Chapter 6: the end of career and marriage
“Failing is not the issue; it’s the failing to try.”
Selby, 2009, recalling her father’s values
John filed his retirement papers at Eglin AFB in Florida in 1970. He and Mary Esther had to decide where they would settle down as civilians.
His father had died in1956, Mimmy was running her Georgia farm at age 76, and his sister Anne was married and living in South Carolina. Mary Esther wanted to move back to Oklahoma to be near her parents and John finally decided that such a move might help repair the strained relationship between the two of them. It also could benefit the children to be near their maternal grandparents. At this time, Johnny was 16; Selby, 15; Bruce, 11; and Sarah, 6.
According to Selby, her dad had sought counseling to help him through this dark period and had listened to a suggestion that he become a teacher. That seemed to be a natural progression from his teaching of pilots and students in engineering classes at the Air Force Academy. He was only 47 years old and he knew he had to be working at something. So, back in Norman, John once again was sitting in classes to gain new credentials for a shift into the civilian workforce.
For someone working to reduce feelings of stress, John’s having to adjust to the teacher training program in the school of education proved to be an especially trying experience. (He would say later this had a great deal to do with his decision to write better math books.) The standard courses John had to take to earn his teaching credentials were, frankly, what he called, “bullshit.”
In his first class, “This man told us how we were supposed to teach children how to think.” John threw back his head and roared with laughter because he thought the instructor was making a joke. “God gives children the ability to think. Society does not give children that natural ability,” thought John. To him, his job was to teach children history, science, philosophy, mathematics—and teaching them things to use in their thinking. “This man honestly believed because he could work sixth grade math problems three different ways, he could think better than a sixth grader. He was maybe 40 years old while the sixth grader was only 12 years old. The sixth grader probably could think rings around this man.”
John said these would be the poorest taught courses he had ever taken in his life. The teacher didn’t have a curriculum; there was no fixed amount of knowledge to teach the students. “Then you’d take another course and talk about different ‘stuff,’” he said. “One time they had five or six teenagers from Midwest City come in and talk about their sex life in group sessions and this was supposed to be wildly informative,” John scoffed.
Actually, he was horrified by those classes, said Selby, who, like Johnny and Bruce, became a medical doctor. Sarah later earned a degree in pharmacy. “It was not any different than the first grade teacher giving him the bow and arrow. The teachers said whatever they thought they should,” Selby said. Her dad’s comments about the instructors were as follows: “They don’t know anything; they’re teaching nothing; the courses are irrelevant to life.” He said the teachers came out of there and they didn’t know anything. They didn’t know history, they didn’t know science, and they didn’t know math. “They’ve never made any application of knowledge to real life—like a pilot or a physician or anyone who has to take what they’ve learned and actually worked with it. Therefore, how can they teach?”
John would later tell Selby that he hated educators but he loved teachers. He felt sorry for the ones who didn’t know any better but said, “Wouldn’t it be great to get all the bright-eyed teachers and start your own school?” She said he always called them the “bright-eyed ones.” These were the teachers who got a degree in education but inherently understood the value of knowledge and how to convey it to the kids. “They just had clarity. They had intellectual clarity,” he would say.
With his decreasing value for those teaching in the school of education, it was not surprising that John decided not to call Tom Smith, the chairman of the department of education and his advisor, “Dr. Smith”—or anyone else with a doctorate degree in education. “There are people at the university who are true scholars, but I have yet to meet anyone with a doctorate in education who is a true scholar—except one. I know one.”
As John suffered through those education courses in order to receive his teaching credentials, he began to realize that Mary Esther’s “need bucket” had holes in it that could not be filled—especially by him. Their married existence continued, however, as he left OU’s teacher training program and began teaching mathematics part-time at Oscar Rose Community College in nearby Midwest City in 1971. Mary Esther had begun working at OU as a librarian. After 27 years of marriage, she filed for divorce in 1977.
John and Mary Esther had such different expectations from marriage that the gap had finally widened too far to be closed. Their interests had been totally opposite of each other’s from the start. Mary Esther loved to entertain, was socially gracious with others, and was not good in and thus did not enjoy athletically-based activities. The only “C” grade she made in college was in golf, which she needed for her physical education credit. John, on the other hand, was a get-up-and-go person. He never sat still. Constantly in motion, he never seemed to think of her quieter needs.
“I think she thought he was her knight in shining armor to rescue her from a small town and he thought she was just going to come along for the ride of adventuring though life together,” said Selby. “He was 27 years old and she was 20. He was good-looking, exciting, and a pilot.” Mary Esther learned later she didn’t appreciate his needs and he learned, equally, that he hadn’t appreciated hers.
There was that instance with a red dress, for example. When they were stationed at Eglin AFB in the 1950’s, there was a red dress in a window at a dress shop in Ft. Walton Beach that Mary Esther wanted for Christmas. He didn’t get it for her and later said, “Can you imagine a red dress making you happy?” Instead, he was wondering, “Why doesn’t she want to go water skiing?” After the divorce, he said to his children, “I never took your mom to lunch. I should have taken her once a week; and I didn’t give your mom any money; we didn’t have any money, but I still should have given her $50 a month to do whatever she wanted to with it.”
Even with the struggles between them, their value systems were the same in terms of how they were raised as children, according to Selby. “They never, in spite of all their difficulties, were in disagreement over us. He always backed her up and if we didn’t jump at what she asked us to do, he was on us,” Selby said. “But the gap increased between them through the years. I don’t think it helped that we weren’t involved in a strong evangelical church—which might have brought them together to be more like-minded—and,” she added, “we moved a lot.”
While John might be chastised for not being more aware of Mary Esther’s emotional needs, he must be credited with being keenly aware of her potential future needs in case he weren’t in the picture. He had seen military widows left with little financial security and no education to support themselves and their children. In fact, this situation made John angry toward men of his generation, said Selby. That women should be left with no resources for emotional and financial independence was unacceptable to her father. So while he was earning his master’s degree at OU, he had insisted that Mary Esther return to college and finish her bachelor’s degree.
Mary Esther cried because she thought he was embarrassed that she didn’t have a college degree. He was not embarrassed at all, said Selby. Her dad was concerned for her mother’s long-term sake. Even though she had three children at home, ages 6 and under at the time, Mary Esther was graduated Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) with a degree in history. Later, when John was in Vietnam, she earned a master’s degree in library science from OU and ended up with a career at that university. “To my dad’s credit, his push for her to finish college changed my mom’s life,” Selby said. Her mother had a career that she truly enjoyed and was active with PBK. John always told Selby, “Your mom is so smart and could have done anything she wanted if she had just been encouraged to pursue it.”
After the divorce papers were filed, John moved out of their home, which they had built in Norman. Johnny, who was in his first year of medical school, stayed with him during that time. Mary Esther later moved to a different house and John returned to the home, which he lived in until his death in 1996.
“I remember Mom had taken half the furniture and my girlfriends came over so we could pull all the furniture together and have a place for people to sit together in one room,” said Selby. When John walked in, he started crying and said, “She left everything she loved.” Much of that furniture, however, was from his side of the family that Mimmy had given them.
John had begun writing his first mathematics textbook in 1976, the year before the divorce. As Selby looked back, thinking if the marriage had been different, she said her mother could have been his best advocate and that she missed the opportunity. He fulfilled his financial responsibilities, and even more, with child support for Sarah, who was their only child under 18, and the alimony as required. But when the time came that he could stop the alimony payments, he continued to give them to Mary Esther. “And when he started making more money from his publishing company, he increased the alimony to equal the annual gift tax allowed,” said Selby.
When Mary Esther was diagnosed with a progressive neurodegenerative disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease, John paid for all of her needs. She had to have house help, an electric wheel chair, a van for the wheelchair, among other things. She died in 1994.
He never stopped loving Mary Esther and he was terribly sad they didn’t make it, says Selby. To him, it was a big loss. Typically, however, he was realistic about it. He didn’t think of it as a failure. “Failing is not the issue—it’s the failing to try,” he would say about any situation. She knew that her father realized later he didn’t know how to love her mother and he didn’t do the things he should have done. “He would purposefully tell us what he didn’t do well so we wouldn’t make those same mistakes,” she said. “He was just so true to himself.”
Chapter Six - John Saxon’s Story read by Niki Hayes and Jenny Hatch #JohnSaxonsStory