“I hustled”.
The strong declaration sprang from my father’s lips. Clyde Baxter Lout was near seventy and I near forty as we chatted. Morning coffee had brewed and I was offering up questions about his early years as a working man.
“Hustle” is an old word. It comes with several different meanings. My father used it for just one.
He applied the term the way Collins English Dictionary does – “If someone hustles, they try hard to earn money or to gain an advantage from a situation.”
Counted among my closer friends are several engineers who came to America’s shores as students from far away places. . . Asia, the Middle East, elsewhere. They hustled.
Getting schooled in Oklahoma, most had arrived at Tulsa University after finishing undergraduate work in their own homelands. Making their way to my state from places few Oklahomans ever see – Bangalore, Beijing, Chenai, Tehran, these friends had grown up in cultures separated by long miles and diverse languages. But they carried this thing in common.
In their daily hustle, the bright young men labored energetically, sacrificing sleep, going after carefully-defined goals.
They apprenticed.
In time job fairs came along. Industries took notice. Meanwhile, for several of the internationals, another kind of shift had come. Discovering the Christian faith through friends in Tulsa, a number trusted their lives to Jesus. So life in another dimension began. A bigger life, one in Jesus’ kingdom.
On the other hand Clyde Baxter had started off as an orphan.
Though lacking formal schooling beyond tenth grade (cotton fields calling him to scratch out a living in the great depression years), he hustled. Fleeing Oklahoma poverty on rumbling freight trains, he moved westward, and landed his first California job as a ditch digger. When a “plumber’s helper” ad caught his attention, the young Okie went for an interview.
“Young man, if you will give energy and attention to it, we will make you an apprentice.”
“What is an apprentice?”
©2018 Jerry Lout