Fellow Travelers – One in a Million

Day 165 – in the North Pacific Ocean – Find Insignia on CruiseMapper

A nonagenarian is a person aged 90 to 99. Less than 1% of the US population qualifies for the title. Statistically, that makes Paul, 91, one in a hundred, but statistics never tell the whole story. Practically, Paul is more like one in a million.

Paul shared 43 days with us on the cruise from Rio de Janeiro to Dubai. For most of those six weeks, Doris spent more time with him than with anyone else on the ship except Louis. In fact, Doris spent so much time with Paul, she was often mistaken for his wife, or at least his girlfriend, which seems appropriate since he entered our cruise life through a matchmaker.

More on that in a moment. First, meet Paul, who easily takes the “most inspiring” prize among our fellow travelers.

The Backstory

Paul (last name omitted for privacy) was born in Belgium in 1931 and emigrated to the United States as a teenager, alone. It was 1947, and there was no future for a bright young man in war-ravaged Europe. Almost unimaginably in this age of Google, Paul managed to identify, from Belgium, a college program in Arizona recruiting promising foreign students. He applied and landed at Arizona State College at the age of 16, so much younger and smaller than his classmates he says they viewed him as a mascot.

Being an exceptionally bright young man, Paul throve academically until, two years after his arrival, he was drafted by the Belgian army. Unwilling to return to Europe and already on the road to American citizenship, he enlisted instead in the US Army infantry. He was quickly identified for officer candidate school (OCS), but only US citizens could be offers. H opted to train as a radio operator. After 14 weeks of schooling, he arrived in Korea. The next morning, he was at the front.

Within weeks, Paul was grievously wounded, hit by a mortar shell that perforated his intestines and penetrated his legs. When the medics evacuating him came under heavy fire, he was still conscious enough to call their coordinates to air support, which held off the attack long enough for the evacuation to continue and get him to a MASH unit (yes, just like on TV). He spent the next six months in Army hospitals, a period that set the course of his life.

“Everything after, I have always considered a gift,” he says. He decided to become a teacher to “help prepare a new generation to continue the great experiment of freedom in our beloved country of which I became a proud citizen.”

Like so many other veterans returning from wars, Paul used the GI Bill to finish his education, graduating with a degree in history from UCLA. He was hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District as a teacher of social sciences and English in grades 7-9 and taught in the district for the next 45 years.

If Paul were one in a hundred, that might be the end of the professional story. Being one in a million, it is not.

The Middle Story

After his first decade of teaching, Paul was convinced the most super-gifted schoolchildren in middle grades needed to more challenge if they were to develop their talents to full capacity. With two colleagues, he launched a program to identify elementary-school students in the district with IQs of at least 145 and to enroll them in a three-year curriculum for highly gifted children taught by the three innovators at Walter Reed Junior High School in Studio City. To avoid controversy over public funding of classes for super-gifted students, parents were required to transport and provide all the materials for their children. Win-win. Students benefited at no cost to the district.

Paul’s Individualized Honors Program (IHP) for highly gifted kids was the first of its kind in the nation. IHP was written up by Time magazine, and the Los Angeles Times routinely reported when IHP students won still another academic competition. Private elite academies in the East recruited the program’s graduates. Eventually, other schools around the country developed their own versions of IHP. If your kids or grandkids were tested for one of these (Doris’s were), they were legatees of Paul’s trailblazing.

If Paul were one in a hundred, that might finally be the end of the story. By now, you know it isn’t.

The Ongoing Story

Paul signed up for Insignia’s cruise from Rio to Dubai for two reasons. One was to visit enough new countries to hit the magical 100-country mark in world travel. More importantly, the itinerary included the Seychelles, the cruise destination that had been his late wife Bette’s favorite in the world.

He achieved both missions, even though revisiting very same beach where he and Bette were photographed 20 years ago involved required 75 minutes each way in crushing tropical heat. The hike didn’t surprise any of the passengers who had gotten to know Paul by then. A regular on the dance floor from 10:30-11:30 pm every night, he had a way of making 91 look easy.

Louis and Doris are rarely even awake at 10:30 pm, much less on a dance floor. Paul came into our lives after being matched with Doris by the ship’s bridge director. On the surface, Paul and Doris were a misfit: Paul is so expert he has owned a bridge club; Doris hadn’t played the game in more than 30 years and wasn’t expert the last time she last.

Lifelong teacher that he is, Paul committed himself to resuscitating Doris’s bridge game by tutoring her privately for hours every morning before playing bridge with her in the afternoon. The two became such a common sight with their heads bowed over a notebook that passengers began mistaking them a couple. Louis didn’t mind. He got to know Paul, too, and was as charmed and touched by the nonagenarian’s kindness, warmth and spirit as Doris was.  

It has been two years since Bette died. Paul told Doris during an early tutoring session that one of the reasons he took the cruise was to find out whether he could travel contentedly on his own. Asked what he had learned, he said simply, “There is still joy.”

Paul’s already has booked his next adventure: an Antarctic expedition in November of the kind where passengers shuttle to land in open boats and visit the continent and its penguins on foot. He will turn 92 the month before he sets sail.

One in a million.

Another Question Answered

Carolyn asked, “Clothes: Are you so sick of certain pieces of clothing (yours or Louis’s) you never want to see them again? Did you buy new ones along the way? Discard some?”

This is one of those topics we could list as a “surprise” in our month-marker reports because Doris would never ever have expected she could wear the same limited wardrobe every day for six months (or look at Louis in a much more limited wardrobe for six months) without being sick of it. But … we never have been.

Doris attributes this to several factors. One is that we have basically cruised through all four seasons which required us to carry seasonal wardrobes. That alone made for variety in what we wore. Doris in particular had also employed the tried-and-true travel tactic of packing interchangeable tops and bottoms, which made for far more outfits than their numbers would suggested. She also packed lots (and lots and lots – this is Doris) of jewelry to dress them up or down and colorful or neutral.

We have watched some passengers so spectacular commando shopping and find wonderful new clothes in every port, but we both lack that skill. We did pick up a couple new dresses and shirts (and jewelry!) that have gone a long way toward spicing things up.

Where’s Snowy?

Besides trying to be obvious enough that even those who have never found her (you know who you are!) can spot her in the Seychelles.

Coming Soon!

War in the Pacific