Richard Campbell:
CLASS OF 1965
Seguin High SchoolClass of 1965
Seguin, TX
Texas A&M University - CommerceClass of 1977
Commerce, TX
Texas A&M UniversityClass of 1969
College station, TX
Magnolia Junior High SchoolClass of 1961
Magnolia, AR
East - West Elementary SchoolClass of 1959
Magnolia, AR
Richard's Story
Life
It has been a roller coaster ride I have been on since high school. I have traveled extensively (mainly because of my job choices). I did go to college in Texas graduating from Texas A&M with a degree in journalism and immediately was drafted during the Vietnam war era. I decided to enlist in the Air Force and spent the next four years as a medic in California (March AFB), Vietnam (Cam Ranh Bay) and a remote site on the Aleutian island chain in Alaska (Shemya AFB).
After the Air Force, I returned to Texas and took a job as a sports writer in Beaumont, where I spent a year. I moved on to the Greenville Herald Banner as sports editor and was lucky enough to meet my future wife, Jamie. We met when I went to her house to interview a German friend who was visiting her and he had never seen a baseball game. So I followed the family to Arlington as they took him to watch a Texas Rangers game and I took pictures of Jamie and him for the newspaper. She showed up at the office the next day to request prints of the pictures and I asked her out on a date to see "Jaws" in Dallas. We met in June, got engaged in August and married in December, 1975.
We have two sons--Jeff, who has an accounting degree and works at Wells Fargo, and Josh, who is working for a medical company based in Richmond, Virginia . We had hectic lives when the boys were small, mainly because I had taken a job as sports information director at East Texas State (now Texas A&M-Commerce) and I traveled all the time. I was able to get a master's degree in journalism at East Texas and then, in 1979, I took a job at Sam Houston State in Huntsville as SID and stayed until 1986.
In 1986, I was lucky enough to get a job with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at the national headquarters in Kansas City. We spent 13 years in Overland Park, a suburb of KC, and we really wanted to settle there when I retired. Unfortunately, the national office was moved to Indianapolis in 1999 and we were forced to move once again. We...Expand for more
enjoyed living in Indy but, in 2000, I injured my back and that started an odyssey of doctors, nurses, hospitals and many operations and procedures.
The diagnosis was degenerative disc disease in my lower back, which had pretty much stopped my many sports activities (I was still playing softball at 50 and was going to play in a baseball league). In April, 2005, I went on short-term disability at work because I was not able to sit at the computer for more than a 15-minute period before my back would spasm. Since I worked as a statistician/records keeper/archivist, I spent almost every minute of the workday sitting in front of a computer. I tried working through the pain by taking my laptop home, but I had trouble meeting deadlines on records books, etc., because I couldn't work at a steady pace.
In October, 2005, I went on long-term disability through the NCAA's insurance carrier and in my 20th year at the NCAA, April 25, 2006, I officially retired and settled in on disability. Jamie and I moved to Greenville, Tex. (Dallas area) in October, 2008, to be near our relatives .
All in all, it has been a lot of hard work since I started in 1970 in the Air Force but I have been lucky enough to have amassed a good retirement nestegg, so I don't really have to work, which is especially important in my present physical condition. I have not really had a chance to correspond with many of my classmates over the years although I was able to attend the 20th class reunion in Seguin in 1985 and the 45th in 2010. In all. we lived in the midwest for 22 years and just did not get down to Texas much. Things in retirement were going so good until December, 2020, when I got bitten by the Covid bug and went into the hospital for kidney failure. I have recovered after going through dialysis for several months but still feel some of the fallout. You guessed it--in December, 2023, I contracted Covid again despite wearing a mask everywhere, but thanks to the preventative shots, it was just a bump in the road.
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