Growing Up Then and Now

In the cab she quickly tells me she had already been accosted twice by strangers, just off the bus, and wanted nothing more to do with St. Paul:  “Please take me to the nearest – safe – hotel,” she commands.  Well right then and there I figure if I start telling her some wild story about having to deliver this blood first, she’s not going to trust me, and so I figure the Holiday Inn is only a couple blocks away, I’ll drop her off first.

A possible reward for gallantry?

Well, the Holiday Inn was completely booked and now I’m worried that some patient in need of a blood transfusion is going to die before I get there, so I spill the beans to her and she says that’s fine, let’s deliver the blood first.  When we get to St. John’s they literally have the elevator door held open to rush the blood up to where it’s needed.  Good thing I hadn’t tried a second hotel first.

Well by now we’re talking quite a bit – she’s a school teacher from Australia taking an around-the-world trip, first a boat to Seattle and now cross-country to New York – and I’m giving her the low down on places to stay saying St. Paul isn’t all that bad.  By the time we get to the downtown Radisson, and I’ve told her about the Carousel Restaurant on the top floor with a view, she says “What time do you get off duty, will you join me for a drink?”

“I’m off in an hour,” I tell her – which is technically true because back in those days you just kept 45% of what was on the meter and you could pick however many hours you wanted to work.

I quickly turned the cab in and couldn’t wait to get back to my new friend.  Once I hear all her details and she mine (it’s really all just clothes in her suitcases – enough for 80 days), I offered she could stay at my place to save money and then tomorrow I would help her pack one suitcase to ship back to Australia by Yellow Freight to lighten her load and be quicker to the cab stand.  She stayed a week.  We had a wonderful time.  Showed her all the great places in St. Paul.  Hardly had time to drive my cab for all our cavorting.  Got postcards from around the world for the next 80 days.

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Who’s first at the Bus?

After leaving Bob in Seattle (read “Florida Rescue Mission”) and Amtraking back to St. Paul to seek my fortune, first thing was finding a job.  My old college friend Giles provided me a temporary residence.  Next morning I went to Parks & Recreation to see if they needed umpires.  “Can you do this afternoon’s North St. Paul – Stillwater game,” Hap Holmgren asked me, “we got a home plate ump, but we need a base ump?”

“Sure,” I said, not even having an umpire’s blue shirt, nor an indicator, nor a vehicle to get to North St. Paul.  Took the bus.  The teams were on the field, but the home plate ump hadn’t arrived by game time so I called the coaches to the mound, and said I would call the game from behind the pitcher’s mound, asked if they had an indicator to spare,

What indicates a Home Run?

and explained that I hadn’t umped in years so the Rules might have changed, but I had good baseball judgment:  “If there’s a ruling that doesn’t fit with any new rules, just call time out and bring me the Rule Book.”

“Okay,” they said.  In the top of the first a Stillwater batter clouts one way back and because I couldn’t wait to show I knew the signal for a home run, I circled my right hand in the air.  Only the ball drops a foot short of the fence; the right fielder takes it off the wall on one hop and twirls making a perfect throw to second base; meanwhile the batter, who had broken into his home run trot seeing my signal, was loping into second when the throw arrived and easily tagged out.   “Time!” I said, and ruled it a ground rule double, a satisfactory solution.  But, like one of the coaches told me, “Son, you’ve always got time to give the home run signal, make sure it’s over the fence first.”  Fortunately the plate umpire showed up just after that.

Tomorrow:  Two Dead Bodies

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One of the great things about the Legal Aid office I worked at in South Jersey was that the Managing Attorney of the office had even a sharper sense for injustice than I did and even a bigger picture of the world than I did.  She was the first Puerto Rican woman to graduate from the Univ. of Pennsylvania Law School.  As Managing Attorney she quickly noticed that while all the other lawyers in the office were white males, most of the clients were Black or Puerto Rican, and all of the secretarial and paralegal staff were Black or Puerto Rican, but it was the lawyers who decided which cases to take and which cases had to be turned down because there were more potential clients than the office could handle.  So she formed a steering committee to decide office priorities reasoning that the secretaries and paralegals (who actually had grown up in the community, unlike the lawyers) should have some input on which clients got our services for what kind of cases. 

Here’s what the steering committee decided:  If you didn’t belong to the Welfare Rights Organization, you didn’t get us to come to your welfare fair hearing.  If you didn’t join the Tenants Union, we wouldn’t represent you in your eviction case.  Etc.  Eventually all the white lawyers left for other jobs because they didn’t like not having final say, and I was the first white male that got hired after the re-structuring.  It worked great!  All the community organizing that ensued led to the election of the first Black ever to the local school board.  No longer would it just be the Whites (the merchants, the judges, etc.) who were the decision-makers for the Poor (the factory workers, the farmworkers).  And I totally understood that to just do one Fabio-type case at a time really didn’t change anything, albeit some justice is achieved.

Only in the end the Powers-That-Be regained the upper hand.  When Ronald Reagan got elected President in 1980 our tiny Legal Aid office in South Jersey became Exhibit A for why Congress needed to pass a law curtailing legal services for the poor from doing political organizing.  Although I had left the office already (read “Florida Rescue Mission”), the managing attorney left shortly after passage of the new law and became a renowned community organizer in Philadelphia.  I still to this day hold the belief that the most important political work is to empower folks to believe that they have control over their destiny.  Even when it seems that we’re losing, keep in mind what Martin Luther King, Jr. said “Though the arc of history is long, and bends slowly, it bends towards justice.” 

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