I was born, raised and currently live, in Port Arthur, Texas, which is located at the most southeastern point of the state. In twenty minutes, I can be on the beach in Texas or Louisiana. The best part of growing up and living in Southeast Texas is the food and the culture. When I was younger, it was very common to have neighbors who regularly spoke French and others who regularly spoke Spanish. While my father spoke fluent Spanish, he never taught my siblings or me the language. It was the one way he could converse with his friends in secret. While it’s more common to hear neighbors speaking in Spanish today, rarely do I hear anyone speak French unless I go to the French market. Although at times it seems as if life in Southeast Texas moves at a snail’s pace, it only takes 1½ hours to drive to Houston and 3½ to New Orleans. You can two-step at the Houston Livestock Rodeo one weekend, and the next weekend “laissez la bon temps rouler,” catching beads thrown from a float during a Mardi’s Gras parade in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Although I attended Catholic school from 5th to 11th grade, the school I attended was forced to shut down the year I was supposed to graduate. As a result, I went from Bishop Byrne High School, of about two hundred students, to Thomas Jefferson High School with more than 800 and alumni the likes of Janis Joplin and Jimmy Johnson. Fortunately, I adapted well and graduated with the official honor of “Mr. Party Hardy” for having more parties than anyone else. But my high school years involved more than carefree enjoyment. My father was tragically killed by a drunk boater when I was in 8th grade, and suddenly money was an issue for my family when it had never been before. At that time, there were no laws against drinking and boating, so my father’s killer walked away free. This proved a hard pill for my family to swallow, but we had other issues to manage.

I was the last of seven children, and although my sister and I were the only two children left living at home, it became a struggle making ends meet. To help out, I began working at a neighbor’s air conditioning business every day after school and half a day of school in the 11th and 12th grade. I started out as a general helper and eventually became an air-conditioning technician by the 11th grade. The one thing I learned more than anything while climbing into those hot attics to service people’s units was that I needed to get a college degree. But my family no longer had the money to pay for my college, and I realized I would have to somehow find the funds for higher education by myself.

Immediately following my high school graduation, I left for the US Air Force. Following basic training, I was assigned to become an Air Defense and Early Warning Technician (radar operator), and my first tour was in Iceland. However, I didn’t get sent to the most pleasant and picturesque part of Iceland, like Reykjavík. They sent me 205 miles east of Reykjavik to a Navy base located on a tiny peninsula called Hornafjörður (Hofn for short) with only seventy people. As I looked around me, I honestly could not believe what I had gotten myself into. Our job there was to watch for and intercept Soviet bombers in flight from Russia to Cuba. When we detected the Soviet bombers enroute to Cuba, we would scramble the Navy fighter jets (F4s initially before we upgraded to the F15s) to intercept and tail the bombers until they passed south of the Faroe Islands. And then we would do the whole thing all over again when the bombers headed back to Russia. Reagan was in office and the Cold War was at its peak. 

During the summer months in Iceland, we had sunlight for nearly twenty-four hours of the day so when we were on break, we had plenty of opportunity to visit the island. We spent most of our summer playing softball, hiking, camping, fishing, and visiting the local villages. I was fortunate to become friends with a local family and visited them often. The view of the aurora borealis from Iceland is something I will never forget.

To make up for my year in Iceland, I received orders for an assignment at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) located deep within the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Living in Colorado was truly the highlight of my military career. My friends and I would snow-ski one day, and then river raft the very next day down the Royal Gorge. Education quickly became the focal point of my life, and I began my formal education at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. During my third year in Colorado Springs, I was selected to become a military instructor in my career field of Aerospace Science. I was sent to the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama for a semester to attend Academic Instructor School. My final three years at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base was spent teaching Aerospace Defense and Air Defense Operations for both NORAD and the Space Command incoming operations’ staff. Believe it or not, Space Command existed more than thirty years ago.

But during my seventh year in the Air Force, I knew I had to finish my degree if I really wanted to advance, so I applied for and was accepted into a program called Palace Chase, where enlisted personnel could transfer from the Air Force into the Air Force Reserve or Air National Guard in order to finish a degree program and return to the Air Force as an officer. I interviewed with the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston and was quickly accepted for the position as the Noncommissioned Officer In Charge (NCOIC) of Command Post Training. While at Ellington AFB, I had the opportunity to work with several NASA shuttle pilots. But in 1993, the Cold War ended, and the Department of Defense was discharging servicemen faster than they could remove their uniforms and I was no exception. After nine years, I was given an opportunity to separate with an honorable discharge and I took it. 

When I first started taking college courses, my plan was to eventually attend medical school, so my classes were geared toward premed. My father was an anesthetist; my grandfather was a medical doctor; two of my great grandfathers were medical doctors (one owned a hospital); my Uncle Donald Duncan was chairman of the UTMB Department of Anatomy for twenty-five years; and my Uncle Christopher Duncan was full-time faculty at Baylor College of Medicine for more than forty years. So medicine was in my blood. But after completing more than three years of undergraduate studies—primarily in the sciences— I was required to complete a semester of some form of clinical work. Therefore, I obtained employment as a physical therapy tech at St. Mary Hospital in Port Arthur, Texas, where I had the opportunity to work with wound care. It did not take more than one semester for me to realize that medicine was not for me. It dawned on me that I had taken over three years of college courses for a career I did not wish to pursue, and because I could not decide on a new major at that point, I took a job as an office manager for a local industrial drug testing business. Focusing almost all my time on my new managerial position, I put my education on hold.

While I started out as an office manager in Nederland, Texas, in one of the company’s seven satellite offices, I eventually started opening new satellite offices for the company. Then when the owners decided to start a second drug testing business, I was asked to transfer to Houston and help build the new business in Texas as general manager over the entire company. During my time working in drug testing, I became an instructor for the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association (DATIA) as well as a certifying instructor for the Intoximeter Alco-Sensor IV Evidential Breath Testing device. Additionally, I worked on the congressional advisory committee for the Department of Transportation’s drug and alcohol testing regulations. 

However, after eight years of working in drug testing, I still had not finished my bachelor’s degree and I suddenly found myself in an employment dispute with my employer. Because of federal protections for small businesses, I quickly learned I was prohibited from bringing suit. I moved back to Nederland, and after working in construction with my brother for a month, I contacted an advisor at Lamar University and asked what was the quickest bachelor’s degree that I could obtain based on my transcripts. I inquired about this because I wanted to go to law school, and in order to get accepted, I needed a bachelor’s degree in anything. I then contacted our main drug testing competitor in Jefferson County and begged for any job they had available so that I could put food on the table for my family. I immediately began studying for the LSAT and applying to public law schools in the Houston area while working at Tower Medical of Nederland collecting specimens for drug testing. After two full semesters and one summer semester, I graduated from Lamar University, Beaumont with a bachelor’s degree in Applied Arts and Sciences. Shortly thereafter I was accepted into Texas Southern University’s law school program. Because I am a Texas veteran with an honorable discharge, I qualified for the Hazelwood Act which paid for my tuition and fees. Although law school is normally a three-year program, I managed to finish in 2½ years, graduating summa cum laude.

Immediately following law school, I was hired by a law firm in Pearland, Texas practicing family law. While I quickly grew to despise family law, I found my passion in Probate (administration of a deceased person’s estate) and Estate Planning. Within three years, I went solo and started my own law firm, The Law Offices of Michael W. Gonzalez, PLLC with an office in Houston and Pearland. But after ten years of successfully running my own probate law firm with multiple employees, I decided to sell my practice, become semiretired and move back home to the Port Arthur area. Now, I only prepare estate plans and trusts online for clients across the state of Texas.