College Reboot

This is my college ID from the year I graduated from

East Central University in Ada, OK.

East Central University is located in Ada, Oklahoma.  The university was founded as East Central State Normal School in 1909, two years after Oklahoma was admitted as the 46th U.S. state. The function of a Normal School was a sort of preparatory school. It was like an advanced high school/community college offering  both high school courses and two years of college credit.  I’m told the first classes were held in local church buildings but in 1910 the Oklahoma Legislature funded faculty salaries and a building on a 16-acre (65,000 m2) site donated by the Chickasaw Nation.  I hope the Chickasaw donation was voluntarily made and not, as past practice would indicate, just taken from the tribe.  The college became a 4 year teacher college in 1919.  In 1939 the school became East Central State College. In 1974, my first year to attend East Central, the state legislature renamed the state colleges, and it became East Central Oklahoma State University.

While some people called it EZU, it was, for me, a good college and my life was changed for the better.  It may have been called EZU by some, but for me, my years at East Central were anything but easy.  

One good thing that happened to Kathie and I was that by dropping out of college and working for a year, when we returned to college, the financial aid paperwork was based on our salaries from the previous year, and not based on our parents salaries and assets.  We made almost no money, so we qualified for National Defense Student Loans and we borrowed our way to our degrees.

Even with loans Kathie and I had to work and attend classes.  Kathie worked at Anthony’s and I worked at Dutch’s Shopping Mart.

I worked long hours, almost full time, to sometimes full time.  It was the most physical work I’d ever done, to date.  I stocked shelves, carried out groceries, and eventually I ran a register.  I learned to take a case of canned goods, cut it around the center with a box knife and split the box so the top and bottom layers of cans were exposed.  This allowed me to use a Garvey stamping gun.  Today the Garvey puts a paper price tag on cans and boxes, but at this time in my history, the Garvey left a purplish ink price on the cans.

During the Oil Embargo during the Carter Administration, inflation when nuts.  Every time we got new stock in, the price of that stuff was more expensive.  And one of my jobs became using a can of hairspray to spray on the Garvey Ink which dissolved the ink allowing me to wipe it off with a paper towel.  Then I could set the Garvey gun to price the cans at the new higher price.  This seemed to happen every week.

My new major was English.  Kathie’s major was biology.

One day I was driving us to campus and we were stopped on the top of a hill waiting for the car ahead of us to turn left, when a red car came up that hill, the driver hit his breaks, there was the squeal of tires and we were hit from behind.  Sore necks.  

The driver turned out to be a church of Christ preacher just passing through Ada.  The church of Christ was getting less and less popular with me.

Our car was in great shape, and paid for, but it was old.  The other guy’s insurance totaled my car out.  We needed a car right away.  We decided to take the $300 we got for that totaled car and we would buy something out of the newspaper.  Because of our hours we ended up going to some guys house, after dark, and buying a Rambler.

The first day we got the car I drove it up to Dutch’s to show some of my co-workers.  When I got back into the car it would not start.  We got a jump and I drove it around to build up the battery.  At the next stop I went somewhere, and when we returned to the car, again, it wouldn’t start.  The following morning I went out to start the car, and it wouldn’t stop.  I walked about a mile, bought a new battery, carried the battery back to the car and installed the battery.  The car turned over immediately.  I got in, drove back to the auto supply place and turned in the old battery.  When I got home and stopped I thought I’d just turn the engine over one more time.  The car wouldn’t start.  We had no money to do another thing to that car.  

Kathie was not working at that time because she was doing her Student Teaching at Ada High School.  We called the school and got permission for Kathie to ride the school bus in each morning to do her student teaching.  I walked everywhere.  It was several miles from our apartment to ECU.  It was a couple of miles from ECU to Dutch’s.  It was a couple of miles from Dutch’s to the post office where we had a PO Box.  And it was several miles from the PO to our apartment.

I can remember getting home around 10:30 pm.  I’d been out since 6:30 am that morning.  I was exhausted.  Kathie said she would fix me some chicken and dressing.  I let her.  When she brought the chicken and dressing to me it was this green clump of mucilage.  I went and looked at this can and it said Chicken Dressing, not Chicken And Dressing.

There was almost nothing else in the house to eat.  I was just about to give up.  

Kathie was close to getting her teaching degree.  I had about a semester more to go, but I did not think we could make it like this any more.  I thought about dropping out and getting a job that paid a little more so we could have a car that ran, and some actual edible food in the apartment.

I think Kathie called her parents and vented.  The next day her mom and dad and sister Melain showed up at our apartment and they had sacks of groceries.  Kathie’s dad and made it clear he would put Kathie through school IF she didn’t get married until after graduation, but apparently he had a tender heart and was more than willing to help us when times were tough.

I didn’t drop out.  I took a chance when the income tax refund came and we called a Texaco station to see if they could get the car working again.  The problem turned out to be a loose alternate belt.  A cheap simple fix.

Church of Christ Reboot

At this time in history the word reboot did not exist, at least I think it didn’t exist.  There were no home computers, but I did attempt to resume my connection to the church of Christ.  

The problems were my fear of losing my wife and my need for money.  

When I started explaining some of my faith doubts, Kathie was alarmed.  

“I married a church of Christ Preacher and now what is happening to you?”

I decided to keep my doubts to myself.  I wondered still if I was wrong.  What if I were wrong and I could have been in heaven but I was going to spend eternity in hell?  We were attending the church of Christ in Ada, and the preacher there was someone I sort of knew, Bud Ross.  Bud Ross had a brother who was a big wig at OCC.  The Ross brothers grew up in Holdenville which is close to Wewoka so I knew Bud’s father, who also served as an elder at the Holdenville Church of Christ.

I shared what happened at Wewoka, and, of course, Bud knew about the withdrawal of fellowship fiasco that had occurred there.  Bud asked to to substitute in the high school Sunday School class.

I guess the feedback was good, because Bud asked me to consider being the Youth Director, and perhaps get a small salary.

I was torn.  I had these profound doubts.  I had this raw anger toward the church of Christ.  I was also poor, struggling, working very hard physically and being a youth minister sounded like a cushy job.  I agreed to start teaching the Wednesday night Bible class for the teenagers and Bud was going to present the idea of me being the youth director after I’d put in a little time with the teens.

Some of the teens in that Bible class were clearly not wild about being in a Bible class on a Wednesday night, but in general things seemed to be going well.

One night, during this Wednesday night class, one of the boys in the class said, “Why Brother Wallace standing at the door listening to you?”

Brother Wallace was an elder.  I glanced at the door and I could see part of someone standing against the wall and his ear was near the door.  I figured maybe this was some sort of secret assessment of me to see if I was going to be a good choice for youth director.

I have to say that I was getting some strange vibes.  Elders would look at me and turn away.  Even Bud Ross seemed standoffish.  I sensed something was wrong, but I had no clue what it could be.

A few days later, I was home, with a short break between my classes and my job at the grocery store, when I got a call from Bud Ross.  Bud asked if I was going to be home a little while, that he wanted to stop by.

I thought maybe this was him coming to tell me I had the Youth Director job.

Bud showed up with one of the Elders.  He said that he had suggested to the Elders that they hire me as the Youth Director.  One of the Elders objected, he told me.  My legal name was Richard Lee Norman.  The Elder asked if Bud was seriously suggesting they hire Richard Norman, a known dealer of marijuana with a number of arrests on his record.

I was shocked.  “I’ve never been arrested, ever.  I am not a dealer of marijuana.”

We know that now, Bud said.  It turns out there was another person in town named Richard F Norman, and I was Richard L Norman.  Richard F was the one with the arrests.  

Later when I was about to graduate I had another problem with Richard F.  He was also attending East Central and he had some F’s on his transcript and some fines that were unpaid.

Bud and this Elder had checked me out and determined that there was a confusion, and that they now knew I was not the pot dealing loser they thought I was.  I was asked to continue to teach the Wednesday night teen class.

I said I was no longer interested in teaching the class.

I again stopped going to the church of Christ.

I could not understand it.  I called my friend, the withdrawn from Stormy and he had already heard about the allegations.  The questions about me had filtered back to Wewoka.

More Loss of Faith

You might blame my loss of faith on bad experiences I had with church of Christ members, and that is, at least partly, true.  I was starting to ask myself, if it the church of Christ that nuttier than a Snickers Bar, or was there something wrong with Christianity itself.

Around this time I had a professor, Dr. Densford, who was a Baptist, and still going to church, but he had no doubts about Christianity, he felt sure it was all just a big club based on myths.

Dr. Densford told me one story that moved me greatly.  He said that he took his wife on a trip to Europe and that trip included a trip to Greece.  

The professor and his wife were on a tour.  When they got to the famous ruins of the Parthenon, the guide pointed out a smaller ruin just down the hill called the Erechtheus.

The guide told this story:

Athena  went to the blacksmith-god named Hephaestus to get the god to make her some weapons.  Hephaestus looked at Athena and was so turned on by her sexy self that he tried to seduce her.  When the seduction didn’t work he got handsy and Athena, determined to protect her virginity, fled.  Hephaestus caught up to Athena and attempted to rape Athena, but Athena fought back.  In their struggle Hephaestus, who was, apparently a premature ejaculator, lost his load, and shot his seamon on Athena’s thigh.  Athena was disgusted and used some wool to wipe the seamon off her thigh.  Athena tossed the wool to the earth, but the story was not done.  Out of that wool sprang a baby, and the child was named Erechtheus, which sounds a lot like Erection.

The professor said he stopped the guide and asked, “Do the Greeks still believe in super virgin goddesses and miraculous virgin births like in this story about the Erechtheus?”

He said the guide was offended.

“Of course NOT!” she said.  “We Greeks are members of the Greek Orthodox Church and we believe in Jesus Christ born of the blessed virgin Mary.”.  

Wow.  The two stories were similar.  Dr. Densford pointed out old stories from other peoples that were very similar to stories in the Bible.  It started to sound like some of the Bible stories were just Hebrew versions of stories that circulated among the ancient societies around their known world.

This was another knock to my fundamentalist faith.

Moving On

Kathie graduated from East Central in the Spring of 1976.  

Kathie started looking for work, and she ended up with two possibilities.  A college professor that liked her recommended her to someone he knew at the Noble Foundation in Ardmore Ok  Kathie was called for an interview and when the day came for me to drive her to Ardmore, it was raining like crazy.  The Rambler's windshield wipers were not working.

I drove the car to the American Motors dealership, the new name for the Rambler company, and they said it was a vacuum powered windshield wiper motor.  They said they could replace the wiper motor, but it would be a couple of days before the part came in.  That wouldn’t work for us because I needed to get her to Ardmore that very day.

There were side windows.  I tied two cords to the windshield wipers and pulled the strings into the front seat area through those side windows.   We drove to Ardmore and the whole way I would pull my cord and to pull the wipers up.  Kathie pulled the cord to bring the wipers back down.  We did that over and over so I could see to drive.

The rain stopped during the interview so we didn’t have to use the strings to get back home.

Kathie also interviewed at Butner School in Cromwell.  

A few days later Kathie was home when Mr. Hoover the Superintendent of  Butner Schools in Cromwell called and offered her a teaching position.  We were very tired of being poor.  Ond advantage to teaching at Butner was that her school loans were forgiven 10% each year as long as she was teaching in an area deemed socially and/or economically disadvantaged.

Less than an hour later the Noble Foundation called and offered her a lab tech job.  She turned them down because she had already told Mr.Hoover that she would take the teaching job.  I think, the rest of her life, Kathie has wondered if it might have been better for her to take the job at the Noble Foundation.

We moved back to Wewoka, because there were not a lot of rent houses available in Cromwell.  I was about to start my student teaching, and Dutch’s Shopping Mart was attempting to expand by buying an IGA store in Seminole.  I was made the night manager of that store so I would not have so far to drive.  I could live in Wewoka, work in Seminole, and do my student teaching at Wewoka High School.

We got a nice house outside of Wewoka.  The house was surrounded by pasture land and while the house was nothing to brag about, it was a nice place, perhaps the nicest place we’d ever lived in throughout our entire married life.

I felt really bad for the Dutch’s Shopping Mart People.  As soon as the Seminole store was purchased road work was started.  The road was torn up from the beginning.  He could not have had fewer customers if he’d perched on the roof of the store with a shotgun and threatened passersby folk.

My student teaching gave me the sense that I was making a huge mistake, but so much time and struggle was invested in this idea we could teach school and make a life together.  I struggled from the beginning with very weak classroom management skills.

I should be honest here and add that I also had no self confidence in my command of my knowledge.