Port Aransas South Jetty

Cavazos pens book on his life

New book Former U.S. Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos and his wife, Peggy, pose recently on the porch of the South Jetty with Lauro's new memoir. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Lauro F. Cavazos, who lives much of the year in Port Aransas, has written a book that tells the story of his life - from his birth on the King Ranch to his tenure as the nation's first Hispanic Cabinet member.

In an interview with the South Jetty, Cavazos said he wrote "A Kineo Remembers - From the King Ranch to the White House" partly to show young people, especially members of minorities, that they can achieve big things through education.

"I started out in a two-room school house (on the ranch) ... and I end up where I am today," said Cavazos, who spends a lot of time each year working at Tufts University in Massachusetts, where he is a professor. "The circumstances that really shaped that were my education, which started on the ranch. I learned a lot of things there. There was a real emphasis on formal education there."

Cavazos, 79, proudly identifies himself as a Kineo - a person born on the King Ranch. In his book, he extensively describes life on the ranch and how it influenced his life.

"Honesty, integrity, commitment to family, education, service to country - those are the things we were taught there," Cavazos said. "We learned about hard work and doing a good job for people. We learned about commitment to good causes."

His education began early. Cavazos was bilingual before he even entered school because he and his siblings were encouraged always to speak only Spanish to his mother and only English to his father. His father was bilingual, and his Spanish-speaking mother could speak some English.

After serving in the Army during World War II, Cavazos went to college and eventually earned a doctorate in physiology at Iowa State University. He went on to a career in medical education. In 1980, he became president of Texas Tech University.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan nominated Cavazos to be Secretary of Education, and he was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. When President George H.W. Bush was elected later that year, he asked Cavazos to stay on, and Cavazos did.

Cavazos was the first Hispanic in U.S. history to hold a Cabinet position. (In 1976, Cavazos's brother, Richard E. Cavazos, became the first Hispanic to be promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army.)

Cavazos said he's proud of a number of achievements during his time as secretary of education. Successes included holding a national forum in which representatives of all 50 states agreed on a specific set of national education goals. Goals included a 90 percent high school graduation rate and to be first in the world in math and science.

Cavazos also pushed for parents to be allowed the freedom to send their children to whatever public schools they liked, even if they were across school district lines. "It wasn't too long after I left that there were at least half a dozen states allowing that," he said.

Cavazos also put together a task force that studied why Hispanics had such a bad failure and dropout rate in public schools. Work by the task force and the Department of Education produced results including an executive order establishing the President's Advisory Commission on Education Excellence for Hispanics. The executive order "markedly increased federal support for the education of Hispanics," Cavazos wrote in his book.

Cavazos wrote that he planned to stay in Washington for only two years but that President Bush, through his chief of staff, John Sununu, asked him in 1990 to resign slightly before Cavazos was ready.

"Sununu said that the president wanted a change in the Cabinet composition because he wanted to bring in some new people at midterm," Cavazos wrote. "I knew then where this discussion was going. The president's domestic agenda was in trouble and his popularity was declining just as he was starting to gear up for reelection."

Sununu urged Cavazos to consider an ambassadorship to Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic, but Cavazos declined.

Cavazos told the South Jetty he was "constantly in trouble" with Republicans because he would not campaign for Republicans running for office if he didn't like their records or ideas. He said he also didn't campaign for Democrats.

"I just was more concerned about getting people educated," Cavazos said. "That was my job."

After resigning, Lauro and Peggy Cavazos moved to Port Aransas. Near the end of his book, Cavazos devotes some pages to Port Aransas and how much he and his wife enjoy taking walks on the beach.

"During our walks, Peggy and I talked about Washington and my education successes and failures," Cavazos wrote of the period just after he left Washington. "We speculated about the outcome of my job if I had been more political in my decisions. But as the days passed, we talked less of Washington. Soon, our greatest challenge and competition on our walks was which of us could pick up the most sand dollars or the prettiest seashell."

For the past 10 years, Cavazos has worked as chairman of the national advisory committee of the Health Professions Partnership Initiative - an effort to get more disadvantaged students into health professions.

Today, Lauro and Peggy Cavazos spend more than half the year living in their Port Aransas condominium. They also spend part of the year in Concord, Mass. Cavazos is a professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

Cavazos said he and his wife explored the entire Texas coast before deciding Port Aransas would be their home most of the year. Fishing opportunities were a big draw, but also "the town itself is just a nice town with good people," Cavazos said.

"A Kineo Remembers - From the King Ranch to the White House" is available at Barnes & Noble Booksellers and through www.amazon. com. It also will be available soon at the South Jetty, 141 W. Cotter St.