Mathis Rogers:  

Updated: July 12, 2011. After graduation in 1980, there really weren’t many options for someone who didn’t want to be a farmer, in Whiteface, so I followed in my brother’s footsteps and joined the Air Force. That wasn’t for me, so I moved in with my grandparents in Plainview and got a job in a local grocery store as a carryout/sacker. That job lasted until the store was sold, and I was given my two-week notice while I was on vacation and stopped in to get some groceries as I was moving into my first apartment. The next week I started working at a convenience store. It was a good thing that I moved because I was working the 4-12 shift at the convenience store and it wouldn’t have worked for me to live with my grandparents and work that shift. Since I had always wanted to be a disc jockey, I started hanging out at the Wayland Baptist Universities’ radio station with plans to attend Wayland the next semester, so they trained me. I had attempted to go to Wayland the previous semester, while still working at the grocery store, but found out the first day of class that I had Walking Pneumonia. Believe me, you don’t want to walk with it, so I don’t know why they call it that. A job came open at a local radio station for the graveyard shift on the weekends, so I took it and continued working at the convenience store. Sometime later, I met a lady who had a 2 year old son. She lived down the street from the convenience store and we hit it off. All the ladies in church told me not to, but I didn’t listen and we got married. Afterwards, I got sick with the flu and was off work from both places for a couple of weeks. The District manager of the convenience store got mad and quit while I was out sick and the new manager came in and fired just about everyone in town (there are several of these stores in town). But they let me go back to another store part time, and I stayed there until they fazed me out. A friend from church owned a service station and let me work for him some, but it and the disk jockey job weren’t enough to make ends meet. My wife was babysitting, so that helped. Her dad lived in Harlingen, (down in south Texas) so we packed up and moved in with him, his wife and their two young children. I couldn’t find a job in Harlingen, so I moved in with my wife’s brother and mother in Garland, and had a job at a convenience store the next week. A couple of months later my wife moved in with us and we found an apartment then she went back to Harlingen and got her son and brought him up and she’d already found a job. Then the convenience store, which was new and on a corner, decided they weren’t as busy as they thought they were going to be, so, since I was the last hired, me and the person hired before me were let go. It was in the era of when you had to have computer skills to get a job working with computers, but you couldn’t get any skills until you had a job working with computers, so I managed to beg the manager at LaQuinta to hire me since they were going to get computers ‘in two weeks’ and he didn’t want to have to train me twice, but they needed someone. So, he hired me. Several months later, our daughter was born and we decided that we really didn’t want to spend winter in the Dallas area, so I called LaQuinta in Harlingen to see if they had any openings, and we moved back to Harlingen. After a couple of years of my working the graveyard shift, my wife decided that since I was always tired and didn’t really want to do anything with the family when I was off, she took the kids and moved in with her aunt and uncle that lived down the street from us. Shortly afterwards, my grandfather died and my mother and grandmother wanted me to be closer to them, so I checked with the LaQuinta’s in Amarillo and transferred to Amarillo. I enjoyed Amarillo. I got involved with a computer users’ group there and met several people. A friend of mine got a computer and logged onto a computer BBS (Bulletin Board System) that was ran by a friend of mine who built an IBM PC for me, and posted a ‘Hi’ message on his BBS. Another user replied to him and then I started talking to him, also. While I was offline getting my new computer from the BBS operator set up, the BBS went down, and it was almost six months later that I was on another BBS that had Chat capabilities and the guy who had replied to my friend’s ‘Hi’ called me into chat. We met where he worked the next Saturday and got to be good friends. Some time later, LaQuinta changed their policies on how they did their pay scale, and I was way over the top with no advancement and no future there, so I started looking for another job. A client came in and said that they had an opening for a bookkeeper in Temple, TX. I said, ‘Sure, where’s Temple?’ 68 miles North of Austin. My friend that I’d met on the BBS was on his way to Austin to go to UT, so I loaded him up in my U-Haul and we moved to Temple. The day I showed up for work, my trainer didn’t, so I was basically learning on my own. After four weeks, I took my friend to the dorm in Austin, and then the next week I moved to Austin. That job didn’t work out, but the boss was terminated since I was the sixth employee to leave that position in a year. I did get a part-time job at a LaQuinta in Austin, and I got on with a couple of Temporary Agencies, too, so I stayed busy and met several people in the BBS community. One of my friends got a job working as a temporary at Front End Support at IBM’s OS/2 call center and he got me on. This was my dream job. I love Austin and would love to go back, but that’s not in the cards right now. Mom called me in 1994 and told me that Mamaw’s Alzheimer’s was too much for her to handle by herself and she’d fall at night when she got up to go to the bathroom and it was hard for Mom to get her up, so I left my dream job and moved back to Plainview. I worked at home for a while, a friend of mine in Austin had gotten me on with a scientific research company either in Washington D.C. or New York, I can’t remember which now, and I transcribed their tapes. It was great, but it was in the era of when everyone in Plainview either didn’t know what a computer could do for them or didn’t want to know, or did know and did it their self, so if it weren’t for the transcription job, I’d been in trouble. We had to put Mamaw in the nursing home because it was just too much for the two of us to handle. So, I finally gave in and went looking for a real job. The next week I was working at the Holiday Inn Express as the night auditor. It was okay to be back in the motel business, but graveyard is hard to do when you’re living with your mother who is on a day schedule. Then my Sunday school teacher decided to hire me to be his office manager for his computer shop that he ran out of his house. So I left the motel business again to get back into the computer business. I won’t go into detail of what happened there, but I’ll just say that I’m surprised he’s still in business. After leaving that job, I ran into the owner of the Holiday Inn Express and asked if he needed any help. The next week I started working at Best Western. He owned both. My grandmother died in 1998, and we had to sell her house, so we found a nice place to rent and moved into it. I continued to work at Best Western until the manager drove me crazy and I walked out on him in the middle of a shift with his wife waiting in the car. Then Staples moved to town, so I got a job there. Retail is not for me, and I only stayed there for about six months. Afterwards, I put in my application at the Holiday Inn in Lubbock, and started working relief audit and relief security there. Holiday Inn Express in Plainview sold and changed to Plainview Hotel, and I got a job working the night audit there, and we got the Ramada Limited franchise, but I kept my relief Audit/Security job in Lubbock. I worked for two years straight without a day off. Then we had a Rogers’ family reunion in Sweetwater, and I took off a few days to attend it. Mother started having fender-benders when she’d back out of somewhere, then one day she was on her way to her Ladies’ Bible Study and turned in front of an oncoming car. It was red and she said she didn’t see it. Totaled her car, I didn’t see the other one. Luckily, neither she nor the lady driving the other car, were injured. So, after all the fender-benders, I told her she...Expand for more