< Back | Home

Earl graduated from Bryan High School and later double-majored in biology and French. He also obtained a teaching certificate from Texas Southern University.

Twin City Mission provides a job for Earl answering phones. It is located in downtown Bryan and helps find jobs for people like Earl, who have encountered hardships that have placed them in their situation.

Hard work has always been a staple value in Earl's life, one that his mother instilled in him at a very young age.

The Battalion | Hunger and Hope

Luck gone astray

By: Lindsay Anderson

Posted: 2/8/08

Shy and self-determined, articulate and mild-mannered, pleasant and quiet, Earl likes to think out his words before he speaks. His gentle voice is unwilling to speak ill of anyone or anything, though he sometimes cracks jokes in his slow, Southern drawl.

Speaking carefully is important for Earl because Earl answers phones for a living. Rather, he answers phones for the homeless shelter he lives at. Earl, what he requested to be called, is a client at Bryan's Twin City Mission's homeless shelter, where he has lived for four years while trying to get his feet back on the ground.

Earl's life has taken him to the metropolises of Texas, but it started in Bryan, in January 1952. His mother was a domestic worker until his father died, while Earl was in the fourth grade, and then she began work as a nurse. "My mother was a strong lady and she took care of us until the end, until she passed," he said.

His mother provided him with a strong sense of values that he maintained throughout his life. "Don't steal," "Don't get in trouble," and "You have to work for what you get," were some of his mother's gems of wisdom. "Trouble's easy to get into, but hard to get out of."

Her strength to survive through challenges lives on in Earl. "If I weren't a strong person, I'd probably be crazy [by now]," he said. Relying on what his mother repeated to him - that things are never as bad as they seem - Earl resolved to see the sunny side of life: "Things will get better - always."

Growing up, Earl played piano for his family's church, and in middle school and high school, he played clarinet well enough to be first chair. Medals and honors followed his music career, but his ambition was in becoming a classroom teacher. "I was inspired by my junior high science teacher, Mr. Cunningham," he said.

His mother encouraged Earl to pursue his desire to teach and to continue his education. "She told me when I finished school, 'Get a job and go to college.'?"

Earl's clarinet talents earned him a music scholarship. He attended Huston-Tillotson University in Houston before graduating from Texas Southern in Houston in 1973 or 1974. He double-majored in biology and French, and obtained a teaching certificate.

Throughout college, Earl struggled to deal with his small physical build, which proved a hindrance to his teaching ambitions. "I never did want to teach after I got through [with college] because I was always small," he said. "In college, I weighed 118 [pounds]. When I finished, I weighed 123. I was secondary certified, and all the kids were always larger than me."

Earl's first job after graduation was in the medical field.

Working at Southern Methodist Hospital as an instrument technician, he furnished medical trays with instruments for Houston heart surgeon Clyde Debakey. Within time, Earl became the sterile supply supervisor and moved on to become the training and instruction coordinator at Memorial Southwest Hospital in Houston.

One day, a friend informed him of a job fair at Texas Southern that renewed his interest in teaching. Already possessing his certificate, he passed a teaching competency exam and transitioned into a job teaching seventh grade science in an inner-city middle school in Fort Worth. He instructed students there for 10 years and eventually taught French as an elective for four of those years.

Another inner-city middle school in Dallas offered him a slightly higher salary for a similar position, so he took the job. He taught there for six years before moving into a high school in the same district.

Under his supervision, students went on field trips, did hands-on learning and group learning. "They loved labs, for some reason," he said.

For two years teaching at the high school, Earl lived a modestly comfortable lifestyle. "When I taught school, I had everything a man would want because I was single and had no children," he said. "I took care of myself very well."

Then began a series of uncontrollable events.

In a coach's classroom next-door to Earl's, two students that he taught during their middle school years started brawling. The coach was absent from the room when the fight broke out, and the school's policy mandated that a faculty member intervene during a fight. "You must go over, if someone asks you to, or if they tell you a fight's going on," Earl said. "You must go over and try to stop it."

The feuding boyfriend and girlfriend were both larger than Earl. He does not remember what ignited the fight, but he stepped in to stop it. He tried to restrain the girl as the school principal restrained the boy. "I caught the girl and my boss caught the boy," he said. "Me and the girl fell on the floor, and I tore some ligaments in my knee."

A protracted knee injury, which took nearly three years to mend itself, began a period in Earl's life that unraveled the accomplishments of his career. Earl said he spent two to three years on workman's compensation waiting for his knee to heal before the district forced him into an early retirement in 2003.

Because most public school districts do not withdraw social security from its staff's monthly income, Earl relied on his teacher's retirement fund to pay his bills. He admitted that he did not properly spend his money during that time, but the inevitable result was that he burnt the only foundation supporting him. "If I had been hurt by a student pushing me down, then I would be getting a pension from [the school] probably on and on," he said. "But I lived off of my retirement."

Attempts to register for social security insurance, a federally-funded program designed to provide income to those with disabilities that inhibit working, took too long to meet Earl's financial needs. Along with his knee troubles, Earl has diabetes and malignant hypertension, which together cost a considerable sum to control.

When he experienced problems with his car, Earl had no options to cover the repairs. With his car gone, so too were his chances to find alternative sources of income.

Earl was reduced to asking extended family for assistance. He moved in with his widowed sister-in-law and briefly depended upon her support until she could no longer afford to help him. No other close family was alive for him to be shuffled to, so she recommended the Twin City Mission to Earl as a place to stay. "I don't like to ask [for things]," he said. "And so, I asked [the mission]."

Earl moved into the shelter and has lived in it for four years. Other clients' tenures in the mission extend as far back as 20 years.

He lives in a long-term dorm room that he said is like a little apartment on the second floor, separate from the overnight shelter on the first floor. He considers himself to be doing pretty well at the mission.

The mission gave him a job answering a phone in the night shelter. He said he works roughly 40 hours a week for a stipend, but is not on staff. The other phone worker and client at the shelter is another Bryanite who attended school with Earl for a year. The two sat in the same band class at Bryan I.S.D.'s Lamar sixth and seventh grade campus as children.

Because he and Earl are the only phone workers, each works 12-hour shifts, occasionally relieving each other for an hour. "[The job is] very busy, very stressful. One thing [is that] I like working, I like being busy. I'm kind of a workaholic," Earl said. "Keeping busy keeps me going, that's what drives me."

In his time alone, Earl said that he treats himself to meals out and movies at the theater, occasionally. He depends on extended family to give him rides to places such as the mall or Wal-Mart. At times, he visits with members of his family who live in Bryan.

Bashfully, he said that he does not have much of a social life anymore, which is OK because he has outgrown it. In college, Earl enjoyed attending clubs to dance and party. "Bryan never had a night life," he said. "College Station has one, but Bryan never had one too much."

Most of Earl's world revolves around the mission. "[The quality of downtown Bryan] has gone down," he said. "When I was young, it was booming down here and busy. But when I came back to Bryan, there was no more downtown. The mall took everything."

Available to Earl are Bryan's public library, the dollar store and the pharmacy within walking distance from the shelter. At the library, he reads poetry, though he likes any genre, author and time period. "I like love poems, black poetry -- anything poetry," he said.

With his time spent in the mission, Earl maintains the friendships he developed among the staff, clients and volunteers. "Things happen in your life," he said. "One day you're up, six months after that you might be down, and it could happen to anybody.

"My caseworkers and the program director, they're the main ones [who are my friends]. And they're not friends -- they're family. This is my family now. You meet people, and they give you a little advice, they talk to you. They're like family to me, now. They keep me going."

Part of this family involves Texas A&M students and community natives representing all walks of life, who volunteer at the mission. "We have a good turnout. People are very, very helpful," he said. "College students, Bryan families, College Station families. We even have some come from out of town as far as Hearne or Caldwell."

After Earl had established himself at the mission, he began receiving social security to help the financial burden of his diabetes, but not for his injury. "I tried and tried to get social security or disability, and I couldn't. It takes time -- it takes about three years," he said. "And after I got here, it came on, so I just think, 'Well, I'm here now, I might as well stay here.'"

However, Earl does not depend upon or expect the government to help him survive. Because of his experience trying to hound down social security insurance, he has reservations applying for other forms of government aid because he said it takes too long to secure assistance.

"Things go sour in life. So, just try to keep your head above water and do what you have to do to make it in life. Whatever it takes, but no stealing, no underhanded things. Do the right thing because it's right."

With such an attitude, it is not strange that Earl grounds himself during his most trying times with sheer force of will. "You just have to go on with life. Pick yourself up and try to go on," he said. "And I'm still trying to accomplish something different, to go on further."

Earl has a network of friends that try to support him emotionally. He perceives an unnecessary barrier between the haves and the have-nots in Bryan, but said that his close friends treat him the same.

"There are still some have and have-nots," he said. "They don't want to speak sometimes. I talk to them just like it's nothing, which it's not. [Becoming homeless] could happen to anybody. It could happen to them tomorrow, if they don't think right."

Support from his close friends can sometimes be backhanded and wounding: "[Some of my friends say,] 'Get away.' 'Do something better with yourself.' 'You're better than this.'

"It kind of hurts you sometimes. But [my situation is] not as bad as it seems. People think it's bad, but it's not."

If Earl could change anything about the choices he made, he would want to keep the job he had in Fort Worth before he had his accident in Dallas.

Earl said that if he could speak to himself five years ago, he would advise himself to be content with what he had. "[I'd tell myself], 'Be still,'" he said. "'Don't move around. Once you have your job, and it's comfortable for you, stay there.'

"I moved from Fort Worth to Dallas to make more money. It wasn't that much more. I could have stayed there in Fort Worth and still been content. I should have stayed there."

For the future, Earl plans to secure housing through the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, and move into his own apartment. He will look for substituting jobs with the hope of becoming a full-time teacher again.

What he misses the most from his past is teaching. "I dream about it: teaching again," he said. "Oh, I love kids. I love science. Love it. That's the main thing I miss."

Earl is open to the idea of returning to teach at inner-city schools, but is unaware of any significant changes in the teaching environment in the previous five years that may affect his desires.

With any luck, his slow, resonating tenor will soon do something other than answer phones for 12 hours at a time. Hopefully, his soft, soporific voice will be captivating and inspiring the science-minded students to pursue teaching for themselves.