Texas

After my discharge, we decided to move to Texas to be near Carolyn's family. We started out living with Carolyn's Mom in Dallas til we both found jobs and knew where we would settle. I found a job in North Dallas doing Landscaping at Valley Ranch (Home of the Cowboys training facility). Carolyn eventually found work as a teacher in Keene, TX. Because of her job, I quit mine and we moved to Cleburne. By this time, Kori was 3+ and Jamie was 1+. My first job after we moved there was working in a bingo hall in Fort Worth, TX. The money wasn't great, but it was a living. It was an interesting experience. It wasn't what I would call a great job, but I did meet a lot of interesting people.

Eventually, I found a job working for a pest control company in Cleburne. They sent me to termite school at Texas A&M. It wasn't a bad job, especially since I knew that I was there because they were going to open a nursery in the spring. I learned the ins and outs of pest control and became known as the "Rat Man". I specialized in the eradication of rodents. I got to see experimental aircraft at Aerospatial while catching rats that were chewing on wires at the facility. I remember that at one little shopping center with a grocery store that I had a kill count of well over 1,000 critters. What a mess. As spring was approaching I was switched over to build the nursery. I prepared the grounds, built a greenhouse and ordered materials for the opening. A couple of weeks before the grand opening they hired a young girl straight out of college. She was a very nice person, but had no real experience. Because she had a degree, she was put in charge of me. I didn't take it well at all. So, I left and got a job at a competing nursery across town. It was new also. It didn't take long before I was rolling. I loved the people I worked with and had a lot of fun. Initially I was working part-time there. So, I took a full-time position working in the hot check department at Winn-Dixie in Fort Worth. It was a small office with a staff that was a lot of fun. You wouldn't believe how some people abuse check writing privileges in this world. They were still using carbon paper between the copies of the forms they used, which was a royal pain if you made a mistake. I had quite a bit of experience on the computers we used from working in the Marine Corps, so I programmed all of the forms we used into the computer and brought the office up to date with the rest of the world. I worked there for a year or so until I decided that I really wanted to go to college.

I began working full-time at Tumbleweed. There was a small junior college in town, Hill College, so I started going to school. I found that at some point after I left high school I developed a brain. My high school grades were not much to speak about. In college I got straight A's. I had one teacher that I took English classes from who was a real hoot. She would decide which classes she would teach each semester and then bug a couple of us to take her class. I had always hated English, but because her classes were fun, I took them anyway. I took almost everything that I could there in Cleburne. When I ran out of classes to take there, I transferred to Tarleton State University in Stephenville, TX (later to become Texas A&M, Tarleton). I took classes with a desire to receive a degree in physical education. The commute was tough, but a co-worker of mine was taking classes there as well so we rode together. Because I wasn't very confident in my math, I took pre-algebra instead of jumping right into the credit course. The book for pre-algebra and for credit algebra was the same. The first half of the book was pre, and the second half was the algebra course itself. Commuting to Stephenville and working full time was taking its toll on me, so I decided that I would drop out of school and stick with Tumbleweed alone for a while. I did take my algebra course back at Hill College. We used the same book we used at Tarleton. The instructor was senile and it was his last class before retiring. I expected to do the second half of the book, but when he gave us the syllabus I found we were doing the same work I had already done. I had all my notes and tests from my last class so it was a breeze. Everyone in class thought I was a genius (if they only knew). That was my last course for quite a while. I was given the management position at the Burleson (home of Kelly Clarkson) store. There were some awesome people working with me and I really gained a lot of valuable experience. Eventually, the owner's sold the store to a family who planned to make it a family operation. Little to say, I was out of a job, but I got a new job working at the GMF Postal Facility in Fort Worth.

Working at the post office was the best paying job, I had ever had. I worked as a mailhandler on the night shift. It was probably one of the easiest and most boring jobs I ever had. The unions had taken over the post office, so I had to join the union. The benefits were good, but the work was very monotonous. Unload a truck, load a truck, sort packages and bundles of magazines. Night after night was the same thing. I became the safety officer at the post office and found that with the union, my job was impossible. I was written up by my own union several times because of my writing up people for safety violations. Heck, black supervisors were being charged by the union with racial discrimination against black employees. The unions won and one black supervisor was booted down from his position. It was all a joke (not funny ha ha). I hated Cleburne and longed to move back to Arkansas, which we did in the summer of 1990.