Angel Montez (l) with his wife Leah, recently moved from Fort Worth to the area. He works for W.J. Mangold Memorial Hospital and is a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force (courtesy photo)
LOCKNEY, TX – With nearly 30 million people residing in Texas today, the growth rate for the state has been staggering.
Almost four million people have been added to the population (2010 – 2020), and Texas became the only state in the Union to gain two congressional seats due to the growth.
While most of the growth has occurred in larger metropolitan areas, one former member of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) is bucking the trend.
Angel Montez lives just outside of Silverton and, despite growing up in Fort Worth, wanted to “get away from the craziness of the city. The schools were going nuts, and we wanted a place where our family could have peace and raise the kids with our Christian values and have less outside negative influence.”
Montez was hired by W.J. Mangold Memorial Hospital in October and was recently named the Director of Quality Management, Infection Prevention/Employee Health/Risk & Safety Management.
“What I am doing here is making sure the hospital complies with Medicare standards,” he explains. “I’m also looking for ways to improve how we do things through process improvement and monitor outcomes, so that the things we want to increase, like patient satisfaction, increase and things we want to decrease, like infection rates, decrease.”
Still, to leave the lights of the metroplex for the stars in West Texas is more than most from the city can imagine, not Montez.
“I love how we treat each other like family here – it’s my favorite part of rural Texas living. We didn’t have as much of this in the larger hospitals I worked at before. Everyone here has been so welcoming.”
Though you can find the 14-year veteran, including two deployments during Operation Enduring Freedom, at work during the day, he has plenty to stay busy during his off time.
He and his wife Leah have five kids, one mother-in-law, four dogs, some chickens, ducks, and a couple of turkeys, “so the family is very important to us.”
