This project in Chicago is torn down now, but it was the site of my next visit to assess a Follow Through program. I hadn’t been in Chicago since 1968 when I was under a curfew in a neighborhood in flames after Reverend King had been murdered. (That will be a post in the future.) Cabrini Green housing project was a forbidding structure packed with children who would have to take an elevator to get to any green space. It was depressing even to visit there, much less live there. I was unable to get a taxi to pick me up after my site visit, so someone gave me a ride to the train.

Since I was in Chicago, I stayed with my grandmother. Now a widow, she  lived in Chicago in something called “The Old People’s Home,” a gross misnomer. It was a lovely old building on the North Shore where she had an individual apartment and shared meals on the first floor. She was delighted to see me and offered me the routine sherry she always served.

The Watergate scandal with President Nixon was in full gear and Grannie and I talked about it. She assured me that it was nothing compared to the Tea Pot Dome scandal she remembered under President Harding. Her perspective always stayed with me reminding me that every generation has its scoundrels. She was remarkably up on current events because she said it was important to be able to participate in discussions at meal times. She thought, and I agree, that her mind stayed sharp after Grandpa died because she had to “get dressed every morning and go down to eat breakfast and talk about the newspaper.” When she died in 1978 she left me her big screen color television so I would always be up to date on the news!

A friend I had met during the City Council campaign knew that I was out of work and looking for a job. While he couldn’t offer me a full time job, he had some consultant work that I was qualified to do. I went to work for a couple of months doing site visits to Follow Through locations in Texas and Illinois.

Follow Through was an experiment to test out different teaching strategies with populations that had Head Start programs. The idea was to see what practices were best able to sustain the gains that Head Start had begun in children. I have very little memory of what exactly I was to look for in each program, and suspect that I was mostly supposed to document that the program existed in the funded sites.

One project was out of Austin, Texas from the University of Texas. There I met two of the principal researchers who drove me to Brownsville, then McAllen Texas, both communities in the southernmost tip of Texas. The poverty was pervasive in this part of Texas and a majority of the students came to school speaking only Spanish.  The teachers and students were warm and welcoming and I could dutifully report back that the projects did in fact take place.

Once in McAllen, the project leaders insisted that we drive over to Reynosa, Mexico for beer and dinner. And the food in Reynosa was indeed excellent. On to Chicago.

I interrupt my employment saga for a brief update on my firing. One year after I was fired, I received a phone call from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. The person said he worked in personnel and asked if I would be willing to come into Portland and talk about my “termination.” Curious, I agreed to meet with the man.

He began by asking me why I had refused to sign my last performance review. I told him that the review was inaccurate and was directly contradictory to one I had received just a few months earlier. I also told him that I was accused of “going to Montana without permission,” a trip I reminded him had been fully paid for by the Lab.

He then apologized for my firing. He asked if I wanted to be employed again by the Lab. Wondering what was going on, I asked him. While he was very vague, he hinted that  “improprieties” had been discovered about the manager who had fired me. He in turn had been fired. I doubted his sleeping with the secretary on the office floor was his only impropriety! (This we all knew about before we were fired.) I understood that it had to do with improper use of funds. This personnel man was trying to clean up the mess left by this manager.

I assured him I had no interest in returning to work there, that I was happily employed, and that I was simply glad that my personnel file would now be accurate. He assured me that the negative review was no longer part of my file and that they would give me a good reference if called for one. In retrospect he may have been trying to make sure I wasn’t going to sue for their treatment of me. But I was just happy to be out of there, and I was amazed that the truth had finally come to light.

I happily returned to Portland to work on the Native American primers, content that I had presented the project accurately to the Montana people. I had stressed that, as our grant maintained, we were there to lend assistance to the local writers. I stated that when they had the expertise, they would be able to continue similar projects without our help. Oops!

It turns out I was caught in a dispute between two project leaders who were over me and my colleagues.  I was called into the office of their manager and handed a negative performance review. I was chastised for having “gone to Montana without permission.” This was crazy, since the Lab had paid for the entire trip. Since I had received a glowing performance review a few months earlier, I knew something was amiss. I refused to sign the new review, signing a line that said,”I do not agree with this review.” Then I and five other employees were handed cardboard boxes, told to clear out our desks and were led out of the office. One of the project leaders was similarly dismissed.

I had never been fired and I was at a loss as to how to proceed. It turns out since I was fired without reasonable cause, my application for unemployment benefits was quickly approved. I had to physically go to the unemployment office once a week and turn in a list of three places I had applied for work. Since there were very few jobs at that time, I had to get creative in finding openings. Still, the State  had the right to phone and see if I had really applied, so I did.

As I stood in line at the unemployment office, I felt the shame that they seemed to intend for me and the others to feel. I guess the theory was that we were to feel responsible for our lack of work and grateful for the State assistance. Of course, the workers there only had jobs because we didn’t. But I chose not to remind them of that fact!

We flew from Portland to Montana on the little planes (smaller than the one pictured above) flown by Hughes Air West. We flew from Portland to Spokane and then on to Great Falls, Montana. We walked up a little step stool type ladder to board. Already I was less than reassured about our transportation. I had a good scare when we were circling the Spokane airport and the pilot announced that he was “waiting until he could see the landing strip!” Apparently he didn’t use more “advanced” instruments.

We drove around Montana visiting Browning where we stayed in a kind of “no-tell motel” with what passed for a diner on site. It was amusing to have the other “patrons” give us funny looks when we came in for a meal. We may have been the most unavailable women the motel had ever seen.

In Great Falls we stayed in a grand old hotel with a bathroom down the hall. The room did at least have a basin sink in the room in case we would rather sponge bathe than venture a dip in the communal bath tub. The Guam Hilton this was not.

Fortunately, the people we met with were warm and welcoming. We spent a couple of nights on the Rocky Boy Reservation in people’s homes being well taken care of and learning a great deal about the challenges facing them. I was eager to return home and get to work on this new set of readers.