I went to UT in Austin in 1954. For three years, I majored in civil engineering, thinking that I might come back to Childress, Texas, my home town, and work for the Texas Highway Department. However, at UT I discovered there were whole other worlds out there – natural history, prehistory, history, literature, etc. I changed my major over to arts & sciences, taking a degree in English with minors in history and, as I recall, math and Spanish. (And making supremely ordinary grades, all in all.)
For want of a job, I would have been better off in civil engineering, but somehow, I managed. After we met at UT, The Marth (my wife’s title, not her name, which was Martha) & I set a wedding date, February 1, 1959, and I went off to work as a survey party chief for the city of Odessa, Texas, where I spent five months, including five weeks after Martha & I married. I then found a new job, as a technical writer, working for a company called R. G. LeTourneau, Inc., a heavy equipment manufacturer in Longview, Texas. After nine months there – where Steve, our oldest son was born – I found a job as a technical editor in Orlando, Florida, where I worked in the defense industry for The Martin Company. We were responsible for developing the Pershing Missile System, which is now in the White Sands Missile Range Museum.
After a few weeks at that job, the head of the company’s documentary film unit came by my desk one Friday afternoon and asked me if I could write motion picture scripts. Bored to death with the tech editor job, I gave him an enthusiastic “YES!” After work, I ran out and bought a book How to Write a Movie Script, read it over the weekend, and came in the following Monday morning and began writing movies. I was assigned to the DOD’s Washington office, so I traveled constantly between Orlando and Washington and well as many other locations (e.g., Cape Kennedy, New York City and Kansas City) in the US, doing research and running filming projects, perhaps the most memorable being an assignment in Huntsville, Alabama, to film a man named Arthur Rudolph. He had been part of Wernher von Braun’s team on the V2 project in Germany. While the film crew set up the cameras and lights, he and I chatted, with him telling me about his days in Nazi Germany. I thought he was a charming man. Some years later, however, I read in the paper that Rudolph had been deported from the US, persona non grata, for working 20,000 Jews to death during his days in Germany’s V2 program.
My films for the DOD played before Congressional committees and on the Armed Services TV network as well as numerous other locations.
After three years in Orlando, on January 1, 1963, I took another job, this one in Houston, working for a motion picture production contractor for NASA and the manned space flight program, specifically Gemini and Apollo. Somehow, I got assigned to NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight in Washington, so again, I was traveling constantly, now from Houston to Washington and well as to Cape Kennedy and various other locations across the US. These films were used to brief Congressional committees as well as Smithsonian visitors and various TV audiences. After the manned lunar landings began, I also took on the additional assignment of doing pictures in lunar science, working with scientists such as Carl Sagan, Wolf Vishniac, Paul Gast, Gene Shoemaker, and others.
As one might imagine, this was an exciting chapter in life. Also an exhausting one. After the final lunar landing, I – like many others who had spent too many 60 and 70 hour weeks – left the program. But somehow, during this time, I did the scripts for an outdoor TV show called “Outdoors With Ken Calloway,” which aired in 111 markets across the country. Although the show got good Neilson ratings during our three years on the air, the producer was a financial incompetent and he eventually went broke. The show shut down.
Altogether I wrote about 250 motion pictures during those years. Also, our youngest son, Michael, was born in Houston.
After the space program, I took a job with a maritime company, an affiliate with El Paso Natural Gas Company, where I would eventually wind up with responsibilities for crew training and safety. We operated a fleet of tankers that traded between Algeria’s Arzew terminal and the US east coast – ports in Chesapeake Bay and Savanah, Georgia. We built the ships, over 900 feet in length, in Dunkirk, New Orleans and Newport News. And we laid up three of the ships for a time in Haugesund, a small port on the Atlantic coast of Norway, while waiting for the Arzew terminal to open.
As one might guess, this kept me in an almost constant travel mode – in places along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts as well as in Scandinavia, western Europe, the UK, Algeria, Colombia, Trinidad and Bermuda – for years. It was, needless to say, a difficult time for Martha, who had to cope with raising two sons, maintaining a home and running her business—a children’s clothing store. Sometimes days would pass when she wouldn’t even know for certain where I was, although, in an emergency, she could always get in contact with me – even at sea – through the company operator.
It was an adventurous life, which included, for example, a passage westbound across the Atlantic in a monumental storm. That was back in the “tall ships” days (the mid 70’s), and I recall that those sailing vessels, with the tall sails, would completely disappear between the waves as we tried, from our ship’s bridge, to watch them negotiate the storm across the sea.
The most memorable experience, however, was when we nearly lost one of our tankers, with a Norwegian crew, in a grounding off the coast of Spain, very near Gibralter. By coincidence, I had just gotten off that ship in Algeria after an eastbound crossing that began in Savannah. I didn’t learn of the grounding until I got back into the US, which meant that the following day, I was on an airplane headed back to Europe, with a crew, and I wound up flying across the Atlantic five times in three weeks, documenting the incident.
I have a ton of stories connected with the wreck, but the one that haunts me most is this: After I finally caught up with the wrecked ship at a shipyard in Lisbon, into which a salvage crew had somehow managed to tow the vessel for repairs under extremely difficult conditions. When I boarded the ship, lying in dry-dock, I found that the extremely distressed captain (who had his wife with him) had not left the ship since the grounding. I insisted that he and his wife get off the vessel that night, when I would pick them up and take them into the city for dinner. After dinner, we sat in the bar until two in the morning with his wife weeping, begging me to “not let them crucify my husband.” There was, however, nothing I could do. He had made a perfectly stupid mistake, which led directly to the grounding. His career was finished. I shall, however, never forget that evening, which was the last time I saw a man who had become a good friend.
At length, our maritime program collapsed following a major dispute between our executives and Algerian government officials, so after a $1 billion loss, that was the end.
The El Paso Company then, in 1981, transferred me to El Paso, where I would work at new assignments in the natural gas industry. First, I had responsibility for preparing company filings with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Then I worked with an ad hoc committee responsible for restructuring the field operations to make us more competitive in the industry. Then I worked with a committee which sold some $75 million worth of company plants and pipeline. I ran a study that led to formation of a new affiliate, where I served as director of business management then as director of special operations.
Fact is, I could never hold a steady job, which is probably typical of English majors. (Altogether, I think I had 13 totally separate jobs, not always with different companies, but with totally different responsibilities.)
Then, in March of 1996, I decided that I had had enough of more 60- and 70- hour weeks, airplanes, hotels, rental cars, meetings, etc., etc., so I retired, an event prompted by our executives’ suggestion that they may like to transfer me back to Houston and new corporate offices.
At that time (we lived in Farmington, in northwestern New Mexico), we decided, after scouting several places, to retire here in Las Cruces. It worked perfectly for us.
Since moving to the Southwest, Martha and I traveled extensively across the region, exploring well-known as well as little known prehistoric and historic sites—one of our passions. We also traveled, with groups of friends, across much of northern Mexico, exploring not only the cities but many remote locations. We traveled with two friends deep into Mexico, exploring places such as Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Patzquaro. We hold special memories of those experiences.
After I retired, Martha and I would travel to Europe about every other year, spending most of the time in England and Scotland, France and Spain. Of course, we visited the famous places, but we also explored many of the far less famous. For instance, adventuring through an old castle ruin in Linlithgoe, a small town in Scotland, we found ourselves in the small room where Mary Queen of Scots was born. Of course, we spent time in London, York, Bath, Inverness, etc., exploring those cities and the nearby countrysides.
In France, and in particular, in Paris, which I had come to know pretty well from my maritime days, we saw, of course, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the, Louvre, but I also took Marth to little out-of-the-way restaurants and bars on the Rive Gauche, to Hemingway’s apartment, to Gertrude Stein’s and Alice B. Toklas’ apartment, to the Shakespeare Book Company, to Voltaire’s little coffee shop on the Seine River. We took the day trip out to Versailles. We saw Rouen, where Joan of Arc was held prisoner then burned at the stake .(and had the best crème brule I’ve ever eaten). We visited Lyon, the center of much of WWII activities in France, (including ferocious prosecution of the Jewish population); Vienne, the site of some incredible Roman ruins; Carcassonne, a Medieval walled city, where we stayed in an old convent that had been converted into a hotel.
In Spain, we traveled to a number of cities, for instance, Madrid, Toledo, Merida, Barcelona, Seville, Granada and Cordoba. We relished the Sardona (the folk dance of Catalonia), flamenco, classical guitar, and festivals. Luckily, on one trip, we met up with friends in Madrid and traveled to a small town named Nerja, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, where we stayed in a small hotel overlooking the city harbor. There, we had the grand experience of being part of a festival called “Bury the Sardine,” which was wonderfully funny and great fun. Perhaps most memorably, in Granada, we stood at Alhambra, looking down over the city and seeing much the same view that Ferdinand and Isabella saw when they led their forces into the area to complete the Reconquista on January 2, 1492, after some six or seven centuries of Moorish occupation. A pivotal point in history, which just preceded the dispatch of Columbus west to discover the New World.
Meanwhile, when we weren’t traveling, I did a lot of articles on the natural history, prehistory, history and travel destinations of the Southwest. Altogether, I sold more than 400 articles, with photos, to various publications, and I did a book – Texas Unexplained — for Texas Parks & Wildlife.
I might also mention that, in earlier years, I wrote numerous other articles both for popular and scholarly journals. I have published many photographs in various publications. I have given numerous papers for historical, archaeological and civic associations, including, for example, the Texas Archaeological Society, the Houston Archaeological Society, the El Paso Archaeological Society, the El Paso Historical Society, New Mexico Archaeological Society, the Doña Ana Archaeological Society and the Las Cruces Railroad Museum. In the past, I have served as a regional vice president for the Texas Archaeological Society, president of the Houston Archaeological Society, president of the El Paso Archaeological Society and vice president of the Doña Ana Archaeological Society, and a docent for New Mexico’s Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum. I served on the board for Human Systems, Inc., a non-profit historical and archaeological research firm, located here in Las Cruces.