[fintstone]

When I recruited officers in GA and ran the region's AF JROTC units, I set records in recruiting and somewhat solved some of our race-related problems in high schools schools from Selma to inner-city Atlanta...as well as greatly expanding rural high school presence. Apparently I was the first officer ever sent there that spoke everyone's language (from the south). The first rural school, I visited, they brought me a basket of collard greens...and were pretty pleased that I knew what they were. A first. Most of the inner city and rural teachers were from elsewhere and neither they nor the students understood what each other was saying. I translated for both. What was really funny was talking to foreign language teachers from the deep south in German, French or Spanish (which I was tolerably fluent in at one time). Their accents made it impossible to understand in the languages they taught. I had to wonder just how many students went overseas and found out their language skills were not quite what they expected.