Terry L. Jones
"It was as if a rainbow had pierced the storm clouds."
Have you ever looked back on your life and realized how events that were terribly disappointing at the time turned out to be God’s blessing in disguise? I have, and two of the most important ones occurred within months of one another.
Carol and I had only been married a short time when I began my doctoral studies in history at Texas A&M. Neither of us foresaw just how difficult our time there would be.
My teaching assistantship only paid a few hundred dollars a month, and Carol had to work at a low paying university job. I also had to pay full tuition costs, so we struggled constantly to keep afloat, and then our daughter, Laura, was born.
To make ends meet, we were forced to move into a roach-infested married student housing apartment, and I took part-time jobs with the archaeology department and a taxidermist. The former required a good bit of travel, which left Carol to work and care for Laura alone.
Then my father called.
Daddy and my brother, Larry, were working on the Alaska pipeline, and Pop said that a job was coming open which I could have if I was interested.
It was like a rainbow had pierced the storm clouds. The salary was more than four times what Carol and I made together. Not only could Carol and Laura move to Alexandria, where she could get a job teaching and be near her parents, we could also save a lot of money and be able to buy a house when I came home.
And the timing was perfect because I had passed my course work and only had to complete my dissertation to get my degree. I immediately went to Dr. Larry Hill, the department head, and resigned my assistantship.
Then Pop called back and said the company had decided not to fill the position; I was not going to Alaska after all. The next day, I humbly asked Dr. Hill if I could have my job back and he graciously agreed.
It was a crushing blow, but in hindsight I realize that it actually was for the best.
The main reason people never finish their doctorate is because they prematurely leave the university to take a job, thinking they will complete their dissertation while working. Life tends to get in the way, however, and it almost never works out.
If I had gone to Alaska, I would not have been able to work on my dissertation for several years. When the job was over, I would have moved back to Alexandria, which lacked the research library I would have needed to complete it. In the end, the time limit for finishing the dissertation would have run out and I would have been left in limbo. Without a Ph.D. I could not teach at a university, and I would have been overqualified to teach high school.
So, we stayed in College Station and struggled on.
A few months later, Dr. Hill called me into his office to tell me that Temple, Texas, was going to receive a grant to publish a history of the city. They needed someone to direct the grant and to research and write the book and were looking for an advanced graduate student who might be interested. He had recommended me.
I recognized the opportunity immediately. The pay equaled what Carol and I made together, and she could possibly find a teaching job there. It would give us a much-needed change of scenery, and, most importantly, Dr. Hill said that if I did a good job with the book, the history department would accept it as my dissertation and I would receive my doctorate.
I talked it over with Carol and the next day told Dr. Hill that I would love to have the position. A few weeks later, however, he called me into his office and told me that the grant had fallen through. It was the second big disappointment in just a few months.
I now realize that we dodged another big bullet. A dissertation defines the historian’s field of expertise. If my dissertation had been a history of Temple, Texas, I would have been identified as a Texas historian, and the only place to get a job as a Texas historian is, well, Texas. I was very indebted to Texas A&M, but Carol and I both longed to move back to Louisiana.
Instead, I chose to write about Louisiana soldiers in the Civil War, a topic I was really interested in. My dissertation, Lee’s Tigers: The Louisiana Infantry in the Army of Northern Virginia, was published by LSU Press in 1987, and the History Book Club offered it as a monthly selection. Lee’s Tigers also won the Gen. L. Kemper Williams Award for the being best book on Louisiana history that year, and it has remained in print ever since. I have written nine additional books, but Lee’s Tigers is what made my career. It never would have happened if that job in Temple, Texas, had panned out.
Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. For an autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, send $25 to Terry L. Jones, P.O Box 1581, West Monroe, LA 71294.
