THE COLLEGE YEARS - 1956-1963

After graduating with the CV class of 1956 I attended Arkansas City Junior College (Juco). The first year of Juco, classmates Gordon Thompson, Maurice White and I shared an apartment over a garage a few blocks from the college. My second year my folks sold the farm and moved to Ark City and I stayed with them.
Wife Nancy (Hankins) (also class of 56), along with classmates Linda Archer and Elizabeth Robinson attended Colorado Woman’s College in Denver. The second year Elizabeth transferred to KU, Nancy got a job working for Bell Telephone in Wichita and Linda attended Colorado Woman’s College.
A week after graduating from Juco in 58, Nancy and I were married. I got a clerical job working for a retail brick company at $1.25 and hour and after 30 days got a 5-cent an hour raise. I thought this corporate world is great, sure beats farming. The master plan was Nancy was going to continue working, I was going to work part time and go to Wichita University full time.
When it was time to enroll for the fall semester, I came home one evening and Nancy said, “I went to the doctor today and Daddy we better talk”. When I was 13 or 14 years old, baling hay on a Kansas hot, humid, suffocating, sweaty day, I vowed that I wasn’t going to be a farmer. I was going to go to college and learn to do something else. Not to be deterred from this vow, thus started five years of night school while working full time.

With Marvin Cable, (Cable Chevrolet) and Vera Sheldon (office manager) attesting to my “good character”, I went to work for General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC) the auto financing division of General Motors. I had the “ highly respectable and stressful position” of being in charge of the mail and stock room. I picked up the mail each morning from the post office, opened, sorted and distributed it. In the afternoon I delivered the out going mail to the post office, but I had a company car I got to drive home, WOW.
In the 5+ years I worked for GMAC, I got “promoted” from being mail boy and did various other clerical jobs, however the greatest benefit was they had an educational program and which paid my college titution.
After five years and two daughters, I did get my BA degree, with an accounting major. Not desiring to sit behind a desk all day, I interviewed at Cessna Aircraft Company in Wichita. The job was for someone with an accounting background to travel the US and assist Cessna Dealers with accounting and management problems. As a youth I had always thought by being a truck driver one could travel and see our great country, so this job sounded great to me and I would not be a “desk job.”
On my second interview I was offered the position. Upon my acceptance, the gentleman that had offered me the job said, “By the way, since you will be traveling, we will teach you to fly our company airplanes, do you like to fly”?
Being a poor Kansas farm boy, I had never had aspirations of being a pilot and had never been in an airplane, but I responded, “ I love flying”. Thus started the opportunity to visit every state in the US as well as Canada and Mexico. The theory for the job was by assisting and hopefully helping the Dealers to be better managers, they would be more profitable and buy more airplanes. I can’t say in reality that this theory was ever proven to be valid. In the nine years I worked for Cessna, it did however give me the opportunity to work in a growing and exciting industry. It provided me the best education and training possible in being a Cessna Dealer for the next 24 years in Monterey, California. A book could be written on the experiences of those years.