Growing Up Southern: August 4,

Did I ever tell you how I got my first real job? Would you believe I did it solely on merit? Good.

It was like this. I had just, by more or less mutual agreement, ended my relationship with the United States Navy. Oh, that’s not true. They wanted me to stay in. Even promised to send me to OCS. But, I was free, white, and over 21, so I wanted more.

Don’t forget about the “white” part.

I intended to go back to San Francisco. That’s where I had begun my four years of a hate-love relationship with the world of John Paul Jones. When I stopped off in my home town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, though, my mother begged me to stick around and see if I might find employment. “You’ve been gone away from us long enough,” she said.

Here’s hoping you understand a thing or two about Southern boys and their mamas.

So, I looked around. I never expected to find anything. The draft-dodgers already had all the good jobs, and, like a carnival ride turning upside down, public sentiment had reversed itself in its attitude toward honorable discharges. Potential employers sort of looked at me as if to say, “You were too dumb to think of a way out of the draft?”

I was packing to head West when my mother told me that one of my favorite cousins ran the sanitation department at City Hall and knew everyone in the county. I went up and talked to him. Turns out he knew somebody who knew somebody in Little Rock who might know somebody.

I went to Little Rock, and within a few minutes was talking to two young men who had just started an urban planning consulting firm. They agreed to hire me if I would work for pretty much minimum wage at first. Gosh, that was an area I had hoped to get into, and I had no expenses. Why not? I found out later that one of the motivating factors in my getting hired was because they mistakenly thought I was related to the somebody my cousin knew and they were working on a big contract with his department. They kept me on anyway.

Within five years, I was a partner in the firm, all this success due to my merit. Oh, a little bit of it was due to the fact that I was a white male of European descent. Why, any young African-American man with my credentials could have walked in and received the same deal.

Maybe not. I’d been with the firm about a year when I referred a secretarial applicant to one of the partners. A friend introduced her to me. She was a highly skilled worker with glowing recommendations and an immaculate appearance. She even fit the “cute and perky” part, which was a, more or less, universal requirement for secretarial work in those days. But, I neglected to mention her race. I barely kept my job because of that one small sin of omission.

I’ve been thinking for two days, and that is the only time in 46 years that my job was imperiled because a human being was offered a bit of human decency and a chance at success in life.

I got my first job more because
of this beloved cousin than
my uniform or good looks.
(That's me on the left).