New World View
In late 1970, I was working for the Passaic County welfare department and one morning was in the apartment I shared in East Paterson with George, a middle-age man with cerebral palsy and a pet boa constrictor.
I got the mail and opened a letter that would change my life forever. I had been accepted into the national volunteer program, Volunteers in Service to America or VISTA. The deal was I would spend a year volunteering in some poor place and would be paid the princely sum of $50 a month.
The program was formed by President Johnson in 1965 and I would be one of 6,051 volunteers in communities around the country in 1971 who would help organize tenants, set up child care programs, legal counseling, transportation and tutoring, community design work and other tasks.
In my application I requested assignment to an indian reservation. Many VISTA applicants wanted the exotic romance of working on a reservation. So I was told I would be one of 30 volunteers to serve in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It did not sounds like exotic or romantic. I didn’t know there was poverty in south Florida; I thought it was all beaches.
I was 21. It was a year of exploding protest to the war in Vietnam, as 500,000 people marched in Washington, D.C. and 125,000 in San Francisco. It was the year of the Attica prison riots and death penalty sentences, that would later be overturned, for Charles Manson and female followers Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten.
The sitcom “All in the Family,” starring Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker, debuted on CBS; and in the “Fight of the Century,” Smokin Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali in a 15-round unanimous decision at Madison Square Garden.
And of course, it was the year that a man calling himself D. B. Cooper parachuted from the Northwest Orient Airlines plane he had hijacked over Washington State with $200,000 in ransom money. He was never seen again.
And it was a time when bright-eyed idealists like myself were looking for excitement and to see more of the country than I was used to in my homogenized, suburban enclave.
My first stop was in Atlanta, Ga., for two weeks of training and meeting with the dozen other new volunteers. I stayed with another volunteer in the home of a very accommodating elderly African American woman and saw my first cockroaches lining the inside of the refrigerator. My eyes were opening. I enjoyed the soul food of pig’s feet, chitterlings and collard greens that she served. It was tasty and challenging. I always had chitterlings and collard greens back home. No.
Then it was on to Fort Lauderdale. Landing at the Fort Lauderdale airport I saw white sand and for a moment I forgot where I was, and thought it was snow. It wasn’t snow.
On my VISTA application, I had said I would be interested in community organizing because I had no specific skills and thought I could learn to organize on the fly. Initially I was assigned with another VISTA, Bill, who turned out to be a total waste who spent most of his time in bars and on the beach.
For two weeks we lived in the ramshackle apartment of an older man who had lost most of his fingers to leprosy. I had never met someone with leprosy before. He was very quiet, unassuming.
Then it was down to work. My supervisor, Dan from Kansas, said I would be working in the 96-unit Citrus Park apartment complex in northwest Fort Lauderdale. Dan dropped me off.
The apartments were all one level and were painted a combination of peeling bland green and peeling bland brown. The green paint was the closest the complex came to any landscaping. There were no trees, no grass. Everywhere was either sand or concrete, in front of the buildings, behind the buildings, between the buildings. And in the brutal Florida summers, the conditions baked everybody who lived there.
Looking back, I know I looked and sounded ridiculous as I started knocking on doors, a 21-year-old white boy from New Jersey, ready to offer my time, talent and innocence. I was an unusual sight, to say the least.
The first few residents were polite but not interested as I said I wanted to help organize a tenants group to get the landlord to make repairs and beautify the area.
Then I arrived at William Keel’s apartment. He lived with Birdie, a woman I took to be Keel’s wife, but wasn’t and their two young sons and a young daughter. One day Birdie was gone and I didn’t ask Keel about it; it was personal.
Keel’s neighbor, who also got involved in the group, was Stan Gautier, who drove large gasoline trucks. He was a big man of more than six feet in height but you knew that his wife who stood about 4-feet-11 was the boss in that family.
Keel also is a big man with bulging forearms who always wore an open button white shortsleeved shirt with an ever present pack of Kools in the breast pocket. In the neighborhood, he was something like an unelected mayor as he knew everyone and people trusted him to help keep the peace and solve differences. I never knew how he made money but I believe it was through regular card games under the complex’s one large tree.
I was a bit reluctant when he invited me in to talk. But Keel had such an easy way about him and a fast, honest smile that it started a long time friendship with the man known as “Paper Sack” because he always had a soda in a paper bag with him.
Keel jumped on the suggestion of forming a tenants organization. He knew how badly the apartments were kept and how defeated were the tenants and he was angry. We both started meeting with tenants and gradually some warmed up to the idea. And within a few days, Keel asked if I wanted to move in to his apartment, which is where I lived for the next 11 months.
Of course, I said yes, and he put me up in a spare bedroom that was always, always unbearably hot. Not long after, I adopted a stray dog that I named “Mange” because he was so mangy. Keel said the treatment for mange is to bathe the dog in old motor oil, which I did and which worked.
I used to tie up Mange to a pole outside of the apartment. After the oil treatment, Mange was so good looking that one night somebody stole him.
After quite a few weeks of meetings with tenants, the group decided that it wanted to press the landlord to spruce up the area, with painting and plantings. Surprisingly, the landlord agreed to buy sod for the whole complex and the underground watering system if the tenants installed it all.
The tenants voted to go along with the deal and one morning went with several trucks and picked up piles and piles of sod and lengths of PVC pipe that would make up the irrigation system. About 30 of us worked throughout the day and into the night before very nearly collapsing.
The next morning, it was back to work. At one point some kind of disagreement had started and I heard two gunshots. That was when I drew on every atom of bravery in my soul and ran like the dickens, hopped on my motorcycle and didn’t return until that night. Keel asked where I was and I said I was frightened and ran. And Keel said, “Why? What was wrong?” All in a day’s work.
And then, as quickly as it began, it was over and time to return home. I kept in touch with Keel for a while but haven’t heard from him in years. I often think about how he is and how his life has gone. He was a real friend.
In 1993, VISTA was integrated into a new federal agency, AmeriCorps program. Since 1965, more than 185,000 VISTAs have served communities from the inner-city to the outer banks.