My Redacted Life: Chapter 16

Life would sort of hit me from out of nowhere sometime in the early spring of 1972. I sure wasn’t looking for it. I was concentrating on work, wanting to go further and higher. I knew what I wanted and I knew how to get it.

While going about my business, I had been observing friends with whom I had attended college. Since I had wondered in the wilderness for, not 40 but at least four, years, they all had a head start on me.

I was catching up fast, though, and I had come upon a secret. The ones who were in the fast lane weren’t always the best and brightest. In fact, some of the best and brightest seemed stuck back in the pack. No, many of the ones who were getting ahead had been at the top of the class, but probably in the second tier of gifted students, solid but not flashy.

What I noticed was that they were the personable ones, the ones who got along well with others. They were the ones you couldn’t help liking. In other words, they would be able to go out and bring in work as well as having the ability to get it done. That’s where the path to success lay.

It was a lesson that I never forgot.

Another thing that I noticed was that I had returned to a state with two noticeable characteristics. First, it was a state that was on the move for the first time after suffering for years under the governance of a shady and bigoted opportunist who had now been exiled to a much-deserved oblivion. The state was enjoying its second progressive governor in a row, a trend that would continue for years with some slight bumps along the way.

Second, it soon appeared to me that I had also returned to a state with great opportunity for a young man hungering for fame and fortune. The level of educational achievement was still very low. In addition, there had been a massive outflow of talent during the dark years. Some of it was trickling back, but it was still a state in which “cream rose to the top” very quickly. This was a phenomenon with which I was familiar as it was true of the state of military service as well. It was like coming home in a way.

I was determined to be on the right side of history this time. That’s why I had turned my back on Riverside Drive and moved a little farther up the hill. Thankful I was. I had a good job in an honorable profession. I worked with high-caliber people like Tom Hodges, Jim Vines, and Ron McConnell, as well as a new administrative assistant named Christie Porter, another gifted and highly intelligent associate. She was a recently assigned single-mother whom life tried on every occasion, unsuccessfully I’m happy to say, to beat down and dispirit. Hers was another professional friendship I would enjoy for years.

One can see where my mind was. As with Orwell’s horse, I just needed to work harder and keep my head down. There would be time for fun later, maybe even romance someday. I needed to concentrate on polishing my skills. Top on the list was overcoming my fear of public speaking. Next stood education. I read, and also took a graduate correspondence course from Berkeley, doing well on it. I just needed to make professional progress each day and stay away from both trouble and distractions. Easy, or so I imagined.

That’s why, one can see, I was so unprepared for the ambush that awaited. A well-armed intruder had been preparing for me for years.

The Descent of a State

Sunday while resting for a few minutes, I caught a documentary on PBS about how the small town of Hoxie, Arkansas, in the mid-1950s, decided to integrate their school system, peacefully and with no court order. It would have been a model for our state on how to grant freedom to an oppressed people without creating civil disorder. We are rightfully proud of their efforts, but a not too funny thing happened.

Jim Johnson, a vicious white-supremacy attorney, rushed to the scene and, using the tired-old “They’re coming for your women,” ploy, embroiled the community in controversy, gaining notoriety that would push Orval Faubus into a staunchly segregationist stance and the state, eventually, into ridicule and disdain.

The rest is history. It proved to be one of Arkansas’s darkest hours.

It made me think of June, 1966, when I graduated from the University of Arkansas. Faubus had been in office for over ten years and had brought nothing but shame to the state during that time. The state had lost any prestige it might have once had, and was rapidly losing population.

Thus the “sucking sound” the next day following graduation, when so many who had no binding ties left the state. It was truly a mass exodus.

As for me, I went to San Francisco. In late 1966, there were so many ex-patriates from Arkansas living in the Bay Area that we would have get-togethers attended by 20 or 30 of my former classmates.

I never intended to return. As the Jack Nicholson character said, “I was just inches away from a clean getaway.”

Then the Draft Board came for me and I was  occupied for four years. During that time a funny thing happened. Winthrop Rockefeller became governor of Arkansas and I began to read accounts from home about how he was making a valiant attempt to bring Arkansas out of the morass into which it had wallowed for years, a morass that only the occasional success of its major college football team could brighten.

He was succeeded by Dale Bumpers, another enlightened soul. Then other funny things happened.

I was discharged and soon on my way back to California. I stopped in Arkansas to visit and met, through a family member, some young guys who had just started their own urban planning firm. I agreed to meet them before I “lit out for the territories.” I was that close to the “Little Rock Getaway” so to speak.

But, I found a job here. And I found a wife here. In short, I found a life here. Tall buildings were rising in my new city. A series of bright young politicians left their mark on the state: David Pryor, Bill Clinton, John Paul Hammerschmidt, Jim Guy Tucker, and Win Rockefeller. The state emerged from its dismal past and flourished. Women and people of color rose to prominence and more buildings rose to the sky. Northwest Arkansas, long a scene of poverty, began to emerge as one of the country’s leading economies.

Then a native son became President of the United States.

That’s when our progress, it seems to me, came under attack.

There were those who simply could not accept the fact that William Jefferson Clinton would be president for eight years, even though he presided over a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity marred, it is true, by personal lapses.

Today, I feel the state tilting backwards into that dark abyss once more. A state law that legalizes hatred becomes effective today, allowed by many who chose to ignore the “better angels of their nature.” The editorial page of the only statewide newspaper daily fans the feeling of disrespect toward our nation's President. Far too many churches have turned from preaching love and grace to encouraging the abhorrence of strangers. There is an outpouring of vitriol against non-Caucasians that hasn’t been this evident since the lynching of black people in our state at the height of the Jim Crow era. Those whose hatred is most uncontrollable are “agged on” as my mother would say, by those who should know better but who are deluded into believing that their right to own firearms is endangered. This is a most terrifying combination in my opinion. It is like a gas can resting alongside a stack of dynamite.

We’ve sunk too many roots to make a getaway at our ages. We might, if we don’t live past normal life-expectancy, survive since we descend from Northern European ancestry, the one truly protected category in our country. If we live too long, the haters may get around to the educated and progressive-minded, but we will be tired and ready to go by then.

In the meantime … my advice to a young person? “Run Dude, run!”

 

It seems that this action is now protected
by state law in Arkansas. Shame on us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also:

www.wattensawpress.com

www.travelswithanalien,blogspot.com