Substitute teacher Edward “Randy” Stephens has traveled the globe as a soldier and a park ranger but has settled down– for the time being– in the Southeast as a part-time substitute teacher, part-time park ranger. “I’m a real estate broker, US customs broker, had Georgia teaching credentials. I don’t know how to make money.”
By KATY MAYFIELD – Print Viewpoints Editor
The ODYSSEY Media Group will provide viewers with stylized profiles that center on people in the Athens community telling their own stories.
All his life substitute teacher Edward Stephens has followed his love of history wherever it takes him: from the University of Georgia to the jungles of Ethiopia and Vietnam.
Edward “Randy” Stephens sits at the front of his classrooms, calling role and then leaving his students pretty much alone, intervening in nearby conversations to crack a joke or break up horseplay.
“Substitute” comes as the latest in a long line of adventures for Stephens.
He left Atlanta to get his degree in Political Science with a minor in History at the University of Georgia. He learned a lot, but didn’t finish college.
Instead, he went on to military training in snowy Massachusetts– for a minute.
“This was the middle of winter in Massachusetts, so they were doing (training) through four feet of snow. Somebody said ‘Look, if you tell them you’ll go to Ethiopia, you won’t have to go through that.’”
Stephens, history minor in hand, was game.
“I didn’t know much about where Ethiopia was, but I knew it had a storied history back to the beginning of man’s occupation of the earth. So I spent a year and a half there.”
In Ethiopia, Stephens saw abelisks, heard hypotheses about the supposedly-nearby Ark of the Covenant, and saw jungle waterfalls which rivaled Niagra Falls, one of which, he says, was hiding a Soviet power plant behind its rock face.
“We made a wrong turn, ended up at one of the Emperors’–a great Emperor, almost the last, of Ethiopia–we ended up at his compound, almost got shot,” Stephens said. “We didn’t carry weapons, which was good. If they thought we had weapons they would have killed us.”
After a year and a half Stephens was sent to Vietnam. Fellow soldiers were confused or resentful, but Stephens made it through, once again, with the help of his passion.
“It was rough for a lot of people, but as a political scientist I had actually been educated and I knew why I was there. We were blocking an army of possibly 40 million Chinese.”
On the trip home from a four year enlistment, Stephens found himself with mostly old buddies from that cold Massachusetts training camp. His time abroad had come full circle.
“When the plane took off, we had been under stress for so long that we all broke into laughing and I guess we laughed for twenty or thirty minutes,” Stephens said. “You don’t ever think the day’s gonna come, but thirty years later you wish you’d stayed in.”
Why?
“There’s a great pension.”
