Seventh in a series
Re “The First Inning of Chabola’s Career”
[img]1372|left|Jerry Chabola||no_popup[/img] “In the early 1970s,” now-retired Athletic Director Jerry Chabola of Culver City High School was saying the other week, “teaching jobs were very difficult to come by.”
That may explain, partially, how young Mr. Chabola, departing his first post-college posting at LaSalle High School, Pasadena, suddenly found himself far from home, at Imperial High School, just outside of sizzling hot, border-friendly El Centro.
After three years at a parochial school, “I was looking to get into the public school system. In the long run, that was where I felt I would need to go.
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Jerry and Janet Chabola
“My experience at LaSalle, it was a great school. But my second year there, the Christian Brothers (who operated the school) had a financial problem. They started laying off lots of teachers. Probably because I was the athletic director, I kept my job.
“I saw lots of fallout from that. Thinking ahead, we took the job down in Imperial High School.”
Culture shock?
“Major, I’ll tell you that,” Mr. Chabola said with a husky laugh. “We went from beach people to the middle of the desert. They have a huge farming community. Jan and I didn’t realize that until we were down there. There’s a military base, all the farming that goes on there, and of course the heat and the desert.
“We lasted 20 months, two school years.
Home Sweet…Maybe
“Janet’s brother lived in Escondido. We went over there for a weekend in the middle of the second semester. Through a friend of theirs, we put in a bid on a house. There weren’t any rentals that interested us in El Centro. We ended up buying a house there. We had to scramble, though, to make that work – my parents, my aunt, my grandfather all helped us.
“Twenty months later, we turned around, sold it, and moved to Escondido when neither one of us had a job. We just knew we didn’t want to be in the desert anymore.
“That summer, Janet got a job working for the Employment Development Dept. for the state, and I got a job working in a gas station, 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. At that time, gas stations still were doing full-service.”
This was more rugged than classroom duties.
(To be continued)
