A Belated Veteran's Day Tribute

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

Veteran's Day was last Friday, but I have waited until this week to share my tribute to the First Veterans from Lee High School with you. As I look through the names many stories of those that have passed and those who are still with us have filled my mind. I hope you enjoy this updated video, it is a bit different from the one posted on Facebook last week.

The Rest of The Story

Rainer Klauss

LHS '64

Several years ago, Rainer submitted two accounts of his first year as a traveling speed-reading teacher in 1974-75. He draws the story of that episode in his life to a close in the following memoir. 

 On the Road with Readak, Part III; 

or, How Did You Celebrate Your 30th Birthday?

Rainer Klauss

  With a very small party, that’s how. That milestone birthday (1975) occurred near the beginning of my second year with Readak. I was teaching speed-reading at Marion Institute, a military junior college and high school in Marion, Alabama (Selma was about 25 miles to the SE). Because Halloween fell on a Friday that month, I drove up to Birmingham and spent the weekend with Gunter, my younger brother. We celebrated with pizza and beer and watched college football.  Happy Birthday, Rainer!

I didn’t really want to travel for another year with Readak, but I had not come up with an alternative job that summer. I had spent it at Auburn, ostensibly working on my master’s thesis.  However, I abandoned that project early on. Shortly after I enrolled that quarter (funded by the last portion of my Veteran’s Bill stipend), I went to the library one afternoon and read through two master’s theses that contemporaries had completed while I was on the road teaching speed-reading in Georgia, Virginia, Illinois, Texas, and Mississippi. The two scholars, both protégés of my thesis director, had written solid works about tropes (commonly recurring literary motifs) in medieval English literature.  Comparing them with the inert mess I had pieced together before I left in August of 1974 depressed me. The inchoate state of “Hunting Scenes in Middle English Literature” (in quotes because it was never more than a loose work in progress) provided evidence of the steady decline of confidence and motivation I had felt about being able to present that topic well.  More seriously, I had doubts about whether to even continue my pursuit of a scholarly career. 

As I was toiling away on the thesis, a highly-respected medieval studies specialist published a book on precisely the same subject. Her far-greater expertise, comprehensiveness, and confident style blew me out of the water. What now? At that point, I had no desire or enough money to start fresh. Those factors and academic weariness motivated me to leave Auburn, take the Readak job, and possibly regroup later.  On my return the following summer, I had recovered some faith that I could summon the scholastic and compositional energies that would enable me to take a new tack with the thesis. I hoped to recover the spirit that brought me to study and prize English to begin with. 

Seeing what my two colleagues had accomplished crushed me, however. I remembered sharing a class with one of them. Sister Marie was a young nun, smart, spirited, and a bit exotic in that setting. The other writer hailed from Huntsville, but somehow, we never crossed paths during our coursework. Their success and what I perceived as my inability to compose a work of similar quality (or even to envision it) and complete the MA sank my spirits. Envy consumed me that afternoon.  I recalled a comment the director had written on one of the early versions of my thesis. He wondered what had happened to his formerly bright and articulate student. I turned the books in and left the library. I felt diminished and that created in me, over time, a harsh judgment of myself that took years to come to terms with and reframe.

Back at my apartment, I relegated the thesis to a cardboard box, moped around for a few days dealing with the emotional blow, and then moved on to trying to enjoy the summer. I spent time with English graduate students who were finishing their work or waiting for job offers, I learned how to play racquetball and took an introductory yoga class (the two activities are poles apart, but each proved to be therapeutic), and I started flirting with a graduate student I met in the English Composition Lab.

A day or two before I was to leave the campus, I had an unexpected sexual encounter with someone I met at a party the week before. RM and I liked each other. Unfortunately, we were both going away. She was graduating and then taking some time off in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi to figure out her future, and I was headed to Huntsville for a brief stay before driving to New Orleans to pick up my Readak materials and receive my assignment. We exchanged addresses and made plans to get together when we had a chance.

A few days after I got home, I began experiencing strong genital pain.  When the pain persisted after two days, I realized that something was definitely wrong. Never having felt such distressing symptoms after previous sexual activity, I suspected that I had caught something. No other cause came to mind. I went to the Huntsville Health Clinic to get tested. After a few days, I called to inquire about the results from the swabbing. I didn’t have an STD, and that came as a major relief. Instead, I had “non-specific prostatitis.” Out of nervousness or embarrassment, I didn’t think to ask for further information about the condition. ”Non-specific prostatitis.” That didn’t sound too bad, did it? Being “non-specific,” surely it would go away by itself. In any case, I had only a day or two before I needed to drive to New Orleans. I had no time to see a doctor. 

I spent three days in New Orleans, enjoying some of the city’s great food and attractions. I even helped out with the training of the new crop of Readak teachers. (The old pro was back to show the rookies how to do it.) That gave me a boost. I didn’t think to inquire if any of my teaching classmates from the year before had returned to the fold. 

The drive to Marion took a full day. Even though Marion Institute and Judson College, a very small women’s school, were solid institutions and certainly drew plenty of parental visits, Marion didn’t have a motel. There wasn’t enough business to support one. I stayed in Selma that night. At Marion the next day, I met the academic head of the school. He informed me of my schedule, showed me the instruction building, and with one phone call helped me acquire a very nice apartment near the quiet courthouse square. Of all the places I rented during my two-year Readak career, that was the best--a bright, roomy, second-floor hideaway at a reasonable price. The school was only half a mile down the road. I never walked there to teach, but many afternoons while I explored the nicer parts of town and enjoyed the bounties of autumn, I strolled by the campus.

I can’t remember how many classes of speed-reading and study skills were scheduled for me--three? four? --but I taught high school cadets and junior college students. One of the college students--a sharp, hard-working kid—mentioned his German mother, so we had something in common. Another student, with the unusual name of Otho, voiced his skepticism of the Readak method and continued his opposition throughout the course, trying to recruit others to his cause. He was the same kind of troublemaker that had disrupted my classroom at Christchurch School in Virginia the year before.

While on campus, I spent my time in the school library, catching up on magazines and reading books from my traveling stash. I made friends with one of the Marion instructors, who had just received his MA in Spanish from Auburn. He invited me to supper at the campus apartment where he and his wife lived, and I was grateful for that. But the two of them bickered too much. I served as a buffer while they aired some of their unhappiness with each other: things they had trouble saying to each other privately.

Two weeks into the school session, the symptoms of the prostatitis lit me up again, and I made an appointment with a general practitioner in town. I gave his lab a urine sample, told the doc about the diagnosis the health department back home had given me, and he said to me, “Son, it’s like this: your prostate has a cold, an infection. I’ll give you a prescription for an antibiotic, and we’ll see how that works.” 

The pills turned my urine an alarming bright yellow, but seemed to help with the discomfort after a few days. Meanwhile, another disturbance arose. I became aware that teaching speed-reading bored me. The excitement of the first year, with its flow of new places, new people, and new experiences, had not carried over. I knew the Readak method worked. Even so, I couldn’t summon the same level of enthusiasm for the instruction as before. That did not bode well. I had many miles to go before I finished with the jobs for that school year. In the light of that, I found myself facing the recrimination that I hadn’t sought another job--that I had settled for another year on the road. Here at 30, I was still drifting along in my life--literally and figuratively. 

What helped me through this difficult period? The occasional weekend companionship of my brother, the physical and emotional therapy of walking and taking joy in the season, the always reliable restoratives of reading and music, and several rendezvous with RM. I also began exchanging letters with my former officemate and good friend at Auburn, RH. Like me, he had bailed out of graduate school, and he also spent a lot of time on the road, working as a textbook salesman at universities in Texas. We affirmed our friendship and cut loose with a ribald, wide-ranging, and creative correspondence that was an elixir for our drifting souls. 

What didn’t help—for very long, anyway—was the antibiotic treatment. I can’t remember how long my respite lasted, but the pain returned, and the doctor prescribed another antibiotic. “Let’s try this one instead.” That got me through the rest of the session and home for Christmas. 

I had amassed a fund of good memories from the preceding year of teaching. There were challenges along the way, yet my sojourn had pulled me out of a blocked and stagnant life and into an engaging one. As I turned 30, however, the challenges changed. Teaching became a chore, and although I had no way of knowing it then, I had begun a physical and emotional struggle with a medical problem that would baffle a variety of doctors and plague me for six months. 

(Continued Next Week)

In Honor or Rainer We Present the Following Video!

I don't think the Covid impacted me as much as the respretory infection I had following my recovery from Covid. I end up having to go to the Walk=In clinic to get some medicine to combat it. I was tired as could be, hardly able to move around for about three days. And then to add to my problems I also developed a case of Pink Eye to top things off.

I know Veteran's Day was last week, but with me being laid up I could not do anything special for last week's issue so I have included it today. I know many of you saw it on Facebook, but there is still a group of you who do not participate in that social media so I decided to share it here.

The program I use to create it still has some bugs in it, but I still have enough of the core of the content to add or edit any classmates' information if I am notified.

Oh by the way, my acting career continues and I made appearance in the wrestling scene and the wedding scene in the last two episodes of "Young Rock." As always, I am "The Professional Blur!"

Last Week's Questions, Answers, Comments

David Mullins Sr., LHS ‘64, "So, so very sorry to hear about Tony Thompson. Thanks CE Wynn for update."

Barb Biggs Knott, LHS ‘66, "Wow...I saw a LOT of shows at the Coliseum and ended up backstage for many of them but missed that one! I'm sure it was because my mom thought me entirely too young at the time for Jerry Lee!"