My Redacted Live: Chapter Nine (Cont._4)

In 1971, the Great Society Program was drawing to a close. It marked the end of a massive effort to address America’s problems with money. Some would say it was a great failure. Some would say it was a great but errant humanitarian effort to help the “least of those among us.”

A Truman-era bureaucrat named Rufus Miles perhaps stated it best in an observation that would become known as Miles’s Law: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” The poor are just poor, some would argue, nothing we can do about it. They deserve it. Over the years, though, I would find that it is easy to denounce our poor “from a warm room on a full stomach,” as Alistair Cook described the source of H.L. Mencken’s acerbic writing.

At any rate, I was learning to write grants. This is a procedure, as best I can describe it, that involves a highly sophisticated and literary begging technique. The trick isn’t to procure funds for a need, but to convince the dispensers of succor that history would judge them wise and proper for the grants they chose to issue.

At any rate, it would send me into some of the poorest and neediest neighborhoods in our state. I would spend many an evening in a small, white frame church building in the middle of an Arkansas Delta summer. There would be no air-conditioning and the mosquitoes would be flying through open windows in formation, like squadrons of the 8^th Air Force over Berlin. From time to time, one would accidentally hit the makeshift podium and knock in over. You had to watch out for them. There is a legend that one once carried off a baby, but I don’t think this is true. I heard it was just a small puppy.

Amway, I would be the only white face in the crowd of earnest folks in desperate need of a source of clean water or some other human need. It would be one of many communities in our state that history was passing over in the new age.

You can’t see those places from the towers of Manhattan or the fancy homes in Georgetown.

I was good at begging, and I was getting better at writing, so I enjoyed some success. I was still hitching rides to planning commission meetings with one or the other of my bosses. On free evenings, I was enjoying myself, mostly reading or picking guitar. Then there was my sometime friend Jackie with her wonderful singing voice and other special benefits.

Oh, and speaking of music, I was becoming a regular at the folk music gathering I mentioned before. This was the group called “The Rackensack Society,” a diverse group of amateur musicians ranging in quality from beginner to near-professional quality. They formed a jolly, welcoming, gracious group. After a few meetings, I even noticed something that struck me as strange.

Some background: There is a large Air Force base in Jacksonville, Arkansas, oddly named “The Little Rock Air Force Base.” There is an enduring legend that the state of Arkansas agreed to adopting modern city planning statutes only as a condition for its location, but that is a story for another day.

What struck me strange back then was that several airmen from that military base were regulars at the Rackensack meetings and that the other members welcomed them and treated them as equals.

Now one may wonder why I thought it strange that a social group of citizens would welcome military personnel into their midst. Just consider my background, particularly the fact that I spent the last portion of my enlistment at Charleston, South Carolina. Had I tried to join a social group there, I would have likely faced the wrath of the local police who hated African-Americans, servicemen, and non-tourist strangers in almost equal portions.

I was living in a new world and I was enjoying it. I had a good job, I felt I was doing some good things, I was making new friends, and Little Rock was a hell of a lot better place to live than Charleston.

I’ll get to the new friends later.  

Cool ... or what?

Back from our first road trip, Jim gave the notes we made to the drafting crew and I wondered what waited next. This world of urban planning was interesting. I felt it would be even more so with a larger city. I didn’t have to wait long. Tom came in next day and wanted to know if I wanted to go to the City of Hope the next night. They were going to consider a proposed urban renewal program.

It sounded good to me. I had gone to work for a city planning firm in the final years of a long period of trying to repair urban decay through massive governmental intervention. One can decide for one’s self how successful it was. By the beginning of the 1970s, the effort had been expanded to countless government assistance programs, attempting to create what was then called “The Great Society.”

A person can demean the results, but in the current age of avarice and greed, that person would be cold-hearted indeed to demean the intentions. They came straight from The Sermon on the Mount, perhaps one of the most beautiful and inspiring works of literature in the western world. It has largely fallen out of favor in both the secular and religious worlds, unfortunately.

Anyway, off we went to Hope next afternoon, back down Interstate-30 past Malvern, then Arkadelphia, cities that were to become as familiar to me as my own home town. We passed where you turned off to go to the small community of Gurdon. One day, far into the future, I would meet a fascinating man from there, who had earned a PhD and spent a career teaching at Columbia University in New York City. He would later retire, move back to Gurdon, and become mayor. He once taught me to do a “Subway Fold” with the daily newspaper

 I’ve met some interesting people in my work.

A funny thing (funny now, not then) happened on the way there. I hadn’t been paid yet and had a dollar and twenty-five cents to my name. Just out of Benton, Tom says to me “We’re running late and had better stop and grab something to eat up ahead at that Stuckeys.”

Fine with me, until he said, “Dammit, I forgot my wallet. You have any money?”

"A little."

“Good. I just want a hot dog and something to drink. Got enough for that?”

“Sure.”

I checked the price of a hot dog and drink carefully. Just enough cash. I handed him my fortune. What did I want? "Oh nothing, I had a big lunch and I’m trying to lose some of the weight I put on when I quit smoking."

We started on, with him munching the hot dog and me looking out the window. A hot dog had never smelled so good in my life, nor has it since.

We arrived in Hope on time. City Hall was a fine old building. The meeting room took up part of the ground floor. Still does. Hope was a “city-manager” city. That meant they used a professional city manager and the governing body was a “board” instead of a council. I seem to remember that the city manager was named Garland Meadors or something like that. It’s funny how you remember things about your first time at something.

The Board members, mostly middle-aged, were all white and all male. This was despite the fact that half of the city's population was female, and the same percentage was what they called "Colored, or Negroes" back then, Change came slowly over the years. As for then, it hadn't even begun.

Back to the meeting. There was a fair crowd in attendance for a meeting with no controversial items on the agenda. That doesn’t happen much these days. They approved what Tom had come for and we headed back. I was sure glad that he was anxious to get home and didn’t mention stopping to eat again. So far. So good.

The old days. Today's new buildings
look like they are made from
plastic shipbuilding parts.