Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. In this September-October 1991 article, alumni spanning the decades recall how they worked throughout college in order to afford attending Baylor.
Three steps at a time
By Dr. William F. Floyd ‘52
After spending my first year at Baylor doing freshman things, marching in the Golden Wave Band and ending up on academic probation, I joined the U.S. Army for a year. I earned $28 a month at first and worked all the way up to $51 as a corporal. I came out determined to earn my college degree.
I returned to Baylor in the fall of 1949. Since my family lived in Waco, I lived at home. I was able to join the advanced ROTC where I earned $20 a month and two uniforms.
By the summer of 1950 my Army savings had run out, so I got a job through Baylor Student Employment. I cleaned floors in dormitories and redecorated student housing on campus. I also worked unloading boxcars and installing the bowling alley in the basement of the new Student Union Building.
When school started in the fall, I got a job at “The Cartwheel” barbecue shop on Eighth Street. I made the place very popular by fixing the sandwiches as I would have for myself. When my boss found out how much barbecue was going out I lost that job. The good thing was that I didn’t have to listen to “Zana, Zana, Zana” over and over all day long.
After this I got a great job at the Brazos Valley Cotton Oil Mill Co. From 3:00 to 5:00 P.M., I was busy with small sales. After 5:00 the very large trucks came in to be weighed; these required a long time to load and unload, so I had plenty of time to study. I also had access there to a typewriter, an adding machine, and a calculator—a rare piece of equipment.
(I usually use a slide rule; my professors were astounded by my accuracy.) The only disadvantage was that I had to stay until the last truck checked out between 11:00 P.M. and 1:00 A.M., when my mother had to pick me up. My parents lived way out on Third Street, past the end of the bus line. My dad worked on McGregor; when he left for work at 6:00 A.M., I had to ride with to Baylor. There I waited outside the buildings for the janitor to arrive around 6:30. Then I went and usually took a nap on the professor’s desk. I always took early classes, so I only had about an hour to sleep.
I soon took an additional job as a lab assistant in bacteriology. I maintained all the bacteria subcultures, made the media, and sterilized glassware for the classes. I also aided in grading papers, administering tests, and assisting students in techniques.
In 1951, I got an additional job as an aide in a cancer research project. With the three jobs in addition to ROTC, I had little extra spending money to go out with my girlfriend (and present wife), but I had a little extra money. One job was on the third floor of the old Science Hall; the other was in the basement. With no elevator, I usually took the stairs three steps at a time. I had time for a fifteen-minute lunch (always a cheese sandwich and Dr. Pepper) then a quick game of forty-two at the SUB.
I will always be grateful to the Gobel family at Brazos Valley Cotton Oil Co., who allowed me to continue working until I graduated in 1952, even though I wasn’t really needed the last year when the cotton oil business rapidly declined. I earned my Bachelor of Science degree with majors in biology and chemistry and minors in physics, English, and German. I was accepted to medical school.
My wife and I married in September 1952, and I entered medical school in Galveston. Financing medical school is another story. But I gained 25 pounds before Christmas that year as a result of slowing down my frantic pace.
Freedom of the press
By Louis M. Newman ‘41
In early spring of 1941 the Lariat editor was summoned to a conference with Baylor President Pat M. Neff. It went something like this:
“Now son,” the president said, “about this time of year—when the sap starts rising and cows are hooking the weeds—I usually have trouble with the Lariat editor. I hereby advise you that I am ready when you are.”
“End of “conference.”
Not quite, because said editor had this strange feeling that planets shuddered in their orbits and the earth trembled. A collision loomed.
As we spoke, your trusty Lariat staff was in the process of stumbling over the absolute best news story of the entire year . . . and the president’s office was sitting on it!
Now hold the frame right there, and I will explain what that has to do with “Working My Way through Baylor.”
There were two pressure points in my work schedule, and they were not exactly compatible. For two of the prior three years I had been the lead linotype operator (typesetter) at the Baylor Press, which produced the Daily Lariat. For this work, the university paid for my room, board, tuition, and fees—a welcome stipend, I might add, for one in my financial straits. I was beholden to Mr. M. R. Goebel, manager of the press, for the job. I was expected to start setting type about 4:00 P.M. and usually finished when the paper was out, hopefully before midnight.
My senior year, however, I was chosen editor of the Lariat, which provided the handsome salary of forty dollars per month—cahs. That little chore required me to start work on the editorial side about 2:00 P.M., with some hope of finishing next day’s copy by 6:00 P.M., when the dining hall opened for supper. Then it was back to the mechanical side until around midnight. (This probably was an unprecedented arrangement.)
As editor I reported to Professor Frank Burhalter, head of the journalism department and advisor to the board of publications (if memory serves).
You may have noticed a glitch in the schedules. They overlapped between 4:00 and 6:00—I was supposed to be in two places at once, but that’s part of the story. Now let us see how it plays out . . .
President Neff laid down the gauntlet early in the week, say on a Monday. By midweek we had the story cold, to the effect that Football Coach Morley Jennings (always reverently referred to as “the dean of Southwest Conference coaches”) had resigned to become athletic director at Texas Tech. But Baylor’s administration was sitting on it, it seems, because the board of trustees was meeting that weekend in Waco and would then make the resignation official.
Even Jinx Tucker and the Waco newspapers were going to hold the story. (Can you imagine that happening today, will all these “reliable” sources embedded in the athletic departments of every conference school?)
The Lariat had no Saturday or Sunday issues. Our deadline was Thursday night, and we were to set up to blow the socks off that little yarn:
Banner headline, type size just short of that traditionally reserved for the Second coming. Multicolumn pictures of running back Jack Wilson on page 1. Possibly pictures of other stars. All accompanied by touching tributes. People like Jim Witt and Bob Nelson and Jack Russell and Jack Lummus (all destined to play pro ball, except Lummus, who lost his life on Iwo Jima and won the Congressional Medal of Honor).
It was to be stirring send-off for the Coach. But don’t sell Governor Neff short just yet.
With his special gift for managing students and other mortals, he seems to have become aware late Thursday afternoon of what the Friday morning Lariat would bring. Instead of calling Prof. Burkhalter, and having him me not to run the Jennings story, he called Mr. Goebel—an even more sensitive pressure point. (Goebel paid me more.)
Mr. Goebel, probably at home by then, called the press building and simply left the message: We stood ready to nail ourselves to the cross of freedom of the press. But President Neff, bless his unrelenting, Baylor loving heart, never mentioned the incident again.
Mr. Goebel, however, then noticed that I was not showing up to set type between 4:00 and 6:00. He gave me a choice: either take a cut in pay or stay two more hours at night and make up the front and back pages, a chore at which I was slow and which usually took longer than two extra hours.
Thus the battle did not end in total victory, by a long shot.
I will always wonder, though, what Prof. Burkhalter would have said, had he been the one to receive the cancellation call at the journalism department. President Neff might have drawn back a nub. Gentle, devout, unassuming Professor Frank E. Burkhalter was a newspaperman.
Typing lessons with President Neff
By Dorothy Boyd Trice ‘36
I graduated from Waco High School in 1931. For those of us who could not get a job or go to college, the high schools offered what was known as a postgraduate course, and I enrolled soon after graduation. Most of us took typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping—just in case that kind of job presented itself. To attend Baylor was out of the question for me, even though my parents’ house was practically on campus.
Before I completed my postgraduate courses at Waco High, one of my caring aunties was instrumental in getting me a job as a “dental assistant” at $6.00 a week. I held that job for nearly a year and then was fired! That was January 1933. I was devastated, and so was my family.
One afternoon in February my mother told me she had been to see President Neff to see if there was anyways I could go to Baylor. (She was such a proud lady. I have wondered many times what she wrote to go see the president of Baylor University.) Mother had told him that I could take dictation! She certainly had more confidence in my abilities than I had. She returned with the news that President Neff would “train” me and then place me in one of the university offices.
If he had been president of the United States, I couldn’t have been more in awe of President Neff. He had a vocabulary totally foreign to me. Each morning I would take dictation; each afternoon I would type the letters on a borrowed portable typewriter at my home. The next morning I took the finished letters to James Mixson, who was President Neff’s “right hand man.” When my letters passed James Mixson’s scrutiny, they were given to President Neff for his signature.
After three weeks of his schedule, President Neff declared me “trained”. He took me to the business manager’s office and instructed me to Mr. Dunker Hudson. Two other students were already working for him. We worked our class schedules so one of us would be in the office at all times. So, beginning with the spring quarter of 1933, I was a student at Baylor University!
We made thirty cents an hour, but no money ever passed hands. Our “time” was kept on record, and, in this way, we worked off our tuition. At the end of two quarters (and because I was a “town” student), I was able to work eight hours a day between the summer and fall terms when there were no classes. By the time fall quarter started, I had enough “time” on the books to pay my sisters tuition. Later, she got a job on the Baylor switchboard and worked for her own tuition.
By attending classes year-round, I was able to finish my studies in three years and graduated in June 1936. I had loving parents who were so ambitious for their three children to get the education they had been denied. I had some loving aunties who helped me in many ways. My sweet mother, who “sewed for the public,” made sure our clothes were okay. Even at my graduation she felt she didn’t have the proper clothes to wear to Waco Hall, but she was standing on the campus watching as I marched proudly by to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstances” as played by the Baylor marching band.
Behind the back of Olive Black
By Sam Garrard ‘59
In the 1950s Olive Black was the absolute ruler over the domain made up of the dining halls and central kitchen connecting the three main girls’ dormitories, and we among her minions provided the labor needed to produce three square meals a day for the inhabitants thereof. In exchange for our labor, of course, we received all the food we could eat and a steady stream of Baylor’s finest coeds with whom to develop meaningful relationships (although it seems Ms. Black didn’t recognize as part of the deal that bit about developing the relationships).
Ms. Black ruled her kingdom from inside a glassed in cubicle in the central kitchen. Now, we were not dumb—we knew that we could not ply our mischief where she could see and hear us. But how did she know when we were doing so outside the range of her sight and sound? I think perhaps she developed her legendary intelligence techniques along with the CIA and James Bond.
She knew when one esteemed sophomore ministerial student disconnected the lever on the dishwashing machine which was designed to trip, stopping the conveyor belt when the dishes were not being removed at the discharge end. Whole trays of glasses, plates, and serving dishes bit the dust on the hard tile floor as the infernal machine kept going. No one knew how to turn it off with the cut-off lever disconnected.
She knew who threw the biscuit during the food fight in our very own dining room (we were, of course, not quite civilized enough to eat in public). The biscuit stuck to the wall near the ceiling. I noticed on a nostalgic visit several years later that it was still there. I dare say the remains of the same biscuit are still there now, a third of a century later, under several coats of paint.
She knew who among us started the rumor concerning the baby unborn chicken being in the scrambled eggs to be served for breakfast tomorrow. You understand, we had a fifty-gallon pot around which we sat in a group and into which we shelled eggs—sixty dozen, or so, at a sitting. All that busy work for the fingers leaves the mind much too idle for half a dozen college boys to invent a few fantasies. (We had what amounted to a world series of a sort, a contest to see who could separate the inside from the outside of a dozen eggs the quickest. The record was around four-and-a-half seconds.) Anyway, Ms. Black knew about the rumor that was blamed for sixty dozen scrambled eggs being scrapped in favor of “just toast and juice this morning, thank you.”
And she knew about the carving. It takes a lot of potatoes peeled and cut up to feed all those girls and it was up to us to sacrifice the smooth skin of our hands by preparing 200 pounds of potatoes for mashing. Sometimes we finished before the time allotted for the task, at which time our shriveled hands needed something else more challenging. You know, it’s amazing what you can carve a potato into. There was a phys.ed. Major who began carbing one fixture at a time until he had a completely furnished miniature bathroom to scale. How careless of him to have left it where it could be seen by some who didn’t appreciate the artistry.
Before I convince someone that we were really a bunch of uncouth young criminals, let me admit that some of the foregoing never really happened, except in our minds. Oh, we talked about doing all these things and more, as you guys will. (Some of you will know which did happen and which didn’t.)
What really did happen was that a very close-knit relationship developed among all those of us who spent several hours together every day under the watchful eye of Olive Black. In a very real sense this time together in the kitchen represented a significant portion of our social contacts. A great deal of growth and learning took place. I had a frank conversation with a black person who worked there, concerning his blackness and my whiteness. This was a first for me. Growing up in the ‘50s in the South, we were taught not to call attention to such issues. Incredible!
At the time, we tended to think that because we had to work, we were in some way disadvantaged. Now, however, I see clearly that those guys who wore the great tailor-made clothes and drove those shiny new cars were the real disadvantaged: they never threw a single hard roll in a food fight in Memorial Hall just as Olive Black came to the doorway wearing those glasses which magnified her eyeballs, making them look as big as silver dollars, and they were focused right on you! My friend, that’s living right on the edge.
Studying for the ministry
By Monty Inman ‘36
What person in his right mind would consider going to college in the midst of the “The Great Depression,” knowing he would have to work his way through? Bread lines were long and what jobs (hardly ever in the plural) were available, even menial ones, were given to those with families to support.
Who would do such a thing? One to whom God had said, “Go.”
Thus I was dropped of at Mrs. Osborne’s Rooming House—now part of Baylor’s campus—by a “share the expense” tourist. I had $35 in my possession plus a broken left wrist which further complicated prospects of working. It had cost two dollars to make the trip from Houston.
I had one thing going for me, and a possible second. I was a ministerial student, so I had my tuition paid, thanks to the Baptist General Convention of Texas. If the Golden Wave Band needed another tuba player I would have my blanket tax taken care of. (They did and it was.) That left the expense of books, personal items, and et cetera to be met. The “et cetera,” as always proved to be extensive.
The first job to come my way was literally manna from heaven. And it came before the $35 was exhausted. A downtown cafe needed a dishwasher to work from 5:00 to 8:00 P.M., seven days a week. The compensation was three meals a day. Occasionally, however, band trips and rare opportunities required me to get a replacement for the time I would be gone. This didn’t sit well with the employer; I was fired. To get fired from a dishwashing job does things to the ego.
A real friend to ministerial students was the owner of the New England Cafeteria on Washington Avenue, a.k.a. Main Street. He was Robert Luby. This establishment was the first of the now highly successful chain of Luby and Romana cafeterias. Only the noon and evening meals were served, however, and those only Monday through Friday. Students were used to bus tables and wash dishes. Two hours of work a day for two meals; no bussing and washing on the weekends, hence, no meals. In spite of my bad record as a dishwasher, Mr. Luby hired me. One extra compensation for those working in the kitchen was that often “usable” food would be on the trays when the dishes came back to be washed. This manna helped tide us over the meals we might have missed.
After Baylor days, another compensation of the job developed. I was pastoring in Houston, and occasionally Mr. Luby would visit a Sunday morning service. He always put a crisp $100 bill in the offering.
I don’t remember how the deal came about, but I made arrangements at some point with a cleaning and pressing service for a 10 percent commission on all work I brought them. I became the unofficial cleaner and presser for the band uniforms. Also a wonderful coed friend, living in Memorial dorm would periodically go through various closets and “find” me business.
My first salaried position was with a service station. Hours were from 5:00 to 8:00 P.M., Mondays through Fridays, and 7:00 to 7:00 on Saturdays. The pay was $3.25. To put the salary in context, it needs to be mentioned that ten cents bought three loaves of bread; fifteen cents bought enough pan sausage for several healthy appetites, and nickel would purchase two meals of Irish potatoes.
During my freshman year in the rooming house I was providentially paired with a sophomore ministerial student named Arthur Rutledge. (In later years he was honored by Baylor as an outstanding alumnus and was executive secretary of the Home Mission Board upon retirement.) We rented a two-bedroom, kitchen-and-bath apartment on Eighth Street. We then subrented the extra bedroom with kitchen privileges, which paid for the entire apartment.
My pastoral experience began when the Baptist church in Oenaville, Texas “called” me for quarter-time preaching. The compensation was $1.25 an engagement. But this also meant there would be at least five good meals each trip—and seven when I arrived on Friday afternoons, which I always tried to arrange. Often home canned goods would supplement my salary. Within a year the church went to half-time preaching and the salary was raised to $3.50 a trip.
One of my business ventures during those years was a dismal failure. I tried selling a family-edition Bible door to door. It was priced too high for the times—$9.00. Not one Bible was sold in six weeks of spare-time effort.
Summer provided yard work, delivering handbills and an assortment of odd jobs in addition to church work.
Graduation in 1936 brought a problem. I owed the University $50 and could not receive my degree until such was paid. On a trip home I was invited out to dinner in a friend’s home. Strangely our plates were upside down. When I righted mine, underneath was a $50 bill. Surely, he who said, “Go into all the world . . . and I am with you always . . .” meant college also.
The Lee brothers—at your service
By Ralph B. Lee ‘34, JD ‘35 and Howard C. Lee ‘37, LLB ‘37
[Howard:] In the depths of the Great Depression, I entered Baylor as a Baptist preacher’s son. With my older brother Ralph (already a student at Baylor), we acquired from a graduating senior for the grand sum of $50 the right to operate a store on the first floor of Brooks Hall.
In our store we sold candy bars, soft drinks, sandwiches, and other convenience-store types of merchandise. We always did our very best to provide all merchandise and services for which our dormitory friends expressed a need. We arranged pick-up and delivery service for cleaning and pressing, delivery of home town newspapers to the dormitory rooms, and on one occasion carried a carload of our friends on a trip to interview for a school-teaching job in East Texas. If our customers wanted it, we did our best to provide it.
The store became a place for the Baylor men to hand out and carry on bull sessions. Among other services, we extended credit to our customers, with the agreement that each account must be paid in full no later than the fifth of the month, or interest would be charged. We knew that any interest in excess of 10 percent was unlawful, so we charged only 8 percent. It was later that we found that the maximum lawful rate of interest was 10 percent per annum, while we charged 8 percent per month. Although this charge was a little excessive, it did encourage our customers to pay their bills on time.
Another effective collection procedure was to learn exactly when checks from home were received by our customers. I secured a job in the Brooks Hall office working at the time incoming mail was received. When I detected a “check from home” letter to one of our debtor students, I delivered that letter in person to the student, making sure I had enough cash to cash the check and receive in return cash to pay his account in full.
[Ralph:] At the end of my freshman year, I bought a topless Model-T Ford; the next fall I started renting the Ford for $5 per evening on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. The car was very popular since I owned the only car in Brooks Hall. The following summer, 1931, I traded the Model-T for a Model-A Ford (with a top) and paid $125 difference. In the summer of 1933 I sold the Model-A for $150 and went to the Chicago World’s Fair and for $625 bought a new Chevrolet two-door sedan (with a radio and glass windows) from the production line—all with money from the profits of the Brooks Hall store. From September 1933 until I graduated from law school in May 1935, I continued to rent the car and many times drove a carload of students to and from Waco Baylor football games.
[Howard:] Our business prospered. In fact, it prospered so well it came to the attention of the university president, Pat Neff, who confiscated the store in 1934, and hired no less than Abner McCall to run the store for the university.
Boiler room poetry
By James C. White ‘46, MA ‘49
I graduated from Waco High in May 1942, and a week later I entered Baylor. All of my jobs during my first years were connected with the campus heating plant. When I showed up, Neill Morris, manager of the buildings and grounds, assigned me to the job of checking out the tools. The first day on the job, most of my work collapsed, since the older workers ignored me and just took what they needed. I asked why they didn’t let me write their tools down on cards. They laughed: “Rules are what you use when you run out of brains.”
One day, Rab Daniel, a friend, came by to get wax for the floors of Pat Neff Hall. He said he needed help to get the heavy machine down the steps. I went with him, and as we rolled a huge round brush down the steps, we hare-lipped the edges of two. Pat Neff saw it soon after and demanded that somebody be fired. But the barks of Baylor bosses were worse then their bites. Rab was made a janitor in the School of Music, and I was to fire the boilers—two Br’er Rabbits sent to two different briar patches.
To run the boilers, I got to the plant each morning and turned on the gas in a little house just below the huge smokestack—a place which always smelled of gas. I lit each boiler with the valves closed. When they registered around ninety pounds, I opened a valve on top of each one and let the steam go to the dorms, classes, and kitchen of Brooks Hall. I then went to the two girls’ dorms and turned on the pumps to send the heat through the radiators and to return the condensed water back to the plant. I did the same for Waco Hall. Sometimes I’d hear Rab playing a piano in the School of Music—in between quick passes with his broom. (Lt. Robert Daniel’s lamppost stands in front of Pat Neff Hall: “Killed in France, 1945.”)
When I learned to use the switches, I turned on the lights in Waco Hall and practiced oratory. One morning, about 6 A.M., I heard a bit of applause. A janitor asked, “You goin’ to be another Gov’nor Neff?”
“Nope, just practicing to be noisy and anonymous.” Another job was to feed the mascot, Joe College, each day. I went to Brooks Hall and got a bucket of scraps. Baylor boys griped a lot about the wartime food. (One morning, I noticed “Ptomaine Tavern” scrawled on the kitchen roof. It was painted out a few days later.) The bear, however, never grumbled about that food. An old man was supposed to help me clean out the bear cage, but he refused.
In the heating plant, once the boilers were keeping their steady ninety-five pounds of pressure, I’d sit back. Neill Morris wanted me to clean up the floor and do some plumbing, such as insulating the pipes with asbestos. I refused. I wanted to write, learn poetry, and talk to friends. After two years Neill fired me. One day I came to work, and there was a man busy with a broom. I went to Neill and asked “Why?”
“You know,” he said. He was a silent man. But my laziness may have saved my life. It was a good thing I let that sleeping asbestos lie, while I snoozed beside it.
The summer work in the boiler room was also dangerous. We opened up the biggest boiler and chipped off the scale by hand with a roto, which was like a small oil-well bit run by water. I worked with a young black man under faulty lights that shocked us daily. After the hard work, we took showers in the heating plant. My co-worker was powerful—he had that kind of body that now makes millions in football or basketball—but at that time he was paid 20 cents an hour, and I was paid 40 cents.
My next job was at the MKT Railroad 901, Jackson. I was a messenger clerk at 40 cents an hour; I worked 4 P.M. to 11 P.M., six days a week. Ruby Hikel, a Bohemian from West, Texas, was my boss. He was once almost a legend at Baylor (a huge lineman, I heard, who played those games against Texas “where Baylor won 7 to 7”). He was a lawyer who didn’t practice. He made out income tax forms for us and helped poor blacks who got in deep with loan sharks. He was a good man; six feet tall and weighing just under 300 pounds, he “persuaded” the creditors to quit hound the man.
Neill Morris was also a good and stubborn man. He had an unlisted number and almost dared any Baylor official to call him at home. When the old man (who had stood outside while I cleaned the bear’s cage) retired, Neill kept him on the payroll, because he was destitute. When he was too sick to come to the office for the money. I took it to the old man’s house—a shack on South Third where he lived with a daughter.
The heating plant was the center for all of Baylor’s workers. Most were from the farm, and even in the city they kept the bright-colored imaginations for country storytellers. The preachers who worked there fit in perfectly with these workers, with only one exception: Neill Morris didn’t go to church and was skeptical of hell and heaven. One young man told him: “Neill, if I weren’t a Baptist preacher, I’d knock your block off.” We roared with laughter.
Since I’ve retired from college teaching, I spend more time than ever on my poetry. That isn’t much, since I work no harder now than when I overlooked the boilers. Those I worked with at Baylor move across my memory like shywriting on a still day: the first word drifts west and the last letters will dissolve someday. What will be left is the pure blue without a cloud of regret. For now I seem to have no choice but to hang on tight to Tar Baby when I see Br’er Bear, Wilkerson Hatch Funeral Home, and the ghost of Old Joe College coming my way.
Day of the living dead
By Dr. Keith E. Miller ‘79
Growing up on a farm, I was not unaccustomed to hard labor and operating machinery. With this background, I thought I could easily tackle any employment I might find.
I was wrong.
My indoctrination began innocently enough, that summer following my first year at Baylor. While scanning the want ads one day, I noticed a help-wanted advertisement seeking “Driver for small truck.” The ad seemed strangely accommodating, stating the hours were flexible and full-and part-time help was needed. This seemed perfect for my schedule.
My suspicions first began when I met my new employer the day before I was to start work. When checking my driver’s license, which I showed him still in my wallet, he seemed more interested in the picture of my wife than he did my driver’s license. He seemed surprised when I told him I had no drunk driving convictions. He told me the job involved the demolition of old houses and buildings. As materials were torn from the buildings, they would be loaded onto trucks and taken to the local dump. My job would be to drive one of the trucks. My new boss did casually mention the fact that if the crew was shorthanded, I “might have to help load the trucks.” This stipulation seemed more than reasonable to me.
Arriving early the next morning, I encountered a curious sight. Old broken-down cars began arriving and depositing their cargo from four to six occupants to begin work. These people ranged in age from the young to the old. Most were shabbily dressed; all were minorities. I noticed one older man drinking from a bottle of cheap wine. None seemed particularly wafer about beginning the day. This mass of humanity, mostly smoking cheap cigarettes, coughing, and trying to attain some levels of consciousness, collectively began to shuffle over to the waiting trucks to carry them out to the job site. It reminded one more of a scene out of Night of the Living Dead than of employees going to work.
As I was to find out later, these people were day laborers enlisted each morning for as long as they would remain at work. If the worker stayed for the entire day, the employer paid him cash and considered himself lucky. If the worker walked off the job before the day;s end, he got no pay. It was quite an arrangement.
When we arrived at the demolition site, I was immediately told that the “crew” was indeed shorthanded that morning and I would be required to not only help load the truck but to help demolish the building by hand, having only hammers and pry-bars for use as tools. To make matters worse, the object of our demolition was an old burned-out, two-story house. We had to go inside the building and even upstairs, knowing that one wrong step could send you crashing through the burned flooring of the charred remains. A half-dozen workers walked off the jon with one look inside the firetrap.
Once work started, everyone was expected to work without stopping. The work was filthy. Within a couple of hours, we were covered with a combination of soot, sweat, and dirt.
By noon, we had lost half the crew we started with that morning. I had gotten the luxury of driving one load of scrap to the dump, briefly relieving my misery for a short time, with the entire remainder of the morning spent tearing the house apart by hand. I probably would have joined the others who had already walked off, except I knew I would have to walk across town to get to my car, left at the company office that morning. Moreover, I had never quit a job in my life, and I was determined to finish at least one day’s work and get my pay.
When we finally got a break for lunch, we were told that no vehicle could be spared for transportation so we would have to remain at the work site. My lunch sat helplessly in my care across town at the company office. I borrowed a coke from another worker; I didn’t feel much like eating anyway.
I managed to get through the afternoon only by a single-mindedness fixed on quitting time. When quitting time finally arrived, I was told I was not through until I had gassed up my truck and taken it back to the office site. This took almost an additional hour for which I was not paid. Arriving home, I quickly came to a decision: it was time for a career move.
I returned the next morning long enough to collect my pay. My employer seemed surprised that I had bothered to show up to tell him of my decision. As I began to offer an explanation for my leaving, he interrupted me and while walking away muttered something about “nobody wants to work nowadays.”
The life of a ‘Government Girl’
By Peggy Reynolds Reidland ‘46
I always thought myself privileged to have the unique job I held while at Baylor. It was with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service, in an upstairs office at the old freight depot near the post office in downtown Waco. I worked about four hours, four afternoons a week.
It all sounds very ordinary, but the fun part came in May of both 1943 and 1944 when the USDA transferred me via train to Washington D. C., to type in their headquarters all summer—then sent me back to Waco in the fall. I was officially classified as “clerk-typist” but the department referred to me and thousands of others like me as “Government Girls.” We worked very hard to be “where the action was.”
Washington was then the nerve center of the world at war. We routinely watched President Roosvelet bravely parade up Constitution Avenue by our windows. Troops came and went through the capitol; sadly there were too many funerals at Arlington Cemetery.
There was no car to be had (and no gas had I found a car), but buses were available. I “saw it all” those summer weekends: the Library of Congress, Congress itself, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Supreme Court, and to me the best of all, Mount Vernon on a beautiful unpolluted Potomac River. I went again and again.
But there’s always a catch to the really great jobs! The catch to mine was that for sixteen hours every week during my Baylor years I typed lists of every day’s rainfall amount for every county in Texas—column after long column:
.0001
.0001
.0002
.0001
.0011
And gleefully every now and then a whole inch of rain to break the monotony:
1.0000
I don’t remember how much money I made in Waco but in the summer I made $220.00 a month for five-and-a-half-day weeks. I was rich!
Juggling jobs, books and play
By Gil A. Stricklin 57
I thought attending Baylor was the “impossible dream”. I was the middle son of five boys in a family of limited finances, from the small railroad town of Denison.
But my dream did come true. In the fall of 1953, with a brown Samsonite suitcase I won selling magazine subscriptions, and an old Army footlocker I painted green and gold in a railroad boxcar repair shot, I began my college education.
During the first six semesters at Baylor, I was employed in seven different jobs—five of them at one time, and most of them all the time. Working wasn’t new for me because I’d had paying jobs since I was nine years old. My first job at Baylor was a busboy at Alexander Hall, serving the freshman girls who lived there. We would laugh when we went to work and say we had to go “slop the pigs.” I’m glad one of those beautiful black-haired, brown-eyed “pigs” didn’t hear my remarks or she might never have become my wife of thirty-three years. Mrs. Olive Black, head dietician, was a hard taskmaker. However, I grew to love her and learned from her the discipline that work requires.
Travis DuBois, a former director of housing at Baylor and a football player, looked at me and said, “Are you sure you can handle this job? Sometimes there are fights and hoist students who need a Wing Director to demand order.” I convinced him I could be a “Wing Ding,” so he hired me. It was a job I would hold for the next three years.
When the “laundry concession” came open in Brooks Hall, I took that, too. I received a small amount of money and a large amount of free cleaning and laundry. I split the task of gathering laundry and cleaning in the dorm with my roommate Jon Ryan, BA ‘56. We’d always blame each other if it seemed there was cash missing from the change drawer. (Dates demand money—not much, but some.)
Every Saturday afternoon in the fall, I hawked football programs at the stadium during home games. “Number 55 is All American Bill Glass, but do you know the rest of the Bears? Get your program right here. You’ve got to have a football program!” That was my sales pitch. With a few tips from Waco’s old and rich, and a good day in sales, I’d make $20 to $30 in three hours, and that was big bucks in those days.
Added to those jobs, in my “spare time” on Friday and Saturday nights, I was a “medical” attendant for A-1 Ambulance Company. No one would have called for an ambulance if they had known how little “medical” assistance I would give. My total job was to keep a patient from falling off the stretcher as we rounded a corner at high speed.
Then there was the construction job at the new building for the Baylor School of Law. When I say, “I helped make Byalor’s Law School what it is today,” I really mean it. I was a construction/brick mason’s helper on that first building. I remember that sweet and lovely, black-haired Ann March, BA ‘58, sitting in a swing in front of Old Main, watching me toss bricks, mix cement, and clean the walls of extra debris/
I would later move from working at the girl’s dorm to Ms. Lilley Varencamps’s Union Building Cafeteria. For all four years at Baylor, I never paid for a meal I ate on campus—but, come to think of it, some of them weren’t worth paying for.
Those first Christmas holidays found me unloading railroad mail cars on Fifth Street, near downtown. I’d railroad mail cars on Fifth Street, near downtown. I’d get off work a day or two before Christmas and catch train number 5, northward bound, for home and a happy reunion.
You might surmise that, with all these jobs, I didn’t have much time for studies. Campus life was busy, too: yell-leading, class leadership, Baylor Chamber activities, and girls (mainly, girl. . . a black-haired one). Well, you’re partially right; work was first, campus life second, and studies were a distant third.
When my class graduated in the spring of 1957, I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant of the United States Air Force and presented a degree from Baylor University.
Both of these represented a lot of work. Now I was to enter the “real” work force of America! I was proud and grateful, because I hoped that going to work was going to be easier than what I had been doing the past four years at Baylor!
Waiting tables at Brooks
By Wm. Loyd Fasion ‘47
When I entered Baylor University in 1940, students performed most of the maintenance and service work required by the university. Being a junior at Brooks Hall was a choice position, and some of the students worked in the kitchen as assistant cooks. I felt fortunate to be a waiter in the Brooks dining room. The waiters had to be neat (meaning well groomed with short haircuts), courteous, clean, and fast on their feet, especially when they worked the athletic tables.
Members of the football team ate their evening meal after football practice. They devoured steak, roast beef and mashed potatoes by the ton (so it seemed). It was not unusual for a table of eight “footballers” to drink four gallons of milk and two gallons of tea.
On one occasion water had spilled in front of the exit door from the kitchen. A speeding freshman waiter zoomed out the exit door with a tray loaded with bowls of ice cream held high overhead. He hit the wet spot; both feet went out from under him; and he hit the floor with the tray and ice cream on top of him. The dining room shook with laughter and applause as the dazed waiter picked himself up with the ice cream running down his face and his white jacket. Despite embarrassment, he was unhurt and returned to the task of cleaning up and serving his customers. (Clean-up was a part of the job. After the meal we cleared the tables and reset them with fresh tablecloths, utensils, plates, and glasses for the next meal.)
As waiters we learned some valuable things—the importance of food for improving morale and nurturing the students, the necessity for cleanliness, the value of service, and how to set a proper table. Even today I respect the job of the waiver (or waitress) and how it is performed.
During the summer, I stayed in Waco, worked full time. And never returned home, except for a brief visit when I could hitchhike a ride. After my freshman year, I became self-supporting and paid all my school and living expenses. My summer experience on the county road gang gave me added incentive to get the education. Men twice my age with families were working on the county road gang cutting weeds, filling the ditches, and sweating as I did. We were told sweating was good for us. I thought, “It may be good, but Baylor is better.”
Least ever paid for schooling?
By J. B. (Jack) Streetman ‘36
I enrolled at Baylor in September 1933, during the Depression days. At the time I had $20 in my possession ( no other money was availbale—no help from parents). Baylor required a matriculation fee of $10, so I paid it. I quickly found employment in a boarding house (washing dishes) to pay for my room and board.
The first two months I mowed grass on the campus for my tuition. In November President Neff decided to use students for campus security at night. I was given employment as a night watchman along with an older graduate student. I received as payment tuition and fees for my freshman year. The following two years (I attend school twelve months each year and finished in three years), President Neff allowed me to pay for my room and some meals in Memorial Dormitory in this way. President Neff and James Mixson will always have my gratitude for their kindness to me during these years.
I graduated in August 1936; at that time I signed a note for $25 for a diploma. The matriculation fee and diploma fee were the only charges for which I paid cash to the university. All other expenses were paid by my work for Baylor. This may be close to a record for the smallest amount of cash paid for a college education.
The case of the blinded barber
By Gail Strother Cramer 78
I can remember opening my college bank account the summer before my seventh-grade year. There was a silent agreement that at least half of what I earned from that day forward would go towards college. That first simmer and for the five years that followed, the bulk of the money placed in my college account came from babysitting or working at a local hamburger stand.
My father, Ralph Strother, thought it good for his children to try and pay for their college educations, but he was more than willing to help us earn money if we worked hard. A hydraulic engineer by profession, my father loved to fix old bicycles in his spare time; we began searching the Albuquerque Flea Marker for bike parts or old pikes that needed some tender loving care. He did the mechanic work, and I helped with painting, washing, and polishing. Half of our profits went into my college account, and the other half into other bicycles. This was a great time—for both of us.
As college neared and I chose Baylor, I realized money in my account would not come close to lasting four years. So in 1974, the summer before I entered Baylor, I went to work for Marriott Corporation, making and assembling meals for the airlines. Dianae Ferguson ‘78 and I left home at 4:00 A.M. to have the breakfasts ready for the 6:00 A.M. “red eye” flight. This was fast-paced, fun, and challenging work. The wonderful part of this job was that anytime I came home for Christmas or summer vacation I could walk in and start working, and I did for the four years while I was in college. I still cook some of those airplane recipes for my husband and two sons: United’s coleslaw, Continental’s omelettes, Eastern’s french toast . . .
Once enrolled at Baylor, I did not attempt too many money-making ventures until my sophomore year when I plunged into being a chapel checker (for which I could not believe I could get paid) and into selling Indian jewelry. I found the latter to be the easiest of all possible jobs. I set the jewelry out and girls came by my dorm room, hardly interrupting my studies. This venture took off, and my supplies, Mom and Dad, were kept hopping to meet my demands. My parents spent several days a week contacting Native American acquaintances and roving the Albuquerque Flea market for good buys. This was the time that I became convinced that it takes much more love to help your children pay their own way through college than to just hand money over semester after semester, which my folks could easily have done. With my Indian jewelry venture began a correspondence with my father that I will keep and cherish forever. Not big on letters, Dad wrote a little clever encouraging note with each jewelry shipment. I was “Indian Princess,” “Hishi,” and “Waco.” He was “SilverCloud,” “Chief Beadsy,” and “SuperChieft.” All in all my parents sent forty-two shipments of jewelry in two years and I sold $5,000 worth of Indian jewelry from my dorm room. In a box, I have every note my dad sent in those shipments. I also made a special friend, Ken Maas ‘77, who sold our Indian jewelry to his friends in Houston.
The Indian jewelry craze came to an end about the time I started my senior year at Baylor. My roommates Debbie Cutrell ‘78, Patti Bushman ‘78 and Angie Miller ‘79 ran a tight ship, spending only $5 to $7 a week each on groceries, but I knew I needed another flexible job. Quite by accident, I fell into cutting hair. Several of the football players could not get to practice and also make it to the barbershop before it closed. With the strict grooming standards set by Grant Teaff, several players begged me one evening to trim their hair. This was the beginning of another lucrative venture. Word spread, and soon I found myself nearly everyday with comb and scissors in hand cutting hair of every kind. I was not licensed, so I accepted “donations.”
This work became extremely interesting when I went to several Waco optometrists who all agreed I had overworn my hard contact lens and had developed a cornea disease. I spent months without contacts and a vision of 20/400. My hair cutting went on, for now I needed my “donaters” more than ever. I told them they had to read my assignments out loud as I cut their hair so I would not get behind. I’m not sure whether any of them caught on to my blindness, and I can honestly say I don’t know how their hair looked, but I did get a 3.8 grade point average that semester!
Not only did I get a classroom education while at Baylor, but I also received an education in survival in life. I often repeat to the college students I now teach the maxim that my father so wisely taught me: “After earning your way through college, it is a cinch to work an 8:00 to 5:00 job.” He was right.
On board the student Transfer
By Peter Bolin Mahaffey ‘29, as told to Jessica Mahaffey ‘87
Back in 1926, the only way students arriving at the train station could get their trunks and baggage to the dormitories was through a service called the “Student Transfer.”
Jim Stovall, a law student at the time, came up with the original idea and negotiated an exclusive franchise operation with the Baylor administration. In the spring of 1926, I spent the only $300 I had plus another $300 borrowed from my uncle to buy out Jim. I inherited from him two Ford flatbed trucks, completely stripped and with just enough steam to make it to the train station and back.
I recruited six to eight freshmen to do the trunk and wardrobe hauling for nearly 1,200 Baylor students each year. My crew would work the train station, picking up the claim tickets for all the passengers. We charged $1.50 to transport one student’s luggage to the dorm and another 25 cents for each floor that it had to be carried up. There weren’t any elevators back in those days, so each trunk had to be hand carried up many flights of stairs.
I hired Earl Coon, one of the strongest men I’ve ever known to be in charge of labor and collections) especially in the men’s dormitory). He was a lineman on the football team, and everybody called him “Walrus.” If there wasn’t anyone working with him, he’d pick up a trunk and carry it himself.
To increase my revenues, I began collecting wooden shipping boxes from businesses all over town. The stockyboys would save them for me, and I would pay them a nickel for each box. I built lids to fit them and added handles on the sides for carrying. At Christmas time, when most Baylor girls had more things to take home and didn’t want to use their trunks, I sold them the wooden boxes for a profitable 75 cents apiece, plus an additional 25 cents apiece to haul the box to the depot. To my delight, I cleared $400 in one month, after operation expenses and paying workers 25 cents an hour.
After two profitable years and enough savings to see me through school, I sold the Student Transfer in 1928 to Sam Booth, who carried on the success of the business.
Automobile maven
By Lonnie Longmire ‘69
My path to and through Baylor was a bit different from that of most students. After finishing high school in 1962 I enlisted in the Air Force for four years. While in service I grew up and figured out that it would be important to have a college education. I began college through correspondence courses because of the remote places I was stationed while in service.
That is a very difficult way to gain college credits, and after my discharge I looked forward to a real college experience. Baylor was all that I hoped it would be and much more.
The first job I held as a Baylor student was working for Central Freight Lines. I would get up at 3:00 A.M. and unload trucks at the dock until I left for class at 7:30 A.M. This was a rough experience that eventually led to double pneumonia and my falling asleep in most of my classes. My grades became so bad that I went on probation and nearly flunked out. I just knew there had to be an easier way to work my way through Baylor.
I came up with the idea of going into a car dealership and telling them that if they would teach me to sell cars I could sell them to Baylor students. I never did sell a car to a Baylor student, but I did sell hundreds of cars in Waco during the next three years. I was good enough at this that I moved up to the best dealership in Waco at the time (Frank Weaver Pontiac). I had my choice of the finest new cars, free gas and insurance, and I was making tremendous money. I graduated in 1969 and at that time was making nearly twice as much money selling cars as most new graduates were being paid.
The part-time job I used to work my way through Baylor led me to discover sales and marketing abilities which I used to meet a life goal of retiring at 40 with a lot of money. Students who work their way through college can gain experience that may pay handsome dividends in later life—mine sure did!
From telegrams to physics
By Dr. H. D. Schwetman ‘32
My parents moved in 1920 to a home near Seventh and James Baptist Church so that they might encourage my sister and me to attend Baylor University since they were devout and active Baptists. My father owned and operated in East Waco a grocery store that served many employees of the MKT Railroad on a credit basis. When the employees lost a long, drawn-out railroad employees’ strike, the business lost quite heavily; we found ourselves ready to attend college when money was not easily available, to say the least. Like so many students at that time, we found that we needed jobs to pay our way through Baylor.
When we graduated from Waco High School in 1928, we found jobs and went to work. I had a high-school friend who was working at the Western Union Telegraph Company at Fifth and Franklin Streets (where Baylor boys caught rides to Baylor) where twenty or more adult telegraph operators and other employees worked and a like number of young men rode bicycles to deliver messages. My friends worked at night from 4:00 P.M. to midnight. He found it necessary to move to another town, so he obtained the position for me. Thus I started my career in the summertime of 1928 delivering telegraph messages from 4:00 to midnight, with much loss of sleep for—and for my mother.
During the fall, I was offered a position (“Route Aide”) arranging messengers for transmission from the various work stations to the large cities and towns with the promise of promotion to “Junior Operator” if I could type and operate the transmitters. I finally passed the tests and worked until the roof fell in after Christmas of 1931 with the deepening of the Depression, I lost my job.
To make this story more complicated, I was also employed during this time by the Department of Physics as a grader, part-time secretary, and laboratory instructor. Also, I was a member of the Baylor University Band. (The Western Union had been most gracious in allowing me to attend most of the football games and other band activities.)
When the W.U. Telegraph Company found it necessary to dismiss me (and twenty adult employees), Mr. Pat Neff arranged for a scholarship for me to continue working in the Department of Physics, to play in the band and the Baylor University Symphony (Prof. Navaratil conducting), and to play in a student, concert-jazz band in the girls’ dining room. Mr. Neff used us for many trips and traveling shows and obtained his money’s worth from us.
The experience of fitting together all these activities—working in the physics department, playing in the bank, working at the Western Union and finding time to study—required a close-knit schedule that was like fitting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. However, from all these various activities I evidently gained some benefits, for I have found that I derived rewards from each one of these experiences at some time in my later life.
Silverware service
By Caprice Posey Hokstad att. ‘81-’94
Knife, fork, spoon, fork, knife, spoon . . .so this was the challenge and excitement of higher education. I strained to remember why I was staring at an endless line of grimy food trays. Only a few days earlier, after much anticipation, planning, and packing, I had arrived at Baylor. Since I lived in California, I had never set eyes on the campus until Welcome Week. Everything had proved to be better than I had expected until I showed up for my on-campus job.
It’s a miracle I didn’t quit the first day. I dutifully reported for work at Collins Cafeteria and was assigned the task of retrieving dirty silverware from the sludge on trays as they reached the end of their conveyor-belt ride. Then I sorted it into knives, forks, and spoons and sent them through the dishwasher. The highlight of this position was carrying the clean silverware out to the front line, unless the supervisor had to come back and get it because the entire line was stalled waiting for clean silverware. Two hours seemed like twenty. When I got back to my room that day, I just cried.
As days passed, my opinion only grew worse. Not only “silverware” but everything about the job was awful. It was boring and disgusting, and I was sure the supervisors couldn’t stand me . I began looking for another job.
About the time I had discovered a more desirable job at the library and was psyching myself up to interview and ask about switching, my first pay arrived. When I went to pick up my paycheck, the work-study clerk could not find it. My anger flared. I had endured all that misery for a whole month, and they had the gall to lose my paycheck.
The clerk asked, “Do you owe money to Baylor?” (What a stupid question: of course I owed money. Why else would anyone waste precious time toiling at such menial labor?) “Then you need to go to the cashier’s window.”
The cashier found my check conveniently attached to my bill “Please endorse this,” she asked, placing it before me, face down. I signed it over and waited dumbfoundedly for further instruction. She credited my account, deftly punched an adding machine, then reported, “Your balance due on this installment is one hundred. . . “ She was articulating clearly, but I didn’t comprehend anything past “hundred.” She looked up expectantly. I hadn’t even consider the possibility. “I don’t have the money,” I said.
“When is the deadline?”
“Three days.”
Slowly, I shuffled back to my room in a state of shock. What was I going to do now? I could call my parents and see if they would lend or give me the money. I didn’t relish that prospect. My dad had seemed very interested in me joining AFROTC, and this might force his point. Or what if they told me to get on a plane and come home, in disgrace? My paranoid imagination was too full of worst-case scenarios for this option
I started to argue with God: “You wanted me here, why aren’t You making it possible? I prayed earnestly for His answer. No miracle money showed up.
Finally, I decided to sell back my meal plan. I lived in Russell; we had kitchens, and I never used all twenty meals per week anyways. I returned to the cashier and canceled my board. The refund covered the balance immediately due and reduced the remaining two installments. All I had was a roll of quarters. My hopes of quitting the cafeteria were dashed. Switching was out of the question because food service positions paid ten cents more per hour than any other on campus job and every penny counted now. Also, employees were allowed to eat in the cafeteria at a discount (when working) and have it deducted from the next paycheck. My budget was incredibly tight. Just about the time I had run out of quarters and was wondering how to get by without toothpaste, a letter from my parents would arrive with a check for $20.
Grudgingly, I had to admit that God hadn’t abandoned me. But I wasn’t exactly “giving thanks in all things” either. Finally, I knelt in prayer one day and, after casting my usual complaints before Him, thanked Him for providing this job as a means to come to Baylor and asked for the strength to endure any suffering.
He did better than that. I went to work the next day and discovered it wasn’t such a bad job after all. I found myself actually smiling.
I certainly wasn’t always cheerful, and I had plenty of bad days. But rather than the hatred I had imagined the supervisor had for me, I found great patience and compassion. As time passed, I grew to love that job and looked forward to it more than anything else. It was my haven away from books. It was the place I felt most comfortable and accepted. To think I could have so easily thrown it away, forfeiting so many of my best memories! God transformed my greatest curse into my greatest blessing.
Chicken pot pies and ’59 Impala
By Bobby Dusek ‘71
I had not planned to go to college. My father was bi-vocational pastor and only finished high school. He was an automobile tune-up specialist by day (and night) and pastor all the other times he was not in the shop. I worked along with my dad in the shop and became a tune-up specialist myself. After graduation from high school, in 1958, I began my full-time career with automobiles.
In 1960, I was working in a shop in Tyler, Texas, when a pastor of a small church there called me and asked if I would consider leading the music and working with the youth in his church. I agreed to help. In June of 1961, after several months of work in that church, I surrendered to the ministry. I realized that the new school year would be starting in just two months. I had spent all my money on a ‘59 Chevrolet Impala. There was no money for college.
However, the people of the church I was serving were supportive of my ministry, and they were generous with love gifts. With those gifts and with what I saved through the summer, I had enough to pay my tuition and books for one semester. I would have to find a job to pay for all my other expenses.
Just before I was to leave home to go to Waco, I received a call from the Live Oak Baptist Church in Gatesville, Texas, to serve as their music and youth minister. My responsibilities would require me to be at the church on Wednesday nights and weekends for a salary of $40 a week. My salary would have to take care of my rent, meals, clothes, and everything else except gasoline for my car. Mom and Dad paid that since they let me use their charge card. (I think gas was 26 cents a gallon.)
I made it through that first semester eating mostly grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken pot pies. I remember two tall stacks of the foil pans that I kept after eating the chicken pies. I think I also cooked hamburger meat in every way possible. I always looked forward to going to my church on the weekend because the people invited me to their homes and fed me well.
But then came the second semester. I needed money for tuition and books. There was nothing I could save from my church salary. (I don’t think I had even one date my first year at Baylor because of both lack of money and my schedule at the church.) So where was I going to get tuition? I never will forget the feeling I had as I walked back to the Baylor campus from the used car lot where I sold my black ‘59 Impala. I held in my hand the heck that would cover my tuition and books for another semester. I was determined to stay in school.
But what was I going to do for a car? I still had to make two trips a week to Gatesville for my church responsibilities. I called Dad. He had an old ‘52 Chevy sitting at home that had belonged to my brother. He agreed to let me use it until I could get into a position to buy my own car. The only problem was that the car didn’t have a reverse. I had to be a creative driver to keep from getting stuck in a place from which I had to back out. There were a few times I had to get help to get “pushed” back.
These arrangements got me through my first year of Baylor. That summer, a man in my church who was aping contractor hired me to work for him painting houses in a new development in Copperas Cove, Texas. I lived in Gatesville that summer serving my church and painting houses. By finding the cheapest apartment ($22 a month all bills paid) and cutting expenses close, I was able to save enough that summer to pay for my tuition and books for the next year—as well as a down payment for a used Volkswagen. Money was tight, but God always seemed to provide what I needed for school, when I really needed it.
