for colleges, especially major colleges of the Southwest. Ms. McCullough felt Gordon John and I needed a basic course in trigonometry. But there was no class available to the two of us before our scheduled graduation. So Ms. McCullough called the Texas educational board and explained the situation to them and her proposed solution: to create a separate class in trigonometry—an additional class, to be sure, as there was one already approved for the school.

Ms. McCullough was instructed to prepare a separate application for the course, a necessary step because the high school needed to be approved by the board so its graduates could be assured positions would be available to them in the workplace and in smaller colleges throughout the state. One of the conditions that would exist if this plan were carried out was that she would be teaching the class during her personal rest time, a personal hour of the day taken by each teacher for rest. This time was a significant concession won by the teachers’ union. There were those who felt that if the teachers were allowed to give up this time voluntarily, the union would be perceived as losing strength as well as time. But Ms. McCullough received approval for the course, and we took the course.

The orphanage contained a rather homogeneous set of beneficiaries. It did not accept disturbed or delinquent children. The typical child taken in was from an American family, of Western European heritage, with a religious background, if any, of a Protestant devotion. During the years I was there, no child accepted came from families strongly representative of other religious or ethnic minorities. Religious instruction was universally that of a conservative (or Southern) Baptist persuasion provided in the classroom and in Sunday school, which carried a religious curriculum similar to that of the normal school day. During my tenure, no child was put up for adoption. Opened by the parent organization were two institutions for unwed mothers, one in Round Rock, Texas, and one in West Texas. No girls requiring these services were transferred from the orphanage.

Supervisory positions were held by white males, teaching positions by white females. During the summer before my sophomore year, I recall interacting only briefly with two adult black males who were hired temporarily to help with the cotton harvest. Broad and complex social subjects such as religious differences, ethnic diversity, and homosexuality were barely discussed and then as secondary subjects during Bible studies. There were no social studies classes (although at times geography classes were often referred to as social studies), and family organization and structure was rarely addressed.

From the vantage point of many years after leaving the orphanage, I believe this latter exception had the most adverse long-term impact on the children. I address the absence of any attempt to promote family identity. The children were segregated according to age and gender, a decision of economic origins. The girls were housed on the south side of the campus, and the boys on the north. Consequently, after my mother left (she had received a job coincident with our acceptance into the orphanage and was able to see my siblings and me together whenever she desired), I rarely saw my siblings as a family group. After I published my childhood memoir, All I Wanted Was a Home, in which I made this point, I received mail from graduates who underscored the fact that many left the orphanage feeling closer to friends who had lived in closer proximity with them than had their brothers and sisters.

Perhaps that could have been ameliorated somewhat if the related children had been brought together to collectively celebrate birthdays or to sit together in church. But the working philosophy of the effort was that those in the institution were one big family. This sense of belonging seemed to help in the maintenance of discipline in that most of the children were so thankful they had been given this lifeline; so deprived were many when institutionalized that they wanted to be a part of no activity that would jeopardize their status in the home.

The school system of the home was private; outside children were not accepted. The campus was in the center of three thousand acres of farmland, surrounded by rural communities, creating distances too large for children from elsewhere to seek playmates. We visited some of the surrounding communities and their schools to play team sports, but there was little in the way of socializing with other athletes after games. Groups of children were often taken by bus to Dallas for social gatherings at Baptist churches, which were not integrated. Every year, children of the home went to the Texas State Fair in Dallas, but no extended time was made available for mingling and social interaction with other groups of children.

Parents and other close family members—aunts, uncles, and grandparents—were permitted to take children off campus on weekends or for vacations. Since most of the children living in the home were orphans, not many of them had these experiences. Consequently, the children of Buckner were not exposed to teenage progressivism, nor were they exposed to personal or societal discrimination.

Throughout my stay at Buckner, every Friday evening, the home provided movies in the auditorium, located at ground level below the church. The movies were suitable for all ages, for children in grades 1 through 12 (and the thirteenth year after 1952). Most were pure entertainment, with little value otherwise for social development. There was one television set that children could view on Saturday afternoons. The first television set appeared the summer before my sophomore year and was enjoyed by young couples, properly chaperoned. Most of the adult staff in the dorms had radios that they generously shared with their charges.

I vividly recall listening to President Truman speaking after his inauguration in 1948 on a radio owned by one of the house mothers. A most prized possession of mine and, no doubt, the source of some of my popularity was a radio given to me by my mother. I shared it unhesitatingly with my fellow wards to listen to music; there were few talk shows as we know them today. Some of the older boys built their own crystal radios, not by assembling kits obtained from Montgomery Ward or Sears, Roebuck and Company, but from an understanding of the technology—a source of pride and accomplishment.

As with most of these children, my childhood experiences, dominated by authoritative figures (older children as well as adults), sculptured an outline of my future life, influenced decisions I made, and served as a template for the understanding of the new world in which I found myself a citizen. Throughout my secondary education, I was the youngest and smallest student in my classes until I reached my sophomore year in high school; then an unexplained and unaccounted-for growth spurt gave me the title of the school’s tallest, if not the heaviest, student. When I graduated from Buckner Academy, there were twenty-one students in my class, eleven females and ten males. With some, I developed personal and intellectual relationships that, in time, I came to view as important as I adopted my new identity. This point may be made by examining some of the records of a few students in my graduating class.

Gordon John Ratcliff was the class valedictorian and its most accomplished athlete. The inspiring story of his athletic achievements has been told in my book All I Wanted Was a Home. You have already met him, but such was our relationship that I cannot effectively tell my story without his shadow. He was my closest friend and my major academic challenger, especially in mathematics and in science.

Gordon John received a baccalaureate degree in physics from the University of Texas. Instead of seeking higher academic honors, Gordon John accepted an offer from Texas Instruments in Dallas to come to work for them. He was placed in one of their laboratories, working on the development of devices and instruments that anticipated the transistor and the chip, so important in later developments in computer technology.

He flourished in these labs, developing skills as an outstanding scientist and a manager/administrator of scientific projects. Although he had taken German in college as his scientific language for graduation, he was sent to France by Texas Instruments to build a research and development complex, which he then successfully managed for three years. While preparation is important, geometric aesthetics at the launch site are not detrimental; the quality of the payload is.

John Vaughn was the number 3 student in our graduating class. He was unlike anyone I knew at Buckner. His speech was crisp, the individual words pronounced as distinct and as clipped as the British. Where he acquired that accent was a mystery to all of us, even him. But once he realized how special this God-given uniqueness was, he worked to ensure its viability and its association with him. When those of us developed a radio club at Buckner, with the help of our science teacher, he became an early supporter as a reporter and was a very popular broadcaster for the station. After graduation from high school, John acquired a doctor of philosophy (PhD) degree from a college in East Texas in American and British literature. His life was devoted to the career that none of us were surprised to see. He taught under the credentials of that degree his entire life, never marrying.

After several years of failing to attend Buckner homecomings, I