Following his departure from Ionia, Dad contemplated working for the Iowa State Highway Commission and went so far as reviewing a contract—not because he wanted to leave teaching, but because his salary had been less than $2,500 a year and he was planning on a big family. In the end, though, he decided to stay with his chosen profession. He loved teaching, being with students, feeling like he prepared young people for the world, and everything else that goes with the job. As a compromise, he moved to a larger community (roughly 3000 people) with a larger school (about 50 or 60 students per grade) for a larger salary (just slightly over $3,000). 

The community was Belle Plaine, Iowa, and there my father began teaching junior high social studies and drivers education in 1953 and continued through 1981. Once, in the late 1960s, he applied for and was offered a job with the nearby Cedar Rapids school system. Despite the lure of a larger salary, Dad chose to decline the offer and stay with the smaller Belle Plaine Community Schools. He never regretted the decision. In fact, as the years passed, he became a legend—a beloved legend—in the small town. 

   When my father came back to Iowa after the war, he did not resume his old wandering lifestyle. Instead, he became a 28-year-old college freshman taking advantage of the GI Bill. He didn’t ponder long what his career would be. He once told me that after surviving WWII every day he lived was a gift, and I know that he wanted to make those gifts to count for all his friends who did not return. He also wanted a good life and he wanted to make a difference in the world: teaching.
   In 1950, freshly graduated from Iowa State Teachers College, Dad hired on at his first school in Ionia, Iowa. It was an auspicious and exciting start, even though the town’s population hovered somewhere in the vicinity of 250 with only seven or eight students per grade, three secondary teachers, and no indoor restrooms (although there was a sink for washing hands). The school was small enough that Dad became an educator-of-all-trades: he taught sociology, economics, world history, and American history; coached girls softball; and served as principal. During the years he taught in Ionia, he became friends with people in town, with the students, and when he left, he took one of the residents (my mother) with him.

    For over thirty years, my father called the classroom home, or at least his home away from home. He rose cheerfully each morning of those thirty-plus years, ready and willing to face the challenge of teaching junior high social studies and drivers education, believing the first developed conscientious voters and the second safe drivers. In all his years of teaching, across four decades that saw far-reaching changes in society and in education, he never lost that belief or that commitment to the job.
    Ironically though, Dad had not set out to be a teacher. On the contrary, as a young man the only kind of education he was interested in was learning how to make enough money to buy and keep a Harley-Davidson and still have plenty of time to enjoy riding it. And because he was a farm kid who attended a one-room rural school, was raised on homegrown food, went to silent movies once a week, and entered adolescence at the start of the Great Depression, he was accustomed to living with few luxuries. So, he spent the years after his 1935 high school graduation working in gas stations, working occasionally on farms, doing a brief stint with the CCC, and roaming the countryside (and a few unsuspecting towns) with his cycle club, The Knight Crawlers. Till the end of the 1930s, he maintained this itinerant lifestyle, not planning for the future or looking much past his life in the moment. 
    Then came the second World War. Soon after the Invasion of Poland, Dad joined the Iowa National Guard—now thinking about the future and what was to come.  As part of the Red Bull 34th Division, he was among the first troops sent to Europe and later to Africa and finally back to Europe. Four years would pass before my father returned to the States. During those years, he spent over 500 days in combat, including the Battles of Hill 609, Kasserine Pass, Anzio, and Monte Cassino. The years he spent witnessing horrors and losing friends and comrades on a daily basis shaped his outlook, his actions, everything he thought and did for the remainder of his life.