Leaving behind a legacy

After 26 years of representing and advocating for the Gary Job Corps Center, Randolph Goodman will be officially retiring from his post as business community liaison on May 31.

Goodman is a familiar face and voice around San Marcos. Anyone that has gone to any civic gathering in the area has probably heard at one point, “It’s a wonderful day!” echoing across the room. It’s been the well-known saying of Goodman, even before he made his way to San Marcos to work for Gary Job Corps Center.

Goodman joined Gary Job Corps in December of 1992 as a placement specialist. But prior to his work at the Job Corps, Goodman served in the United States Navy for 20 years — or as he puts it “I worked, one war, two government overthrows and fought one typhoon and two hurricanes out in the ocean.”

Born and raised in east Austin, Goodman attended Johnston High School in the 1960s, where he was under the tutelage of Dr. Charles Akins — the educator for whom Akins High in South Austin was named and the first black teacher in the integrated Austin School District that went on to become the first black principal. Akins was Goodman’s history teacher in 1964 and it’s with him that Goodman said he was first given the drive that has marked his entire life.

“I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of mentors in my life like Dr. Charles Akins,” Goodman said. “He’s the one that got me to get a degree in history and to push to get to go to college because he was a great man that pushed and he was who was instilled that in me.”

Goodman attributes Akins’ example to why he joined the Navy during Vietnam.

“In 1968, I was in college and I was going to get my degree, but that year is when Robert Kennedy was assassinated and then Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated and I said ‘I can’t be here, I can’t be here and do nothing,’” Goodman said. “So I went to my Navy recruiter and joined right away. I wanted to make a difference and the first thing I wanted to do was go to the Republic of Vietnam and do what I needed to do.”

Goodman took part in five campaigns during his two tours in Vietnam — the first on an assault cargo ship USS Washburn as a boat engineer, where he routinely dropped off cargo and troops on the beaches, and second in Da Nang at the Naval support facility — and received the Presidential Unit Citation and Vietnam Cross of Gallantry, among other honors.

After Vietnam, Goodman was transferred to the USS Henley, a destroyer based in Norfolk, Va., traveling up and down the east coast, and to Canada, Puerto Rico and even Egypt. After that, he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba overseeing a fleet of crash rescue boats.

“While I was there, that thing that was in the back of mind thanks to Dr. Akins was still there, so I started attending night school at Old Dominion University,” Goodman said.

Never giving up on his dream to finish college, Goodman took courses as he could during his Naval career,. After 14 years, he graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with a double major in history and political science.

After 20 years of service in the Navy, Goodman retired and was working for a technical school in Austin doing public relations. That is when he came to the attention of Gary Job Corps. After repeated attempts to get him to come check out the campus, he finally obliged.

“The magic word to get me to go anywhere is ‘I’ll pay for lunch,’ and they were trying to get me to come to Gary and I was just kind of avoiding it, but they invited me out and offered to buy me lunch so I came out,” Goodman said. “And as soon as we started driving onto the center, I started seeing some of the young people and I said, ‘You know those guys kind of look like me when I was 18, 19 years old.’ I fell in love with the idea of working and helping these young people.”

As soon as Goodman finished lunch that day in the Gary dining hall, he went back to his office in Austin, cleaned up his resume and called Gary Job Corps.

“I called that day and let them know, I don’t care what I have to do at Gary Job Corps, I’ll pick up trash, but I want to come to work out there,” he said.

Luckily, he said, a job opening was available in placement. Eventually, he moved to the role of public information officer and business community liaison, where he not only represented the Job Corps, but passionately advocated for it to one sitting president, several senators and dozens of congressional representatives.

“What can I say about the past 26 years? I’ve met so many great people and it’s been very fulfilling working at the Gary Job Corps,” he said. “I have been many times to Washington to speak on behalf of the Job Corps program, and we always maintain our funding, and to me that’s because of the mission that we’re on. We deal with the underserved, that’s who we serve. My job has been to just to herald what these young people were doing, what they were already doing all the time, and that wasn’t hard.”

Goodman said the thing that has driven him for the past two decades was the students. He saw the same potential and heart in those kids that he saw in every kid around the world and in himself, that kid that grew up in east Austin.

“I saw in all of those students, I saw that kid in Nairobi, Kenya, or that kid in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, or that kid in Vietnam, I even saw that kid in east Austin, Texas, that had Dr. Akins say ‘You can do this,’” Goodman said.

Goodman said one of the aspects of the Job Corps program that he relishes the most is the social bearing it gives its students. They don’t come to the Job Corps as perfect people, but for him, imperfect people are the ones that shine light.

“I live for seeing the change in students to see them grow,” Goodman said. “I tell students that, ‘We’re all crackpots, if you have a candle and you put a perfect pot over it, there’s no light, but if you put a cracked pot over a candle, there will be light and that’s what we are, that light.’”

Goodman said that Job Corps students learn to be a whole person, not just academia and vocational training, but how to live and work with other people and how to focus their energy, and be driven.

“With Job Corps we try to deal with the whole person,” Goodman said. “So we have academic, vocational and social skills training. And you know colleges tend to focus on academia and junior colleges focus on vocational, but no one works on that social part and that is where the experiment of the Job Corps worked out. Being driven is an important thing. It builds upon itself. I was driven to get an education and it took me 14 years of night school to get it done, but it built upon itself.”

All told, Goodman’s Navy experience allowed him to travel the world three times over. He’s seen and served in the Strait of Gibraltar, the Panama Canal, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Bass Strait and countless other places all because he always raised his hand when it came to service.

“When the Navy asked for a volunteer I always raised my hand,” Goodman said. “Navy is supposed to stand for Never Again Volunteer Yourself, but I never learned my lesson. I guess I’m a slow learner.”

Goodman’s service didn’t end with the Navy though. In 2013, he was honored by the Texas Legislature for his community service based on a long list of volunteer activities. He has held every office in the San Marcos Lions Club, served on the boards of the Hays County Food Bank, the San Marcos Educational Foundation, the Hays County Crime Stoppers and CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates). Twice named Ambassador of the Year by the San Marcos Chamber of Commerce, Goodman has served on numerous committees for that organization. He has also served in the Rotary Club, National Council of La Raza, the local LULAC council and the American Legion.

Goodman said the thing he’s proudest of though, after his almost five decades of service, is that he married his childhood sweetheart, Eva. They will celebrate their 49th anniversary in December.

But Goodman still has one more goal that he wants to finish before he lays down his hat.

He wants to officially place the marker for the PFC Kristian Menchaca Memorial Highway along Highway 21. The marker will cost $5,000 to create and put in place, according to Goodman. But it’s important to him, because the person it represents was important to him.

Menchaca was a Gary Job Corps Security/Corrections graduate who joined the U.S. Army and was killed in combat after he and two other soldiers were manning an observation post. The three soldiers were ambushed resulting in one being killed in action, while Menchaca and one other were captured, tortured and eventually killed in June 2006. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Prisoner of War Medals.

“That’s the last thing on my bucket list,” Goodman said. “Well, that and maybe going up to Little Bighorn to see Custer’s Last Stand.”