It’s a wonderful wife

My beautiful wife!

When I was a sophomore in college at East Texas State University in late 1969, the university changed the way the semesters were scheduled by moving fall semester finals to before Christmas rather than right after. That gave us nearly a month between the end of fall and the beginning of the spring semester. Not wanting to be idle for that time, I wanted to get a job to make a little money. My sister Sande, a sophomore at South Garland High School, and I headed out to Northpark Center which had opened just four years earlier. She immediately found a job as a waitress at Kip’s Big Boy Restaurant, but I did not want to work waiting tables so I applied at all every other non-food shop in the mall – over 150 at that time – and got nothing, even though it was just three weeks before Christmas. Not finding what I wanted, I went back to Kip’s where they hired me to buss tables.

On my first afternoon I managed to drop and shatter a full tray of dishes, relegating me to the kitchen where I spent the next month washing dishes. On the up side, I met one of the best-looking girls I had ever met – Jean Caskey. I asked her out to a concert by Dionne Warwick, but since that was not until February I also took her to see Midnight Cowboy, which had opened that past summer. After we saw the movie I asked if she was REALLY hungry, and when she said yes, I took her to Phil’s Delicatessen, where their burgers were huge.

Since I came home from Commerce every weekend to help my mother with her interior decorating business, I was able to take Jean out those weekends. We dated for two-and-a-half years, getting married August 4, 1972, less than three months after I graduated from ETSU. We moved to Carrollton where I had gotten my first job and eventually bought our first house there five years later. We also were able to do a good bit of travelling. When I worked at Lone Star Gas in downtown Dallas I was able to attend job-related events all over the United States, often taking her with me – Washington, DC; Boca Raton, FL; New Orleans; New York City; Anaheim, CA; Las Vegas; and Colorado Springs. We also made trips on our own to Corpus Christi and Rockport (on our honeymoon), to visit her sister Sue in Charleston, SC; skiing in Colorado; and many other places all over Texas, the US and even Guadalajara, St Thomas, the Bahamas, Canada and Britain.

We both loved to eat, so we have done that both at home and everywhere we traveled. We’ve had Chicago-style pizza in Chicago, muffulettas and beignets in New Orleans, Katz’s Delicatession and Carnegie Deli in New York City, and many great dining experiences everywhere we went.

Jean has been with me through thick and thin. About a year before we were married, I decided to buy a motorcycle and pick her up for lunch at Zuider Zee restaurant, where she worked. On the way there I wrecked the bike, breaking my jaw. Of course she wonedred why I never showed up for lunch – I was in the hospital! Then in Tulsa the summer of 2003 I spent a month in the hospital, along with nearly a year in rehab, from Guillain-Barre syndrome. And, of course, most recently on November 1, 2012, I ended up at Parkland Hospital after being hit by a car, suffering a traumatic brain injury.

Jean has been there to help and support me ;every step along the way. With the TBI keeping me from being able to take care of the bills, for the first time in her life Jean had to take over those chores. I hadn’t meant to keep her in the dark about our finances, she just did not have any interest. Two years ago she and Evan had to dig through my stuff – mostly online because I received and paid bills online whenever possible – to figure out who we owed and how to pay for everything. Jean worked miracles getting me organized and taking care, not only with the bills we already had, but also the new ones resulting from my injury, from medical bills to long term disability and Social Security Disability Income.

I always knew how wonderful she was, but after the past two years, I am truly amazed at what she is capable of doing, for me and with me.

Jeannie, I admire and love you, beyond belief!

Seeing Whoopi in New York

Whoopi with Jean and I

Over the years I worked at several jobs where I had to live somewhere far from home.

In 1994 after I left Lone Star Gas Company in Dallas, Jean and I moved to Wichita, KS, because I took a job there with USF&G Insurance, which was based in Baltimore, MD. After working there for sixteen months they closed that office and offered me a position with their life insurance division F&G Life in Baltimore. They moved me to Towson to live in a campus apartment at Towson University. After leaving F&G Life I took a job working for IBM in White Planes, New York. There I rented a small bedroom from a Jewish lady in Scarsdale.

In 2003 when I contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome and was in recovery for nine months. I then got a job in Tampa, FL, with Neilsen Media Research, the company that measures what people watch on television (ratings) so the networks can determine how much they can charge marketers for advertising. There I found an apartment where I could walk just 200 yards to the nearest bus that would take me to Neilsen.

Whoopi Goldberg grew up in the Chelsea area of Manhatten New York, but moved to California before she was twenty, where she worked at the San Diego Repertory Theater, and with various groups developing her skills as a stand-up performer. This was also when she adopted her name “Whoopi.” In 1984 under the direction of Mike Nichols they created Whoopi Goldberg, her one-woman show, which opened October 24, 1984 at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre.

For that highly successful show’s twentieth anniversary, she and Nichols decided to do it again with a brand new show based on the original creation – a one-woman show featuring several of her character creations: Live on Broadway: The 20th Anniversary Show. Because I had worked for her a few years earlier, she offered Jean and I free seats if and when we could get to New York. So we planned a trip to meet there – Jean from Tulsa and me from Tampa – the weekend of December 3 – 5, 2004 to see Whoopi at the Lyceum Theatre! You can see the photos I took here. Also check out my Whoopi web site.

9/11/2001

American Airlines home office

The September 11 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks launched by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda upon the United States at the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. The attacks killed almost 3,000 people. On that day I was working at the American Airlines center at 3800 N Mingo Rd Tulsa, OK 74116.

I had moved to Tulsa in 1997 to work for Commercial Financial Services, which went out of business a couple of years later because of fraud perpetrated by part of senior management. After that I worked for several companies as a contractor, including American Airlines (!), The Nordam Group, Oklahoma Central Credit Union, and eventually Sabre, which was a subsidiary of American Airlines. I was hired as an employee, not a contractor, in May of 2001, just before American Airlines outsourced their entire IT organization to Electronic Data Systems (EDS).

My responsibility at Sabre/EDS centered around maintaining the inventory of American Airlines’ aircraft engines, which FAA regulations required to be overhauled periodically. My function was to keep up with which engine was on which aircraft. Planes would be brought into our Tulsa center and engines would be removed for overhaul and replaced with other already overhauled engines, thereby keeping the planes flying as much as possible.

On the morning of September 11, because an American Airlines aircraft, Flight 11 from Boston’s Logan Airport heading for Los Angeles, was the first aircraft flown into the World Trade Center,  all of the employees at the Sabre offices became glued to the available televisions and online news programs to see what was happening. I saw our Flight 11 soon after it had hit the North Tower (1 WTC). That was quickly followed by United Airlines Flight 175 that, too, had left Logan Airport en route to LA, when the hijackers flew into the South Tower (2 WTC). Next, American Airlines Flight 77, which had left Dulles International Airport in Virginia, also en route to LA, was flown by hijackers into the Pentagon. Finally, United Airlines Flight 93, which had left Newark International Airport heading to San Francisco, as passengers attempted to subdue the hijackers, the aircraft crashed into the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The attacks resulted in the deaths of 2,996 people, including the 19 hijackers and 2,977 victims. The victims included 246 on the four planes (from which there were no survivors), 2,606 in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon. Nearly all of the victims were civilians; 55 military personnel were among those killed at the Pentagon.

I’ve had over 40 jobs

My first job was working for my mother. She had gone to college during World War II to receive an education in textiles. When I was in kindergarten she found a job at Sears as an interior decorator. She took what she’d learned there and started her own freelance decorating business which she called Vesta Spreng Interiors. She would design and make draperies for friends and neighbors, and found work for home builders at first to select exterior brick and paint colors along with interior carpet and kitchen cabinets. That work soon led to taking care of the designs for model homes. That would include designing and making draperies and sometimes adding furniture, art, towels and other items to make the homes look attractive and lived-in.

My mother would work with the builders and decide what needed to be done with the houses and she would make the draperies, purchase the furniture and equipment necessary for hanging the window treatments, and on Saturdays my father and I would load up our station wagon and we would take everything to the houses we were working at and handle the necessary installation. At first, I was only a “gopher” handing my parents the tools and materials they needed, but by the time I was 12 or so I could handle the same work they did, including hanging drapes, installing furniture and hanging pictures on the walls. We did this nearly every weekend until she retired when I was 35 years old! We used to tell people that I had 25 years of experience as a decorator!

Last week I mentioned my years as a musician with the Caballeros. During my four summers at college I worked for a motion picture shipping company in Dallas called Central Shipping and Inspection. We loaded film containers from our warehouse onto trucks for delivery to theaters across Texas. While I was in college at East Texas State University – now Texas A&M – Commerce – I was a teaching assistant. In 1969 ETSU changed their Christmas break schedule from a couple of weeks right before finals for the fall semester to four weeks after finals and before the start of the spring semester. That gave me the opportunity to work for a month and make some money. I went to work at NorthPark Mall at Kips, where I first met and began dating my wife Jean.

We got married  in 1972 after I’d graduated from ETSU, moved to Carrollton, TX, where I started my first “real” job at Rogersnap Business Forms. From there I went to TJM Corporation, another business forms company, where I worked as a forms salesman. After that I worked for Computer Language Research (aka “Fast-Tax”) where they trained me to program computer applications to process income tax returns for accounting forms. That gave me the skills to write software with PL/I, which would keep me working for the next 30 years. From there I went to work for a software consulting company, Cutler-Williams, Inc., who assigned me to work at Lone Star Gas, Dallas’s natural gas utility. Soon I was “hired away” from Cutler-Williams to work full-time at the utility, where I stayed for over 17 years, moving through two subsidiaries before returning to the “mother” company at the end.

Cutler-Williams was only the first of six or seven consulting/IT service companies that helped me find work using the computer skills I now had. These consulting firms helped me get jobs with IBM Credit Corporation in White Plains, NY, The Nordam Group in Tulsa, Nielson Media Research in Florida, State Farm Insurance in Bloomington, IL, and others.

After leaving Lone Star Gas, I moved us from Texas to Wichita, KS, to work for USF&G Insurance. After a couple of years they closed their Wichita office (on their way to eventually closing the entire company) and I moved to Baltimore, USF&G’s home office, to work for F&G Life, their life insurance office. Then I went to White Plains to contract at IBM; then Commercial Financial Services in Tulsa (to where we moved for ten years); American Airlines; The Nordam Group; Oklahoma Central Credit Union; Sabre, Inc./EDS Corporation; Decision One (Sprint); Domino’s Pizza; Tulsa County Jail (Corrections Corporation of America); Healthcare Administration Technologies; and Genesis10. During my time in Tulsa I also worked for Fellowship Bible Church Tulsa, Christ for Humanity, Carol Publishing (Everything Rosie), Whoopi Goldberg and writing for Network Magazine (CMP Media’s Data.com website).

In April of 2004 after nearly a year recovering from Guillain–Barré syndrome I moved to Tampa, Florida, to work for Nielson Media Research. This was another PL/I consulting position which ended in January 2006. I was able to quickly segue into working at State Farm in Bloonington, IL, but that only lasted about five months, after which I moved back to Tulsa. After a couple more failed attempts at consulting positions, I decided to move back “home” to Garland, Texas, and attend A+ Texas Teachers to obtain a Texas Teachers’ Alternative Certification Program classroom training which allowed me to take and pass the TExES Exam #131: English, Language Arts and Reading 8-12 and the TExES Exam #139  Technology Applications 8-12 teaching certifications. I am also “highly qualified” in Mathematics with 35 hours of college credits, 27 of which are upper level, which gives me the state’s teaching certification in Math. After teaching at DeSoto High School for a couple of weeks, I quickly learned that, as much as I wanted it, I was not cut out to be a teacher.

Looking for something else to do using that education, I got a job at the University of Texas at Dallas’s Callier Center for Communication Disorders. This is where I was working when I was hit by a car while walking across the street to work, November 1, 2012.

In all, I have had more than forty different jobs, in 13 cities over 55 years. Do they give out awards for that?

Guillain-Barré syndrome

I was out of work in 2003 when I took a job at the Tulsa County Jail, then operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), as a Corrections Officer. After going through a couple of weeks of training and then spending a few more weeks managing with a pod of about 80 inmates, I contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS). What that did was leave me totally paralyzed from my shoulders down, where I was unable to walk, stand up or even feed myself.

The syndrome took only a couple of days to progress from my having difficulty standing to my being completely unable to walk. The first day I went to my family doctor, who was out of the country and had been replaced with a substitute who told me just to stay home for a couple of days and it would pass. It did not. The next day I could not walk at all and my son Evan took me to the nearest hospital – St. Francis in Tulsa, at which my physician was not associated, where I was admitted. By going to the wrong hospital, I was fortunate that one of the doctors at St. Francis had seen GBS and figured that might be what I had.

After making a number of tests on me, the doctors at St. Francis began treating me with high-dose immunoglobulin therapy, a treatment that cost $30,000. Even after those treatments, I was told that I would need several months of rehabilitation to learn to walk and to train my arms to be able to feed myself and to write again. While this may sound similar to my brain injury in 2012, there were several differences. With GBS, I could not move my arms or legs, but I did have full use of my brain, including my memory.

Early in my stay at St. Francis, while I was being treated with immunoglobulin, a group of students or interns or something came to me wanting to help me exercise, apparently unaware that I could not stand up at all. They helped me out of the bed and I immediately fell onto the floor. The hospital then brought in a lift device to get me up and back into bed. As a result of this incident, I was taken to ICU for 24 hours. They never explained to me why this error in management happened to me.

After my treatments with immunoglobulin ended, I was moved into a hospital room at Broken Arrow Rehabilitation, which was within the same buildings as St. Francis Hospital. I was in rehab there for speech therapy, physical therapy and occupational therapy. At first, being confined to my bed, I was not able to get myself to the bathroom. I was dependent on the nursing staff to respond to the call-nurse device and come help me. Sometimes they were pretty prompt and it would only take two or three minutes for them to move me to one side of the bed while they stripped half the bed and replace those linens and then move me onto the other side while they replaced the other half of the bed linens. But they were not always so prompt. Several times I was unable to wait for them to come help me, so I devised a way to control that. I was strapped to a heart monitor to make sure it was still beating, so I learned that if I unfastened that, the nurses would immediately come running to see what was wrong.

During my first few days at Broken Arrow Rehabilitation, my OT therapist would came in each morning to get me dressed. At some point I’d pretty much decided that I kinda liked being cared for so well and would like to just stay in that condition. So my therapist came in, tossed some clothes on my bed, and told me to either learn to dress myself, or resign myself to being a vegetable for the rest of my life. I was astonished. I could not sit up and could not even reach the clothes he had left me. I flayed around for a day or two, but eventually managed to get some of my clothes on. Within a week, I could dress myself and was exceedingly grateful to that therapist for forcing me to get real.

When my OT therapist made me learn to start taking care of myself, I was listed on the schedule as probably being confined to BAR for another two months. After his influence I began really working hard to get better and was able to leave the hospital in just under a month. I still had several more months of rehab ahead of me, but I left Broken Arrow Rehab with my head held high.