Well, it all started on a hot sweltering summer afternoon when I was in the 7th grade and attending North Cumberland Elementary school in Crossville, TN. Up until that point I had made straight F's throughout my scholastic career and in those days they just passed you on to the next grade no matter what, so why try?
However. there was one particular teacher named Mrs. Bilbrey, a substitute teacher who, to me at the time, was the oldest person I had ever seen. She had white hair and when she walked, because of bad hips, she waddled down the hall like a duck.
Mrs. Bilbrey was an old school school-teacher whom had been teaching for over 30 years and had taught at the high school that my mother attended when she was young. She was accustomed to teaching respectful children that had been brought up to respect their elders. My generation was apparently when many parents began letting their children go wild without any proper discipline or respect.
My parents, thankfully, instilled within me and my siblings proper respect for our elders and an inherent christian desire to do good.
My first memory of Mrs. Bilbrey was when she came to substitute for a teacher that had to take the day off, I don't remember which one or for what reason. But from the moment she entered the room to the end of the class she was disrespected, heckled, and mocked for the entire class.
They did this to get a rise out of her. She was quick to temper and her face would get red as a beat as she tried to maintain order in the a classroom filled with the most unruly and disrespectful children I had ever seen. In the beginning, I admit, for the first few minutes I laughed when the other kids got a rise out of her. But after a while I began to feel uneasy at felt sorry for her when I realized that she was just trying to teach and what the other kids in the class was doing was disrespectful and wrong.
From then on, when the students found out that Mrs. Bilbrey was substituting they would excitedly let everyone know else know that day was going to be a day of poking fun, at her expense.
This went on several times and each time I was not excited when I heard she was going to be teaching because I knew what was going to happen. One day in particular, an especially bad day for her, the class was completely out of control and they had riled her to the point of screaming, a popular and particularly disrespectful girl chewed up a huge full mouth spit wad and threw it into Mrs. Bilbrey face.
This ultimate act of disrespect did not have the intended effect and instead of exploding into a fit of rage, Mrs. Bilbrey broke down in tears and left the room. The room the fell completely silent and you could hear a pin drop and all of the other kids looked at Christie like they couldn't believe what she had done. I was completely appalled and for the first time I spoke up and asked her what was wrong with her, what was wrong with the rest of the class? Didn't their parents teach them better than that? Being the unruly heathens they were, they then turned on me and I became even more unpoplular in school, if that was even possible.
But, that day I felt incredibly bad for Mrs. Bilbrey so I wrote her a heart felt letter telling her how horrid I thought the rest of the students had been treating her and that I wish they would just leave her along and respect her and let her teach. I handed it to her in the hallway as I was going for my next class, she was still crying.
The rest of the school year went basically the same with Christie being the taunting ring leader. Mrs. Bilbrey still showed up knowing what to expect. In the brief moments when she was allowed to teach, she was awesome!
That summer, during summer vacation, on a particularly hot summer afternoon there was an unexpected knock at my families farmhouse door. Even more unexpectedly, it was Mrs. Bilbrey!!
Mrs. Bilbrey apparently saw something in me that no other teachers. She had come to my house to deliver a brand new complete set of World Book Encyclopedias. FOR ME!! I was flabbergasted as was the rest of my family.
At first I didn't even know what to do with them. But I deduced that the best way would be to start with volume A and from that day on every time I wanted to know more about a subject, I looked it up in my encyclopedias.
Because of this, I found within my self an awakened insatiable curiosity to learn about everything possible. From A to Z and everything in between and by the beginning of the next school year I had completely scoured the entire set of encyclopedias. Every time Mrs. Bilbrey taught a class and she was able to ask a question for the class to answer, my hand went up every time with the correct answer and she would grin from ear to ear with look of complete satisfaction. To this day, even though Mrs. Bilbrey is long gone, I can still see that smile and the feel the immense satisfaction of knowing the correct answer and the even better feeling of knowing that if I don't know the answer, I can always look it up!
Since that time, Thanks to Mrs. Bilbrey, I have always been fascinated with the entire world, especially the electronic and microscopic world.
At age 17, I think it was in 1988 or 1989, on a particularly hot summer afternoon my family and I were living in a farm hand's trailer because that spring a hail storm had destroyed the roof and allowed rain to enter the electrical service box. As a result our family house was destroyed by fire.
Then, as before, there was an unexpected knock at the door. This time it was a travelling recruiter for R.E.T.S. Electronics Institute in Louisville Kentucky. I don't remember the recruiters last name but his first name I remember because his name was Paul, same as mine.
RETS Electronics, was a school which taught a two year degreed course that covered Electronics Theory all the way up to Industrial Robotics and had at that time started teaching about Microprocessors, including the new line of 8086, and more excitedly the X286 CPU!!
In retrospect, to say that I enjoyed my time at RETS is an understatement. I learned an incredible amount about how the electronics world functioned. I excelled at this school and maintained a 100% average. But, actually and truthfully, I had already studied most of the material covered from my World Book Encyclopedia Set by Mrs. Bilbrey.
Then In 1997, during a particularly hot summer, I was attending Roane State Community College in Harriman TN in an attempt to earn my A.S. Degree in Computer Science.
That summer I decided to take my Biology electives, all three. BIO,II & II. My counselors recommended not taking all three because the summer classes covered the same amount of material normally covered in three months, all crammed into one month.
Upon first using a microscope in the lab to peer at the opening and closing of the stomata of an plant leaf and seeing for my self first hand the nucleus of a cell and the DNA strands at the center of it, and closely inspecting algae for the first time, to say I was enthralled is an understatement!!
I was so engrossed and enthralled that I aced my entire three biology electives with a 100% grade for all three classes.
I obtained my Associate Of Science in Computer Science from Roane State Community College and I proudly walked out onto the graduation floor as the first college graduate on either side of my family.
But, actually and truthfully, I had studied almost everything covered in my biology class, and most everything else covered, in my two years at Roane State Community College inside my World Book Encyclopedia set given to by Mrs. Bilbrey!
So thanks Mrs. Bilbrey!!
..and thanks mom and dad for teaching me respect, honor and proper christian values.
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