Oh, I didn't even think of that. That year they made me stay on to finish
up the work that we were doing. Now that was hard. As long as we were in
the war you didn't think about anything else. You knew. But then I got
to yearning to come back to teaching. I wanted to come back to my high
school students. I was offered work in colleges but I had promised Dr.
Garinger I would come back to Central, and I could hardly wait to get
there. In '46, that was the fall of '46, but you know what else was
happening then? The veterans were coming back, and they needed a place
for them to use their GI Bill. They wanted to go to college, and a lot
of these were people who were first generation college students. So I
came back. I think I got out in August, and I started work in September.
I hadn't enough time to get home and get back here. As I say, the North
Carolina College Conference working with Chapel Hill, with the Director
of Extension, which was located in Chapel Hill, decided that they would
have to open some centers to take care of these veterans. Dr. Garinger
worked to get one of them here in Charlotte, and it was in the same
building that I was teaching in at that time, over at Central High
School. And so, when I reported to my duty he said, "We want you to
teach the engineering mathematics for the [inaudible]
college, where the students [inaudible]. We want you to
test them in college, testing the high school, teaching a full load, and
I had a homeroom, too, a senior homeroom, which means you had to be sure
they had everything so
Page 26 they could graduate that
coming June. Seven hours a week in the college plus the testing, and it
was engineering math. And I knew those men would be men, after they
fought in the war, they were men. I knew they would be, you know, going
to other engineering schools. In the directory of extension we had N. C.
State, and Chapel Hill, and Woman's College which was at Greensboro. So
I started immediately working with the people at N. C. State, and I
finally asked them—Dr. Fisher I believe was head of the math
department—I said, "You give tests every week." It was a uniform test on
the campus at N. C. State, and they gave it on Thursday. And I said,
"Would you let my students take the same test?" I used the same outline.
I used the same books, because I wanted them to be able to transfer.
Most of them would be going to N. C. State. So they did. Every Thursday
those tests would come in, and I said that they were as much a test of
the teacher as they were of the students because if I hadn't stayed on
target, you know, they wouldn't have done well. I graded those two hour
quizzes myself, and, you know, it was just great. I know where some of
those students [inaudible] too.