I Was a Spear Carrier in the War on Poverty
Rowe, Jonathan
I Was a Spear Carrier in the War on Poverty By Jonathan Rowe When I tell people that in the late sixties I was a VISTA Volunteer on Manhattan's Lower East Side, I sometimes sense in them a...
...And let's be honest: not everyone pays his rent on time, and under rent control, not that much cash was coming in to begin with...
...I wandered down 42nd Street towards Grand Central Station, wondering what to do next...
...Still, this was my team...
...College didn't really alter any of these beliefs...
...When you consider the other things the federal government fosters and promotes—from synfuels to tobacco—at much greater expense, then VISTA stacks up fairly well by comparison...
...By the late sixties, having been tamed by the investigators, MFY also was falling out of favor with the quasi-political leaders of the Lower East Side...
...These events, and those that followed, have been on my mind during the last four years...
...VISTA volunteers have found that to improve the lot of people low on the ladder, they sometimes have had to do what the realtors, gun-owners, and cigarette companies do, which is to try to bring some pressure to bear upon elected officials...
...A government program, of course, is hardly the only way to promote a culture of service...
...Bernie devised a plan...
...MFY survived, but the place was never the same...
...I worked under Ron, a canny young black from Harlem who had the gift of ironic detachment from the confusion around him...
...I was less inclined than others of my generation to question authority, but I did feel impelled to call attention to this...
...A different poverty A year, two years, after I left the Lower East Side, my old apartment at 131 Pitt Street had become a psychedelic crash pad...
...and leaders of local organizations were wondering why the uptown types —such was now the perception—who ran MFY were getting so much of both...
...But to me it seems important that we put a little more emphasis on responsibilities and a little less on rights...
...With Nadia I often made social work calls, investigating family squabbles and welfare problems and occasionally taking an alcoholic husband to Bellevue or Long Island to dry out...
...You get them out of here!' She was up and waving her arms, but the complaint was served...
...It has tended to attract volunteers of other than Reaganite persuasion, largely because they seem less interested than Reaganites in making money...
...Then there was the pianist, a nervous little Jewish man whose wife hated his piano playing so much that she would shut the piano lid on his fingers...
...It was with a sense of exultation that I made the rounds with Mrs...
...I stood across the street, looking through the cracked plate glass, watching the cleaver go up and down, whacking through the fish...
...No toilets:' one proclaimed...
...The story on the street was that so many policemen had been summoned to deal with the students rioting uptown that patrols on the Lower East Side had diminished...
...Rivera to help collect the rents—a bit perhaps like the Sandinistas felt when they took over the Nicaraguan treasury...
...We were trying to establish, to some degree, that welfare recipients should have a telephone as a matter of right...
...There has been absolutely no national recruiting of the kind that made it possible for me to pick up an application outside my college dining hall...
...Shepstein knew his business...
...They even removed VISTA from the stationery of Action, the agency of which VISTA is a part...
...The cleaver stopped...
...My formative political reading consisted of such fare as Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, Herbert W. Philbrick's I Led Three Lives, and Harry and Bonaro Overstreet's What We Must Know About Communism...
...Nevertheless, MFY had retained the contract to run the Youth Corps program for another summer, and in the spring I was transferred back to this program...
...Indeed, VISTA did arise as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty...
...Martinez, lived on Avenue C, in a tenement indistinguishable from hundreds of others except that it was shabbier...
...It was a little like the drill a tax preparer runs you through...
...It did not turn out quite that way...
...Shepstein was begging for mercy before the judge again...
...The apartments tended to be similar...
...Finally there was a barely audible "Quien es [Who's there...
...Instead, there was a gregarious local social worker we called "Auntie Harriet," who fed and cheer-led us, and generally represented the acme of Jewish motherhood...
...From there, I was assigned to something called the Mobilization for Youth, on Manhattan's Lower East Side...
...Pauken too...
...This was the administration of Mayor John Lindsay, and while the streets on the Lower East Side were not paved with gold, there was an emergency heating program, under which the city would send a truck to fill an empty oil tank and even fix the boiler...
...As she was barricaded behind the switchboard, there was no way I could touch her physically with the complaint—the legal requirement of service— and I wasn't sure whether throwing it was sufficient...
...One of my first enduring political memories was the time my grandfather pulled me aside at a family gathering to dispense a bit of advice...
...I Was a Spear Carrier in the War on Poverty By Jonathan Rowe When I tell people that in the late sixties I was a VISTA Volunteer on Manhattan's Lower East Side, I sometimes sense in them a certain reverential awe, as though I were a veteran of the good war...
...So declared James H. Burnley IV, Reagan's first VISTA chief and a Republican district chairman in North Carolina prior to his appointment...
...But I could watch trials from the back of courtrooms and traipse around New York, with which I was infatuated...
...The American judicial system was not formulated with people like the Henry Street tenants in mind...
...Harvard was going to help straighten things out...
...During the summer after my junior year, I worked on a house painting and tutoring project in the black Boston ghetto of Roxbury...
...There was no shortage of administrators, who seemed to issue forth from the inner sanctums of PS 82 like clowns from the Volkswagen in the old circus trick...
...But I can think of nothing I've done in that period that helped concrete individuals the way we did when we got the boiler fixed on Henry Street...
...In Washington's clamor of selfinterest, we need ways like VISTA to encourage people to think about the problems of their neighbors...
...Then they started sending over employees who said they couldn't do the work because they were boiler men and not plumbers...
...Iry was a somber man whose hang-dog expression suggested he had processed a few thousand too many forms in the New York City schools...
...This was my first failure as a process-server...
...Under him were a Puerto Rican, a black, and a WASP...
...The director of this group, a large man of obvious Mau-Mauing potential, told two other volunteers and me to go register new voters in a housing project that was set off like a dump on the outskirts of town...
...The crew leaders at the service agencies that served as job sites had filled them out incorrectly, and as a result the entire payroll process had gagged...
...Uh...
...Finally Bernie decided that if the maildrop was all Shepstein had listed, then the maildrop was what we would serve...
...Most offered sums safely beneath the ceiling...
...What did you bring them for...
...The gangs, the drugs, the crime— I had no idea how I was going to fight poverty in a place like that...
...I drafted a letter of protest to Mayor Lindsay, reciting all these difficulties and others I haven't mentioned...
...But there were also "recreational aides" or "community support workers," who might hang around a playground and perhaps push some kids on the swings...
...Innocence is a greatly undervalued asset, and we actually spent an entire day at the end of this canvass ferrying new voters back and forth...
...Ninety-five cents would buy a weighty veal cutlet platter at the Ukrainian restaurants on Tompkins Square Park, or a plate of lo mein in Chinatown...
...you get that thing out of here...
...To the lawyers it may be a distinction without a difference...
...Besides, people on the financial edge just don't like to make trouble...
...It is a rule of life in such places to minimize contacts with authority, since just about everyone has a skeleton in his or her closet, such as an undisclosed source of income that stands to be exposed...
...This was not a simple matter either, since Shepstein's only listed address was a maildrop, and repeated calls and letters went unanswered...
...Still, I like to think that my year in VISTA was not totally without value...
...The office was the first floor of a tenement at 26 Rutgers Street, at the far bottom of the Lower East Side, near the stanchions of the Brooklyn Bridge...
...My recollection is that after we had paid the bills we didn't have a great deal left over for repairs...
...He was the one I had to inform that his wife was suing for divorce...
...The mailboxes were gouged and pried almost to the point of uselessness, and the entryway was a littered invitation to junkies and whoever else would take refuge in the building's dark recesses...
...It was totally beyond me how a city could set up a program to help desperate tenants, and then erect impediments like these...
...My $49.50 per month rent included utilities, and you could get imperfect eggs and cheese at the Essex Street Market at seconds prices...
...Running the state afterwards is something else...
...These were invariably the nicest kids, the ones you saw dressed in white on Sundays with bibles under their arms, who showed you a deference that you didn't deserve...
...Thus there was some anxiety on Rutgers Street when the plaintiff in the telephone case didn't appear to sign some required papers...
...This possibility is especially distressing for legal services attorneys, to whom such suits represent a blow not only for social justice but for career advancement as well...
...But the primary value of a program like VISTA may be in addressing a kind of poverty that the Reaganites are inclined to overlook—the kind which causes comfortable Americans to live oblivious to the need that exists in our own country and the world...
...Owing largely to the controlled rents—apartments could be had for $37.50 a month—the Lower East Side had become Haight-Ashbury East, the Atlantic capital of the Flower Children...
...Despite the dire conditions, getting the signatures was not always easy...
...Then they said they could not do anything because the tenants weren't paying their rents to the city...
...Shepstein owned two tenement buildings on Henry Street, about two blocks from the office...
...There was also, of course, a generous provision for MFY's administrative expenses...
...Pianist spent her afternoons...
...Just a few days later, a city truck appeared, accompanied by a police escort and a bigshot in a brown leather trenchcoat, whose solicitous manner suggested that someone had chewed him out...
...Some blocks east of Avenue B had been virtually demolished...
...As it turned out, he had neither ghouls nor goons but rather a lone woman manning a switchboard as though it were a battleship's controls...
...Now there were still enclaves of stability...
...Tomasita Rivera was a tenant organizer's dream...
...Enrique then turned the station back to me, and I proceeded to follow his example...
...Purist that I am, the television sets surprised me...
...I wonder too whether he would sit there and tell a 13-year-old that he can't have a job because he may be living on a little more than $21.63 a week...
...There was an absurd incongruity between my rickety doorframe and the hostile world that this barrier was supposed to protect me against...
...And again...
...This is an office...
...While this 7A was working its way slowly through the esophagus of the courts, the people at Henry Street were still without heat and hot water...
...In the eerie mid-day quiet, drug dealers were doing business from abandoned buildings, passing their envelopes through holes in the concrete blocks with which the city had tried to seal these buildings off...
...I, for the most part, was a messenger...
...Should we simply have handed out charcoal and blankets to the freezing tenants...
...At the other end of the street, across from the public housing projects, blacks and Puerto Ricans lined up for their late afternoon pharmaceutical trade...
...You just, ah, withdrew, is that correct . . . ?") Again, a locksmith would have been more helpful...
...She was fearsome, and at the sight of the legal complaint in its telltale blue binding, she exploded...
...And as the real estate operators now move in, buying and selling the remaining buildings at enormous markups, raising rents to the $700-amonth level and even higher, making life miserable for existing low-rent tenants to force them out, there will be still fewer dwellings for those at the bottom...
...In terms of friendship and experience, it was by far the richest year of my life...
...A few, however, blurted out some higher figure—$4,900 perhaps or even $6,200—causing me to wince...
...Poverty money represented, simply, jobs and power...
...Auntie Harriet' fed and cheer-led us...
...Then, in a voice that seemed to rumble up from the gravel pits, that sounded like Sonny Terry hung over, "Wha's dis shit...
...But are you completely sure...
...The turmoil I experienced during my college years was largely personal, and unlikely as it now sounds, both the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war were like a commotion in a room down the hall...
...It sounded too good to be true...
...When you start a lawsuit in New York, someone has to deliver a copy of the complaint to the person being sued...
...At the same time, factions at city hall thought that the millions MFY was receiving from the federal government should be channeled instead through themselves...
...At the first apartment I knocked at that cold February evening I was greeted by Mrs...
...This was the dead of winter, with temperatures in single digits...
...Commando, however, was not impressed...
...Martinez were so terrified that they locked their doors for the duration...
...I lived with a blind woman—a real live member of the community—who kept getting the mineral oil and the cooking oil confused, and I was assigned to a local storefront action group of the kind that were proliferating at the time...
...I rid myself of everything I might worry about losing and lived in one-and-a-half rooms with only clothes, pots, and plates from a second-hand store on the Bowery, and the old radio on which I listened to Lyndon Johnson announce that he would not seek another term...
...We sat in the classroom, correcting card upon card, while "Whiter Shades of Pale" came from Tito's radio on the window sill...
...Tomasita Rivera...
...255 East Houston Street had become a branch of the New York City Department of Social Services...
...This was the Boy Scout Manual view of individual good deeds rather than a yen for what was called, at the time, "social change...
...It was at first terrifying, but then rapturous...
...President Reagan might have been expected to embrace VISTA's volunteer spirit: the way it tries to help communities help themselves, the' patriotism that is implicit in taking time out to help your country...
...But MFY also engaged in direct action against what its organizers saw as the perpetrators of distress in the neighborhood...
...My first night there, I went to Katz's delicatessen and sat next to a man who said he was Art Garfunkel's uncle...
...We would peer through a crack in the door...
...On the Lower East Side the neighborhood becomes generally worse as you go from Second Avenue on the west towards Avenue D and the river on the east...
...For the next several days she and I made our evening troop through the tenements, she doing the talking with her rat-a-tat-tat Spanish, I standing there trying to nod in the right places...
...Or is that just an estimate...
...Jonathan Rowe is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...This was not exactly the sort of work the VISTA posters and forward-looking logo had suggested...
...He took it, without visible emotion...
...I knocked at the apartment...
...A few years after that, the building had been gutted by fire...
...Poverty is always more pleasant when it is voluntary, but the effect of lightening the load in this fashion was unexpectedly liberating...
...We translated it into Spanish and Chinese so that everyone in the two buildings could sign and sent copies to The New York Times...
...Entertainers like George Jessel and Eddie Cantor grew up here...
...Many volunteers, especially in smaller communities and rural areas, have made a significant impact...
...abolishing VISTA, as the Reagan administration wants to do, wouldn't change that...
...I didn't think so...
...I recalled hearing somewhere that the police had to help you serve process if you asked them...
...But by the time I arrived at 255 East Houston Street, an old catering establishment that had been converted into an MFY center, the organization was approaching middle age...
...To be sure, VISTA volunteers like myself didn't make much of a dent in poverty on the Lower East Side...
...On the positive side, Youth Corps workers were reading to elderly folks with failing eyesight and doing other things along that line...
...Which one of you is from Harvard...
...The way such questions were resolved was simply to ask the kids...
...When I tell of my VISTA days, the "tenant organizing" is the part I take greatest pleasure in recounting, sounding as it does like service on the front lines...
...But the Peace Corps application was long and complicated, and they seemed to want skills like animal husbandry that were not my strong suit...
...But it's almost as hard for me to argue that people like Mrs...
...The people at the store front seemed no less surprised than those at city hall...
...I remember one case in which a black woman was divorcing her husband for atrocities I cannot now recall...
...But the government affects our mores and culture for better or worse...
...Still, we got the signatures, calling in Ping to translate for the Chinese...
...if the government wasn't supposed to do very much, then wasn't it all the more important that individuals pick up the slack...
...At least this was so for the months I was there...
...MFY's main focus was job training, including the creation of enterprises, such as a gas station and a luncheonette, to employ the people so trained...
...Indeed, a substantial portion of VISTA volunteers have gone on to lives of public service...
...It is still hard for me to swallow the idea of a "right" to a telephone...
...Process server for the people When the summer was over, I was assigned to one of the MFY legal services offices, the shining stars in the MFY galaxy at the time...
...Ninety-five percent of the cases, it seemed, had to do with the tenuous ordering of unordered lives...
...There is no demonstrable record" that VISTA had "any effect on poverty in this country...
...The head attorney was a former youth worker named Bernie...
...It was pretty scary...
...Pianist lost his composure and made a break for the stairs, leaving me standing in the broom closet, its door wide open, for all to see...
...Not appreciating such subtleties at the time, I undertook the task with earnest zeal, trooping up and down the stinking stairwells, knocking on doors, trying to cajole people into coming with us to city hall a week or so hence...
...The VISTA training program, unfortunately, seemed to have been designed by sociologists, not police patrolmen and locksmiths...
...In the end, the obvious solution was not to fortify the camel but to disemburden it...
...I am not brave but dutiful to the core...
...Every time we called, it was another story...
...Still, the regulations were the regulations, weren't they...
...The closest I came in those college years to a political act was joining the Young Republicans...
...Hot dog vendors would set up their carts nearby, so brisk and open was the trade...
...It was for these—the Puerto Ricans and blacks, primarily—that the Mobilization for Youth was founded in 1962...
...Though a member of the generation that came of age during the sixties, I was never really of it...
...But the money in slum housing is not in rents...
...I had just reported here with another VISTA volunteer to work with the Neighborhood Youth Corps, a summer job program for teenagers that MFY had contracted to run...
...YOU CAN'T PRIME THE PUMP...
...perhaps there would be a fire, or a power outage, or perhaps a rabbi would drop in for a chat...
...Life was not so rapturous, of course, for those who were there because they had no choice...
...If there were not so much of this kind of poverty, there wouldn't be as much of the other kind either...
...Looking back, I think the primary purpose of this assignment may have been to give the white boys something to do, and perhaps sober them up a bit...
...Family income' can be a pretty nebulous concept in places like the Lower East Side...
...I studied the faces for a hint of benevolence...
...But even if such realities are unacceptable to the Reaganites, what about the VISTA volunteers who have helped start local enterprises such as crafts co-ops for low income producers in West Virginia and South Dakota...
...Jacob Riis discovered how the other half lives...
...When Jefferson and the others drew up the Bill of Rights in Philadelphia, was telephone service in Lower Manhattan really what they had in mind...
...The private sector was in the person of an individual I will call Shepstein...
...These punch cards, I learned, had spawned a crisis in the Youth Corps program...
...Fair enough...
...A few days later they called, person to person, and asked if I could start training in June...
...The revolution is exhilarating...
...As these original occupants—many of them at least—moved out, and new immigrants from the Caribbean and the South moved in, the neighborhood began to unravel...
...Tito, a gangly Puerto Rican youth with one arm, sat at one of the desks, flipping doggedly through a stack...
...At the end of one typically sweltering afternoon, I approached Iry (not his real name), one of the top administrators, as he was departing, leather portfolio under arm...
...It was on 42nd Street, not far from the New York Public Library...
...he asked the next person in line...
...The funny part is that I think Ronald Reagan himself would approve of at least part of what I saw and learned...
...One strike against VISTA in the Reaganesque mind is that its volunteers have, on occasion, interfered with the benevolent workings of the private sector...
...It was the prototype, I heard repeatedly, for the federal War on Poverty...
...When one of the tenants came timidly to our office one afternoon, the building had been without heat and hot water for, I believe, more than a week...
...But somehow in my mind, conservatism had always been connected to the idea of service...
...It sounded unlikely, but having no better plan, I set off to find the police...
...In my naivete, I thought this was the blockbuster move that would really shake up city hall...
...If there is less poverty there now, it's mainly because there are fewer dwellings in which it can reside...
...Rita was asking...
...Again...
...To the east, on East Broadway, were the Garden Cafeteria, thick with the aromas of pea soup and challeh, Noah Zark's kosher pizza, and bodegas...
...The narrow staircase looked forbidding—what ghouls and goons might Shepstein have lurking up there...
...Our plaintiff, whom I will call Mrs...
...To start a 7A the tenants must sign a petition...
...I have since suspected that Bernie was having fun with my dutifulness, but I regarded this as a solemn assignment and carried it out accordingly...
...By some miracle, the letters seemed to work...
...To start the 7A, these tenants needed to appear in court at 10 a.m...
...And always, those window grates and the specter of crime...
...For people like Thomas Pauken, Reagan's Action director, VISTA is a symbol: social "activism," the antiwar protests, Hayden and Fonda, the works...
...it is in such things as depreciation, which were of use to the landlord but of absolutely no use to ourselves...
...We do not want to turn those kids away," he said, in a way that made me remember, with shame, that I was after all only a guest in someone else's house...
...That summer, 1967, was like the autumn ripeness before the final decline...
...Believe me," Iry intoned, with just a trace of irritation, "there is nothing you can do...
...Emaciated acid freaks and Hare Krishna chanters peopled the street corners...
...Over the past 13 years I have been engaged in various kinds of "public interest" work here in Washington...
...and on attaching a lock to a tenement doorframe that has been reduced to sawdust by holes drilled upon holes (not to mention a little Spanish...
...What they all did, I never quite grasped...
...The neighborhood was a living archeological dig...
...Actually, I pretty much just held the clipboard...
...In theory, I am inclined to agree with the Reaganites that people shouldn't expect the government to fund "social change' In practice, however, I don't see how you could get the boiler working on Henry Street without making trouble for somebody...
...El abagado [the attorney]," I replied—the magic password...
...It is a place of legend, captured in the movie, Hester Street, and the classic American novel, Call It Sleep...
...We celebrated the occasion with a picket line in which tenants carried placards announcing their views of Shepstein and the city administration...
...Errr," I began, "don't you think we should get out to the job sites more and make sure the kids are doing something useful...
...None of this direct action endeared MFY to its targets...
...All the while, there were uplifting lectures on poverty by officials from Washington, visits to black churches, and excursions to such places as a migrant labor camp, where we were all duly appalled...
...My window opened out to a fire escape that seemed ominously accessible from the ground...
...We celebrated the occasion with a picket line in which tenants carried placards declaring, again in three languages, their views of Shepstein and the city administration...
...But the ubiquitous metal grates across windows and storefronts gave the dark streets the feeling of a city under seige...
...Disemburdening the camel VISTA pay was $205 per month, which had to cover rent, food, everything...
...Now he was off free...
...Why did she have to bring up Harvard...
...Martinez had not left the apartment for two or three days...
...First they said they would send an inspector...
...More than that, you were too well off...
...Before we could get Shepstein, however, we had to serve him with the complaint, and before we could do that, we had to find him...
...Is there someone here from Harvard...
...But the impression is not entirely accurate...
...But Reagan first tried to eliminate the program, and when Congress wouldn't let him, his underlings set out to run it into the ground...
...How much do your parents make...
...this meant, as best I can recall, $4,500 a year for a family of four, or $21.63 per person per week...
...The processional organ strains of Procol Harem and the Doors somehow blended with the Latin music blaring from the record stores, the black nationalists, store front evangelists and Hasidim...
...That was it...
...I came upon a couple of burly policemen, picking their teeth as they emerged from a luncheonette on Madison Avenue...
...Men in Goodwill overcoats and tattered army jackets leaned lank and tired under a fluorescent light, cupping cigarettes in their fingers, waiting for nothing in particular...
...In the old days nobody locked his door, even though the Lower East Side was the most crowded area in the world, and neighbors visited from one tenement floor to the next...
...The common belief is that such offices were hot-beds of legal "activism:' In reality, Rutgers Street was more a divorce and welfare mill...
...There was vinyl-covered living room furniture and a formica dinette set...
...I was dispatched to find her...
...For considerably less you could get a knoblewurst at Katz's...
...Mrs...
...We'll all get typhoid!' By the end of the day, the heat was on...
...For weeks I lay awake at night concocting medievalish devices for foiling intruders—spikes in the window sill and the like...
...Despite her imperfect English, Tomasita understood immediately what was afoot and seized hold of it like a Common Cause chapter head undertaking a good-government drive...
...There was no sergeant presiding over this training...
...There were two social workers: Ping, whose conciliatory style might have driven the confrontation types to distraction, and Nadia, who was indifferent to her beauty, both cherubic and world-wise...
...Jonny," he admonished me, apropos of nothing, "I want you to remember one thing...
...word does get around...
...Only, not quite yet...
...But they have inflated this objection into a caricature of the entire program that bears virtually zero relationship to what I experienced as a VISTA volunteer...
...she shrieked, with no less belligerence than before...
...Enrique seated himself at my registration station and showed me how it was done...
...Pianist passed by, he would give the signal, and I would burst forth and present the notice of the divorce...
...The only hitch was that at first sight of his wife, Mr...
...Aside from a pregnancy in the ranks, the cause of most concern was the volunteers who complained they were given neither sufficient supervision nor "meaningful" work to do...
...This amount was not as little as it may seem...
...A few years after that, 131 Pitt Street was a pile of rubble...
...Everything stopped...
...As for the other part, I wish he had been there to see it with me...
...Actually, it was the Peace Corps that had captured my imagination...
...What I really needed was advice on walking a ghetto street at 1 a.m...
...An MFY supervisor, whom I will call Enrique, came by on a routine check...
...the neighborhood wasn't even there...
...Under a 7A tenants can withhold their rents from the landlord and pay them to a trustee, who will use the money to make needed repairs...
...This often included, not incidentally, traipsing through Chinatown at lunchtime, on the way to the city courts...
...Uh-huh...
...He wanted a divorce...
...You get that out of here," she shrieked...
...Staff salaries at MFY were quite competitive, and the term "poverty pimp" was appearing in the raucous "letters" columns of The Village Voice...
...Isn't such entreprenuership worth supporting...
...Sobering up the white boys When I set off for Springfield, Massachusetts a few days after graduation for VISTA "training;' I felt a little like a Marine recruit headed for Camp Lejeune...
...She had a cap on a front tooth and moved with a kind of tomboy swagger...
...Lacking a telephone, she was not able to call a doctor, a lawyer, anyone, when her child became ill...
...More specifically, the Reaganites have objected to the way Sam Brown, who was Carter's Action head, dispensed large VISTA grants to groups with nationwide organizing agendas, like Associated Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN...
...For some reason the husband, who ran a fish and chips joint not listed in the Michelin guide, had to be served that evening...
...When he finally did, we learned that Shepstein had somehow managed to get a postponement...
...When you told them you were sorry, these kids actually thanked you, and departed as politely as they had come...
...There were front stoop domino games on milk crates, polkas at the Ukrainian social clubs, and bocci at the corner of East Houston and First Street...
...This made it difficult for me to serve the complaint...
...Junkies and muggers were having a field day, and people like Mrs...
...I didn't see how you could fob off humanity's well-being onto automatic cosmic processes, the way communists do with their historical dialectic and capitalists do with their invisible hand...
...There's no Shepstein here...
...Around one corner, on East Broadway, sober young Hasidim in black robes and payess (ear curls) lined up at shul...
...Proud of my diligence, I showed Enrique my stack of rejects...
...institutions like the Henry Street Settlement, the Educational Alliance, and the garment workers union defined a whole era of American idealism...
...It was...
...In the world of New York landlord-tenant relations, which resemble relations on the Iran-Iraq border, a primary weapon of battle is something called a "7A...
...He might have seen what a bargain the government and the country get when they tap the enthusiasm of young (and old and middleaged) people for, at present, $7,800 a year, all costs included...
...He had suffered through a dozen ulcerous years of Roosevelt and he was not about to let his grandson go down that ideological drain...
...Mothers were huddling with their children in front of open ovens at night to keep from freezing, while elderly ladies were burning charcoal in trash barrels...
...I even tracked down elderly couples who were listed as second mortgagees on his deeds...
...For at least two days there was no running water at all...
...Whenever I hear Reagan recite his litany of antipoverty "abuse,' I think of that Youth Corps registration, and wonder what exactly he has in mind...
...But it was a Jiggs and Maggie situation, and he was so terrified of her that he refused to point her out to me in person...
...This was reinforcing but it didn't get me any closer to Shepstein...
...A greater problem than money was crime...
...Then they said they had to contact the landlord (an inspired regulation, that...
...I can still feel those eyes bearing down on me...
...sitting in a living room on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, I listened to one such couple lament how Shepstein had welshed on his debt to them...
...It is widely suspected that when Mayor Koch finally routed the pushers from parts of the Lower East Side a number of months ago, it was not entirely for the benefit of the welfare mothers there...
...You have no business...
...Does the niece sleeping on the couch for a few months count as "family...
...Hardship, no doubt...
...But if that were the standard, capitalism would be judged a failure as well...
...He, however, was not pleased, especially about those that were near the borderline...
...At the very least, I developed an immunity to the cliched views of poverty and how to reduce it that issue forth from people like Reagan and his counterparts on the political left...
...As best I can recall, neither these administrators nor I got out into the field a great deal to actually see the program...
...But since New York was overwhelming and I had no idea how else to wage war on poverty there, the punch cards were at least a way to keep busy and feel like I was contributing...
...This can be interesting work...
...Rita was a sturdy Latin woman, bronze and handsome, who had just emerged from a classroom in PS 82 at the corner of Madison and Grand Streets...
...I could barely imagine what wonders must lie ahead...
...For this reason I was somewhat skeptical of the major lawsuit in our office of the kind that so annoys the Reagan types...
...She was square-shouldered and brawny, her black hair lacquered fast, lipstick blazing, and breasts boosted atop an expanding girth, contoured by her cashmere sweater...
...The reason, I was told, was the Columbia riots...
...Minutes before I had had visions of him handcuffed before a judge, begging for mercy...
...The VISTA application was much simpler...
...Were he still around when I finished high school, my grandfather would have been proud of my long senior paper on John Maynard Keynes, in which I concluded that a government that manipulated the economy was a menace to our freedom...
...Martinez don't need one—perhaps not as a right, but as something the rest of us ought, by public policy, to provide...
...My request seemed to puzzle them, but to my amazement, they agreed to help...
...The surrounding streets that had been so alive had become a grim combat zone...
...Being a messenger often meant being a "process server...
...She ushered me into the old classroom, where ochre computer cards were stacked up on hingetop desks...
...There is nothing you can do' The Lower East Side was the port of entry for the wave of immigrants, especially Eastern European Jews, that flooded the city in the late 19th century...
...A television set along with wall hangings of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King or the pope formed the family shrine...
...Finally, we obtained the court order...
...To the west the Chinese were spilling over from Chinatown...
...Your father may have missed a week or two of work because he was sick .. .?" And so on until, if possible, the individual was down to the requisite level...
...Tomasita was somewhere in that foggy territory between 22 and 45 that Puerto Rican women enter when they have not much money and a brood of kids...
...Key positions have gone unfilled for months, even years...
...Uh, $4,800," this teenager replied tentatively, as though wary of thin ice...
...This is for you," I forced from my mouth...
...Finally, no such reprieve in sight, I resigned myself to my fate...
...In 1964 the Daily News accused the organization of being a "Red honeycomb," prompting an orgy of investigation that was referred to within MFY simply as "the trouble...
...In the rear, an ox of a man was hacking away at a fish with an enormous cleaver...
...With her were a sister, or neighbor, and a little boy who seemed to be ill...
...I shivered, and waited...
...This wasn't exactly on the VISTA posters, either...
...The legal services office reflected this polyglot brew...
...or were plumbers and not boiler men...
...We stood in the back of the courtroom for what seemed like hours as we waited for the clerk to get to our case...
...A long line of teenagers extended down the staircase at 255 East Houston, and I was one of the people conducting the registration on the second floor...
...VISTA hasn't eliminated poverty...
...It was during the registration for this Youth Corps program that I first began to think in a serious way about what has come to be called "waste, fraud, and abuse...
...As I followed them up the staircase, their shoulders just about touching the walls, I felt I now knew how Charlie Conerly, the New York Giants quarterback, felt when he dropped back into the pocket behind Jack Stroud and Roosevelt Brown...
...What about the money your mother gets—in cash—for working in the laundromat on weekends...
...I felt some trepidation, nevertheless, submitting my meager credentials before those high people in Washington...
...I questioned whether welfare should provide for such things and took a dim view of those who, I thought, wanted to raise the detritus of the consumer culture to a matter of right...
...I thought I was living pretty well...
...It was a blustery December night, the streets were desolate, and the scene inside the fish joint was like an Edward Hopper painting racially transposed...
...Elsewhere in the room sat one or two others, similarly engaged...
...I began to supect that the Neighborhood Youth Corps was intended to provide summer employment not just for ghetto youth but for high school guidance counselors from Brooklyn as well...
...The only alternative was retreat...
...The regulations said that only those below the "poverty level" were eligible...
...As the object of Rita's question, I was embarrassed and a little confused...
...I helped cause such interference...
...This was mainly to help a friend who needed votes for an opposition slate, but it was not out of character either...
...I ignored most of this and went about registering voters, a response which caused the program psychiatrist to puff thoughtfully on his pipe at the required interview at the end of the training...
...Garment district tycoons with homes in Scarsdale or on Long Island started as pushcart peddlers on these same streets...
...What I did see gave me cause for concern...
...One of the hazards of such lawsuits is that plaintiffs have a way of disappearing...
...Since I had little to fear losing, New York became, in a sense, mine...
...At the end of my senior year, the "future" suddenly looming before me like a cantankerous creditor, and the draft beginning to loom up as well, I found a VISTA application outside my college dining hall...
...They organized rent strikes, picketed construction sites over union hiring practices, took on public school principals, and in general made a ruckus not seen on the Lower East Side since the garment workers took on the bosses earlier in the century...
...The pianist and I would secrete ourselves in a broom closet in the senior citizen's center where Mrs...
...She opened the door a crack and then let me in...
...When Mrs...
...one morning in early March—no problem for Shepstein's lawyer, but quite a production for two buildings full of tenants, some of whom were elderly and infirm...
...Checks for the Lower East Side were being sent to Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville, kids had not been paid for weeks, and there had been sitins and threats of violence...
...This is where I came in...
...This I greatly enjoy...
...Holding the blue-covered complaint in front of _me like a soldier bearing the cross into the crusades, I entered and walked across the room...
...The bloom may have been off the rose, but her puckish humor and spunk were still there...
Vol. 16 • November 1984 • No. 10
