“What I did on my summer vacation”
A plainsman on the bounding main

By JOHN ANDREW SNYDER

What did you do last summer? Go to the beach? Visit Arlington National Cemetery? “Do” Europe on a package tour just so you could say, “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium?” Let’s try another set of options: Did you “do” the Ozarks? “Set” on your couch or easy chair and watch Rudy Giuliani lock horns with Mitt Romney? Go for a 5-week cruise on a U.S. destroyer in the vast Pacific while working for your fare, room, and board?
While the votes are being tabulated, I am going to make a prediction -- TAMIU professor Lem Londos Railsback is the only person in Laredo who bought into (or should we say “bit” into) the final option. Needless to say, neither Norwegian Cruise Lines (home of the “Freestyle Cruise”) nor Carnival Cruises (where the complaints vary from “bad food” to “missed ports” to “branding” at the spa) do not offer a “WWII war zone” option.
But the USS John Paul Jones (DDG 53) does, if you qualify, and if you can get high priority clearance from the brass (and we’re not talking about the trombone, the tuba, and trumpet). And you can, if you’ve got the goods, like Professor/retired Navy Chief Petty Officer Lem Londos Railsback. A veteran of a great many missions in the far east and other places all over the world as a uniformed naval officer during his 14-year Navy career, Railsback spent the summer of 2007 on the bounding main working as an independent contractor to teach freshman English to 20 enlisted sailors. “I flew to New Zealand and went by barge out to my ship and went aboard near the Kingdom of Tonga, southwest of Samoa and southeast of Fiji,” he said, adding, “Tonga doesn’t sound like much, but the British have a high regard for the royal family there, going back two generations; in fact, our ship took the Australian and New Zealand consuls over there to pay homage to the Tongan king (Taufa’ahau).” Since the USS John Paul Jones has a broad mission ‘to conduct prompt and sustained operations at sea in support of U.S. interests,’ it covers a lot of watery territory. “We covered over one-third of the entire world, vertically,” Railsback said. Among some places where the Jones sailed was the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of any ocean, the Equator, and Guam. “When the assignment was over we were in the mid-Pacific, and I was helicoptered from the Jones to the supercarrier USS Nimitz, which eventually docked at the island of Guam (US territory in the western Pacific Ocean). I took an American Airlines flight out of Guam back to the States. The flight lasted 22 hours, but I still left August 8 and arrived August 8,” he said. Railsback said that his teaching jaunt over the billowy briny on the Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones was well worth the effort because he found practically everything he saw and did, and everyone he met, interesting if not fascinating. That’s just what he anticipated his reaction would be. Lem Railsback is a seeker of adventure, and his catalogue of remembered people, places, and things seems as one with his burning desire to keep on adding to it.
Towards the end of the Great Depression, Lem Londos Railsback was born in Menard, Texas, county seat of Menard County in central Texas, right about where the Great Plains begin, or end, a county bordered by no less than seven others, namely Sutton, Schleicher, Concho, McCulloch, Mason, and Kimble. His first name is biblical, his middle name is Greek, and his last name is German (originally Railsbach). “My dad had done some amateur boxing and wrestling and gave me the middle name ‘Londos’ for Jim Londos, wrestling world champ (also known as ‘The Golden Greek’),” Railsback said, adding, “Our family name is Railsbach, but with all the anti-German feeling left over from World War I, Dad had to change it to Railsback, and we’ve been working ever since.” Regarding the hard economic situation in central Texas in those days, he said, “We ate a lot of squirrel.”
Young Lem Londos attended junior high school in Brady, the geographical center of Texas, and the county seat of McCulloch, Texas, “where there were more churches than street lights,” Railsback said. He has vivid recollections of his music teacher, Miss Marson. “In the sixth grade I fell in love with her, in the seventh grade I learned to hate the man (her husband) who brought her lunch every day, and when I was in the eighth grade, she had to leave,” he said. Miss Marson did something else -- besides look pretty -- that had a lasting impression on Railsback’s life. “She introduced us to the song ‘The Streets of Laredo.’ We sang out of a music book that had been put together by a lady named Carmona at LISD. Hearing that song made me see the far pavilions --I knew I had to go to Laredo someday,” Railsback said.
Many of us, like L.L. Railsback, came of age back during the time when the military draft was in effect, when Uncle Sam had total control over a young man’s fate -- they called it “universal conscription.” In order to fulfill his obligation to his country and also not be drafted, Railsback volunteered for the Navy’s eight-year Naval Reserve program. He attended Jr. - Sr. boot camp in 1954-5 at the Marine Corps recruit Depot (MCRD) in San Diego California, then served his two years of active duty, and wads five years and six months into his eight years of stand-by status when Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas offered him a music scholarship (trumpet). His captain in San Angelo told him, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth; you can always go into the military, but when you get a chance to go to college, you should take it.” Since the armed forces had just undergone a budget cut, Railsback and other college-bound men were given honorable discharges for time completed.
By 1972, Railsback was working as a college professor in Laredo. “What do you do if you reach your dream in life before you’re 40?” Railsback asked. The answer to that rhetorical question is that he has been very busy indeed. He still is. He always will be.
He was 10 years into his professorial career when the Hezbollah bombing of the U. S. Marine a barracks at the Beirut Airport took place, which prompted him to re-join the Navy, and Professor Railsback volunteered to serve his country in uniform a second time. This time they couldn’t have kept him out if they had wanted to (and they had no reason to not want to), because he made the highest grade they’d ever seen on the entrance test and was in better physical shape than most of the younger guys. He worked his way up through the ranks -- seaman recruit, seaman 3rd class, seaman 2nd class, seaman 1st class. At the same time, he racked up 26 correspondence courses in the specialty areas of yeoman, personnelman, and legalman. When he went out to active duty during the summers, he was first sent out to Hawaii, where he became Fire Team Leader, after which, on later assignments, purposely worked on different types of vessels -- carrier, light destroyer, light frigate, cargo ship, and minesweeper. He did “double duty” several times, going active two times in the same year. “In Brady, you grew up tough and ornery or you didn’t survive,” he said. Then he became a top training officer, and in the 1980s he molded his Laredo outfit into the most achieving small facility in the U.S.A . “I do it serious,” Railsback said.
During the early 1990s Railsback was called upon to train Navy personnel from west of the Mississippi at Coronado Island (where they train the navy SEALS). Then, in 1994 he was promoted to Chief Petty Officer in San Antonio at the Marine Corps Reserve and Naval Reserve Center.
Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve Lem Londos Railsback Jr. retired from the Navy in 1995, after serving for 14 years . He had joined on a sudden impulse after the 1983 terrorist bombing by of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut Lebanon, and through intelligence, hard work, and determination became a standout member of the U.S. armed forces. Hopefully, there are still men with half the brains and grit of Lem Railsback still wearing the colors.
Railsback has been an educator (in the true sense of the word) for 49 1/2 years, and plans to retire in January 2009. Fifty years of teaching! And 32 years a member of TAMIU’s Department of Education faculty (i.e. Texas A&I Center at Laredo, Texas A&I at Laredo, Laredo State University, and now TAMIU). His loyalty, the high quality of his teaching, the breath and depth of his excellent academic writings, mostly related to curriculum, and the incredible enthusiasm for education that he has instilled in his students down through the decades, more than qualifies Dr. L.L. Railback as a bona fide founding father.
Well-known at TAMIU and to the broader teaching community (since he is a professor of Education, almost all local teachers have taken at least one course with him) as a knowledgeable, quick-witted teacher with twinkle in his eye and an anecdote for every situation. Dr. Railsback is probably not a “typical” German-English-French-Scottish-Irish Cherokee. In fact, he’s not “typical” in any other way, either -- he’s well-read but not “bookish,” he’s pure Texan, but not booted or Stetsoned, he loves his country and says the pledge of allegiance, but he’s not a “wave-the-bloody-shirt” jingoist, he’s opinionated, but open-minded, he gets along with people famously, but he’s not a social butterfly, he has the gift of gab in spades, but doesn’t try to be “clubby,” and as it is with the good doctor with the golden touch, his patients (the students in his classes) willingly take their medicine, get their shots, and say, “Thanks, Doc, I’m better now.”
Doc Railsback, as a matter of fact, is “just what the doctor ordered” for a rough-and-tumble bordertown like Laredo -- Laredo doesn’t cotton to ho-hum, humdrum, bore-you-to- death types of people, but it has been known to tolerate, if not demand, individualism -- and Doc Railsback is definitely not cut out to be an “old cloth” conformist.
“I never intended to be typical, average, or normal,” he said, adding, “When I retire, I’m not going to stop thinking or working, I’m just going to work for different people.”
He has multiple travel/exploration plans, including the Iberian Peninsula -- Lisbon, Seville, Toledo, Barcelona, and Madrid, as well as Istanbul, Costa Rica Nicaragua, and 13 South American countries, as well as African nations from Tunis eastward around the “hump” of Africa. He also has ideas for three books. “I have about 200 years of work that still needs to be done,” he said.
At the end of the spring semester, one of his students came up to him and said, “Dr. Railsback, thank you for being the most eccentric and interesting professor I’ve ever had.”