VIEW from behind the plow

Last week a few members of the 1954 Altus High School graduating class got together for a mini reunion. We do this on an irregular basis – just when a few of us can coordinate a time when we can get away for a few hours. Most of the class members are retired by now. Worse, many of them are no longer with us. (One of the subjects that usually comes up is who’s died since we last met.) We met at the lovely home of H.B. (He’s called Hugh now) and Jill Talley in Yukon. They are located rather centrally and don’t seem imposed on when we drop in. They moved back to Oklahoma in 2002 after H.B. (we still have trouble calling him Hugh) retired from a successful engineering-construction career that took him on projects from New York to the West Coast. H.B.’s story is compelling. Like the large majority of us in the class, he grew up sorta on the poor side. After high school and completing an army tour in 1957, he landed a job with an engineering firm – Fox Engineering – in our old hometown, Altus. The owner of the company, Raymond H. Fox Jr. took an interest in H.B. – probably because H.B. took an interest in his job – and began teaching him the engineering business from the ground up. It was like having his personal college professor. We recall hearing H.B. talk about staying up late at night hitting the books. At our get-together we recalled our school teachers that had such an impact on our lives. They were determined that we were going to learn. Probably none of them earned the median income for that time but that didn’t seem to matter to them. They had a calling and a responsibility and we were going to learn, if it killed us. We don’t recall that our school gave students a warm, fuzzy feeling. This writer anyway always had the feeling that we were in a military boot camp rather than a learning institution. Somehow or other it worked to our benefi t. We have never heard of a single member of that class who became a drag on the state or nation. Rather, they became contributors. Talley started work for Fox as a bookkeeper after getting out of theArmy but later began doing drafting for his engineering fi rm. He attended the Altus junior college for a semester to learn more about drafting where his teacher was Bill Schafer, who was our eighth grade shop teacher several years before. Later H.B. and Mr. Schafer (we always called our teacher Mr., Mrs. or Miss – it would not have been appropriate to call a teacher by his-or-her first name) worked side-by-side at the drafting table. The boy who never got an engineering degree worked at Fox for some four years before going to work for large construction companies and had many graduate engineers working for him on various major projects that he led. Many of them were projects you wouldn’t have run across in Jackson County, Oklahoma: major Mississippi River navigation projects, for instance. H.B.’s story should be an inspiration to any young person starting out without a lot of fi nancial backing. If you apply yourself, you can do just fine here in the land of opportunity. Stories like H.B.’s are just one of the reasons we oppose the efforts of left wing groups seeking to destroy America’s free enterprise system. No system is going to guarantee an absolutely even standard of living for everybody, but the American experiment has provided the opportunity for millions to take care of themselves and those for whom they are responsible in a manner exceeding that found anywhere else in the world. We hope H.B. won’t be embarrassed by us talking about him in this way but he’s a hero to us. And his career is one that should encourage anyone. Note: A college degree wasn’t necessary then and still isn’t. We’ll bet there are people in your lives with similar experiences – or maybe it’s you. We love “poor boy makes good” stories and couldn’t resist telling this one.