Posts Tagged ‘Lawton’
Lawton, Oklahoma
Fouad was one of my numerous roommates; he was a Lebanese student majoring in pharmacy, used to travel two hours on weekends to work as a bartender at an Army base in Lawton. He rented a house there for the weekends and then spent the rest of the week studying to be a pharmacist in Oklahoma City, one hour away the other direction to Norman where he rented with me. He used to pick me up in his Spitfire to Lawton, a “hole of a town”. He could afford a Spitfire; he sold me his old fashion VW, an engine cooled by air. This car was wrecked by a drunken lady at 2 a.m. at an intersection; I was lucky to be alive and the insurance paid what the car was worth on the market and the lawyer received as much in compensation for depositing a claim for health damages. At the time, it was common for anyone who had car accidents to sue for “backlash” and the physiotherapists were glad for this booming business and they cooperated well with lawyers.
Fouad married a US “Philippina” and then divorced after he obtained his US passport. I expounded on details in my piece “Raine’s my initiator; or maybe not”. On my second trip to the U, Fouad had re-married and then enrolled as a surgeon at a Mexican University and commuted everyday from El Paso until he graduated. He participated as a surgeon with the US invading troops in Panama.
I finished my program in two years but I was displeased with my thesis which was suggested by my advisor, Dr. Foote, another Zionist inclined professor. I was just inputting random numbers in a written computer program that another student had written and dealing with stochastic production demands. The results didn’t turn out encouraging and I suffered grueling months, very unsatisfied with the whole project. I am reminded of this expression a “bullet shit” of a non-fighter joining a fighting group who is loaded with ammunition so that the fighters could eventually use his ammunition if he dies; that what happens to many graduate students who have no idea for a proposal. I decided not to pursue a PhD program.
The Oklahoma Daily (of the University of Oklahoma at Norman)
I wrote a lengthy article in 1976 about the causes of the civil war in Lebanon which the Student newspaper The Oklahoma Daily published as a series in two successive issues. My friend Ramez aided in the editing because he was familiar with journalism and was studying History of Science. Somehow the Chairman of the Syrian National Social Party at the time, In3am Ra3d, received a copy and he sent a delegation from Houston to link up with me; I kept a copy of the article and then lost it and then years later I contacted the Oklahoma daily to mail me another copy but never receive it.
Foreign student organizations
At this period there were hundreds of Iranian students on campus and they were the main core of all the demonstrations and the few Arab students were organized under the wide banner of The Arab Students association and I was appointed president of this association (since not many met anyway) for a year. We had a room allocated to us in one of the university buildings but since we never met in that room the student association decided to allocate it to another association but I fought for it and retained it for a short while. The Iranian students were active politically and well organized and the Komeinists arrived to power in 1979 while I was in Houston. It was in 1975 that I was beaten up by a group of Lebanese Phalanges coming from Oklahoma City and they never showed up because I complained formally to the police and spent an overnight at the university hospital.
My roommate Fouad, a Lebanese student majoring in pharmacy, used to travel two hours on weekends to work as a bartender at an Army base in Lawton. He spent the rest of the week studying to be a pharmacist in Oklahoma City, one hour away the other direction to Norman from where he rented. He used to pick me up in his Spitfire. Fouad married a US “Philippina” and then divorced after he obtained his US passport.
I finished my program in two years but I was displeased with my thesis which was suggested by my advisor, Dr. Foote, another Jewish professor. I was just inputting random numbers in a written computer program that another student had written and dealing with stochastic production demands. The results didn’t turn out encouraging and suffered grueling months very unsatisfied with the whole project. I decided not to pursue a PhD program.
