My wife and I had been working with exchange students for a few years and we had some feeling for the difficulties people had changing cultures etc. A young couple came to our area from France to operate a business. Our best friends met them and we all became friends. We helped them as much as we could, they really didn’t need a whole lot of help but when I talked about going to the race the young lady told us her mother had a teaching colleague who went to the race every year and might be able to help me. Turned out I went to LeMans with him and his 16 year old son Rudolph who served as our interpreter. Had a wonderful time. We parked his motor home in the reserved parking behind the main grandstand, we watched the start, rode a bus to the end of the Mulsanne straight, he cooked dinner, we slept for about four hours, had reserved seats across from the pits and passes that gave us access to just about everything. It was magic. But that’s not what’s important.
After the race (Jaguar won, the Brits, some of whom slept on the ground the way I had planned to) went crazy. When it was all over we drove back to their house in Angier. Rudolph my translator was very bright and spoke English extremely well. He had like most Europeans the dream to come to California. So in my American way I invited him to come and spend a summer with us. Then his mother took me aside and enlightened me. She was hesitant about speaking English but got her point across very well. Rudolph was “A lazy boy” He didn’t work hard in school and despite being gifted was in danger of not graduating. So my “Manager” kicked in. I took him out in the garden and told him he was invited on the condition that he graduated and cleaned up his academic act. He sort of did. By the way, we had a wonderful dinner and a very pleasant evening. Got a little drunk as well.
Next summer he came, He had skated by at school because he was clever and a smooth talker but needed to really buckle down and work. His family is wonderful but they are like us. Not rich people, sending a son to California for the summer wasn’t easy for them. Rudolph needed to work, so my son who was an outside sales rep, just starting his career, offered him the opportunity to help do store sets of plumbing fixtures in a customers locations up and down the Central Valley of California. In July. Near 100F, no air conditioning in the truck. And when John works, he works. Three sets a day, Redding to Bakersfield. Hard work. Do a store set, get in the truck, go do another store set. Rudolph took more money home than he came with but more important he found out what was in store for him if he didn’t buckle down and get an education.
He went home and shortly after we got a letter , in English, from his parents. Something on the order of “We don’t know what you did to Rudolph but he is a different boy, etc” He wound up doing a business course at Oxford, learning Spanish, and going to work for Peugeot or Renault or something. He’s doing very well. Funny how having to bust your hump in 100 degree heat will make that classroom look good to some people. So that’s payback, I got a weekend to remember at the racetrack, and a young man got, I hope, a life.
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