Misplaced Priorities

I entered Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, in the fall of 1958. It was culture shock from day one. I don't think I fully understood anyone until halfway through that first year. For example, my roommate, a gifted pianist named Rex Wilson, told me he was from Snashional. Only later that year did I realize he was saying San Angelo. One day we walked across the campus, and he introduced me to three different people in three different locations on the campus. To the first one he said, "This is Bob, my roommate. He is from Iowa (pronounced with a long a). To the second he introduced me as Bob, from Idaho. To the third he introduced me as Bob, from Ohio. To Rex, people from all three of those states were just "yankees" anyway, so what difference did it make?

The saddest moment of my young life was when my best friend in high school, Tom Rivers, was killed in a car crash my freshman year at Hardin-Simmons. He was returning to school at Drake after a semester break. He was in such excellent shape he did not die right away, as all the other people in the accident did. A week later he died. I attended the funeral, sitting next to his mother. I was furious at the priest, who used the occasion to preach against sin. He obviously did not know the young man whose life we were celebrating.

It was love at first sight when I started attending the University Baptist Church. I could not believe the joyous singing. I was baptized and later became President of the Baptist Student Union. But, all was not right. Here I was at Hardin-Simmons University. Sammy Baugh was the football coach. Were there any black athletes on scholarship? No! Why? I started asking questions, but I was not getting answers that I liked. Why were there no blacks in the churches? I traveled with either the basketball team or the golf team to east Texas, and saw ridiculous separate drinking fountains. I watched television news and saw what was happening across America. My second job after graduation was as a child welfare worker. My supervisors did not like the fact that I watched the Huntley-Brinkley Report every night and then talked about what I saw the next day at work. My supervisors called it The Frontley-Pinkly Report (front for Communist front, and pink for Commies).

Then, John F. Kennedy came to Dallas. Although he was assassinated by a leftist Communist, there were people the next day quoted in the Dallas Morning News who were happy to see him killed. I left Texas in 1964 to go to graduate school in social work at the University of Kansas, and I was ready to get radicalized.

But wait, I'm going too fast. After graduation with a major in psychology and a minor in history, I married Lillian Pattillo, the prettiest girl at Hardin-Simmons. I was 22, and she was two years younger, and had just graduated from a certified Registered Nurse program in Abilene. Her father was a Baptist big shot from California. After a wonderful courtship, we embarked upon our honeymoon at Lake Murray in Oklahoma. It did not go well. Just like that, overnight, we went from romantic lovestruck kids to a couple who fought about everything, even on our honeymoon! Too damn young, too damn immature. We moved to Topeka, Kansas, where I began my first year of graduate school at The University of Kansas in Lawrence and Lil got a job as a nurse.

My "field placement" that year was at the V.A. Hospital in Topeka. Every Saturday I attended a seminar taught by none other than Dr. Karl Menninger, probably the foremost psychiatrist of his day. Psychiatrists from all over the world came to Topeka to study under him. I was assigned to work with alcoholic veterans and their families. Do you know what the fad treatment was in those days? Does the name Timothy Leary mean anything to you? That's right, a doctor would sit with a patient and put the patient on a LSD acid trip. Most of the veterans liked it better than alcohol!

The second year I was assigned to an elementary school in the "low income" area of Topeka. I worked with kids who were on the verge of being kicked out of school. I worked with them in a group, and tried to develop relationships with their parents, in order to encourage the parents to get involved with the school. Near the end of the school year two things happened that brought me great joy. One of my group members, the baddest, biggest black boy in the school, beat out a brainy diminutive blonde girl for the school spelling bee championship. Our group put on a play on Abraham Lincoln's birthday. The heretofore "worst behavior problem" in the school played the part of Abe. It changed the image of the group members significantly.

Dr. Roy Menninger, son of Karl, was the consultant to the Head Start program that started up the next summer after I graduated with my Masters degree in Social Work (M.S.W.), and I signed on. Never one to keep my thoughts to myself, one day I asked "Dr. Roy," "How is it helpful for us to sit here each week celebrating our superiority over the families who are sending children to this Head Start program (one of the first Head Start programs in America). He did not like the question. Luckily, I was saved from any further confrontations with "Dr. Roy" when an unlucky event occurred in June in Topeka. A tornado hit the ground and plowed its way across Topeka from southwest to northeast, lifting only at the state capitol, but still taking off some of the gold dome on its way back down to resume its destruction across town. I spent the summer helping families apply for emergency assistance to rebuild their homes and neighborhoods.

Lil gave birth to our first child, Laurie, shortly after the tornado came within one block of our modest house. We doted over Laurie as much as any parents ever doted over a child. She was my pride and joy. Two years later Marisa, our second child, was born, and we were just as proud of her as we had been of Laurie.

That fall I became Director of the Northeast Neighborhood Counseling Center in the Kansas City, Kansas ghetto. We counseled families and fought for innovations in education and hiring programs. A couple of years later I became a community organizer ala Saul Alinsky! My job was to organize poor people of all races to stand up for themselves and join together to help each other.

One night Lil and I were out to dinner together in Kansas City, Missouri. About ten p.m. a cop flashed his lights at me. I pulled over, the cop asked for my license and returned to his car. We waited for what seemed like a half hour. When the cop came up to me, he said he was taking me down to the station because I had a slew of unpaid parking tickets. I was indignant, and protested that I had no unpaid anything. It turned out that I had cosigned for a teen boy to buy a car. Since my name was on the title to his car, the tickets were traced back to my license. Nevertheless, I was "booked," and once again, there I was, back in the pokey! This time it was not a fun experience. I was put in a bullpen with quite a few other law-breakers. A drunk black man was brought in to the bullpen. The cop wound up and slugged the man in the stomach. Alinsky had been organizing the community to put a stop to police brutality. Now I had seen it up close and personal. I knew the Methodist minister that was working with Alinsky and actually counseling Chief Clarence Kelly on eliminating police brutality. I made my one phone call. I got out in the wee hours of the morning, and we got the cop fired a few days later.

That organizing job expanded into a ten state program where I was a regional director of the National Self Help Corporation. Our objective was to organize people enrolled in the federal government's WIN program, short for Work Incentive Program, in order to ensure that job opportunities were real and relevant. That job brought me to Colorado, as well as to Indian reservations in the West.

Things were not any better between Lil and me. I engaged in an extramarital affair. Where was that guy who had been baptized in the church as a born again follower of Jesus Christ? I had a new religion: the left wing "change the world" religion of Saul Alinsky. We did get back together, and moved to Denver, where I took a job training caseworkers all around Colorado. Three years later, I took a job as Director of Human Services in La Plata and San Juan Counties in beautiful southwestern Colorado. Our marriage lasted only a few more years. The saddest day of my life was when she was awarded full custody of our daughters.