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So, finally, Bob Shaw, who is Chairman of Shaw Industries and founded Shaw Industries, and a lifelong friend of mine, and I would talk, and he was aware of what I was interested in and he asked me one day.
He said, "What are you - what are you doing?”
And I said, "Well, Bob, we finally reached a determination as to what we have to do.
And that is we've got to get some teachers from Mexico or somewhere in Latin America, to come up here and work in our schools, because these kids -- I mean, you could bring an Anglo-Spanish speaker, but they're not of the same culture.
And that cultural aspect is absolutely a dynamite thing.”
And he said, "Well, you know, I've got a partner down in Monterrey, Mexico, who is a -- he's connected with some school down there.
Would you like for me to contact him?”
I said, "Go get it!”
And to his everlasting credit, I don't think that Bob's partner was all that enthusiastic about it, but I think Bob was tenacious and stayed after him.
And finally, out of the clear blue, I got a -- a letter written by Dr. Victor Zuniga, from the University of Monterrey.
It told me that he had been designated as the Mexican director of the Georgia Project.
Not our name! It was their name!
And that he wanted to begin communicating with me.
And that started a communication, and that was back in about 1995.
And we -- or '94 -- anyway, we kept saying, "You gotta come up here and see what this situation is.”
He'd say, "You come down here.”
I said, "No, it's not down there, it's up here!
This is where this has to be addressed.”
"You come down there. You come down to us.”
And so finally, they prevailed, and I took the superintendent of schools, the chairman of the board of education.
I took a teacher or two, and some of the people that were working with me.
And we went down and met with people at the University of Monterrey.
The first day that we got there, they put us in a little room that'd be just half the size of this office.
And -- but we had a good meeting.
And so, we got a call the next morning at the hotel to say, "Okay, you're - we're changing locations.”
We came to -- about three times as far and about three times as many people.
By the third day we were in almost a ballroom of folks at the University who were listening to what we had to say.
And now, one of the folks who I continue to work with, he's now a professor at the -- at the -- UCLA, and written a number of books about the Georgia Project.
I asked him, "Now, just tell me. Why is that ya'll insisted that we come down here, rather than you all come to Dalton?”
He said, "We wanted to find out if you were real. And now we have.”
And so, just a couple or three weeks later, they came to Dalton, and the Project was well underway.
And -- it's the funniest thing, that -- that is the folks down there at Monterrey, I think they felt the carpet industry was going to fund us, and pay the bill.
Of course, the carpet industry hadn't promised us any money at all.
Nobody'd promised us any money.
But we had done this elaborate planning, and we had a plan and force that we were gonna put into operation, the fall of 1996.
And we didn't have one dime to fund it. And this was the spring of '96.
Well, this is, you know, this is oral history and you don't need an old man not telling you the truth!
Out of the blue, the city of Dalton, composed of five folks.
And I kid them, they were all white and intelligent, and I say, "Here you got five fellows who can't speak good English!”
Say, look here, we're gonna give the Georgia Project 750 thousand dollars over a three-year period to get you off the ground.
And that was just like, manna from heaven.
And believe me, we had kept them informed after everything.
We kept the whole community -- and the newspaper!
This is why I have such respect for being open with the news media to let people know what's going on.
They came to our aid and we got that 750 thousand dollars plus we got, you know, about half a million dollars from the Federal Government, plus we were beginning to get, through Max Cleland and Paul Coverdell, federal funding.
And we continued to get it, to a lesser degree, through Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss, till it got to be such a hot issue (laughter) that I -- and it just ran its course and ran out of money.