By Jim Rix
After being graduated from TUHS, I entered San Jose State University, on a football scholarship. For my football promise, I’d also received an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland, but I didn’t pass the entrance exam in English. At SJSU, I even had to take bonehead English. Halfway through the semester, the teacher told me she didn’t know why I was in the course. I guess I had had a bad day when I took that exam.
My roommate freshman year was another football player, Robert (Bobby) Bonds. One night we had fun waging a talcum powder fight. After both of us were covered with the white powder, Bobby said, “You never smelled better!” to which I responded, “Well, you never looked better!” And he said, “Wha’ chew mean?!? We both had a good laugh at that. Bobby was black.
Later that first fall, I had a season-ending injury – a torn Achilles tendon – and I gave up football once and for all. I majored in Mathematics and minored in Chemistry & Physics, and in 1964 was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree. Why not a Bachelor of Science degree? Good question. I suppose it’s because a BA provides a solid mathematics core within a flexible curriculum. I can’t remember whether SJSU at that time offered a choice of bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.
At SJSU, I met Carol Sue, and we were married on the summer solstice of 1963, Friday, June 21, between our junior and senior years. Our children would be Leland, 1964; Vanita, 1966; & Marlon, 1971.
I taught high school math for two or three years*. I did not particularly like teaching. Roughly 10% of each class (3 students in 30) were interested in math and really understood it; they were my A students. A third of each class (my B students) worked hard memorizing formulas and did okay on tests, but they had no real understanding of the subject matter. Most of the rest struggled for their C or D. One or two in each class didn’t care (F students).
Much of the work of teaching is preventing a handful of students from disrupting the teaching part. While it was nice having the summers off, the salary was nothing to get excited about. My initial salary was $4,000 per year ($400 per month for 10 months), the lowest point on the salary schedule, which I’m sure was the big reason I – at age 21 – was hired in the first place. But is was 1964, and my house payment was $71 per month.
Realizing that as a teacher I would have to work summers (probably in the Del Monte Cannery) to make ends meet, I looked for a new job. It would not be in teaching. New horizons lay ahead, and they involved no further use of that lifetime teaching credential.
* It had to have been at least two years that I taught, because Mo, in the course of editing this account, reminded me that he and his wife honeymooned in our house in Los Gatos after we attended their wedding in Carmel-by-the-Sea in April 1966. (Carol Sue and I went elsewhere for the weekend.)
| Copyright © 2020 by Jim Rix |
Jim, reading your autobiography has occasioned a number of walks down memory lane, or down a number of memory lanes. That wedding was of course one of the main lanes we walked along together. Since Carolyn and I “eloped” – which was really a cover for the fact that we didn’t have enough money for a “proper wedding,” and neither did her parents or mine – you and Carol Sue played hugely important roles in the event, you as my Best Man and Carol Sue as Carolyn’s Matron of Honor – I hope those are the correct terms.
ReplyDeleteAnother memory lane is the one that both you and I trod as high school math teachers, for during that first year of your teaching algebra and geometry at Los Gatos High School, I was teaching geometry at Berkshire School, a boarding preparatory high school in Sheffield, Massachusetts. (And, during the second semester of the 1965-66 school year, I taught in our own Tulare Union High School, which is what brought about my encountering Carolyn.)
Before I leave this comment, I’d also like to relate your meeting Carol Sue to the subject of your previous chapter, about being on stage. I seem to recall that you met Carol Sue in a dance situation, didn’t you? Did you and she try out for a theatrical production at SJSU? Please remind me how you and she met. Thank you, my friend of 64 years.
Yes my friend I believe you and I did modern dance at TUHS. I continued to modern dance in college mostly to meet girls which is what I did - Carol Sue. And the rest is history...
ReplyDelete"Mostly to meet girls." Sly dog, you! "Modern dance" – an extracurricular subject by name at T.U.H.S.? Who was the faculty coordinator for that? Not Shirley Skufca for that too?
ReplyDeleteDon Richert, if you are reading this, what do you learn about "modern dance" from those Argus yearbooks you have kept? Is it represented in all four of the yearbooks; did it start somewhere during the course of the four years? What?
My interest in reading Shirley Skufca's own book (for which she sought Jim's autobiography for inclusion) is growing, now in the hope that it will assist my memory of some of those fond four years of high school.