Beverly Tucker Wikle

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Dear El Dorado High School grads of 1961: 50 years. What ought I transmit?

The summer after high school I served as Unit Leader in a Girl Scout camp near Perryville, Arkansas, an experience that introduced me to the bats and tarantulas of our state. Through May 1965, I pursued a B.A. in English at Ouachita (Wash-a-tah) Baptist University (OBU) in Arkadelphia, 85 miles from El Dorado, earning college money with summers of waitressing at our Holiday Inn restaurant. Summer ‘soap operas’ included the surprisingly dignified arrival of our first African American patron, exercising the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of that and other 1960s maelstroms, I suppose that each of us has memories in common, but about Jack Ruby and Lee Oz-wald and what really happened in 1963 at Dealey Plaza I have my own theory.

Icebreaker #1: The tragedy was providential. In lieu of a class message that won’t fit the memory book, I call your attention to the Messiah’s initiation of a whole new ballgame, as he tosses a ball into a large-minded country [KJV Isaiah 22:18] whose herd mentality has been idolizing ‘shepherds’ who idolize dreamlike research styles that strike out so much Major Information that we really are in that Paragraph’s valley of perplexity. The major prophets highly recommend exercising our freedom to know that the Lord is not owned by the theologian franchise, whose Chicken Little m.o.  bats such fouls as (strike 1) world’s end, (2) ‘Old’ Testament, and (3) a chop shop as to Who’s on first. (Few would think why we’re getting such movies as “Angels in the Outfield” and “Field of Dreams” and Michael Lewis’ Moneyball baseball bio [his Blind Side flyleaf verbatim explained that new information is used to outwit conventional wisdom].) / The El Dorado I knew was an unusual environment wherein, for instance, our family friend Glen Ruth--a cousin of Babe--would want me to defend the ball pitcher against denominational illegalities. Rather than the terroristic ‘worlds’ end’ propaganda, the Word from the Lord God who formed the earth assures us that He “made it to be established, created, inhabited” [rf KJV Isaiah 45:17-18]. The leagues of mystics have striven to compete with much of His down-to-earth Homebasing. / Another denominational strikeout is mislabeling the southpaw Testament into the wrong time zone. Most prophetable books by God are progressive and readable in the present tense. Evidence of seminary duplicity is their representatives’ by-passing of the odometer the Almighty dropped into KJV Isaiah 3:18-19: His arrival during our modern-day day of “round tires like the moon…and the mufflers” and the “changeable suits” [L22]. As to who the Messiah is, He tells us--pointblank and repeatedly throughout the Isaiah documentation, whose cheatreaders an American Christian population ought no longer tolerate. Speculation> Because Scripture-land isn’t NeverNeverland, wouldn’t stun me if Razorback U materializes the “shave with a razor” prophecy via Isaiah, son of Amoz; after all, the state’s GPS has Christ of the Oz-Arks and the city of Hope, Traveler survived Little Big Horn, and our class president’s at Canterbury Road.))

Returning to the memoir track, my OBU student teaching channeled me, once again, to the classroom of Margaret Hamilton then situated me as a fellow English teacher for three years (1965-68) at El Dorado High School’s new campus. As a (transitory) Stanford University experiment, each EHS class was compressed to three hours weekly, liberating two hours for each student to allocate, at will, to one subject matter or another. Flexible scheduling enabled me to tutor one-on-one and mentor my double pair of identical twins to stage a Comedy of Errors during the weekly gathering of the sophomores. Flex-time vanished when my teachathon in Dallas, Texas (1968-69), overloaded me with 150 Bryan Adams high schoolers--motivating my uptick to college level. My few Texas highlights include a summer study of Robert Browning (atop Baylor’s splendid Chapel of Clasped Hands with a sculptural replica of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett’s handshake) and a two-week tour of Puerto Rico, St Thomas and Antigua. By then, Monsanto in El Dorado had folded, and my chemist Dad and Uncle had relocated to Baton Rouge. Thus, I was housed  (‘69-’71) as I earned an MA (LSU Tigers) and formed a fondness for cajun cuisine and river road plantation settings such as Ashland, where Clark Gable trekked the swamps in “Band of Angels” and Clint Eastwood ingested poison mushrooms in “The Unforgiven”.

Dramatic tension of a personal sort occurred when 1971’s college teaching crossroad shrank to Huntsville, Texas, versus Huntsville, Alabama.

The latter features Monte Sano mountain and holds the Huntsville campus (UAH) of the state university (Crimson Tide), Redstone Arsenal, Space Camp, and Marshall Space Flight Center. Four years (‘71-75) at UAH and a refresher course for Arsenal soldiers climaxed whatever motivation I’d had for literary fossils (at the time I detected no ultimate purpose). Before I left the profession, early years in my new hometown presented firsttime adventures. I was snow-ski tutored by a downhill racer whose dad had arrived with Pennemunde German scientists to baseline the US space program (thus our Werhner Von Braun Civic Center). I was one of a sailing crew into the Bahamas--with still-vivid memories of snorkeling in Bertram’s Cove, leveraging our yawl off a sand bar, and trashing a concrete pier at Bimini. At age 29, I shared another trip with my new husband (wed 14 July 1973 to 21 July 2008: 35 years). Two years later, I was out of the classroom, embarked on renovating our bungalow in the historic district. My younger brother’s two daughters were soon joined by their cousin, one month before my 35th birthday of November 1978. As years passed, we trekked the typical PTA /-science project parenting path, inserted a Disney World trip, cycled annually on car or train holidays between the senior Wikles here in Huntsville, the senior Tuckers in Baton Rouge, and Lloyd’s family in Maryland. Perks included the Wikle cabin cruiser, our Alabama lakeside camping resort (lazing near Langston), and forays to D.C, (on the Wall: Mike Rasberry, El Dorado scout from Dad’s troop).

From a parental viewpoint, a blessing were our son’s RV trips to Gulf Shores (AL grandparents), then to the Rockies and Alaska (LA grandparents: mother Grace, though polio stricken at age 21, remained an active traveler with Dad) and then internationally (decades of brother Lloyd’s Lockheed Martin projects to England and Europe enabled a round robin of family sightseeing).

In the 20th year (mid-1981) after high school, I began two colorful years as Staff Writer in a group of individualists under a Training Contract to Redstone Arsenal, scripting classified lessons for nuclear weapons maintenance specialists. On the side, I also rewrote a businessman’s cryptic Japanese-English (Japlish) manual for a vibration meter he wished to market. The next nine years (Sept 1984+, age 41 to 50) landed me in a research-and-development (R&D) environment within Marshall Space Flight Center—via a USBI contract to upgrade the spray insulating and robotic water stripping of proprietary segments (fore & aft) of the solid rocket boosters. As a Senior Technical Writer,the meticulous documentation of real-time progressions from R&D workcells was a psychological fit. Of immense value was the kaleidoscope of papers, hand-in-hand with 21 technicians and engineers who lived and breathed specifications, procedural details, and evidentiary data to safeguard manned spaceflight at Kennedy Space Center. (Ultimately, I also became sensitized to subStandard cheatreaders in a High-Tec branch of research who, like “the smooth stones of the stream”   [Isaiah 57.6], skip a lot.) By November 1993, those formative nine years ended when a USBI rif transitioned a fraction of our United Technologies population to KSC. With former USBIers, I next joined a two-year (1994-96) entrepreneurial effort to develop a commercial thermal insulation. PyroShield folded, and economically I went into limbo.

With time on my hands, April 1995 (age 51 1/2), I accompanied brother Lloyd to England and Wales. The Chicago parents/grandparents of our mother Grace were newcomer Welsh, but her brothers’ Old Country visits to their dad Lewis’ hometown Bethesda had, heretofore, failed to identify living cousins. Inexplicably, tea in Grandad’s old townhouse prompted the resident lady’s introduction of Elfed, bilingual Bethesda historian – our missing link to Cousin Annie (circa 1930), his ‘enfant school’ teacher and, thus, our link to her surviving sons in South Wales. That serendipitous quest enabled mother Grace’s reunion with unknown cousins before her passing in 1997 March. (Dad’s ancestor search found Londoner Isaac A on the 1620 Mayflower from Plymouth to William Bradford colony, VA.) My 1995 walkabout in England also trekked literary touchstones: blind Milton’s Giles retreat where he dictated “Paradise Lost” during the London plague, Thomas Gray’s locale for “Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard” re unschooled geniuses, the Poets Corner, Warwick Castle.

Speaking of Warwick, I recall the 6th of June 1995 Faith and Values television broadcast by a Church and Steerman (so named) as they preached their belief that every female, “being a daughter of Eve,” is a pagan--including Jacob’s Rachel, mother of Joseph (interpreted they, she coveted father Laban’s clay idols). Then along came theologist Page (so named) to propagate faith in his Southern Baptist fundamentalist doctrine that trumpeted (1) female submission and, as I recall, (2) his use of the Bible without reliance on Christ’s viewpoint (!).

Well, Church, Steerman, Page, etcetera have another think coming. Such free speech is not free. In accordance with a fine Southern Baptist principle--not systematized but viable, I’ve exercised the honor code called autonomy of the believer. Now research independent, where “two roads converged in a wood” I took “the road less traveled and that has made all the difference” (gratis Frost). I thus found the Lord’s Breach Repair Specifications---His Standard for interpretation, reinforced by His curses wherever Justice is backward, Truth is fallen, and Equity cannot enter the libelous theology equation. Equity: equal genetic respect and superlative respect for God Incarnate and His Principles [L14 of Isaiah 59 all and 58].  // As for ”Eve”, I suggest that chivalric rebels adhere to KJV Genesis 5.2 (boy/girl twins and a Rorschach test) and deductively discover dogmatism’s dishonorable dastardly deed.

Sincerely yours,
Beverly Jane Tucker
16 September 2011

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