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Retirement Reflections
Sharing resident stories from Canterfield
Hosted by: Lee Martin & Carol Giusty (Juice-tea)
Produced by: Patric E.K. Bundrum
Music by: Parkcore
Retirement Reflections
Making Decisions
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Lee and Ellen interview Bob Bouchard about his time in the military and following education career.
Welcome to Retirement Reflections Podcasts, coming to you from the library of Canterfield of Kennesaw Independent Living. My name is Lee Martin. I'll be your co-host along with Carol Juicy. Our podcast producer is Patrick Bundram, who will oversee the entire life cycle of this podcast, which simply means if something goes wrong, it's going to be her fault. Well, Carol, it is so good to see you today.
SPEAKER_03Well, Lee, I appreciate that. I like seeing you too.
SPEAKER_01This is episode five, I think, and I have breaking news. Are you ready for this? Yes. The Retirement Reflections podcast now has a way we can get fan mail. No. Yes, that means uh I don't really know what that means, other than they can go online and they can make comments about what we've said. Okay. I think I'm gonna be kind of interested in reading that. Well, we have a guest today that we don't know a whole lot about because he hadn't been here that long. His name is Bob Bouchard, and we're gonna have fun with him. Afternoon, Bob. How are you? I am great, and thank you very much for having me. It's good to have you. You've been here how long? It's gonna be eight weeks. This this Wednesday it'll be eight weeks. And you're here with your wife, Margaret?
SPEAKER_02Correct.
SPEAKER_01First of all, let me tell you what I know is probably wrong. The name Bouchard is a French-Canadian name. And if you break it down in parts, it means burg and hard. If you put it together, it means a strong protector or strong fortress. See, I did I did my homework. Also, there's a nickname too. It also means strong mouth. Translated means big mouth. But so we'll find out about that. That is also correct. Now that I've aired all the dirty laundry, tell us about yourself, Bob.
SPEAKER_02Well, you are you are correct. I am half French. My father's family came from the Quebec area of Three Rivers. They call it Arriva Swais or something. And mother's people were from Portugal, born and raised in the Azores, and they all moved to the Fall River, Massachusetts area. And that's when my dad met my mom and they got married, and of course, I was three and a half years the result of that union. I had two very, very wonderful parents. Neither one of them were high school graduates, but they were the hardest working people I'd ever seen in my life. My father, even though he could butcher the English language, he could build or fix anything. And my mother was a seamstress in what they call the old sweatshops, used to make ladies' clothing. And a good week for her was making $42 or $43. Wow. And we were raised not with a lot, but we never did without either. And my mother was the type of person she would go without so that her kids could have what they needed. I think the greatest benefit was being able to know that your parents were going to be home every night and they were there and they were loving and giving. And I was fortunate to have them until I was uh well into my 60s.
SPEAKER_01You probably said it and I didn't hear it, but where did you grow up?
SPEAKER_02Okay, I was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, which is about 40 miles south of Boston, but that's where I was born. I was raised in a little town of Westport, and it's kind of like right at the beginning of where that the cape starts going out. That's where I was raised. It was a small village, I say small, probably less than 5,000 people. But it was a good place to be raised. Had a lot of fun, had a lot of neighbors. If anybody's ever seen the movie Sandlot, kids playing baseball out in the gnome field, that's the way I was raised. Yeah, that I had a brother and a sister, both younger than me and both deceased now. But my brother and I used to, when we weren't supporting each other and playing baseball hard, we were fighting each other.
SPEAKER_03So you said that you graduated from high school. Did you go on to college? Yes, ma'am.
SPEAKER_02In the interim there, there was the military. Oh, okay. I graduated June the 12th, 1963, and went to work in a bakery. It was kind of like Nabisco, but a little bit smaller. And I worked there for about nine months until a friend of mine whose daddy worked at General Motors asked me if I wanted to work there. So I went to work in the assembly plant for General Motors. We were making Pontiacs, Cadillacs, and Oldsmobiles. And for a kid who did not have a formal education, I was making $3.13 an hour. And annually I was making more money than some of the teachers.
SPEAKER_03I was gonna say that that was good done.
SPEAKER_02That was a lot of money back then. And then one day the greetings and salations letter came along, and I was going to be drafted. And that's one of the few times my daddy got into my life in a way that he provided direction, uh, so to speak. You know the kind of direction parents provide. Yeah. And what he definitely said is that uh he was a World War II grunt, and knowing what I had ahead of me, he said, son, if you don't join the Air Force, I'm gonna kick your butt. So it was an easy decision to make. I went down and joined the Air Force. I enlisted in April 1966. After basic training, I was sent to Kinslow Air Force Base, which was a strategic air command base, and I stayed there for a little over a year and a half, almost two years. And the Air Force sends you when you're in training. I was a welder, or they called metal processing specialists. That's a fancy. It is for a welder, you know. But we did other things. We used to try to get the airplanes and inspect them and make sure there were no cracks, and because you don't want a B-52 bomber dropping a missile on somebody. But I was sent off to school. They did that often, sent us off to advanced training school. And I met a senior master sergeant, which is as high as you can get in the Air Force in the enlisted ranks. His name was Mr. Mills. And he just took a liking to me. And I was there for a four-week training school to learn advanced processes. And he called me in the second week. I said, Oh God, what have I done now? And he said, Airman Bouchard, very seldom called anybody by their first names. He said, We've been watching you. And I said, Who is we? You know, and we think that you would make a good instructor. Are you interested in doing that? I said, Well, he said, You'll never have to go back to Vietnam. I said, I'm in. So you're gonna be in the middle. He made me a deal I could not refuse, you know. So I went back to my base, and a month later I was transferred to Illinois to Chinoot Air Force Base, and I was an instructor. I taught eight classes, and he called me back into the office and he said, You've done such a good job. We want you to take over the test and measurement facility of the welding school. You'll be preparing all of the tests, giving it to the instructors that teach each, they call them block, correcting the tests and then giving them back to them. So I did that for almost the last two years, a year and a half that I was in. It was a job that only took three days a week. So I had two days a week to sit there and either look at the walls or try to figure out what kind of trouble I could get into. I started taking college courses.
SPEAKER_01So the classes you taught were welding classes.
SPEAKER_02They were. Okay. They were. I taught advanced welding, which is called heliarc, which is a type of welding that uses a uh wire and there's a argon gas that comes out of the welding tip because when you're welding titanium, you cannot let the air get it or the weld will break. So it was it's one of the advanced uh welding techniques.
SPEAKER_03We're learning a little bit about welding.
SPEAKER_01We are, we are. How many years were you in the Air Force? Four. Four four years. And what'd you do when you got out?
SPEAKER_02Okay, one of the things I was going to school while I was in, so I had completed just one semester short of two years of college. Is that right? So after my discharge, I enrolled full-time and finished my last semester of college. Where? It was the Parkland College, which was kind of a feeder school to the University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana. Okay. So I finished that last semester, got my associate's degree, applied for entrance into the University of Illinois, and was accepted very easily. My grades were good, and I was a veteran, and that also helped. So I had GI Bill to help me get through college.
SPEAKER_01Somewhere in there, you met Margaret.
SPEAKER_02That was long after college. I did all of my undergraduate school. I graduated, let me see, I'm trying to think, 1972, when I got my Bachelor of Arts degree in social studies. I was a social studies teacher at that point, but I had met people in the graduate school that took a liking to me, and they wanted me to go to graduate school in social work.
SPEAKER_03So this is the second person that took a liking to you.
SPEAKER_02Yes, well, there were a couple others before, but these are the ones that had the main influence in my life. And her name was Ione Vargas, and she was Portuguese, which didn't hurt at all. She knew that I was half Portuguese and made it possible for me to get into the School of Social Work, and that took me two years. Then I went to the real world.
SPEAKER_01So if we were sitting at breakfast to you, and we would say, Bob, what'd you do for a living before you came here? Would you say social work?
SPEAKER_02I was a school social worker, and of course, later, after I spent 33 years in education, they promoted me up to I was an assistant principal at both the high school and middle school levels. And then from there I went to the central office and was in charge of all of the school social workers, all of the social services, and they made me the disciplinary hearing officer.
SPEAKER_01Oh, good. I want to hear this.
SPEAKER_02And when I made a friend there, Dr. Bill Young, who's another very influential person in my life. And he took a liking to you.
SPEAKER_01He's a likable kind of guy.
SPEAKER_02I was gonna say we had a common camaraderie. We were both Yankees in the Deep South. So this was in South Georgia, in Brunswick. And uh Bill was from Pennsylvania. Of course, I was from Massachusetts. He was an assistant superintendent. He said, I want you to be the disciplinary hearing officer. And I was thinking to myself, a social worker who spends his life advocating for children is now going to be responsible for discipline. I don't see how that fits. And that's what I asked Bill. I said, Bill, why would you want a social worker to be a disciplinary hearing officer? He said, Because you have to go through the process of finding out what needs to be done with them, what kind of discipline needs to be done, and who can advocate for a child better than a social worker.
SPEAKER_01How has discipline changed over the years? Do you see it different? How was it back when you were doing it?
SPEAKER_02If I were to go knowing what I know today, if I were to consider a career, it would not be an education. It would not be. No, ma'am. Okay. It would not be because the kids have changed. Now, I'm talking in generalities. This isn't this isn't the case in in every school system. But for the most part, the kids are very disrespectful. The parents are even more disrespectful than the kids, and it makes being an educator a very difficult process. So I wouldn't do that. I might considering what's being done today and the money educators made, I might go back to welding.
SPEAKER_01Well, listen, let me let me ask another question. We kind of jump around when we meet here. We don't stay on a real strict schedule, but is this the first senior adult setting that you've lived in? Yes. What was the transition like?
SPEAKER_02Well, let me tell you what led up to it. Okay. You talked about my wife earlier, how I met her. I met her after I graduated with my master's degree. She was a teacher also. And I was in a big high school gymnasium where the Van Dyke brothers went to school and Jean Hackman went to school. And I was down there on the floor with one of my friends that I work with, was a basketball coach. And this one girl is yelling, Bob, Bob, Bob. And I looked up and I said, Oh, Bill. Romine, that was her name, Debbie Romine. She's got some girl she wants to introduce me to. So I went up there and she said, Bob, I want you to meet my friend Margaret. And the first words out of my wife's mouth was, You must be married. I looked at her and smiled. I said, I am the most unmarried person you're ever going to meet. And she said, Good, what are you doing for lunch? Oh my. We went to lunch, we went to dinner. 59 days later, we were married. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01So she asked, and you said yes.
SPEAKER_02That's exactly right. And she will fuss up, she will admit to it. But then from there to here, we spent our years together. And then I mentioned earlier, you know, her fall, and she had the problems with onset, dementia, and all that. And we were living in Fort Lauderdale at the time. We'd sold our house in Brunswick. And she had one of her episodes. I had gotten hurt and I was in the hospital. And she came to see me, and then she was going home and supposed to come back the next day. Well, by two o'clock in the afternoon, I had not seen her, and she was off wandering. She had driven from Fort Lauderdale all the way to Tampa. Oh, she didn't know where she was or what she was doing. So our son and daughter-in-law had to come down because I was in the hospital to find her. Yeah. And they finally did. She was at the Savannah Police Department. And my son looked at me at that time. He said, Dad, this can't go on. He said, We want you to be safe and we want mom to be safe, but we can't be taking time off our work three, four days at a time to come help you out when this kind of thing happens. So he's the one, he and my daughter-in-law, who is a uh nurse educator for the children's health care of Atlanta, she educates all of the nurses for that hospital system. They went looking, and this was one of two places that they had found. And my son said, I don't want to influence you, but you look at them both, and I have one that's my favorite, but I'm not going to tell you till after you see it. And we saw both places, and this was hands down the best place that we saw in Canterfield was offered so much more than any other place I'd ever seen. And so we made arrangements to sell our condo and come here.
SPEAKER_03I am prejudiced. I think you made the excellent, an excellent decision. I do too. I do too.
SPEAKER_02Everyone has been so warm and welcoming. And it, you know, it's really a nice uh atmosphere. And my son put it to me this way. They knew that we loved cruise. My wife and I have been on 43 cruises. Oh, and uh he said, Dad, I want you to think of it this way. He said, Canterfield is like a giant cruise ship, it offers everything a cruise ship offers except it doesn't go anywhere.
SPEAKER_01I love that. Yeah, and on Thursday, you can get on the bus and just cruise around Atlanta. There you go.
SPEAKER_03My granddaughter said that grandma, this is exactly like a summer camp for seniors. So her girlfriends came with her and they wanted to come here, but they said that there was an age limit, so they weren't able to come here. But they thought, boy, this would be the perfect place to be on campus.
SPEAKER_02But you know, I had a hard time realizing that and trying to get here because I'm only 26. So they didn't okay, and you know how to lie.
SPEAKER_03Well, there's a there's a rule. Did you say 26? Yes. He said 20. He knows how to lie.
SPEAKER_02No, no, no, no. I'm telling the truth. There is a rule that once you go into a new 10-year period, you know, 60, 70, 80, for the first five years, you get to reverse those numbers.
SPEAKER_03Oh, I didn't know that. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Now you know why you went to the Air Force. That's how they think.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's exactly right.
SPEAKER_01Oh, well, hey, listen, you're living here now, you've been here eight weeks, you said you moved from not from another facility, but from your home. So far, and it's probably an unfair question because you, I mean, eight weeks, but what has been the most difficult thing to get a hold of, to figure out?
SPEAKER_02I think trying to not feel guilty about not having to cook and clean and do all that stuff. Right when my son and his family used to come visit, the first question he's asked is what we haven't for dinner, and then the next one is who's cooking? Because he knew that his mother wasn't not a great cook. She has she had three specialties lasagna, fried chicken, and God, I can't even remember the other one. But she hasn't cooked in, I'll bet you 25 years. I've done all of the cooking. So one of the things is maybe the sour not tinkering in the kitchen anymore. Oh, so when you were cooking, you call it tinkering.
SPEAKER_03Well, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Now, yeah, now it's good. But although I was a very, very good cook, I have to say that myself. But the other thing is the realization that how much of your autonomy are you giving up? You know, is there any place where being in a facility like this means that you can't make your own decisions? And my answer has been no. It's been wonderful. We still have our car, and now my wife can't drive, but we can still get in that car and go anywhere we want to go. And it's nice uh still having that flexibility. I worry about the day down the line when we may be leaving this building and moving over to assisted living. That's something that scares me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think that bothers everybody. We we feel like we got one step.
SPEAKER_02Well, anybody that's used to doing things for themselves, it would have an effect on them. If you don't mind, now my wife doesn't mind having people do things for her. That's not going to be a big deal for her, you know.
SPEAKER_01My grandson lives in Nashville and he listens to our podcast, and he said, Every time you meet, I want to hear people talk to someone my age, he's in his mid-20s, out on his own, as he says, I'm finally trying to be an adult. But he said, Ask them, how do you make decisions? Because he said, I've always had decisions made for me. How do you make decisions? How do you tell a kid like that? He's not a kid, he's a young man. But how do you tell them? How do you help them understand how to make decisions?
SPEAKER_02Well, I would say this first to him. I would say my wife went to college in Nashville. She went to David Lipsum College and took some classes at Vanderbilt. So she's familiar with that area. But the answer to that question is you rely, if there's anyone that's really important in your life and you trust them, you rely on their guidance. But that's only to give you options. The ultimate decision lies with the person themselves. And you have to make the decision that you think is best. You're going to make mistakes. There are many things that I've done in my life that I would look back and say, oh, I wouldn't do that again. But you know, that all gives you the basis for making future decisions. Right. Because that helps you determine what you think may be positive and what may have a negative concept. And you always try to do the positive. So rely on those around you, but only use them as a sounding board to give you options.
SPEAKER_01It's kind of a nice way of saying you're gonna have to suck it up and just hope you make the right decision.
SPEAKER_02That's exactly right.
SPEAKER_01And you won't always see he moved there from Kansas, so he's there. He knew nobody there except a couple of co-workers that he's working with, you know, and having to make decisions. The first time now he'd gone to college uh for a few years, but again, they were they were making rules for him. These are things you can do and can't do. And so he found himself in a situation where, you know, and on top of that, he's the manager of a of a uh of a car wash, pretty, pretty big outfit, and so he's a leader and he's having to make decisions, and he's saying, I'm still having trouble knowing how to make decisions, you know. He makes decisions for other people. But he also asked if they could tell me something that I needed to be careful about doing, you know, like if you had to go back to your 20-something self, go back and say, if you had this to do over again, this is what I would not do or do.
SPEAKER_02Don't make a decision when you feel like you're under stress.
SPEAKER_01Good point.
SPEAKER_02If you are in any way having any kind of trauma in your life or you're upset or you're angry at someone, not a good time to make decisions. On the other side of it, if you're on a super high and everything's going well, you need to be careful when you make a decision there too, because that can be as damaging as making a decision when you're on a low. So I would say wait until you feel like you're somewhat in control or you're stable, and that will help you make a better decision. But the bottom line is 26 years old, God almighty, there are going to be some mistakes somewhere along the line. The thing is to learn from them and use that experience to help you make the next decision.
SPEAKER_01So, Carol, did you learn from your mistakes when you were younger?
unknownOh, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yes, I did. But I have to say, I never made the same mistake twice. That's the key. That's the key. I learned once and didn't do it again.
SPEAKER_02You know, stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
SPEAKER_03Right, that's what it is.
SPEAKER_01Bob, it's been good having you visit with us today. Our time is about to draw to an end. I want to remind our listeners again that we now have fan mail. Now, the way you get to the fan mail, you go to the little logo thing we've got on our app, and there's three little lines on there. You click on that line, and then it'll come down and say fan mail. Now, from there, I'm not sure what you do. I assume you just follow the prompts and you can figure out how to do it. But we want to hear from people. I'm curious. Our uh producer is setting over here, and she told us the other day we had 130 some listeners. Has that gone up? 203. All right. 203 people who have nothing better to do than listen to a podcast from a bunch of old folks. I think that's exciting.
SPEAKER_02I I don't know that that's necessarily true. It's like I said earlier, learn from people, and people at our age are probably not wanting to learn something new, but you might want to see how many people did the same thing you did exactly.
SPEAKER_01Well, and we're looking forward to learning things from you and Margaret. You may not tell us, we may just watch and see it and think, oh, don't do that.
SPEAKER_03You know, but Carol, have you got anything else you want to add? Well, the only thing I'd like to say, Bob, is that I would like to have breakfast with you. Sure. And Margaret. So find out more about your teaching experience, as my background is in education, and I think we have a lot in common.
SPEAKER_02She was a teacher in high school. She started out in middle school, but high school economics. Oh. The nice thing about it is that to pass her class meant you could graduate. If you didn't pass her class, you didn't graduate. So she didn't have many discipline problems.
SPEAKER_01Just so that everyone would know that this is a really legitimate podcast. Today we have an audience. We have two people sitting in the room listening. So on my point to you, you cheer and applaud, and that'll be the close of the podcast today. Are we ready? Here we go. Okay, guys. Thank you. All right. See you next time. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Hey there, producer Patrick Buntrum here. We now have a new exciting feature where you can send fan mail on our website. Access the message board on BuzzSprout by clicking the fan mail link on any episode. We appreciate your continued support, and we'll be back next week. As always, retirement reflections does not claim to give any advice, and the personal beliefs of hosts and guests do not necessarily reflect the Canterfield community official policies. Thank you again for joining us.