Neal Washington uses dreams to keep him focused on his life’s path, he told a crowd gathered at Ward Chapel A.M.E. Church Monday night.
Washington, the son of Helen and Spencer Ambler of Iola, spoke in honor of the late Martin Luther King, “the only single individual that the United States recognizes with a special holiday,” Washington said.
Washington himself has had an illustrious career both as an officer in the U.S. Army and as a professor of applied mathematics at the university level.
As a person whose job is to prove a “logical, sequential, decision-making processes,” Washington said the elusive art of dreaming for change can also be a “science, because I’m proof of having dreamed big dreams” and seeing them come true.
“Of course it helped having parents who taught me how to do the right thing,” he said.
He began with humble roots in Iola.
“I was never too proud to take any kind of work,” he said, including hauling trash. As for the smell, “I got over it. It was good pay at $1.25 an hour.”
Washington also learned the value of an education at an early age. His love of math and science as a high school student allowed him to work as an assistant to a soil engineer as a summer job.
“Those trigonometry and calculus classes landed me a job many adults couldn’t get,” he said.
A particularly memorable summer position was with an uncle on a military base in Massachusetts where at 14, he worked in its commissary. Not only was the pay good — it afforded him to buy a leather briefcase — but the experience also gave Washington a taste of life outside of smalltown Kansas and again started him to dreaming.
Washington said he is a purposeful dreamer. “I go to bed with a specific thing to dream about and wake up with an answer.”
Of course, Dr. King’s dreams of eliminating injustices and inequalities go on “forever and are for all of us,” Washington said.
Washington recalled instances of his and his family’s dealings with racial injustice. Some were from the early 1960s when he was a youth, including being barred from eating in a restaurant in Cherryvale, others as recent as the past few years when he and his family were literally encircled by a group of angry patrons in a restaurant in the Southwest, forcing them to leave.
“I tell you these things so it’ll hopefully prepare you for the ‘real’ world when you’re out there. So you can stand up to these injustices,” he said.
The program included vocal and musical presentations by Patricia Pulley, Lloyd Houk and Zareona Williams.
