Al Lavelle

Al Lavelle

          I did my student teaching in early 1984 at a large suburban high school named after Theodore Roosevelt. TR High. Al Lavelle was two classrooms down. He taught world history, Russian, and Japanese. He taught me that a teacher’s best friend is his or her stapler. And I believe him to this day.

          At the time I met him Al was approaching retirement age. He was mostly bald, and what hair he had was white, as was his moustache and goatee. He was shortish and roundish and had weaknesses for skinny cigars and a confection called Gummy Bears. He once told me that, after a certain age, a man’s metabolism slows down, and he grows rounder and rounder until he gets cancer; then he starts to get thinner and thinner, and just about the time he’s starting to look good again, he dies. Al delivered little gems of wisdom like this with an impish smile and Irish eyes that twinkled.

          He told me he’d grown up in a starchy upper-middle-class Irish-American family in Colorado. They’d dressed for dinner. He’d started his career as a pilot when he’d been a teenager in the 1930s. He had, he told me, been involved back then as a bush pilot with an expedition mapping the Amazon River basin. When I knew him he was almost 65 and was continuing to do aerobatics in his microlight at least once a week. He’d been a military pilot of some sort during the second world war and in Korea, and there were still people around who addressed him as Colonel Lavelle, but he didn’t seem to like that.

          He’d had some experience with managing reconstruction with the Occupation in Japan, which is where he’d learnt Japanese. He told me there was even a high school north of Tokyo that had been named after him. After he left the military he’d gone more or less in that direction, and had ended up with the State Department. I think it was the State Department that had him learn Russian. He told me stories about working as a translator of intercepted Russian military communications during the Cuban missile crisis. Russian air force pilots apparently liked to sing bawdy-to-filthy songs to each other over their radios, just for a laugh and probably because they knew the Americans were listening to them.

          He’d then done a long stretch for the State Department in Vietnam, working on village reconstruction and fortification with the hill tribes. It had been what he’d done in Japan, only in a seriously different historical and cultural milieu. But still, he told me, building a wall or a school in wartime Hmong country wasn’t much different from a construction standpoint than it was anywhere. Anyway, he’d learned their languages and cultures and lived with them. He had, he said, accepted wives as presents from grateful tribal villagers, never forgetting his wife and family back in Texas. Well, at least not for long.

          He told me of leaving Hmong country once for home leave. They helicoptered him out to Saigon, put him on a transport to Guam, and then onto a commercial flight for the US. He found himself sitting in a comfortable jet plane high over the Pacific, heading for suburban San Antonio and his middle-class family, and looking down and seeing that he was still wearing all the symbolically-woven bracelets and amulets and so on that signified his relationships with his various tribes and wives. These were things that had been vitally important to him a few days before, and now looked totally ridiculous and out of place. He took them off.

          He did woodwork for creative release — joinery and carpentry. He said he always had. He told me that the key to post-disaster reconstruction work was just knowing how to estimate how much timber, nails, and suchlike were needed to build a certain number of structures. He’d started out his teaching career as a wood-shop teacher; he showed me the photos. Extensive creative woodwork adorned his house at the start of the Hill Country northwest of San Antonio.

          I went out there a few times to be sociable. I remember once he invited me out when his daughter Dawn was there. Dawn was a Navy helicopter pilot stationed on Midway Island. Al was enormously fond of her and proud of her, telling me that she’d always loved challenges, which is why she had such a bizarre job. She was a very good-looking woman, too, and it became embarrassingly clear that Al was trying to set us up, and that Dawn wasn’t having any of that.

          Another time Al took me to the airfield where he kept his microlight in which he did his aerobatics. Then we went to a room he had at another airfield, where they called him Colonel Lavelle, and he showed me various documents and photos and trophies commemorating various stuff he’d done. It was cool, but I didn’t know why he thought I had to see proof of his bona fides; I was gullible enough to take his word for the stories he’d told. Then he showed me an enormous, unedited manuscript of his memoirs. He was concerned that the State Department or somebody in the government would confiscate it. He claimed that it told some truths that had long been hidden. Al had something of an anomaly about him. For all his military-aviation, State-Department-in-Vietnam background, he was, as he put it, a committed socialist and secular humanist.

          Al and I continued to hang out now and again long after I finished at TR, and I enjoyed my visits out to his rancho. He liked to read history so I gave him a book I’d read called The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment. A wedding present he gave when I got married again in 1985 is still the favourite bowl of one of my grown daughters. We kept in touch after I moved to Guam, and he expressed a bit of envy when I told him I was moving to New Zealand, under the mistaken impression that somehow New Zealand was a socialist country, which it never was. Then somehow we lost touch with each other. I saw on the internet that he died in 2008 at the age of 88.