RJ: I got a Masters in Education. Now I had another stroke of luck: I still loved the navy and lo and behold, my first job after retirement from the navy was teaching at the Guantanamo Naval Base, in the dependent school there. So I took Arlen and Pierce, and we moved down to Guantinamo. I spent a wonderful year teaching school down there. And all of a sudden, they were getting ready to move a General Electric plant down from Lynn, Massachusetts, to Hendersonville, [North Carolina]. I came home for the summer and I just casually went down and applied for a job at personnel. And they hired me. So I was at General Electric for three years--long enough to realize that industry was the last thing I wanted to be in. But I was a good personnel manager. So, I got out of that. Arlen and I were up in cold country in Hendersonville, so I said, "Let's go back to Florida." So I came to Florida and started looking around Cape Canaveral [for work]. I saw several jobs doing technical recruiting and that sort of thing, because I was real good at that. But I said to Arlen, "You know something? I want to do what I want to do." She said, "What is that?" And I said, "Teach. I trained for it and I am going to do it. And I liked what I did at Guantanamo." So I went down and in five minutes' time I had a job. CJ: Where? RJ: [I was] teaching in Eau Gallie, which is now a part of Melbourne, Florida. And we had a wonderful time. Pierce did very well in school. He went to Melbourne High School which is supposed to be the school, and he continued on with his education. I taught quite a few years in Brevard County, [but] then the teacher walk-out came. I was one of the top men in the teacher's organization, so they fired me. [It was] purely because the teachers walked out. It happened that a friend of mine was the Superintendent of Schools in Palm Beach County, so I just called him. He gave me a job and we moved to Boca Raton, [Florida, where we] lived very happily for twenty-four years. CJ: When was the teacher walk-out? RJ: Oh my goodness, what did you ask me that for? It was 1968. It was a very traumatic thing, [and] it was one of the most unselfish things that you have ever seen. The teachers were not asking for a thing for themselves; they were asking for better schools and better equipment. And Governor Kirk (Claude Kirk, Jr.) really gave us the business. It set education back a great deal in the state of Florida as far as I am concerned, for what they did to us. And they knew what they were doing when they did it. But I was very happy in Palm Beach County and I loved seventh grade science. I had the best time; I thoroughly enjoyed my working life. Fortunately, -23-