June 1997

(Gary with Jack and Petey and teaching pottery in the required TIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
As mentioned below, June of 87 saw me graduating from college. June of 97 saw me retiring from teaching high school (snort, guffaw....) and becoming a full-time potter. June of 97 was pretty darn pivotal, as you might imagine, going off the grid and becoming a potter full-time.
So, Maude and I were teaching at Cush!ng Academy in Massachusetts, one of those expensive boarding schools, and I was the yearbook advisor (snort, guffaw) which is why there are such nice pics of me and my favorite students throughout the book. Anyway, going back to 87 and continuing the story, I graduated from college and after a year of minumum wage pre-school teaching got a research assistanship in Chicago for a masters in special ed. I knew only one thing about teaching special ed: the papers were full of job listings, whereas nobody seemed to be hiring potters to do anything.
So, off to Chicago, and I did my two years, and got a masters in 90, although I didn't learn a thing and didn't know how to teach anybody anything. The best part of my masters at that terrible university, aside from the fact that it was free and gave me a salary, was that there was an OPEN POTTERY STUDIO, run by Maude. Later, we started palling around, and well, been married almost 15 years.
So, in 1990 I started teaching blind children in Chicago, and at least if nobody learned anything from me, I was nice, people liked me, and nobody got hurt. I went back to grad school after 3 years teaching blind children nothing, and studied to become a reading specialist at a different university. I learned a great deal in that program, and loved it, and after a year of courses and with the help of a head hunter, a school in Massachusetts needed us to teach reading and writing skills, and both of us to also teach art, so off we went. We taught at Cush!ng for 3 years, but I was itching to make and sell pots full-time, so we retired and now it has been ten years! Pretty much, if I make it I sell it which is fortunate, and I have a mellow time of it, and life is good.
Ironically, although the high school where we taught never gave me an honorary high school diploma (still havn't finished 11th grade...) the speaker at graduation on our last day was the former preseident of Bennington College who had become chancellor of University of North Carolina. He gave the SAME speech he gave to my graduation class of college in 87.....................