Teacher, pastor, singer. At one point in his life, Milton Fields has been all of those things, often at once.
“I grew up here, most of my growing up years,” he said. “We were over in Alabama for a while. My father, O.L. Fields, was a minister, and he went over there to pastor and organize churches.”
The shape of his life — a PhD, a career in elementary education, following his father’s footsteps into the ministry — seemed inconceivable to the young Fields.
“Who am I? I ain’t none of those things,” Fields said. “I grew up as a boy who liked to be by himself, who liked to fish and hunt. I was as shy as I could possibly be. I just wasn’t interested in (education) as a student. I preferred the woods.”
The influence of a string of standout teachers began to change his mind, though, starting in the third grade.
“I had a teacher named Miss Grace,” he said. “If anybody was the perfect teacher, Miss Grace was the perfect teacher. She made learning exciting. I had several great teachers in high school. I had a teacher at (Lee High School) we called Mama Ruth; she taught literature. She made it live, and didn’t accept second-best in anything. They inspired me.”
Fields said he was drawn to elementary education because of the importance of giving children a foundation for future learning.
“The problem with our high schools is we got into a position where our high schoolers were not ready,” he said. “The only way to get them ready is to go back to kindergarten and first grade. I wanted to be able to give those kids a good foundation. That’s the reason the Lord uses the example of building a house on sand, or why the Army is so concerned with your feet.”
Fields’ education career started on the coast as assistant principal at the Escatawpa School, but a medical emergency would bring him back to Columbus in 1982. He explained that his son had a rare and very dangerous spinal tumor.
“He had to have some real serious surgery, and the only person in the state who could deal with his problem was here in Columbus,” he said. “My mother, Lois, was retiring from her job as a nurse at Columbus Hospital, so she could help my wife and I take care of him.”
Fields served as principal at several local schools — Caledonia Middle School, West Lowndes, and, eventually, Fairview during his time in Columbus. About 1994 he took a job with Welch College in Tennessee as director of teacher education, eventually rising to the level of vice president. Since 2011 he has served as a consultant for the school.
Along with all that, Fields was led into the ministry.
“My father was a minister, but I had never been all that interested in it,” he said. “But I don’t know what it was, in my late teens people started coming to me for advice. I was the sort of person who needed advice, not the kind who gave it.”
An experience at a revival gave Fields the nudge he needed to realize that particular calling.
“They asked me to sing (at the revival),” he said. “I saw people, businesspeople, coming every night and making professions of faith. One night I got to realizing that I was singing about something I just didn’t practice. I thought about that a lot, and it seems like the Lord laid (ministry) on my heart.”
Fields pastored churches in tandem with his education career, including leading First Free Will Baptist Church in Columbus from 1982 to around 1986.
Just as Fields’ son’s health brought him to Columbus, his wife’s would bring him back again. When Helen Fields began showing the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, they decided to move back to be close to their son. They settled on about 18 acres near Ethelsville, Alabama, just over the state line.
“She always loved flowers, and I wanted her to be somewhere she had flowers,” he said. “She worked them up until about a month before she passed away.”
Fields still lives there, happy in the woods.
“I found out about three weeks ago that I have liver cancer,” he said. “I haven’t lost the first minute’s sleep, and I’m not going to. I’ve had a good life. Sometimes when I get to feeling sorry for myself, I see a commercial for St. Jude’s. Those kids never had a life. I had one. I have nothing whatsoever to complain about.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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