It seems like yesterday that I was going on a train from Glendale, California to Santa Fe, New Mexico in around October of 1965. I said goodbye to my girlfriend in Glendale who came to see me off for the school year. Going on this trip in the end wasn't good for my girlfriend and I in the long haul. She was my girlfriend from Church and I had known her since I was 6 years old and always believed she and I would marry. I think she felt like this too. But, going away to this private school sort of changed all this in various ways. Was this good or bad? Do any of us ever really know?
So, on the train which was my first long time away from home at age 17. I had been to Yosemite National Park with a friend and had discovered God there for 2 weeks when I was 15 while his mother and sister got Ptomaine poisoning from spoiled Tuna Fish Sandwiches in the heat of Driving there from Glendale then and so we boys just took off at age 15 to explore Yosemite while the Air Force Coreman (medic) took care of his mother and sister who were sleeping in the back of their station wagon like a bed. So, they were sick all the time we were there but recovered enough to drive us back to Glendale Eventually.
So, this was only my 2nd big foray away from home at 17 for the school year. I met a soldier from Viet Nam who was maybe a year older than I. His life had been ruined by Viet Nam and looking back now he was very PTSD. I didn't know about things like this then because I was only 17 but I knew his life had been destroyed by the Viet Nam War. The look in his eyes said it all and what he had seen was real horror!
I realized then I didn't want to get drafted and sent to Viet Nam. Even my best friend in High School went to Glendale College the next year to get his Jet engine Certification (as a jet engine mechanic) so he could repair B-52's and Fighter jet engines and wound up serving in Thailand repairing and updating all these jet engines of various planes.
Then when I arrived in Santa Fe the lady who ran the dorms there treated me as a spoiled Los Angeles Californian. She had been in an internment Camp during world war II in Belgium where she met her husband who was a doctor developing limb prosthetics at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He came home from there on weekends because it was too far to drive there and back every day.
The lady from Belgium confronted me because she had had trouble with 17 year old boys before and wanted to weed me out if I was going to be an authority problem. I knew what she was trying to do and since I wanted to stay there I saw her sort of as my drill Sergeant in a new environment and so we got along fine after he initial confrontation of me in a very European way. She was tough as nails after surviving seeing people around her starving to death (literally) in a concentration camp during world war II.
They had a really nice home on the hill next to the "I AM" School then in Santa Fe, new Mexico which is at 7000 feet elevation approximately. So, it could snow and get really cold there during the winter. So, night time temperature of 16 down to zero weren't unusual there while I attended the "I AM" School which was affiliated with my Church in Los Angeles, California that my parents were in charge of from 1954 until 1960 when I was 12 years old.
The biggest change for me that year was living at 7000 feet in the mountains with the cold and the snow. The other nice thing about this was I was the biggest and strongest person in the school so no one messed with me at all. I didn't have to defend myself at all unless it was intellectually with teachers in school or people of my type of church there.
By the time I returned back to Glendale, California I realized what wonderful people my parents were and so we became much closer after this with my 9 months away from home there.
I returned home on the train at Christmas time for two weeks and kept guard over a 16 year old girl from the Los Angeles area too. Her name was Patty and she had become infatuated with me because she had gone into seizures from an ulcer at the dorms and I was the only one big enough and strong enough to carry her to the car to be driven to the hospital in Santa Fe. So, she decided she was in love with me which is why this wasn't necessarily good for my girlfriend and I back in Los Angeles needless to say. Because she was really attractive too and I was a tall handsome 17 year old boy. What can I say?
So, this year changed my life in many ways being away from home in California. The first thing it did was to take me out of the more Los Angeles way of thinking from public schools which was sort of anti-College into a place where I could see myself actually getting a college degree in my life.
Going to college wasn't as common then as now and this changed a lot during the Viet Nam War from Boys getting Bachelor's degrees and master's degrees and PHds in order to not die in Viet Nam.
Boys that got drafted and went to Viet Nam often didn't know anything about anything and were dead within 2 weeks of arriving there.
So, unless you were smart enough to protect yourself by actually getting a student deferment often you were dead within a few weeks of turning 18 then if you were a body in the U.S. then.
It was sort of College or Death. That was your choice in those days. or an even worse fate was PTSD and wandering the streets the rest of your life completely dysfunctional. There are still some people my age wandering the streets since the 1970s now my age by the way.
So, going to the "I AM " school saved my life in many different ways.
By God's Grace
