Only two hours north of Atlanta heading south on I-85, I couldn’t resist the lure of visiting Tri-County TEC, five miles west of the Interstate. I had taught psychology there just over a year after finishing my Master’s degree at West Georgia College. In between finishing at West Georgia in March 1973 and starting at Tri-County in August 1974, I had acted in the Legend of Daniel Boone in Harrodsburg, KY, worked as a journeyman actor at Kelly’s Seed and Feed Theater in Atlanta, and Program Directed a Boy Scout camp at the Buckskin Scout Reservation in Marlinton, West Virginia. If it seems like I might have been a bit directionless, your sense is correct. I had no clue what might appear over the next horizon.

I left the scout camp in West Virginia on August 8, 1974. The date is deeply etched since, as we stood in the parking lot bidding each other farewell, Richard Nixon delivered his resignation speech. (I skipped around the lot singing “Ding-dong the witch is dead.”)

From Marlinton, I drove to Atlanta to pick up my brother and head to Florida. My folks were flying to Florida the next day, so we planned to spend a few days hanging out together. During the afternoon as my brother Joe and I were on the road, my mother received a telephone call from a professor from West Georgia, Jim Thomas. Jim told Mom that he had just learned of a teaching opening at a two-year college in South Carolina. The school was rather desperate to fill the position since another classmate had accepted the job several months earlier then backed out that very day to take a position in his native state of Minnesota. School would be starting in a week; they needed someone! Jim told my mother that I should call him as soon as she could get word to me in Florida … which was when we all met up with each other the following day. (No cell phones in 1974, you know!)

I called Jim immediately. He had told the school to “look no further. I have just the person for you.” When I called the school, they were delighted and asked if I could start work tomorrow. I spent all of about 1.5 hours in Florida!

Many hours of driving later, I arrived at Tri-County, got oriented, and started work. What a thrilling job: Tri-County had spent the first ten years of its existence – like all of the “Technical Education Centers” in South Carolina – as a strictly voc-tech school. A decade into that experiment, the state realized that it needed to offer Associate’s Degrees as well. I had the rare opportunity to develop a two-year college-level psychology curriculum including courses in Intro, Abnormal, and Social Psych. I had no clue what I was doing, but OMG I had fun doing it!

Rebecca and I arrived on the Tri-County campus mid-afternoon, just over 41 years after I had arrived there the first time. My how it had changed! Back then, the school consisted of three buildings; today it has multiple campuses, and the main campus has six or eight buildings.

We entered through the main entry at Miller Hall. The lobby area to the left of that entryway had been my office! We chit-chatted with the receptionists for a while, and that was that. I had paid my respects. A quick trip to the restroom, and off we’d go to Atlanta.

Not so fast. As I exited the restroom, I encountered a familiar face. Fortunately, he wore a nametag, and his name was familiar too. Glenn Hellenga, the school’s Director of Career Services, has worked there 42 years. I introduced myself. “Great to see you again,” I said. “I’m Ken Mirvis, and I taught here forty years ago.”

“No you’re not,” he said, “You’re Kenny Mirvis.” And thus began a spectacular afternoon of reminiscing and storytelling!

 Glenn and I both had full heads of hair in 1974.  The picture of me (bottom left of the yearbook page) has my feet propped up and my Earth shoes filling the bottom of the frame.  The caption reads that Kenny Mirvis always has time for his students.  It is a caption I remain proud of.

He remembered everybody. Gus Wentz and Rufus Mitchell are both gone. Bill Graham made it to the cover of Time for being a super cop. The campus was named after the president, Don Garrison, who lived and breathed the college his entire life. Laurence Teague, the garbage can emptier, had impressed Glenn as much as me for his garbage-can-emptying prowess. (No one could empty trash like Laurence! He was so good I once had him deliver a lecture to one of my classes on taking pride in your job.)

“Slob” Goss lives on in everyone’s memory. Slob delivered one of the most powerful lessons of my life on the misguided nature of much of our formal educational system. A shy Vietnam vet who always wore a tattered WWI campaign hat, Slob was earning a GED. He also lived in the same old mill village as my brother and I, Newry SC.

One of my students had recently sold me a 1958 Chevy BelAir (“Rosebud”). On the first day I had Rosebud safely parked in front of my house in Newry, Slob stopped to visit. He was driving a WWII-vintage Willys Jeep. Slob’s storehouse of knowledge about that ’58 Chevy blew me away. He knew every hose, every gizmo, every difference from the ’57 and ’59 models. We compared notes: We had both recently paid $25 for our somewhat ratty cars. Rosebud had needed new brakes to become road worthy, but that was about it. Slob’s jeep, he told me, needed a transmission overhaul.

The subsequent conversation went like this:

Kenny: “Replacing brakes is easy. A transmission is hard work. Have you ever worked on a transmission before?”

Slob:      “Nah.”

Kenny: “Did you have a manual?”

Slob:      “Nah.”

Kenny: “So how did you fix it if you didn’t know what you were doing and didn’t have a manual?”

Slob:      “Easy. I just took it apart, seen what was wrong, and fixed it.”

Kenny: “And now it works?”

Slob:      “Runs fine.”

Kenny,   “Slob, if you can take apart a transmission, repair it, and then put it back together without a manual and without ever having worked on one before, what are you doing in school getting a high school diploma?”

Slob:      “They won’t pass me in English.”

Kenny: “What do you mean they won’t pass you in English?”

Slob:       “I can’t figure out where them fuckin’ commas go.”

With that, I realized that our educational system often tries to nourish potentially silly qualities so we can all fit into the same box while all-too-often overlooking the amazing genius around us. Slob has been a poster child for searching out and nourishing people’s real potential for virtually my entire adult life.

Tri-County plays a similar role. I can’t imagine a more fertile two-year period or a better place to work. I left for Boston in July 1976 to enroll in a doctoral program in Humanistic Education at Boston University. I needed to find a way to put some theoretical frame around what I had been doing at Tri-County. My 2 years at Tri-County and my 1.5 years at West Georgia were, by far, the most profoundly important educational experiences of my life.

Following my doctorate, I started writing about solar energy, hung out a shingle as The Writing Company, and started consulting, writing, training, and developing curricula. Tri-County was indeed my very last actual employer.