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.

Our Guam readers were ready to be duplicated. While I had been reluctant to be involved, we did produce some brightly colored, well illustrated primers about Pablo and Teresita. I am sure that the kids in Guam appreciated not having to learn to read by puzzling about snow, snowmen and snow suits featured in things like “Dick and Jane.”

The Lab hired a man from the Warm Springs Reservation, a central Oregon Native American reservation that held citizens from several tribes. The Lab had received a grant to prepare readers for several tribes in the state of Montana, including the Rocky Boy (mainly Cree), Northern Cheyenne and Blackfeet. I was a little more optimistic about this assignment, since I now had actually written a primer. And this time the director of the project was a Native American himself. He wasn’t from one of the tribes we were going to prepare texts for, but at least he had a clue about the need for culturally appropriate reading materials.

We first visited a school in Warm Springs and understood the desperate need for education. I enjoyed the school and imagined it would be nice for the kids to see their faces reflected in the books they were reading. Then I packed for a trip to Montana to visit the reservations.

The only downside was we were going to have to fly Hughes Air West, lovingly called Hughes Air Worst.

Before I return to Portland for my next work adventure, I wanted to comment on two experiences I had with airplanes on Guam. I was there in the middle of the Viet Nam War. At the time, Nixon was President of the United States. He had said unequivocally that we were not bombing Cambodia. I sat at night in my hotel room in the north of Guam and watched B-52 bombers take off from the Air Force base on their way to bomb Cambodia.

Later, when it was time to fly home, we were scheduled to depart on a Boeing 747, a jumbo jet which held passengers in three sections across, with I think about 12 seats in each row. The plane was comfortable and meals were hot and good, so flying for hours was less of an ordeal than today. However, this plane was first coming from Bangkok, Thailand. Security forces surrounded the plane and we weren’t told what was going on. We waited in the Guam airport staring at the plane for a long time until we were finally able to board.  It would have been likely that drugs were being smuggled into the United States on this plane. However, when we were finally let on board, we learned that they had feared that the plane had an explosive device aboard. Needless to say, all the good food, comfy pillows and warm blankets did little to reassure me on the way home.

But all went smoothly, and I returned to the office the next Monday to resume my writing work.

In Guam we were housed in the Guam Hilton, a very posh place with a large outdoor swimming pool with an attached bar. You could, in theory, swim up and get a drink. Never a big drinker, I watched others drink blue and red cocktails while I happily swam around. After a while, the head of the whole agency where I worked called me over from the bar. Ever the polite employee, I swam over to see what he wanted. He wanted me to join him in his hotel room! I declined, telling him I was really enjoying my swim. I was less startled by the invitation than by the thought of going anywhere with this old, old man(probably he was 50!)

The school officials and teachers we were working with invited us to a feast near the end of our visit. I was asked to come for the day to help with the food preparations. I had never been involved with such a monumental task. It was like Thanksgiving on steroids. About 20 women were cooking all day. At lunch time, it turned out that not only were they preparing the night’s food, but also had made a generous lunch. The photo above shows me poking at some marinated meat. I was really not any help, but loved watching everyone work.

A full roasted pig, apple in the mouth and all, was the centerpiece of the dinner. The delicacy was a fruit bat. I was introduced to the fruit bat in its cage before it was prepared. While I know it was a great honor that we were being feted with a fruit bat, it still gave me the shudders. The food was unbelievably good, though I managed to avoid tasting the bat. The generosity of the people touched my heart and made me determined to try to do the best I could at the job I had been assigned, even if one of them should have been the employee.

To rectify my total ignorance about Guam, I was sent there for a week to get to see the island, meet some people, and get a taste of island life(more on that tomorrow.) Two women from Guam had been hired by the Lab and were living in Portland for the year while we worked on the primers. Both were named Marie, a name as popular in Guam as Mary is popular in Connecticut. In the right hand picture above, one of the Marie’s is on the right trying(with no success I might add) to teach me how to weave the local leaves. On the left is a photo of a woman accurately weaving a basket with other common items shown on the screen behind her.

I learned that Guam is incredibly hot and humid, that the people are genuinely friendly, that the Air Force has a large base occupying the north end of the island, and that it was even more ridiculous that I was supposed to write a book for the kids. Any of the wonderful teachers I met during my visit would have been better equipped to write the books. Then the Lab could have simply provided technical assistance in getting them published. But I was not in charge, and I learned as much as I could for the job awaiting me back in Portland.

My next job was completely different from retail, but supposedly informed by my teaching certificate and M.S. degree. I was hired by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory as a curriculum writer. I have tried to remember how I ever even learned about this job, much less get hired for it, but I have come up blank. Suffice it to say that in the early 1970’s there was much federal funding for education and some of it went to these regional “laboratories” which were expected to come up with innovative solutions.

The project assigned to me was to work on readers for Guam. That is primary learn to read books that were “culturally relevant” for beginning readers in Guam. Where to begin with how unqualified I was for this job? I had never written a primer. I had never taught beginning reading. Most important, I had never been to Guam! I had to haul out my atlas to even find out where Guam was located.

But I was now working for more money, only five days a week, regular hours, with a real office, a real desk and real secretaries. It didn’t seem prudent to point out my shortcomings. Clearly they saw promise in me that I wasn’t aware of! And so began my two year sojourn with the Lab.