Teacher turned author made his mark on Odessa

Joe Suffield has a lot of entries on his resume, from being a Little All-American quarterback in 1958 to coaching future professional baseball players to teaching physical science at Odessa’s Bowie Junior High School.

Now he’s added something else to the list. He’s now author Joseph Suffield. "Escape to the West" chronicles the life of Will Frederick and his journey from rural England to early day America. It tells the tale of Frederick’s tribulations as an indentured servant forced to flee from Virginia to western Pennsylvania and then to the frontier beyond. The protagonist pursues the woman he loves and tells the story of how he preserved in his quest to reach Detroit, then the frontier’s western stronghold.

The book is a result of Suffield’s lifelong fascination with that period in history. "Growing up, I was always infatuated with colonial America," he said. "I couldn’t get enough of movies like "Northwest Passage" and "Unconquered." I read material written by writers who covered that period: Kenneth Roberts, Walter Edmonds and Dale Van Every, to name a few."

So when he finally retired from education in 2006, it was the right moment. "I had been thinking of writing for a long time and finally had the time after I retired. I wrote most of this book in Odessa before my wife retired from ECISD in 2008 and we ‘retired’ to the north." The book is available at amazon.com and lulu.com.

The Suffields now reside in Peoria, Ill., the place where he taught English and served as head baseball coach and assistant football coach at Peoria High School.

He said, "Over a 10-year period I had 73 players go on to play college baseball. Four signed professional contracts and one of those was the No. 1 Major League first-round draft pick in 1971."

That came after his collegiate career as a football and baseball player at Monmouth College in Illinois, where he was Little All-American in 1958. He earned a bachelors in English at Monmouth and a masters at Western Illinois University.

But there’s a lot of Odessa in his background, too.

The Suffields came here in 1983. He taught science at Bowie and English at the junior and senior levels at ECISD’s summer school. "I enjoyed my 23 years at Bowie. The faculty and students were a terrific group to be around."

And, as a sidelight, Suffield and Brian Rosson created a fantasy football league a quarter of a century ago when fantasy football not only wasn’t cool, but hardly even existed. The league thrives today, but without longtime commissioner Joe Suffield. He fell victim to his own rule that anyone who left town had to forfeit his membership.

That long run ended with the decision to go back home. Suffield said, "Our kids, who all graduated from OHS, had moved away and we relocated to Peoria where we are closer to our relatives."

Suffield’s own journey to a frontier of sorts in West Texas may not have been as adventurous as that of his lead character in "Escape to the West," but it sounds like he has enough material for something a little more autobiographical.