The
year I spent as a VISTA volunteer was a watershed year in many ways; that year
could even legitimately be called a “life-changing experience.” I have an aversion to this expression because
so many people use it too casually, thereby diminishing its true meaning. For example, one of the co-travelers on a
recent African Safari labeled our trip as “a life-changing experience.” “Really?” I wanted to ask him. “What will you do differently when you return
to your home in California because of this trip?” He probably would have given me a blank stare,
and his answer, if he were being truthful, would likely have been, “I’ll show
friends my pictures, and I’ll tell stories about what we did and saw for years
to come.” So, “a terrific adventure,” or
“a wonderful trip,” or “an amazing experience,” all right; but “life-changing?”
Probably not.
In
contrast, my VISTA year truly was life-changing in that this was the year that
eventually led to my career-choice of school psychology. It was the year during which I became sexually
active. As a result, it was the year
that estranged me from my parents; an estrangement that would take years to
resolve fully. It was the year that began
a deep friendship with Debbie Green, which led to other friendships that remain
sustaining and important to me forty-some years later. And, it was the year that firmly established
me as an adult, independent and on my own in the world.
My
VISTA “year” began in the summer of 1971 and ended in June of 1972. After returning from a post-college-graduation
sojourn to Europe, I was living with friends in a house near the Baylor
University campus and working as a waitress at The Hickory Stick—an upscale
steak house in Waco—while my friends were finishing their senior year at
Baylor. Having graduated a year early, I
was at loose ends. Waitressing certainly
wasn’t my career goal, even though I was good at it and the tips were great. When recruiters visited the Baylor campus early
in 1971, I filled out an application for VISTA—Volunteers in Service to
America—a kind of domestic Peace Corps, created by President Lyndon Johnson as
part of the War on Poverty.
When
John Kennedy had launched the Peace Corps in 1961—one of the first acts of his
presidency—I was in sixth grade at Neosho (Missouri) Intermediate School. I immediately decided that I wanted to join
when I was old enough. But now, Peace
Corps seemed like a bit too much. Did I
really want to go overseas again? Did I
want to commit to two years? Could I
actually do what was required? My friend
Ernie Lewis had entered VISTA to avoid being drafted and going to Vietnam; his experience
was positive, and so, I decided to follow his lead. It was only a one-year commitment and besides,
wasn’t the problem of poverty in the U. S. as important to address as the
problems of other countries?
Before
long, I received a letter saying that my application had been approved. I was assigned to an educational project in
Southern Colorado with training to begin in Denver in July. I was at a party not long after. Graduation was nearing, so everyone was concerned
with what came next. I fell into
conversation with Debbie Green, a woman I had known during my Baylor years but
not really been friends with. She was
very interested in my VISTA assignment and asked me multiple specific questions
about it. A few weeks later, Debbie
called to tell me that she had applied for the same project as me and had been
accepted. We would meet in Denver for
training and would become life-long friends.
Unfortunately, in this case, “life-long” ended with Debbie’s suicide some
twenty-five years later, but that is a story for another time.
Approximately
fifty volunteers stayed at the Mayflower Motel in Denver for a week or so of orientation
to VISTA and an introduction to issues of poverty, race, and community
organization. The Mayflower was in a section
of Denver that could best be described as marginal and run down. The motel was reputed to have a sex-worker
clientele, and couples tromped up and down the outside metal stairways at all
hours of the day and night. Debbie and I
shared a motel room. In the evenings we
stood outside our room, leaning over the wrought iron railing along the second-floor
walkway, debriefing our day as she smoked.
When a couple walked up the stairs, we would watch, laughing, as we
created a story about them.
I
wasn’t prepared for the animosities between Anglos and Hispanics that arose almost
immediately when our training sessions began.
While the term wasn’t in use at the time, this was my initial exposure
to my “white privilege.” This particular
VISTA project was designed to pair college-educated “national” volunteers with
local community volunteers. We national VISTAs
were a white group, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty-five. Most of us were recent college graduates from
middle-class families. What did we know
about racism or economic hardship or food insecurity or the privileges that had
been accorded to us simply because our skin was white?
The
Denver-based community volunteers going through the training with us were all
Chicano. They weren’t shy about sharing their
frustrations at years of discrimination with us, their “Gringo oppressors.” Our discussions often became acrimonious and
heated. I did my best to listen and hear
those frustrations, to try to understand their source, and to accept my role in
this societal racism, but it was hard.
Most
of the Civil Rights rhetoric I had heard so far had dealt with the Black
experience in America, but in the early 1970s, Chicanos (as they referred to
themselves) were beginning to rise up and make demands for equal
treatment. Members of La Raza Unida, a political party
and social movement, were organizing and taking to the streets across the Southwest. Members of the movement wore brown berets,
similar to the black berets then worn by African-Americans. They referred to themselves as La Raza (“the
people”) but were also called the Brown Berets.
While
La Raza was fairly well established in the Denver area, the communities we
national VISTAs were sent to were not yet so radicalized. At the end of that first week, Debbie and I
went with eight others to Pueblo, Colorado for project-specific training. The others from our training group were
dispersed to Great Falls, Montana; the Navajo reservation in southern Utah; and
Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Those
of us in the Colorado group moved in to dorms at Southern Colorado State College
which, at the time, was a two-year community college. Our project sponsor, Spanish Peaks Mental
Health Center, provided additional training and assigned pairs of us to junior
high schools in one of three towns:
Pueblo, Walsenburg, or Trinidad.
I stayed in Pueblo; Debbie was assigned to Walsenburg, about thirty
miles south of Pueblo. Our assignment
was rather open-ended: create projects
for at-risk students to increase the odds that they will stay in school and
graduate.
According
to a letter I wrote my family in July of 1971, we received a weekly “incidentals
allowance” during training of $6.65, after taxes. After we began our assignments, we would
receive a living-expense stipend of $235 per month, before taxes. I also had written that I liked everyone in
my training group except for a woman from California named Janet. Unfortunately, Janet and I became reluctant house
mates because we couldn’t afford to live alone.
She was a few years older than me, a tall, blonde, out-spoken and
opinionated woman. I can still hear her
deep raspy voice complaining about nearly everything. We learned to live together peaceably enough
but didn’t become friends.
The
only thing I recall us having in common was a love for John Stewart. The singer-songwriter had joined The Kingston
Trio in 1961, but by 1971 the group had disbanded and he was on his own,
touring and performing in small venues across the West. There was an old, smoky bar in Pueblo where
he played a few times that year. Janet
and I arrived early and claimed the table right in front of him every time he
came to town. As John strummed his
guitar and sang his beautiful ballads, we both melted. His song, “July, You’re a Woman,” still has
that effect on me. Even forty-some years
later, I can recall the words and evoke the feeling of that time gazing up at
John Stewart as he sang:
I can’t hold it on the road when you’re
sitting right beside me,
and I’m drunk out of my mind, merely from
the fact that you are here.
And I have not been known as the Saint of
San Joaquin,
and I'd just as soon right now pull on
over to the side of the road and show you what I mean.
Almost
as soon as we settled into our two-bedroom stucco house in Pueblo, I had to
have an emergency wisdom tooth extraction.
My mother saved this letter she received from me: “I have been wishing you were here all day,
Mom. . . . The dentist took a look at my tooth, gave me 6 shots, and yanked it
out. Four hours later I am about to
die. He gave me some pills for the pain,
but they aren’t helping much. L.” The letter continues to describe our attempts
to furnish our house—“for $10 I got a mattress and springs set”—and bemoans my
tight finances: “my $175 ‘adjustment allowance’ is going fast. I spent $75 on rent and utilities.”
**********************
Pueblo
was a steel town. The main facility of CF&I
(Colorado Fuel and Iron) was located next to Interstate 25 at the southern end
of town. Our house was just a few blocks
away, and when the winds blew our direction, the stench was terrible. Pueblo was variously known as “Bessemer,”
“little Pittsburgh,” and “the armpit of Colorado.” There were two more reasons that Pueblo was
generally scorned by those who lived in other parts of the state: it was the historic home of the Colorado
State Hospital for the mentally ill, and the Colorado State Penitentiaries were
in nearby Cañon City.
The
south side of town—my territory—was largely Hispanic and poor. East of CF&I was an unincorporated
community called Salt Creek. Many of the
families there traced their ancestors back generations and were fond of
reminding us Gringos that their families had settled here long before Colorado became
a state. The older people spoke only
Spanish, but the kids were all bilingual and often served as interpreters for
me.
I was
assigned to work with a second-year VISTA from Boston, Bill Marcotte, and a
local VISTA, Vido Granillo. Vido was a
large, jolly woman, about thirty years old.
She had dropped out of high school, married young, and had three
children. She had grown up in the area
of town where Bill and I were to focus our efforts. Vido aided our access to the community, and
we legitimized her access to the schools.
Walsenburg,
where Debbie was living, was a smaller town, in the foothills of the Sangre de
Christo Mountains. It was rural and poor
but more of a farming community than an industrial one. Walsenburg was a magnet for hippies, and
communes were springing up in the mountains near town. Debbie moved easily into that cultural
milieu, smoking cigarettes and weed, and living a much more laid-back lifestyle
than me. She was romantically involved
with a former VISTA volunteer, Perry, who lived in Trinidad, the third town in
our southern Colorado project group.
On
weekends I often traveled to Walsenburg to hang out with Debbie. There was a bar there where a local Grateful
Dead-style band played on Saturday nights.
We would drink and smoke and dance and sing until well after midnight. One Saturday night I hooked up with a man at
the bar, and we drove back to my house in Pueblo together. I don’t know what I expected would happen,
but the night did not turn out well.
This
was the era of the sexual revolution, but I was still young, naïve, and steeped
in the Southern Baptist teachings of my upbringing, one of which was that sex
needed to wait until marriage. Perhaps
that was why so many of my high school and college friends married almost as
soon as they had graduated from college, but I was not in a relationship that
would have led to marriage. In an
earlier conversation, Debbie had told me that she enjoyed sleeping with men,
but she told them that she would not have sex with them. I naively believed that that was all that was
required to preserve my virginity.
So, I
allowed this strange man to share my bed, telling him that we could kiss,
caress, and snuggle, but that we could not have intercourse. Thinking that was mutually agreeable, I went
to sleep. Sometime in the night,
however, I awoke with him on top of me and forcing his way in. I fought and screamed, but he continued to
pump until he was finished and collapsed on top of me.
Surely
my roommate Janet heard my screams and cries, but she stayed in her own bedroom
that night. I ordered the man out of my
bed and house. He withdrew meekly,
reminding me that he had nowhere to go in the middle of the night. I had no idea what else to do, so let him
spend the rest of the night on the couch.
I went back to my bed alone where I cried and tossed and turned until
dawn. In the morning I had to drive him
back to Walsenburg. I don’t think we
said a single word to one another on that long drive down Interstate 25. To his credit, he made no further demands and
seemed genuinely sorry about the way the night had ended.
I didn’t
tell anyone about the rape. Janet never
asked about it, and I never volunteered any information. I was humiliated and ashamed. I felt stupid for thinking that all men were
honorable. It took me years, decades
even, to label this as rape, but I had clearly said no and been an unwilling
participant in the event, even though I might have played a role in “causing”
it to happen. As I have watched other
women come forward, years after the fact, to report on their sexual assaults, I
recognize their struggles with memory. I
do not recall the name of my rapist, what he wore, nor even what he looked
like. But I can clearly “see” his bulk
lurking above me in the dark, holding my arms down, and forcing his way
in. I can feel the excruciating pain of
his forced entry. I remember the blood
and semen that flooded my bed when he withdrew.
And, I continue to feel the self-blame, the anger, and the shame that come
whenever I happen to recall this event.
Two
things happened nearly immediately after the rape. As soon as I could find another place to
live, I moved out of the house I had shared with Janet. What kind of friend was she, after all? And, since I no longer had to “protect my
virginity,” I began to sleep with my work partner Bill and, after that
relationship ended, with other men.
On my
very meager VISTA salary, I couldn’t afford much of a house. I moved into a one-room stucco “cottage”
behind a larger house, on the access road to Interstate 25 and across from the
main blower of CF&I. It was a dump,
but it was mine. There was no sensitive
roommate to tiptoe around, no one but me to cook for, and the freedom to pursue
a sexual relationship with Bill.
My
visits to Walsenburg dropped off after that.
I had bad memories of the place I had loved and a new relationship to
nurture. Besides, Debbie was spending
more of her weekends with Perry. While
we saw each other less often, Debbie and I drove together to Texas for
Thanksgiving. I picked her up after work
on Wednesday, and we drove through the night in my little gold Datsun. What I remember about that trip, before
satellite radio and audio books, was the singing we did to keep ourselves
awake. One contest we played was “name
that musical.” One of us would sing a
song, and the other had to guess the musical it was from. I thought I knew lots of songs from lots of
musicals, but I ran out of songs long before Debbie did. Early Thanksgiving morning, I dropped her at
her mother’s house in Dallas and continued on to my home in Waco.
When I
made the same trip at Christmas, it was with Bill. He was not a singer, so I’m sure the long
drive was less fun than it had been with Debbie.
**********************
While
we had been given very little guidance about the work we were to do with VISTA,
we had been given an office at Corwin Junior High School, between the
vice-principal and the counselor. Bill
had purchased a meager home in unincorporated Salt Creek and his work centered
on the families that lived there. While
I did some work in Salt Creek, I focused my efforts on students whose families
lived in the southside “projects,” or government-subsidized housing. Those parents who did work mostly had jobs at
the mill. Some parents were unemployed
and others were in prison. In a letter
to my family, I wrote this about one of the families I worked with:
I have
just been playing in the park with and reading to one of the little boys I
inherited from an old VISTA. He is one
of about 9 children (every time I go over, there are more!). The oldest two are black, the middle few are
white to light brown, and the youngest ones are dark brown. The mother is now working on her 4th
marriage. She works at a bar and is
never home so the two oldest girls (neither knows how to cook or do anything. They watch TV all day) are left in
charge. I am working with Larry, Carol,
and Carl—all 8 and 9—none of them can read even the Look, See books! And people wonder why these kids grow up to
be wild with no ambition or direction!
One of
the earliest projects I wrote home about involved computer-aided learning. We likely had a mainframe computer with
multiple terminals (monitors) since this was a decade before the introduction
of the Apple personal computer.
Dr.
Sterritt, who heads an elementary school learning center, called me in this
week to learn how to run his computer. I
will be working two to three mornings a week helping kids use it—for math and
reading. It’s really fun—types out
problems and you type the answer, then it types GOOD! or NO. If no, it retypes the problem for you to try
again. I ran two kids through Friday and
they loved it. These are 75 first
through third graders placed in a special individualized classroom—what’s
called “behavior modification”—it ignores bad behavior (no punishment unless
the actions are extreme) and rewards good behavior with points. The points work kind of like green
stamps. They have toys, free hours,
computer work, etc. which you can “buy” with your accumulated points. It’s an interesting concept.
I
learned more about behavior modification that year through a course at the
Colorado State Hospital. A few years
after my VISTA year, I entered a graduate program in educational psychology at
the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I worked with a professor on his
textbook about behavior modification and individualized learning, educational
concepts that grew in popularity through the seventies.
At the junior high school, I did some counseling with individual students and co-led a counseling group with the school counselor. I recruited some of the junior high students who had learning problems of their own to tutor first and second graders at the elementary school where I worked in the learning center. The hope was that the older students would improve their own reading while helping these younger children. Unfortunately, the experiment didn’t last long. The principal asked me to discontinue it when a teacher complained that I could not manage the older kids and we made too much noise. We might have been noisy, but it wasn’t due to lack of control. The older kids were energized by the experience of actually being able to read something, and the little kids loved the attentions of the older ones. Sometimes active learning is noisy.
Outside of school work, Vido and I started a “mother’s club” in Salt Creek. I had written my parents that our intent was to teach them something about nutrition and how to cook a wider variety of foods. Instead, they taught me to make corn tortillas, to fry sopapillas, and to make refried beans by mashing left-over pintos with lard.
One of the other VISTAs in my group was a sixty-five-year-old woman named Katy, a delightful, energetic, and talented artist. Katy helped me start a Salt Creek Art Center. With Bill’s help, the boys built crude work tables and shelves to furnish our space, and we hauled sand and loaded it on the tables. Katy showed us how to make candles using sand as the molds. She also provided a mold for a concrete Madonna, and the kids made Christmas decorations with the candles, Madonnas, and scraps of driftwood.
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| Creating art in our studio |
The
City of Pueblo had just made water available to the Salt Creek area and laid
pipes down the dirt streets of the community.
Anyone who wanted water in their homes, however, had to install their
own pipes from the road to their houses.
Some of the older people were unable to do the work required, so Bill
and I recruited kids to help dig ditches.
They balked at doing menial labor but reluctantly did so when they saw Bill
and me hard at work with our shovels.
 |
| Working in Salt Creek |
Perhaps
the most interesting program I worked with that year was our prison
project. One evening each week Bill and
I took a group of our most troubled junior high kids—boys one week, girls the
next—to the state penitentiary in Cañon City, about twenty miles from
Pueblo. A group of prisoners at each of
the men’s and women’s facilities had been cleared to counsel our kids. The intent of the project was for the kids to
hear directly from the prisoners how they ended up in prison and what the kids
needed to do to avoid a similar fate.
Later
that decade a documentary called “Scared Straight” was released. It showed a single session during which
juvenile delinquents met with prisoners who attempted to scare them into better
behavior. While the prisoners in our
program certainly wanted the kids to avoid prison, they took a more positive approach
and did not berate or yell at the kids as the prisoners in the documentary did.
I don’t know what the kids remember of this experience, but I recall the pat downs, the loud clank of the heavy barred doors sliding shut behind us, and the mass of men all dressed in blue milling around the large common room. Our group of mentors would approach and disappear with the kids into a smaller room, leaving Bill and I on our own with the rest of the prisoners and their guards. The mentor prisoners did not want us to go with them because we might inhibit their free flow of conversation with the kids.
 |
| Me and two girls at the women's pen |
I was
allowed to sit in with the group at the women’s prison, however. The women and the girls sat around a large
round table—each girl sat next to her assigned mentor. One night one of the women related the story
of her imprisonment. She had gone out
drinking with a group of friends. As the
night wore on and they got drunk, someone insulted one of her friends and a
fight broke out. The person who had
insulted the friend ended up on the ground and everyone joined in kicking her
(or him, I don’t recall). When they
finally stopped, the person was dead.
The woman telling the story cried as she told our girls that that one
stupid act of group anger led to a murder and a life sentence in the pen.
The
message was repeated over and over by the other women: learn to control your anger, don’t drink,
don’t just go along with the crowd without thinking about what you are doing. All important life goals, but how to teach
them so that they became internalized standards of behavior and not just words
the girls heard?
Here
is a portion of a letter I wrote to my family about this project.
I
talked at length with a guy named Mike, and he tried to explain the
crime-prison-return cycle. His mother
was Chicano, his father Anglo. (He looks
very Anglo with blonde hair but talks with a Spanish accent.) He grew up in a poor Chicano community. He always wanted those things he’d never had
and never learned to wait until he could get his desires so he learned early to
steal. He was first sent to the state
boy’s prison. He firmly believes that
the place made him a criminal. He
learned lots from the older, rougher boys and was made extremely bitter by
horse whipping, beatings (by guards and other boys), and being chained to walls
during the day and beds at night. This hardens
boys with no attempt at correction, understanding, or rehabilitation. Once out, the same desires hit with more
violent methods used to obtain them.
Mike was in “reform school” four times before getting 20 years in the
pen. He’s 28 now and hopes to get the
sentence cut and be out within the next two years. But he’s real afraid he’ll lose control and
be back!
After
5 years of abstaining in the pen—where drugs are super easy to get—supplied by
the guards—he started shooting heroine and has now quit. He made a deal with the kid he was working
with that he’d quit shooting up if the kid stopped stealing. He’s been off three months but is scared
he’ll fall back there too. He says
that’s why many guys return. They get a
habit in prison and then begin stealing when they get out to support it and end
up back in the joint.
Most
of those guys have really tragic experiences to relate, and yet, the ones I
know are very other-centered. They are
really sincerely dedicated to doing everything they can to keep others
out. One guy heard that the kid he’s
working with just got sent to Golden (boy’s reform school) and he cried for
several days.
**********************
Bill left, returning to Boston, sometime during the spring, but Vido and I continued our programs. Most of the kids we worked with had never been outside of their neighborhoods, so I took small groups of them on various outings in an old station wagon with U.S. Government license plates. Something about driving around with my multi-colored carload of near-juvenile delinquent teenagers in a car that proclaimed “for government use only” on the doors, made me smile. We explored the Garden of the Gods in nearby Colorado Springs, we hiked in the Sangre de Christo Mountains, we threw snowballs at one another on Wet Mountain, and once we drove all night across La Veta Pass to watch the sunrise from the Great Sand Dunes National Monument near Alamosa.
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| Bill sledding with some of our kids |
The
kids always had fun, but I didn’t feel like I was actually making a difference
in their lives. At some point in the
year, I wrote home: “I get the idea that
this year will make me more cynical--like I really can’t do anything but a
little bandaid work here and there, but little long term.”
When
my year ended, “my kids” were sad. I
have a good-bye card signed by more than fifty of them, only some of whose
names I now can recall. I don’t know how
many of those kids graduated from high school and whether or not we
accomplished our goal of preventing them from dropping out.
Many
years later I was driving through Pueblo and decided to stop for a meal at the
Mexican restaurant I used to frequent when I lived there. The hostess seated my companion and me, went
and conferred with someone, and returned to ask, “Aren’t you Kay Bull?” She introduced herself as Gertrude, one of
“my kids,” and said her family owned this restaurant. During the ensuing conversation, she told me which
of the kids I had worked with had gone on to college and who had married and
had children. We parted with her
assurance that my time in Pueblo definitely had been worthwhile. I hope that is true. Regardless, the encounter was a powerful reminder
that we never know which of the actions we take will bear fruit and perhaps
contribute to someone else’s life-changing experience.
