When career general officers in the U.S. military near retirement, they are required to take a course on preparing for their non-military futures.
So, last October, when Brig. Gen. Patrick Mordente was at the end of his 29-year career in the U.S. Air Force, the central question was: What now?
When the course director asked Mordente what his dream job would be, he didn’t have an answer.
“I told him I’d had my dream job for the past 29 years,” he said.
That night, the 50-year-old Mordente talked it over with his wife, Marissa, and by the next morning, he had his answer…sort of.
“Something in academia,” he said vaguely.
Marissa, meanwhile, jotted down her hopes on the back flap of a small spiral notebook she keeps with her at all times. It read simply, “Gainful employment in accordance with God’s will.”
A few days later, Patrick learned about a job opening in Texas: director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
After having completed an extensive application and interview process, he will take over as director on Monday morning, putting an abrupt end to his four-month retirement.
The Mordentes have spent the intervening weeks visiting Patrick’s family in Columbia, South Carolina, and Marissa’s family in Columbus, the place the couple met in July 1987 soon after the recent graduate of the Air Force Academy had arrived for pilot training at Columbus Air Force Base.
Friday, the couple spent their last day visiting Marissa’s family and saying a temporary goodbye to their daughter, Catherine, a freshman at Mississippi University for Women. A son, Cauthern, is in graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis.
Preparing to move…again
One thing career military wives have in common is they are expert packers. For soft-spoken, Marissa Mordente, moving has been pretty much a way of life. Aside from Patrick’s four-year stint as an instructor at CAFB, the last quarter-century has been a flurry of moves — 16 in all, including their last assignment where Patrick was wing commander at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
As of Friday, the Mordentes’ belongings were scattered in three storage units in Illinois and Mississippi. It will likely be months before they find a home in Dallas and reassemble their possessions.
Marissa hardly bats an eye at the prospect.
“This is the start of a great new adventure,” she said softly. “I’m so excited. We’ll find a church, make some friends and I’ll find somewhere to volunteer, maybe even at the Presidential Library, if they will allow it.”
The visit to Columbus has allowed Marissa to reconnect with her large family.
Her parents, Wilburn and Barbara Beatty still live here, along with a bevy of uncles, aunts and cousins from both sides of the family (Her mom, a Duncan, is from Caledonia).
Gen. Mordente can attest to that.
“When I married Marissa, it was like I was marrying into half the population of Columbus,” he said.
The right kind of experience
At first blush, Gen. Mordente’s new job seems unrelated to his military background.
He served within the Department of Defense, sometimes working directly with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. He is also a combat veteran who served in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq and was wing commander in both Germany and Kuwait.
That experience, he said, has prepared him for his new job in one important sense.
“When I was first approached about this and asked if I would be interested in applying, my first response was I’d absolutely love to, but I’m not a librarian or archivist,” he said. “But what you find, what I discovered in going through the interview process, is that a presidential library is a cooperative effort. At the George Bush Library, it’s a collaborative arrangement with the National Archives, which is who I will work for, the Library Foundation and Southern Methodist University.
“I think that’s really what prepares me for this job: the ability and experience I’ve had in team-building,” he continued. “All three have to work together. I think that’s the biggest thing I’ll bring to the table.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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