“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler ...”
Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is probably the most often quoted American poem, because it deals with choosing one thing over another, something we all have to do often. Sometime it is a minor decision, such as which outfit to wear or what city to move to. But sometimes the choice will have a major effect on one’s life.
One of those life-changing decisions came to me in 1956, when I was in my 30s, teaching English in a high school in the little town on the Columbia River, Rainier, Ore.
I hadn’t always planned to be a high school English teacher. When I enrolled in the University of South Dakota on the GI Bill, I had in mind a career in print journalism. But as I neared diploma time, jobs in teaching were much easier to get than in newspaper work, and I always chose the easiest way.
After six years on my first teaching job in Madison, S.D., a town about the size of Chehalis, I felt entrenched as a teacher. When the offer came to teach in that little hilly Oregon town that was kept from slipping into the Columbia only because it was bound to the hill by wild blackberry vines, my pregnant wife and I put everything we had into our first car and headed west.
Following a year of explaining the ins and outs of the English language to the Tom Sawyers, Huckleberry Finns and Becky Sharps of that river town, there came my fork in the road and I was forced to make a life-changing decision. Those “two roads that diverged in a yellow wood” came in the form of a telegram.
It was from Al Neuharth, my old college friend for whom I had written columns in two newspapers of which he was editor. Al, who was to become the journalism dynamo of the 20th century, was in the early stages of his ascent. I remember the words even today. It said:
“I am now editor of the Miami Herald. If you are bastard enough to quit your teaching job in the middle of the year, I’ll put you on as a feature writer at the Herald.”
It was a brow-furrowing time for me: Should I be that bastard and go back to my first choice, becoming an almost sure success as long as I was hanging on to my buddy’s coattails? Should I go for the more glamorous, higher paying job or should I remain in relative obscurity in a job in which I had spent eight years proving to myself I could do?
Then there was the personal angle. Carolyn and I had just brought our newborn baby home from the hospital and took her and her diapers all the way across the continent, far away from her potential baby-sitting aunts seemed bad planning. Besides, my experience in Los Angeles before and during World War II had soured me on city living and city traffic.
And so I took the easy way again, being a non-bastard, but not because of strong ethical concerns.
After another year in Rainier, I moved to Centralia High School, and many of you know the history from then until now. Later in the poem Frost says, “I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages since.” Well, 55 years in the Twin Cities hardly constitute “ages and ages,” and any sigh you might hear is one of sweet remembrance, not regret.
I made the right decision about the job change. I LIKE the life I have lived here.
And incidentally, those Toms and Hucks and Beckys I taught in the little river town turned out OK. Two of them, now in their 70s, stopped to see me on the way home from a reunion in Rainier of the high school class of 1957. They reported that one of them owned a large string of pharmacies throughout the Northwest; another became a general in the U.S. Army. One even became a college English teacher with a doctorate and traveled to Russia frequently.
And I have the best of two worlds — education and the newspaper.
•••
Gordon Aadland, Centralia, was a longtime Centralia College faculty member and publicist.
