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Each month, Texas State University President Dr. Kelly Damphousse sits down with faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and community members for a conversation about all things TXST — the past, the present, and the bright future of the university.
Part of the TXST Podcast Network: https://www.txst.edu/podcast-network.html
- I think students are attracted to that idea, like, you don't want to be too far away, but you want to be far enough away that your mom isn't showing up all the time, right?
- Well, and back then, the speed limit was 55, so it took a lot longer to get here than it does now.
- So you decide to go to school and you applied to come to Southwest Texas State back then, and what were you majoring in?
- You know, I didn't... I was undeclared.
- Undeclared, one of the most popular majors we have.
- It was completely undeclared, and everybody takes English, there was a... There were two Dr. Grosses here, I think they were a husband and wife, and I had the Mrs. Dr. Gross, and she converted me to an English major, it was awesome.
- You know, that happens so often, people take a class their first semester and go, "Oh, I'm actually kind of good at that, I enjoy it, let's..." "I didn't even know you could major in that."
- I didn't graduate with that. Hey, Bobcats, Kelly Damphousse here, president of Texas State University, welcome to the podcast where we meet with faculty, staff, students, alumni, friends of the university to find out what is going on at Texas State, and today, I'm super excited about our guest, Nim Kidd, who is the chief of the Division of Emergency Management for the state of Texas, thanks for being here, Chief, I'm gonna to call you Chief, I know you...
- Just don't call me late for dinner, everything else is fine, yes.
- So we had a chance to meet a few weeks ago, we're meeting with a bunch of university presidents and you're talking about emergency situations that you're thinking about a lot on college campuses, and I was so proud that someone said he's actually a Texas State alumnus, and I had heard about you, but not had a chance to meet you before, so thanks for coming in so we could hear more about you, and I love to start off these things by hearing your Texas State story, so starting, like, where you were born, where you grew up, why you came here and so on, so let's go back as far back as you wanna go back.
- That's a long way back.
- I know. What was it...? What was your freshman year? How long ago was it?
- 1987.
- 1987, man...
- I think that's 39 years.
- You are so young, golly. All right, so fire away, so where'd you grow up?
- In Kirby, right down the street, right outside of San Antonio, went to Judson High School.
- Okay, tell me about your parents.
- Still alive, still around there, living out in the La Vernia area now, life's good.
- What'd they do?
- Small construction company, just cash construction kinda stuff, yeah, and actually when I was at Judson, I went to school half a day and worked half a day, back then they had the...
- Back in the olden days.
- Vocational Industrial Clubs of America, VICA.
- Oh, never heard of it before.
- And so, I went to school half a day and worked half a day, and I thought that's all I was going to do.
- I think a lot of people at that age think, like, that's, you know, "Here's my lot in life," right?
- "This is my path."
- Did your parents go to college?
- They did not.
- Yeah, so there you are, so...
- And so, that's exactly what I thought, and so, as I graduated, even only going to school half a day, I still got credit for the work half of the day, but I applied and got accepted and I was like, "Wow, really?"
- It's just like that. Did you apply other places, or was this...?
- I did. I did, and I was accepted other places, so that's good as well, but this was far enough away from home but still close enough to home if I needed to go back.
- You know, I think students are attracted to that idea, like, you don't want to be too far away, but you want to be far enough away that your mom isn't showing up all the time, right?
- Well, and back then, the speed limit was 55, so it took a lot longer to get here than it does now.
- So you decide to go to school and you applied to come to Southwest Texas State back then, and what were you majoring in?
- You know, I didn't... I was undeclared.
- Undeclared, one of the most popular majors we have.
- It was completely undeclared, and everybody takes English, there was a... There were two Dr. Grosses here, I think they were a husband and wife, and I had the Mrs. Dr. Gross, and she converted me to an English major, it was awesome.
- You know, that happens so often, people take a class their first semester and go, "Oh, I'm actually kind of good at that, I enjoy it, let's..." "I didn't even know you could major in that."
- I didn't graduate with that, but it was... It really was, it was changing for me, I had great English teachers here. I came here for three semesters, but work was so good and the construction business was so good back then I dropped out and ended up working full-time construction until I got into the fire department in San Antonio, and that's kind of what changed the path that I was on, and in the fire department, you can promote through civil service testing, you didn't have to have a degree to... Up to the rank of district chief, but to be higher in the department, the city manager wouldn't appoint anybody without a degree, so that's when I decided, "Hmm, better go back and get another degree."
- You know, increasingly, we have more and more students come back who we call... I don't like the term non-traditional student, but there are students who have started, and then, life happened, and then, some point along the line, "I wish I could finish what I started," some people it's like, "I've already retired, but I just wanna finish this thing I started 30, 40 years ago," and we actually have a program called ReUp, and so, we find students who have started with Texas State, we'll take all comers, but we tend to start with our former students, and then, invite them back and say, "Did you know that if you did this and this and this, you could actually graduate in a year or so?" And a lot of people, I think we have 700 graduates in the past year or so that went through our ReUp program, so yeah.
- That's awesome, and I think it is truly life-changing, you know, I... My degree from Texas State is the Master of Public Administration.
- It's one of my favorite degrees, that's a great master's program.
- And the program here was great, I mean, Dr. Longoria, Dr. Balanoff, Pat Shields, I think was still here and taught one of my classes, Billy Fields, the stuff that I learned during that time as an adult, family, kids, not yet a grandfather, but close to it at that point in time, I use that every day in my work today, and so, I was so proud to have a degree from Texas State.
- It's such a practical degree too, for someone who's gonna work in the... In, you know, civil service or in public affairs, public works, that degree really teaches you a lot about how the world works, and there's those lessons that can be very useful as well. So you leave Texas State for a while and go into the fire service.
- Yes, sir, San Antonio Fire Department.
- Yeah, so why a firemen? I guess a lot of kids grow up wanting to be a fireman, right?
- I didn't. No, literally, it was a grace of God, I have no idea how I got in the San Antonio Fire Department.
- 'Cause a lot of people are... You get in because you're connected, like, your dad was one and it's like a family affair.
- I'm telling you, grace of God, that's the only answer for it. Back then, the city had been on a three-year hiring freeze, so from 1990 to 1993 they had zero firefighters hired, and I was playing softball out in La Vernia, Texas on a Sunday afternoon, and this big guy named Joe Aaron Beattie, who's a hero of mine, hard to spell his last name, was trying to play shortstop, and he wasn't very good at shortstop, he was a big, big man, and he jumped for a ball and twisted his ankle, and so, we picked him up and moved him off the field 'cause we wanted to keep playing, and I... Again, I grew up in the construction business, I didn't know anything about it, but when I was younger, I also thought I was a cowboy, I actually was a member of the Southwest Texas Rodeo Association back when I was here back in the day, I got the jacket to prove it, but I had broken my leg on a horse two years before that, so I knew what a broken leg looked like, and that was about the extent of my medicine, and I looked down at his ankles like, "Well, Joe, it looks fine to me, I mean, can you walk on it?" So he hollered for his daughter, Amber, to go to their suburban and bring the bag out, and this little girl brings out something that looks like the back of an ambulance. Well, I didn't know Joe, but Joe was a firefighter paramedic with the San Antonio Fire Department, and the next weekend he brought me an application to the fire department...
- Isn't that crazy, that serendipity?
- That's the story, I mean, there's... That's it. I went and signed up, took the test, got in the class, and as they say, the rest is history.
- Yeah, so you're working as a firefighter, and so, what happens next?
- In the fire department, all firemen have part-time jobs, the 24-on 48-hour work shift is what it was then, so...
- So 24 on...?
- 48 hours off, so back then in San Antonio, our shift change was at noon. Best shift change on the planet. You're off every day of the year. I'm off all morning, I go in at noon, I get to have fun all night hanging out with the boys, cooking dinner, maybe make a few runs, go to sleep, wake up the next morning, make some breakfast, clean the trucks, maybe make a few more runs, you're off the rest of the afternoon, then you're off all the next day, and then, the next day you're off until noon again, so it was great... But when you don't have something else to do, you tend to get in trouble, so I started doing hazmat work and all kinds of stuff.
- I think a lot of firefighters have a side gig, right?
- I don't know one that doesn't. Every one of them that I know has some sort of side business doing something, so as I got into that, I kinda got into the hazardous materials response business and started taking some other classes, promoted up through the ranks, civil service testing, you have to stay in a rank a certain period of time, and then, it's competitive exam against the others and move up, I made engineer three years after I got in, in '96.
- What's an engineer?
- It's a driver, someone that drives the apparatus, and so, you're a firefighter, which is the one sitting on the back of the truck usually and doing all the work, the drivers drive the truck, and then, the next rank would be lieutenant, captain, and then, district chief, so as an engineer, fire apparatus operator, I drove the downtown district chief, a guy named Jimmy Scarmozi, who's best in the business, and then, I started driving the city's technical rescue team, and so, when I started doing that, that was '96, in '97, after the Murrah Building collapsed and it was realized that Texas did not have a centralized urban search-and-rescue team, the folks over at the Texas Engineering Extension Service, TEEX, part of the A&M system, actually went to the legislature and had funding created for Texas Task Force 1. Back then, George Bush was governor, and so, Valentine's Day of 1997 is when Texas Task Force 1 started. In March of 2001, we became the 28th team in the Federal Emergency Management Agency Urban Search and Rescue System, the FEMA USAR Program, so from '97, I was an engineer, in '98, I made lieutenant in San Antonio and I stayed on the city's technical rescue team and part of Texas Task Force 1, in March of 2001, we became the 28th team in the national system. September 11, 2001, lieutenant on the rescue team in San Antonio, it's my day to go to work at noon, 9:00 in the morning, I'm still in bed, phone rings, it's a guy that I'm going to work with, another Bobcat, his name's Dusty Mayer, Dusty says, "Hey, man, turn on the TV."
- Yeah, "Are you watching TV?" That's...
- And I'm like, "No, I'm still in bed, bro," and so, I turn on the TV and I said, "What channel, Dusty?" And he says, "It doesn't matter, just turn it on."
- "It doesn't matter," yeah.
- Now, we were at engine 11, which was downtown San Antonio, and so, I can hear his TV in the background over the phone, and in my mind, for that split second, I'm thinking, "Man, we missed a working fire in downtown San Antonio on a high rise, and that means we're gonna spend the rest of the afternoon picking a pose," so I was kinda, like, bummed out, and then, as I turned it on, I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center and I said, "Hey, man, I don't think I'm coming to work today," we were the second up in the nation for national deployment, and so, we wound up getting activated that day, we went to College Station 'cause that's where the team was based out of, and then, they held us in College Station for about two days, and so, after the teams had been deployed to the World Trade Center, and then, into the Pentagon, we were on standby to go anywhere else in the nation where the next attack may occur. We wound up going to the World Trade Center about on the 14th, 13th or 14th, and stayed there for 10 days deployed, and then, came back, and I guess that was kind of the defining moment... One of the defining moments in my career to get out of being on the firetruck every day and shifting more towards emergency management, so I was a lieutenant at the time, I was on the list to promote to captain with the city, in November of '01, I promoted to fire captain and I went to the hazmat team, and they were opening a new position in emergency management for the city and I was like, "Man, I'm 35 years old, I wanna be on a firetruck, I don't wanna ride a desk, I wanna go fight fire," and so, for a year, I did that, the next year, 2002, they said, "We've created a second position," and that's when the Department of Homeland Security was created, FEMA moved under them and they started passing out billions in grant dollars, so I managed the city's first Homeland Security grant program as a captain in emergency management back in 2002. Stayed there for about a year and a half, I promoted to district chief in 2004 and that's when they named me city emergency manager, and I stayed there for about six years as the chief in San Antonio, and we worked so close with the state, Governor Perry was governor at the time and we had Hurricane Katrina, and Rita, and Dolly, and Edward, and Gustav, and Ike, and San Antonio was the central staging area for all the state assets, and so, we came... Real good relationship with the governor's office at that point.
- Why is that? Was it because it's so far away from the coast?
- All roads lead to San Antonio and all roads lead out of San Antonio, so you can get from Brownsville to Beaumont from San Antonio, and it's the largest... Second-largest city in the state, lot of infrastructure, a lot of resources, we had a really good team that knew how to manage events and disasters and worked very well with my predecessor, a guy named Jack Colley, who passed away in April of 2010... I'm sorry, May of 2010, and that's actually what got me to the state is the governor's office, Governor Perry called and said, "Hey, I know you and Jack worked very well together, I need somebody to come and do this, will you come up here?" And I was like, "No way, no, I'm not gonna come and do that, I've got a great job here in San Antonio," right?
- It's like you're dragged kicking and screaming into all these great opportunities, right?
- "I don't wanna go, no!" And so, "Well, will you come up for six months? Will you come up here for six months 'til we can find somebody else to do it?" And that's been over 16 years ago.
- Wow. And so, you go there in what role?
- As the chief of emergency management for the state, it's the same role that I have today.
- Oh, so you... So you went there for six months and here you are 16 years later.
- Yes, sir, yeah.
- How have things changed over that time period? 'Cause it's such a nascent thing, as you said, really post-Oklahoma City bombing, I'm sure things have changed a lot, but what are some things that really have changed in emergency management?
- There's a lot of things that have changed, there's a lot more things that need to change, so I'd love to take just a few seconds to talk about both of those. I think the things that have changed the most has been technology, and that has helped every citizen more, I mean, when you think about when Hurricane Katrina happened, and then, Rita happened right after that, and Rita was more of a Texas strike, remember all the evacuation problems with Rita?
- I remember people trying to leave Houston and people getting stuck in traffic jams and a bus caught on fire, terrible things happened.
- That's right, and that was 2005. You didn't have iPhones in 2005. You didn't have a live map in everything.
- You couldn't look and see, "I'll take a shortcut or maybe take a detour around this traffic," or whatever.
- That's right, so so much technology has changed since then, mostly for better, but some for worse, and the technology change I think has really allowed us to get instant news, instant messaging, reverse notification, reverse 911 systems like the one y'all have here on campus, notify students.
- Tracking people, like, you can find, "Oh, where's my loved one?" Oh, I can find them on Find My Friends or whatever, and so many great technologies...
- So those technologies have changed. Here's what hasn't changed yet. In Texas, in order to be a peace officer, a cop, you go through a state-certified academy with state-certified instructors, state licensure, pass a test, and then go get hired. If you're gonna be a firefighter in Texas, you pass a state exam that's run by a local government or community college, but it is state-certified curriculum. If you're gonna be an EMT or paramedic in the state of Texas, you have to go to a registered academy, certified academy, instructors curriculum, pass a national test in order for you to touch a patient. To be an emergency manager in the state of Texas, you need the signature of an elected official.
- Huh.
- There's no minimum requirements, and we're really, really trying to change that, we've had... We started our own academy, like you have a police academy or fire academy, Texas had the first emergency management academy in the nation, we've had five cohorts of students, a little over 100 graduates, it's eight months long, they pass our test, and we think within the next two years, you'll probably see a state certification for emergency managers at the local level and state level, just like you have for every police officer, firefighter, and EMT and paramedic in Texas, I think those are some of the big changes that we've been working on, and you'll see more of those coming.
- So what are the kinds of things...? What are the skills that they need? I'm sure for crisis management, but communication and some other things and coordinating things.
- Yeah, that's the beauty of our business, we do everything. A lot of people see our business whenever they see lights and sirens on the TV, somebody's getting rescued or a fire's getting put out, most people don't know that our agency is managing $23 billion in federal grant funds right now, we have as many auditors on our team as we have planners.
- I'm sorry to hear that.
- It's a diverse organization, it really is, from people in the field that know how to communicate one-on-one with local officials, planners, organizers, we have logisticians, we have several warehouses across the state that we can take food and water and cots and blankets, I mean, everything that a local government does in all departments, we do a little bit of that to support those local governments, and it really is... It's a great team, it's a great organization, and the best part of it is our people that are out there to serve Texans every day.
- You know what's interesting? Beth and I used to live in Oklahoma and we had a terrible situation where we got stuck in a tornado, and so, we were fortunate to survive, a lot of people didn't, it was a very bad tornado, and... But I was... We were actually out unloading a car into a storage facility, and so, we weren't in the house where it happened, and then, we got away and came back to where we were and total devastation, it was amazing to me how quickly backhoes started showing up and dump trucks started showing up, and we found two dogs at our house and someone said, "If you got..." "If you find stray dogs, take 'em to the Home Depot down there," and they had vets sitting there and the vets were checking over the dogs, and they were storing 'em in cages, and I remember thinking how coordinated Oklahoma is to deal with tornadoes, but in the back of my mind, think about all the work that was done when there was no tornado to get ready for that, and that's what emergency management is, not just what happens in the emergency, it has to be all that stuff that's going on before the emergency, getting ready for it.
- Albert Ashwood was the Oklahoma state director during that time and he spent 20 years building that program to do exactly what you just talked about.
- It was just amazing, the coordination.
- Yeah, his sister was killed in the Murrah Building collapse, and so, it drove him to build a better Oklahoma emergency management program, and he's an icon in this business, he's retired now, but he built that program, and it is, I mean, it's everything that you see happening, and the volunteers and the faith-based organizations are the biggest unsung heroes in everything that we do.
- There's people cooking hamburgers and hotdogs, within a couple hours, there was, like, a food truck set up, it was unbelievable.
- It's beautiful to see, it's sad whenever it has to... The reasons that bring it together are horrific, but to see the human nature and the people respond to that, I think is just incredible and inspiring.
- We've had some tragic events happen just even in my time here in Central Texas with flooding and so on, what is your role when those critical events are happening? There's a flooding in Kerr County and so on, you're trying to deal with this, what do you do?
- So my job is to not be in charge, but be responsible, so state law in Texas says that mayors and county judges are the emergency management directors for their communities, and so, they hire... Some of them hire coordinators, the governor is the emergency management director for the state, I'm appointed by the governor to manage the programs and the state agency coordination that supports those local governments, so we roll into a community and ask, "What do you need? What can we do to help?" In many places across Texas today, we've added county liaison officers, Hays County has one of the first ones that we created a few years ago to help and be embedded with those local officials in real-time, so we're not waiting for them to call us, we know what's happening when it's happening, we've already coordinated with them, we know what their needs are, we know what their capabilities are, we have a pretty good idea what they're gonna ask for, and our job is to have that stuff sitting right outside the city limits waiting for 'em whenever they need it, and it really... It's all across Texas that we do that, and so, we wanna bring in resources when a local government or local community doesn't have enough of what they need in order to take care of their people.
- It's fascinating to think about all that, and you must do... Like, how big is your operation, by the way?
- So we have about 650 people across the state, but the beautiful part of it is we get to add local government resources, we're sending local firefighters on the state dime out to support other communities almost every week in Texas, and so, you know, we bring in all of those local resources, police, fire, EMS, public works, public health people, because the local governments have a little extra capacity and nobody can send all of their staff, but most cities can send two or three, and we package those in together into strike teams and task forces and they roll out to support those local officials.
- It's such a smart thing because not everyone can gear up for the... To be fully capable of the biggest emergency that could happen, and so... And you gear up to a certain level, but not all the way, but when something does happen and you need more help, well, the ability to borrow from other places is what makes that happen.
- It's a 9/11 lesson. FDNY is the largest fire department in the nation...
- Still wasn't able to do it.
- They handled everything except 9/11, and it brought firefighters literally from all over the nation to support them, and so, not everybody can do it all by themselves all the time, and we talk with our team all the time, there are no more single-disciplined, single-jurisdiction responses in this state. They just don't exist. Everywhere we go, we go in groups and packs, multi-disciplined, multi-resourced in order to be able to support it, whether that's the flooding that we had last year in Kerrville or the flooding that we just had this year that went... You know, we've still got rivers out of their banks and major flood stage going down into Lake Corpus Christi right now, and we still have teams on the ground there to work that, and so, we will continue to watch what's happening all over the nation to be ready for what's happening here in Texas.
- What is...? What's your favorite part of the job?
- The people that I am blessed to work with every day, and they live and breathe, they eat this stuff and they just eat up with it and their families are so supportive of them doing it, and the folks that we have out there on the street just love what they do and taking care of each other and taking care of Texans, that's probably the favorite part of the job. I also love a challenge. I've gotta have something that's like, "How are we gonna fix that today?" I don't know, what are we gonna do for this?" There is no status quo, there's no ho-hum days, every day is a great day, and there's not a day that goes by that I wake up in the morning and know what I'm gonna do all day, something's gonna change.
- That's the amazing thing, even my job, I wake up, here's my calendar, and then, I... Like, an hour later, like, "Okay, cancel all those things, I gotta deal with this thing," that's the nature of crisis, though, right? You never know what's gonna come, but a lot of it, again, goes back to the preparation. So what's the toughest part of the job?
- Watching people lose ones they love. That's the hardest part of the job.
- [Kelly] I just think that...
- And everybody wanting it to be preventable. It's not.
- Yeah, you know, I think there's an expectation that the police should always keep us safe, for example, and it's just impossible to be on guard for every single hazard, every act of God or act of man that might put us at risk, yeah.
- Yeah, that's the sad part.
- It's interesting, I think about when I do terrorism research, or I used to back in the day, and we used to... There was joint terrorism task forces that started after 9/11 and some other activities, the idea is that they weren't communicating very well, the FBI and the CIA and other local jurisdictions weren't communicating well, so they brought these things together, do you all have that kind of approach as well? Like, everybody has to come together to talk about...? Tabletop exercises and things like that?
- We do, we also participate in the JTTFs like you talked about, they still exist, they still have communication gaps, but we have the State Emergency Management Council, which is 39 state agencies, all of the state public university systems, Texas State is a part of that council, and so, we bring in higher education, we get the research component, we've added that, that's new in the past six years, seven years that we brought in higher ed into emergency management because there's so much capability in all of our public universities, I mean, you've got Freeman Ranch here, you've got a lot of things that we use all the time, you've got the ALERRT Center, there's so much that's in higher ed that we use from the Texas State system that we didn't use 10 years ago, and so, the Emergency Management Council is the Department of Public Safety, the Texas Military Department, State Health Department, it's a group of agencies and I chair that council, and those are the state assets that we package together and send to support local governments.
- You know, one of the things they learned about the joint terrorism task forces as I... From my perspective, was that terrorism is such a rare event that you'd be training for terrorism attacks, and then, thankfully, it's a rare event, and people kinda get burned out after a while, like, it's almost like crying wolf and there's concept of all-hazards training, like, it could be a terrorism event, but it could be a flood, or it could be a tornado, or a hurricane, or some other... accidental, you know, explosion, and I think that that's a wiser approach to this, instead of just focusing on the very rare critical event of a terrorism attack, a lot of the things, the search-and-rescue parts of it, the communication with the media and the public and so on, those are all kind of... Those are all standard, right?
- Yes, sir. Yes, sir. They are, and that is, it truly is... We don't truly focus on... And this is the way it used to be in the pre-9/11 world, you had a hurricane plan, and then, you had a wildfire plan, and then, you had a tornado plan, and now, it is... It's all hazards, it's any and all hazards and any and all threats, because it is the same components that we use those ingredients to mix together regardless of what the recipe calls for.
- Yeah. All right, gonna go back in time, favorite memory as a Bobcat.
- I think my favorite memory now, I stopped there for lunch today, I went to Alvin Ord's,
- Okay.
- If you've never been to Alvin Ord's, you gotta go, it's a family-owned business, they've been around probably, I don't know, 45 or plus years, and got to talk to the folks in there, it's changed a little since the 39 years ago that I was here...
- All things do.
- All things do, yes.
- You know, actually, things get smaller, right? I remember thinking, "This used to be so big," and I walk in, "Holy cow, it's not as big as I thought."
- My dorm room looked the same today. It looked pretty good.
- What dorm were you...?
- Butler Hall, right across the street, yeah, yeah. I also remember the excitement of walking across campus, walking into the Quad, looking at the Stallions. Pretty good memories of that.
- It's pretty cool. Did it seem big when you came here?
- It seemed... I went to Judson High School, so Judson was a big campus, this was a lot bigger than that, but it didn't feel big even though it was big.
- People still say, "Well, I'm glad my daughter goes to a small school like Texas State," you know? 'Cause it feels that way.
- It's not a small school, but it's certainly... I mean, it's a great feeling, right? It's not like a campus where you feel like you gotta walk two hours to get somewhere and you can't get anywhere on campus because of traffic everywhere else, so I really love that aspect of it, and it's such a beautiful place, now, I do miss the cheese grater. The cheese grater was the outside of this building, which was awesome.
- It was named in some architectural digest as the ugliest college campus building in America.
- And I'm sad the outside's gone.
- All right, Chief, now we're gonna switch gears here, I'm gonna give you a card, so this is a question, I've not seen it, you've not seen it, these are viewer and listener-submitted questions, but you get to be the podcast host here, you get to ask me the question, and if it's a good one, we'll let you answer it as well, so fire away.
- All right. Let's check this out.
- You never know what they're gonna ask.
- Are you ready?
- I'm ready.
- I'm gonna get my big podcast voice on and ready.
- Okay. Oh, there you go, lean right into it.
- All right. "What is the most adventurous thing you've ever done?"
- You know, when I... So when I was a young man, I was... I went to... Got a law enforcement diploma at a community college, worked in prison, and I was prison guard and I was like, "Oh, man, my career is over," and that became, like, adventure time for me, so I was, like, mountain climbing and doing all kinds of crazy things, motorcycle riding, and I got into skydiving for a while and it was crazy, I look back at it now, I think I was probably, like, 20 years old or so, and I was on the fire team at the... I was on the tactical team, so if there... Ever there was a riot, I was the guy that had to get suited up and go do it, but the skydiving was probably the scariest, kinda craziest thing, and we learned how to land by... This is a podunk little skydiving operation up in Canada, and we got on a picnic table and jumped off of it and that was our training, and then, they took us up and I'd never been in a plane before, and so, I was kind of a little afraid of heights and I just imagined when we got up there, I would just see Earth, you know, like, the pictures from the Moon, but I got up there, I could see my car, I could see people walking around, I was just really high, and then, I had to jump out and I didn't jump out in tandem, they just kinda push you out and you gotta pull it down, they got a little walkie-talkie telling you how to land, but you're kind of on your own. I had never prayed before in my life until I got in that plane, and I was like, "God, if you get me out of this, I'll never do this again," but then I kinda, like... I survived and I thought, "Well, I could do it again," and I prayed every time I went up, and so, finally, I just stopped, but then, this summer, the ROTC group invited me to go to Fort Knox, Kentucky to go hang out with them as they were training, they said, "By the way, we're gonna let you jump with the Golden Knights if the weather holds," I started praying again, but now, I'm praying for the weather to hold so I get to jump with the Golden Knights and I got to do it again...
- That is awesome.
- My 13th jump ever was with the Golden Knights and that was really exciting, so have you ever been skydiving?
- I have not. I have not.
- Oh, it's... If you're gonna go, you gotta go with the Golden Knights 'cause they know what they're doing, it was... They were so reassuring and so professional and so on, but what about you? What's the most adventurous thing you've done? You're a fireman.
- Well, so never skydiving, never would jump out of a perfectly good plane, I don't think, I've had a really great adventure for life, I mean, from high-angle rescue, rope rescue, technical rescue on the rescue team...
- It's a lot of repelling and...
- And all of the boat rescues and, you know, most of the fun things, I've been able to do and call it work, I think right now, the most adventurous thing that I've done is my wife and I bought land and we have cows now. I've never had cows in my life, I have no idea what I'm doing with cows, but we're on this adventure together like, "All right, I don't know, what do you think we ought to do today?" "I don't know, let's go buy some cows," and I know that sounds corny and crazy, but it's a crazy ride right now, I love it.
- You know, one thing I learned, my brother-in-law is... Runs the family farm, his father's farm, and one day, we're talking and I said, "How many cows do you own?" He said, "You never ask a man how many cows he owns," it's like asking how much money you have in the bank, so I'm not gonna ask you how many cows you have, but that is pretty exciting, so...
- It is, we're having a great time with it, yeah.
- Well, good for you guys. Well, Nim, thank you so much for joining us, it was great to hear your story and to hear more about what you're doing here to make Texas better and make Texas safer, so thank you for doing that.
- Thank you.
- Yeah, it was great to hear your story, and I gotta go get an Alvin Ord's now, so you made me hungry, and thank you all for joining us as well, it's always great to hear from our former Bobcats... Well, actually, former Bobcats? Once a Bobcat, always a Bobcat, so thank you for joining us and it's always a pleasure to have this moment to share about what's going on at Texas State University, until next time, States Up, everyone.