milk and look after cows (I piddled on an electric fence there once, but that's another story). It had a processing plant, where we learned how to pasteurize and bottle milk. That area of Northern New Mexico is apple country, and McCurdy had extensive orchards, wherefrom we picked, and which we minded. The girls made apple butter and processed dairy products for the dining hall. Everybody cleaned and mended: McCurdy didn't hire janitors and our one physical plant guy was also a math teacher.

McCurdy also had paid jobs. I think the rate was something like $.50 an hour, but that isn't so important as the fact that they would apply your earnings to your tuition. I didn't do this, but a lot of kids worked their way through high school that way, supporting themselves and building lives that otherwise would have remained beyond their reach. That was the genius of McCurdy: To turn lives around, to take kids on a fast track to the nearest dead end and make something out of them. Today, they couldn't operate that way, what with government regulation, unions and all. They were still there when I visited in 1996, but I doubt they're as effective as they used to be.

For all that, I'm still the product of a public education, and I did learn most of my math and just about all of my English from teachers like Madge Childre and Jim Lacouer at Albuquerque High School -- the one on Central, not the one out north onto which the roof collapsed once.

I joined the Air Force in 1959 and went to Syracuse University for a year to study Czech Language and history. The Air Force sent me to Europe: Several sites in Germany, and finally to Toul-Rosieres Air Force Base in France. I was home by the time DeGaulle kicked my fellow Americans out of that country.

With considerable help from my mother Agnes and a small