Hustling on the Range
Henderson, Jim
Hustlers On theRange by James Henderson There were 50 or 60 of them waiting in the second-floor corridor of Muskogee’s aging federal courthouse, sitting on wooden benches, talking...
...NOCDC got the $1.7 million contract...
...The irony is that most of the expenditures challenged occurred in 1972...
...His reasons for resigning were never clear...
...Scattered about the yard of the deserted corporate headquarters are a ?ew pieces of heavy equipment obtained from GSA and large stacks of trays left over from an ill-fated mushroom-growing venture...
...In casual moments with close associates, he sometimes talked of the vast economic power the OEO grants afforded the person charged with administering them...
...During recesses and lunch breaks, the court reporters chatted with Mansfield and his attorney and after the second day, no one seemed to sense any impending danger...
...Scales...
...By 1970 there was ominous handwriting on the walls at OEO, where officials felt that if the community development programs could make a good showing, it might forestall the agency’s doom...
...The only real political kingdoms, the only efficient political machines, in Oklahoma are in the eastern half of the state, where ignorance and poverty are the most widespread...
...thev laughed...
...I drove 60 miles down here and they didn’t even give me a chance to bring it up...
...Near Taft, a weathered billboard stands on an empty field where a toy factory was to be built...
...When the bid was submitted, Comanco consisted of nothing but a small office...
...The company’s manpower director had been critical of some of their policies, and Mansfield and Stilley wanted him out of the way...
...Could be a Great Thing...
...Finally I sent my wife...
...After purchasing a building for $5,000 and obtaining surplus government wiring, the company set out to manufacture a burglar alarm...
...He has been involved in most of the dubious activities which have led to the sending of our suspension letter...
...But much of the responsibility for the poor financial picture must be borne by NOCDC management,” the report said...
...A1 Hughes, a Litton official who recommended acceptance of Comanco’s bid, became the NOCDC’s sales manager...
...Gibson and Muskogee for $15,000...
...Roberts tried to whip the dissident board members into line by telling them that if the controversies continued, “My bank isn’t interested in going along with you...
...Later, Mansfield reprimanded him: “That’s a government car...
...It turned out to be something less dramatic than that...
...True to form, the suspension was lifted on December 10, and the OEO stated that no action would be taken to terminate the corporation’s funds...
...The poverty war had taken a typically bureaucratic turn in its early years...
...The people are backward, clannish, reticent, and suspicious of outsiders...
...Intellectually removed from the real life needs of the poor, this breed was less susceptible to pricks of conscience, but at least in Mansfield’s case, the object of the new poverty game was not the successful perpetration of a fraud, but power...
...Carter demanded...
...Indeed, the NOCDC had been good to Roberts in other ways...
...It pumped money into three other ventures that never got off the ground...
...In spite of these internal difficulties, the corporation went about its business through 1970 and 1971 almost unnoticed...
...You should tell the U. S. Attorney you haye more to say,” another reporter said...
...The road they had traveled to the Muskogee federal courthouse was littered with the wreckage of the Northeast Oklahoma Community Development Corporation, called NOCDC in memorandum lingo, which was created in the summer of 1969 under a new Office of Economic Opportunity division responsible for pumping money into impoverished regions where small businesses and light industries could be established...
...Are you threatening us...
...Unise x for the Horsey Set The first blunders were minor...
...To OEO’s satisfaction at that time, Mansfield replied that the detectives had been hired to help locate some equipment missing from the corporation’s saddle shop venture...
...When he spoke, they James Henderson is a reporter for the Tulsa Daily World...
...One day a messenger from NOCDC arrived at Hill’s home to remind him that the corporation was considering buying a bank in his town and what the hell, Ed, you’d like to be a bank president, wouldn’t you...
...The building had to be wired for electrical heat, since there was no natural gas line within 14 miles...
...Furthermore, his tenure as ‘acting president’ was never specifically approved by OEO...
...is totally unrealistic...
...He likes to brag that his children are the only whites in their school,” a former associate once said of him with considerable disdain...
...Five board members resigned in disgust...
...When he ioked...
...But he lived in Mayes County, which was Carter and Hill’s county, and he could not be dismissed quietly without their support...
...On a visit to the NOCDC office in the spring of 1973, I met Luther Scales, a black board member from Coweta...
...No one seriously expects indictments and Pyle has privately conceded that the evidence of criminal fraud is weak...
...OEO requires a written justification...
...I thought of my father following the rainbow to California in the 1940s and then following it back a decade later, still poor and still convinced it was only temporary...
...He was always at the president’s side, and had become- the official interpreter...
...Although the project never worked- 1 1 business ventures were initiated and only three live on now on borrowed time-the OEO to the end praised the NOCDC as a model of the community development ideal...
...In fact, he had seemed annoyed by the whole investigation, which he began under pressure from former officers and employees of NOCDC who claimed they had evidence of wrong-doing...
...Sixteen shareholders listed the same address-a small house in the chairman’s home town...
...Most of the ventures, which Mansfield himself proposed and had no trouble getting approved by OEO, were located in the counties represented by those members most subservient to the management...
...They didn’t even ask me about the private detectives...
...Mansfield and Stilley settled comfortably into their jobs and started learning the politics of the operation...
...The corporation advertised for a president and hired Troy Stilley, who was working as a division manager for a West Coast electronics component manufacturing firm...
...As part of the bargain, however, the board agreed to buy up the remainder of Stilley’s two-year contract for $35,917 and Mansfield’s for $2,594...
...So the chief impounded Mansfield’s wheels...
...Each venture was bungled disastrously, a fact that did not wholly escape the attention of the board members...
...Judge Bill Haworth, whose brother had turned a handsome profit in the sale of the NOCDC headquarters building, readily granted the injunction...
...After all, the OEO had been aware of what was happening and had taken no action to stop it, so why should he labor at such length in a stuffy little room with 18 jurors to gather information that was already in the hands of another federal agency...
...After six days, in May, the grand jury recessed, its investigation ended and a report due in September...
...What he had done, rather, was to use the federal money to develop personal power...
...At this late date, in the sweltering summer of 1974, they were still convinced that Jack Mansfield knew best...
...So when the OEO ventured into community development programs designed to encourage some of the missing business activity, a group of Community Action Program directors in eastern Oklahoma applied for and received two $50,000 planning grants to get into the business...
...Early in November, Stilley resigned as president...
...In September, 1971, Roberts and John Haworth, brother of a district court judge who would come into the picture later, purchased an abandoned school building between Ft...
...If this is the way the investigation is being run, it may be a waste of time,” she said...
...Calling the Bluff One of the enduring mysteries of the NOCDC‘s five-year saga is why the OEO allowed it to continue receiving federal money while blatant violations and improprieties were turning up with embarrassing regularity...
...The chairman of the board was caught selling stock illegally to people who lived out of state...
...Now and then, when someone came out of the grand jury room, they gathered like a flock around Jack Mansfield, their leader, who towered over them as though elevated to an altar, and traded information and fretted over the next move...
...He could persuade and manipulate and get things done...
...Next, Stilley used $250 of the money to purchase five $50 tickets to an appreciation dinner for House Speaker Carl Albert...
...Payment on the check was stopped...
...Well,” Carter said, “I was just suggesting...
...Immediately after the checks were issued, the board’s attorney advised the directors that the amount paid to Stilley was excessive and in violation of OEO regulations...
...In other words: it’s your problem, you solve it, and start by silencing the opposition...
...Then there was trouble with the local police in Wagoner, where the NOCDC was headquartered in a small, store-front office until the big money started arriving...
...Bartlett, who this time, at least, seemed to be acting for relatively upliftjng reasons, answered that bipartisan pressure had convinced OEO to reevaluate the program “in order to save the companies and jobs involved...
...So what did they do...
...it was not revealed until several weeks later that he again had been paid more than $35,000 for the remainder of his contract-a payment that apparently was authorized by the OEO...
...Mansfield told the grand jury that he had received verbal authorization to hire private detectives...
...England appeared before the grand jury and denied it...
...The show would not close until it played out its advance...
...One evening, with his family safely away, Carter approached a car parked near his home and asked the men in it who they were and what they wanted...
...In a lengthy petition to the OEO, with copies to newspapers, congressmeljl and the Justice Department, they itemized what they felt was wrong within the corporation: exorbitant executive salaries, mismanaged ventures, improper shuffling of funds among ventures and the parent company, private planes being chartered to bring in prospective employees from out of state and to conduct tours for visiting OEO officials, favoritism in the location of ventures, conflicts of interest in some transactions, unnecessary trips to Washington for favored board members, board meetings held at Western Hills State Lodge with the tab paid by the taxpayers, large amounts of money paid to consultants who were not under written contract...
...Clem McSpadden, a Democrat, began leaning on the OEO), there was no urgency to take drastic measures...
...It was quickly becoming evident that Stilley was little more than a figurehead...
...When Carter objected to a decision at one board meeting, Stilley told him, “You only make the policy, I run this company...
...Waiting for the End “I don’t know why they subpoenaed me,” said a woman coming out of the grand jury room...
...By this time, Mansfield and the board of directors had become accustomed to and blase about big-wigs in Washington trying to throw their weight around...
...He explained that the company had spent $31,000 LO try to find $1,000-worth of equipment, and the OEO apparently accepted it...
...In September, the OEO again determined that there was “further evidence of the failures...
...The contract bid, which contained 96 items, was prepared in 21 days by a team of consultants who did not have all the specifications available to them...
...By the standards of OEO philanthropy, it was a small project, costing the government only about $4 million in direct grants, but throughout its existence it was considered by the OEO to be the best and most promising of the community development corporations among the many that were scattered from the backwoods of the deep south to the slums of big northern cities...
...Mansfield charged that Bartlett was “determined to kill NOCDC because it was nothing but a bunch of liberal Democrats...
...and [the course of events] does not show a willingness on the part of NOCDC to remedy them...
...He was a kindly man, well along in his years, with a mellow voice and a touch of sadness in the way he moved...
...The story is told of a tourist, passing through Sallisaw, who stopped at a fork in the road just outside of town...
...An old man was sitting under a tree nearby...
...We know that some mistakes have been made,’’ he said, “but this could be a great thing for our area...
...He had a few loose family ties with the NOCDC region, but he was essentially an outsider...
...At its peak, the NOCDC had created no more than 100 to 150 jobs, and except for the work being done for Litton Industries, most of those jobs had been painfully temporary...
...He knew people in Washington and how they talked and how they thought...
...It is evident that the members of the board are split on a number of basic issues including over-all program goals, strategies and board-staff relations...
...The OEO was starting to look more closely at the corporation’s activities, and hostile correspondence from Washington was becoming more frequent...
...Few witnesses spent more than 10 minutes with the grand jury and most reported to Mansfield when they came out, gathering about him like a flock, still believing in him...
...A bid was submitted on a $25,000 contract for trays for the General Services Administration...
...At one time there were as many as 15 private sleuths in Mayes country, tripping over each other and never being very secretive about their mission, which was to find out something embarrassing about the two board members, or failing that, simply to wear them down...
...Mansfield hired the foreman from the first construction firm as an NOCDC consultant...
...She had been approached by the detectives seeking information on the two dissident board members and she was one of the few witnesses not directly associated with NOCDC who had information that might be harmful to the corporation...
...The approval, he said, came from Tom England, a program analyst in Washington...
...The percentage of families below the poverty level ranges from 27 per cent in some areas to more than 40 in others...
...Bad publicity and unforeseen legal expenses were blamed in part for the losses...
...Ramirez’ letter was ignored and Mansfield stayed on as acting president...
...He listed his occupation as a farmer, and I suspected he had spent his years working another man’s soil...
...A few days later, the figure was adjusted downward to about $50,000...
...Read more of the Khosrovi report: “Much work must be done by both the board of directors and staff of NOCDC to bring its operations back in line with previous performance, a performance which led OEO to believe that NOCDC was one of the most progressive and potentially successful of the OEO-funded rural community development corporations...
...While the argument was raging, the board of directors submitted for OEO approval the names of three candidates for the job of NOCDC president...
...Comanco North at Alluwe, the largest of NOCDC ventures and also the most suspicious...
...It looks to me like we’ve been as good to you as you’ve been to us,” Carter said, reminding him that the NOCDC loans were 75 per cent backed by the Small Business Administration and therefore of little risk to the bank...
...It served as the corporate headquarters until last June, when OEO shut off the tap...
...On July 6, Louis Ramirez, Director of the Community Development &vision, responded : “There are many reasons why Mr...
...After receiving the contract, it purchased 19 acres of land and a building which turned out not to be large enough to provide the storage room required in the contract...
...When the chief of police called on Stilley to complain about the delinquent tickets, he was told to kiss off, government cars are not subject to local ordinances...
...As long as its just a suggestion,’’ Stilley said, “I’ll consider it...
...I hope you’re right, Mr...
...NOCDC has continued to use administrative and venture funds on business ventures without prior OEO approval in continuance of a practice which has gone on for almost two years, in the face of continued orders from OEO to cease...
...He translated OEO letters and guidelines into language the board members could understand...
...Maybe there is less here than meets the eye...
...All this required professional guidance, and the Jack Mansfields of the business were sent out among the poor...
...We just got to get behind it, that’s all,” he said...
...They quickly identified themselves as private detectives hired by NOCDC to investigate him...
...Dutifully, the OEO, which was about to release a $2.5 million grant’ to the corporation, sent investigators to look into the allegations...
...Coweta Electronics Inc...
...During the grand jury’s summer recess, Mansfield and his entourage went back to Comanco and the Litton work to await the final report...
...That company is one of the remaining ventures begun by NOCDC and it is surviving on the last of the OEO money to be released to NOCDC...
...The board...
...They were farmers, rural school teachers, general store proprietors, unskilled laborers, unemployed skilled laborers, some good ole Sallisaw boys and Nowata rednecks and Indians from the Cookson Hills, and one or two blacks-in all, the kinds of people who had spent most of their lives in poverty or just across the creek from it in the harsh, picturesque bush of eastern Oklahoma...
...Not much had been done for the poor of eastern Oklahoma...
...In Rogers County, the most affluent in the NOCDC region, the per capita income is $2,461...
...Hustlers On theRange by James Henderson There were 50 or 60 of them waiting in the second-floor corridor of Muskogee’s aging federal courthouse, sitting on wooden benches, talking in whispers, or huddled in small groups around the soft drink machine...
...U. S. Attorney Richard Pyle seemed annoyed when the matter was called to his attention...
...Adair, Sequoyah and Cherokee counties, by far the poorest, were virtually ignored in the venture planning, and it was directors from those counties who asked Mansfield and Stilley the toughest questions at board meetings...
...Of course, his interpretations usually were compatible with his own ideas about what the corporation should be...
...The OEO required that all jobs be filled by persons living within the region if possible...
...At the time the bid was submitted, NOCDC officials had no knowledge of GSA specifications...
...In the Cookson Hills, storied for harboring outlaws from Jesse James to Pretty Boy Floyd, 10,000 full-blooded Cherokees live in squalor and speak little but their native language...
...The customers rejected the first batch of sheet metal drawers, 47,000 of them, because they had been stored outdoors and had corroded...
...They told me the investigation would stop if I would stop bothering Jack Mansfield and Troy Stilley,” Carter said...
...There were six months left in the grant period...
...Suspended again...
...An employee who was in charge of property and equipment went down to the police station and paid $77.50 (using OEO grant money) to get the car back...
...The work of the construction company hired to refurbish and expand the old building was so shoddy that another company had to come in to finish the project...
...The plan for the second year of your grant funding period...
...The Community Development division of the OEO was in its infancy when the NOCDC was funded and therefore was slow, purposefully slow, to admit it was screwing up so thoroughly on the first lap...
...The company was set up to bid on a Litton Industries contract for the manufacture of stowage gear for the Landing Helicopter Assault ship Litton was building for the Navy...
...Mansfield looked every bit the ordained Methodist minister he once had been...
...The last of the OEO money has been spent and when Comanco folds, the only trace of the NOCDC will be the wreckage, lying there like a faint malodor intruding on the sweet smell of alfalfa and honeysuckle...
...The corporation purchased a failing machine shop, then a tooling shop, a boutique, a transformer repair business, a saddle shop, upholstery business, an electronics plant, wood shop, and a metal fabrication plant...
...Mansfield’s name was among them...
...They could keep it as far as I’m concerned...
...must deal with these issues forcefully and expeditiously and individual members of the board must resolve that their opposition to certain board decisions must be constructive and supportive of the over-all program and must not be allowed to derail the board or staff from meeting their primary responsibilities of developing the economic and social wellbeing of northeastern Oklahoma...
...Claiming that the agreement had been breached, Stilley and Mansfield moved back into their offices and, with $1 1,000 of NOCDC funds, hired a lawyer to help them obtain a court order prohibiting the board from firing them again...
...NOCDC could be seen less charitably as a model of the classic con game that has been with the OEO from the beginning-the game of money that never quite hits the target when the smooth, career consultants like Jack Mansfield move in to intercept...
...Some of this can be attributed to causes external to NOCDC...
...Does it make any difference which road I take to Ft...
...The corporation belonged to Mansfield, who hovered in the background, rarely allowing himself to be drawn into argument...
...On February 9, Willie J. Williams, chief of the OEO’s program operations division, concluded in a letter to the NOCDC board: “The NOCDC program is in serious financial trouble...
...He was an organizer, a politicker, hardnosed and heavy-handed when the occasion called for it, sly and cunning at times, innocent and injured at others...
...One stipulation...
...The president would be paid $24,000 a year, and below him, three division directors, comparable to vice presidents, would be paid $22,000 a year, tidy salaries considering the economics of the region...
...Carol M. Khosrovi, the OEOs director of Program Development, responded in a report based on that investigation, on June 8, 1972: “While it does not appear that any evidence was found upon which the federal government is likely to allege violations of federal criminal law, a number of irregularities were found including violation of OEO regulations and grant conditions.’’ The investigation verified most of Carter’s allegations...
...One can imagine a gigantic yawn at the next board meeting...
...Evidence turned up by the federal grand jury revealed that the detectives had been less than diligent in their work...
...They were not professionals in the causes and cures of poverty, but in the mechanics of the bureaucracy...
...The tab came to $31,501, and the expenditure was an apparent violation of an 1893 federal statute which prohibits the federal government and its agencies from employing private detectives...
...Their suspicion is without healthy cynicism, and if that leaves them with a large capacity for hope, it also renders them vulnerable to deception...
...no later than June 30, 1972...
...I didn’t know who they were but I was getting a little afraid...
...Stilley and Mansfield hired a detective agency to tail the two most outspoken critics-Carter and Hilland the manpower director they had fired...
...In their search for allies, Stilley and Mansfield even turned to J. C. Roberts, whose bank held some NOCDC deposits and loan notes...
...Reflections Boutique in Wagoner...
...and kids out of state so I could have a showdown with them...
...Mansfield, who never left the payroll, even kept his termination pay while drawing his regular salary...
...Undaunted, the company branched out to produce wooden desk trays...
...The budget included $30,000 for the wiring, but the cost eventually ran to more than $60,000 (a workman on the job remarked, “If they used gold wire it couldn’t cost that much...
...Some extreme tactics became necessary in the spring of 1972 to keep everything hitched up, largely because the $2.5 million grant was still hanging over their heads...
...It was during that period that foundations were laid for the ventures that would bring NOCDC to fruition...
...Propped up by OEO funds, the shop stayed open for two years and never came close to black ink...
...Were you prepared to tell them something...
...Jack Mansfield was working as a consultant to the Muskogee Community Action Program in June, 1969, when the NOCDC was chartered, so he had already begun to penetrate the shell that outsiders encounter when they first come here...
...It cost $70,000 to refinish them...
...The NOCDC purchased it with plans to market a line of unisex clothing-in Wagoner, Oklahoma, where they still chase cattle thieves on horseback...
...listened...
...Hopes of economic security are not easily cast aside, even by those who have spent a lifetime chasing the elusive dream...
...It is reasonable to assume that Mansfield is not overly concerned by OEO’s attempts to collect the money...
...Of all the charges which were eventually leveled against him, there was no accusation that he had amassed personal wealth from the $4 million that had slipped through his hands...
...Carter was an electrician and small businessman, Hill, a small-town school superintendent...
...Nope,” the old man answered and, as the tourist sped away, added, “not to me it don’t...
...If we can just get everybody behind us, we can make it work...
...It was to sell for $12...
...OEO now rejects his name as ‘acting president...
...The headquarters had closed up and Mansfield, still acting president, had moved a skeleton staff into the officc of Comanco...
...is that new management be injected into NOCDC to save the program,” Bartlett said...
...I kept seeing cars parked around my house with strange men in them,” Carter said, after the detectives’ mission was finally exposed...
...a reporter inquired...
...It seemed it would be impossible to fill the highest paying jobs locally...
...six-feet five-inches tall and 195 pounds thin, dressed in black, laying a broad hand on an occasional shoulder, never letting loose of his what-do-you-know half-moon Stan Laurel smile...
...He stayed behind it, like a few dozen others, throughout that year and into 1974, when the federal grand jury in Muskogee began searching for criminal activities in the NOCDC’s behavior...
...Early in January, 1973, with Mansfield now acting president of the corporation, OEO sent another team of investigators to Oklahoma...
...Mansfield’s name should not be approved...
...At the machine shop in Muskogee, an estimated $;?-million worth of surplus GSA equipment, bought when there was no place to use it, sits rusting among the weeds...
...He knows all about the demands from Washington...
...By early 1974, only three of the corporation’s ventures were still on their feet, and they were limping badly...
...Mansfield claimed the venture was not a total loss because a few people received valuable job training in strip ping the insulation from surplus wire...
...And in the absence of substantial political pressure to clean up the NOCDC (it was not until mid-1973 that Senator Dewey Bartlett, a Republican, and Rep...
...The per capita income of Adair county is $1,572, andin 1973 the OEO rated it the second poorest county in the nation...
...Yes,” she said...
...Mansfield had been assigned an OEOowned Ford station wagon, which he parked on Main Street without bothering to pay the parking meter or the subsequent fines...
...No,” Roberts said, surprised...
...Late in June, the OEO disclosed that it was disallowing $94,000 in unauthorized expenditures and the corporation would have to pay it back...
...He understood such esoteric matters as grant applications, venture proposals, guidelines, policy statements, and OEO regulations and procedures...
...In practically every sense, business ventures have suffered from inadequate business planning...
...A 15-member board of directors was elected by the stockholdersmostly indigent residents of the area who paid $5 for the one share they were allowed to buy...
...All operational ventures are presently cash drains on the corporation and have sustained considerable losses since inception...
...Still, there is an ironic quality to their parochial instincts, a quality that renders them prey to manipulation...
...It was one of Mansfield’s characteristics to hire for his own staff employees fired by other NOCDC department heads, and over a period of time he built a personal staff that was unquestioning in its loyalty to him...
...Some examples: -Boots Off Inc., a wood shop, manufactured 22,000 boot jacks and sold fewer than 5,000...
...Just a Suggestion If OEO officials in Washington had been ignorant of what was happening in eastern Oklahoma, it was called to their attention rather dramatically early in 1972 when W. D. Carter and Ed Hill, the two board members who became the corporation’s major critics, broke the silence that had kept most of the activities concealed...
...Smith...
...Proof that the threat was as hollow as they had suspected came on July 23, when a scheduled hearing on the suspension order was cancelled because the OEO felt “it might be possible to deal with NOCDC’s problems without the necessity of suspension...
...the motorist asked...
...It created its own language (“I didn’t get any money, but I got a new vocabulary,” the punch line goes) and its own labyrinth of tiresome procedures and sluggish reflexes...
...He apparently has been involved personally in several conflictofinterest situations in his tenure at NOCDC (using NOCDC funds to sue the board of directors, collecting termination pay along with his regular salary, hiring the private detectives, unauthorized use of venture funds...
...By the spring and early summer of 1972, the OEO had ample evidence of the direction its model community development corporation was taking...
...But that episode, along with an auditor’s discovery in the summer of 1972 that the corporation’s books were $40,000 out of balance and virtually inauditable (the auditor charged $27,000 to examine the records of a few small enterprises), shifted the balance of power against Mansfield and Stilley...
...They frequently gathered in bars or at resort spots and drank into the night, charging NOCDC for their time and booze...
...A former associate of Stilley’s in California became the director of operations, and Mansfield possessed just the credentials for the director of venture development . Jack Mansfield was not in sole command of the NOCDC, but he made it tick...
...But in the spring of 1973, Bartlett and McSpadden persuaded Washington to reevaluate the program, and OEO notified the corporation of its intent to suspend funding...
...Sewage disposal was another problem at the Comanco site, so they built two huge lagoons, at a cost of $21,000, capable of handling the waste from a town of 5,000 populationfor a plant that would employ, at the most, 75 workers...
...All but $100,000 of the $1.7 million contract had been spent before manufacturing was half completed...
...As the OEO continued its policy of nonintervention, Stilley and Mansfield went from confidence to arrogance...
...Until August, 1970, when the NOCDC received an $800,000 operating grant from OEO, he worked as an adviser to the new agency, ironing out wrinkles in the corporate structure, drafting venture proposals, writing by-laws and job descriptions, and outlining the qualifications needed to fill those jobs...
...Yet, despite this blatantly self-serving vision of what he could do with the poverty funds, his self-image as an idealist who had started out as a civil rights organizer in the South during the years when it counted remained intact...
...The Khosrovi report, with characteristic toughness, said in June, 1972, “OEO questions how the use of private detectives can qualify as a justifiable expense in carrying out the work program of this grant...
...Until December, 197 1, the boutique was operated by the Wagoner Youth Council and was less than successful...
...Later, after 1,000 units had been produced, it was learned that a Taiwanmade alarm of comparable quality was on the market for $1.49...
...In spite of OEO’s warning to knock off the bitching, the opposition board members persisted in complaining publicly and irregularities kept surfacing...
...The eight counties also rank among the lowest in educational levels and the highest in unemployment in the state...
...Things are starting to settle down...
...Litigation by stockholders and former board members was also mounting and Stilley, unlike Mansfield, seemed to lack the staminaand will for the combat that lay ahead...
...By the late 1960s the War on Poverty was faltering in rural areas across the country for several reasons, one of the most important being that educational and job training programs were turning out students who had few, if any, prospects for employment because the jobs simply were not there...
...In September, they were fired...
...Since 1964 he had earned his living in one anti-poverty agency or another: the Community Service Foundation of Tallevast, Florida, VISTA, OEO’s Community Action Program, the public health and welfare departments of North Carolina, and as consultant to the U. S. Department of Labor, the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, and HUD...
...Moreover, “none of us had sufficient experience or knowledge to work or quote sheet metal operations and items,” Claude Smith, one of the consultants, conceded later...
...He had to pay it back from his own pocket when he was caught a few weeks later...
...With his own skills at organizing minorities and labor groups, he once said, the economic strength of the NOCDC could make him a political powerhouse in eastern Oklahoma...
...Six months later, in April, 1972, they sold it to NOCDC for $67,000...
...Also, they did not know that the required grade of plywood was not available, and they ended up paying a Wisconsin firm triple prices for a special mill run...
...There were eight directors from eight of the most impoverished counties in the state, beginning with Adair and Sequoyah counties on the Arkansas border and stretching north through the Cookson Hills to Kansas...
...Hill, his face crimson with anger, confronted Stilley a few days later: “Don’t ever send anyone to offer me a bribe.’’ There were attempts to fire Stilley and Mansfield, but each was turned back by an 8 to 7 vote...
...If it is not repaid, the matter could be turned over to the Justice Department...
Vol. 6 • September 1974 • No. 7
