Page 34 - Senior Link Magazine Winter 2019- Online Magazine

Dave Lou Stafford
Raider Ranch
Royalty
by Jane Bromley
“ e met in prison” is the
unlikely introduction
WDave and Lou Stafford
often offer. And after a pause,
the reigning Silver Prom King
and Queen delightfully share
the serendipitous circumstances
that brought them together. The
Staffords are new to Lubbock,
having only moved to West Texas a
year and a half ago, but they have
acclimated quickly.
Lou
McMurrey
was born
in Beeville,
Texas in 1946,
the daughter
of an oil field
worker and a
schoolteacher.
Dave Stafford
was born
in Bedford,
Indiana in 1939. His dad had been
a postman, and he remembers his
mother working in a weapons depot
during WWII. The circuitous route
that landed them “in prison” is not
your typical love story.
After “a normal childhood”, Lou
graduated from Beeville High
School. Beeville, population-15,000,
“was a good place to grow up”. She
married and went to school at Texas
A&I. Her husband was drafted and
served in Southeast Asia during the
Vietnam War. Lou got her bachelor’s
in Education and master’s as a
34 Lubbock Senior Link
Reading Specialist. Her teaching
career began as the Speech and
Debate teacher and coach at Bishop
(Texas) High School.
Meanwhile,
across the
country, Dave
Stafford was
raised by a
single mother
with two
sisters and
two brothers.
He graduated
from Howe
High School
in Indianapolis in 1957. After one
year at Purdue University, Dave
joined the Air Force. He met and
married a woman from Colorado
and started a family. After being
discharged, he worked at a couple
of jobs in Colorado which he did
not enjoy. He went back into the
military, this time in the Navy,
where he served 18 years before
completing his career. He had been
around the world 2½ times and
ended up as Command Master Chief
Petty Officer (E9) at Chase Field in
Beeville, Texas. “The plot thickens,”
Dave chuckled.
Beeville is home to a maximum-
security prison. Lou’s marriage
had ended, and she found out
she could make a lot more money
teaching there. Another perk for the
single mom was that there were no
extracurricular activities to take her
away from her three sons, Michael,
Clay, and Cole. She began teaching
GED classes and also served as
the school librarian. It was “an
ideal teaching environment,” Lou
said. “You literally had a ‘captive’
audience.” By this time, Dave was
also divorced, and he had gone
back to college to earn a degree in
Management and in Elementary
Education. He then went to work
for the Windham School District -
the one that oversaw education at
the prison. His first position was
teaching the most uneducated of the
prisoners, “Kindergarten to third
grade level students.”
When Dave transitioned to
teaching GED classes, he took his
classes to the library twice a week.
“Everyone at the prison loved the
quiet library. It was one of only
two air-conditioned places, offering
respite from the humid, south Texas
climate. And a prison is such a noisy
place. I had to go through 13 loud,
heavy, locked gates to get to work,”
Lou remembered. Soon, common
interests and mutual respect led
to a friendship between the two
teachers, which then blossomed into
a romance. Dave and Lou married
July 10, 1998. Lou’s oldest son,
Michael, and Dave’s oldest three,
John, Mary, and Charles, were all
grown, but the blended family did