This is a rather chopped up story of how I came to be an accidental social worker. It was written in weekly increments along with updates of the business of my accidental over thirty year encounter with social work (deleted for this exposure). I am now an accidental environmentalist but thats another story.
I came to this work with no formal education in the field. I majored in English Literature with a minor in music. Subsequently, after my first run in with social work which I will begin describing below, I received associate degrees in Industrial Electronics and Broadcast Engineering and came within a month of receiving a third AA in Bio Medical Equipment Electronics (I was trying to get as far from a career in social work as possible – but more about that later).
It was Chicago of the late 60’s and early 70’s. I was of that generation that was deeply involved in the movements against the war and for civil rights. Two of the most impactful events in my early years were Martin Luther King closing downtown Chicago with his march and Mayor Daley’s police going berserk in the park at the Democratic Convention. After the convention I quit school (the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus two quarters before graduation) and traveled the country in an old pick up. Along the way I learned candle making and tried my hand at selling candles first in Colorado and later when I returned to Chicago. I was a good candle maker but not a very good salesperson so I gave up candles to work at the Post Office. Feeling socially unproductive I volunteered in an after-school program in Uptown Chicago. I taught kids candle making. Within three months I gave up my job at the PO to become a “counselor”. Within six months I found myself as the manager of the program.

It would be hard to describe my first job in the field without providing some political and social context. Uptown Chicago in those days was the target of two very different forces. Mayor Daley and his minions wanted to tear the neighborhood down and build high-rises, fancy eateries and expensive shopping malls. The Inter-Communal Survival Committee (formerly known as the White Panther Party) wanted to organize the poorest of the poor in the neighborhood to their philosophy of “democratic centralism” a fancy moniker for Chinese communism. Mayor Daley went so far as to hiring Latino gang members to burn down buildings to make way for gentrification of the neighborhood. I knew that because some of the families I worked with were Latino and they would get ample warning of the fire. Even the gang members balked at burning their families.

The Inter-Communal Survival Committee (after a few meetings with some of their gang I took to calling them the Inter-Galactic Survival Committee) was, I believed then and still believe today, infiltrated by the FBI and Mayor Daley’s Red Squad. The Red Squad was the Mayor’s personal palace guard. You did not want make those folks angry. But some of the crazy actions those folks took were just asking for retribution. They were very secretive and later I suspected them of vandalizing my car and home and making threatening phone calls. And am still not sure if it was them or Mayor Daley's guys. Or maybe they were one in the same. But I am getting way, way ahead of myself.

Being young and very, very stupid I found myself unwittingly betwixt and between these two forces. In tenth grade I was introduced to an African American alderman who was a disciple of Saul Alinsky. Saul Alinsky is to community organizing what Abraham Maslow is to humanistic psychology. Alinsky and Myles Horton are two of my heroes. (Rosa Parks attended Horton’s organizing school). Somehow someway I must have picked up, probably by osmosis because I certainly hadn’t any particular organized thinking, how to organize. But there I was in Chicago and found myself intuiting that the only way to help the kids I was working with was to organize the community. There was a small but proud few blocks in the neighborhood inhabited by blue collar hardworking folks. They were very responsive to block parties, community gardens, beautification projects, etc. The problem as you might be guessing is that my group of social workers and I were actually bringing the community together and it did not escape the attention of either Mayor Daley or the Inter-Galactic group.

We were housed in a loft on Broadway Avenue which is one of the main North South streets in the city. It was about three blocks east to Lake Michigan which was the main reason Mayor Daley and Co. wanted to develop so badly. Much of the North Side of Chicago along the Lake is called the gold coast. It was then about two blocks deep and was a mixture of old mansions and new high rises. In Uptown beyond the two blocks it became a mixture of slums and lower middle class neighborhoods.

Most of our kids went to Senn High School. One of the first things we did was to conduct a survey seeking to discover the demographics of the school. We learned that there were over forty languages spoken. It made outreach something of a challenge. The stratagems of outreach were no different then -then they are now. We identified the various cliques and factions and went after the leadership to try and coax them to the after school program. In the very early days we had little to offer other then our naiveté.

Speaking of naiveté: One afternoon sitting at my desk multitasking (yes, we used to multitask before computers we just didn't know what to call it) I heard the sound of someone crashing up the stairs. It was a pretty rough neighborhood so I immediately became focused on the sound. Several days earlier someone in the community had donated some 45's. For those of you too young to know 45's were not firearms but records that played only one song per side and revolved at 45 revolutions per minute. I thought it was great until that moment when I discovered that the person crashing up the stairs was the owner of the beer garden down the block. It seems that my darling charges who I expected to jump all over the chance to play some tunes on the victrola (I won't even try to explain that reference) were using the 45's as Frisbees and flinging them long distances so that the folks in the beer garden found themselves under attack by a barrage of 45's. It was not my first and certainly not my last encounter with the laws of unintended consequences.

I left you last week with 45's raining down on the customers of a local beer garden down the street from our after school program. But that was just one of the many exciting moments in my three years - let's throw Arnie into the deep end of the pool doing social work - in Uptown Chicago.

When I first volunteered you will recall that I taught kids candle making. At the time it was the only activity available. You see the founders of the agency thought that we could attract kids to the center by luring them with the prospect of groups. The founder and executive director of the program was a former prostitute and heroine addict who had gone through Essalen and was convinced that all anyone needed to change was a good group. In fact, all twenty or so employees had to attend one staff group a week.

At one of my first encounters with this group (what did I know from groups - remember the major in English Literature) I happened to ask a very stupid question which drew the ire of the director. She proceeded to manipulate the entire group to attack me and make me feel lower then a worm till by the time they were done I was in a fetal position on the floor sobbing. You see the major idea of the Essalen-like therapy model is to tear away every protective personality shield and then presumably rebuild the psyche back to health and functionality. They were very, very good at the tearing down part and conspicuously light on the rebuilding piece. After the group I walked out into the hall with my mentor and said,”What the [expletive deleted] just happened?" He proceeded to explain the whole process to me. On the positive side I have been a life-long opponent of any therapeutic modality that even smells like Essalen.

Of course, there was no way we could bring kids to the center with the enticement of groups. Even in the coldest darkest days of a Chicago winter it just wasn't going to happen. I probably attracted more kids with my candle making then in the entire year prior to my joining the team. If nothing else hanging out with hot wax did provide some comfort from the Hawk. The Hawk is what Chicago types call the winter wind that whips in after winging across Lake Michigan.

Before being appointed the director of the program I was told that I would have to cut my hair (it went most of the way down my back). Yes, not only was I a hippie candle maker but I was a long haired hippie candle maker. Cutting my hair was a major deal for me. But the decision was one that I have often reflected upon over the years. The choice was between hanging on to a symbol that in those days meant to a lot of folks being against the war and for civil rights on one hand and shedding the symbol with the likelihood that I would be able to do a better job on behalf of the kids and families I was working for. It was hard but a no-brainer.

The main reason for the hair cutting was that I had to join the local Kiwanis club. This was to be my very first foray into the world of services clubs. There was a maxim back then that is less true today but still provides a map of the service club world. It was, “The Lions work in the town, the Kiwanians run the town and the Rotarians own the town". The lead figure in the Kiwanis club was a Lutheran minister. As a result of his support we were eventually able to buy a printing press and its related equipment and taught printing and graphic design while making a little money printing newsletters, brochures and the like. The club also paid for the installation of a kitchen, a ceramics studio and a bunch of musical instruments so along with the candle shop the place was really hopping.

I ran the print shop, candle making operation and kitchen. A woman with a master's in counseling from the University of Chicago was also a master potter and ran the ceramics studio. Everyone who worked there but me were disciples of Carl Rogers. Rogers ran something called the Counseling Center. His belief was that the therapeutic process needed to be demystified. He believed that he could train anyone in the basic techniques of "active listening" and since we all contain a core of competence and goodness all we needed to do what to have our words and thoughts played back to us in order to be able to commit to change. (Ah! to be young again.)

We also operated a teen line and trained kids in active listening. I think I did my best work back then working with kids on the various projects and doing my counseling while cooking, printing or candle making. But I really had no business doing that work and certainly not acting as the program's manager.

Since I was a vegetarian back then I would cook up casseroles, salads etc. as a means to entice kids to the center over the lunch hour. The cafeteria food at the high school was dreadful and the atmosphere was even worse. It was the size of two basketball courts and had those octagonal small black and white tiles that used to grace most bathrooms in the day. Walking into the cafeteria was a stomach wrenching experience. But my cooking was not working to bring them to the center. So, one day I went out and bought the biggest bologna I could find a couple loaves of Wonder Bread, potato chips, and assorted condiments. It was the perfect solution. I told the kids they could make their own sandwiches but just to please me I begged them to have at least one spoonful of my culinary preparations.

The greatest compliment I received was from an African American young woman whose family had just moved up from the South. She was a very good kid and always called me Mr. Arnie. One lunch time, after her taste of my latest concoction, she said in her very thick southern accent. "Why Mr. Arnie this is almost as good as McDonald's".

When last we visited I was receiving one of the most memorable compliments of my life in comparing my cooking to McDonalds..... So, the program was booming with the print shop, ceramics studio, kitchen, music lessons and just a general buzz that it was a happening place.

One part I left out was the funding for this venture. We were primarily funded by the Illinois Department of Alcohol and Drug Abuse. As we purported to be the first prevention program of its kind and the department had no prevention line item our funds came out of their methadone maintenance funds. Which created this rather bizarre situation that tied our funding to how many kids we could get to sign in (as if they were getting their cardboard cup of methadone) when they came to the center. It was a little difficult to get Chicago street kids with the normal teen age paranoia of authority on top of the ingrained Chicago paranoia to sign in. We tried all sorts of stratagems including a flashing sign at the door asking kids to sign in Please! (Take note you literature buffs: the following is foreshadowing). At one Junior League meeting, I attended to plea for some funding, I took note of the odd funding and hoped for the day when the work we did could be recognized for what it was and not methadone maintenance.

I noted earlier that my early inspirations came from Saul Alinsky and Carl Rogers. My thinking was also informed by a year I spent on a kibbutz in Israel. Many of you know that I was raised orthodox Jewish. I rebelled but instead of running away to Boston, Boulder, or Berkeley (that was later) I ran to Israel. I bought a one way ticket with no idea other then I wanted to live on a non religious collective farm. I did not know that the kibbutzim in Israel were run by the political parties (all eighteen of them). So when I arrived I looked up the party offices in the phone book and walked to the one nearest to the hotel I was staying at. The office worker I spoke with showed me a map and pointed to various parts of the country where they had kibbutzim and asked me where I wanted to live. I might as well have closed my eyes and stuck a pin in the map.

I ended up at a place called Beth Kesheshet (House of the Rainbow) on the north side of Mount Tabor in the Galilee. I won't go into all the adventures there only to say that my good fortune landed me there several months before the Six Day War and I was too unlucky or too stupid to get out before the conflict. And to recount one experience which relates to my work in Chicago. We worked six days a week. So having a day off in the middle of the week was exceptional. When I asked what the holiday was I learned it was May Day. So, I spent the day lounging in front of my room watching a group of younger children arranging colored stones in a particular design. I was looking at the design being made upside down. After a while my curiosity got the best of me and I walked over to the other side of the square. I found myself staring at a hammer and sickle and realized I had landed at a kibbutz operated by the communist party. Ooops! I suppose there is an FBI file somewhere....but it’s probably only my Chicago paranoia.

But it was good because I realized that I could never live under either a socialist or communist orthodoxy anymore than I could live under a Jewish one. The realization hit me over the course of several weeks when the big debate on the kibbutz was whether or not their top youth could join the air force. At the time the Israeli air force was recognized as one of the elite military organizations in the world. Most of it pilots came from the kibbutzim. It was a fact that once a kibbutznik had seen the world from Mach two he would not be returning to the farm. What struck me was that this was not the kid's decision. It was the decision of the whole membership of the kibbutz. After a fierce debate he was allowed to go but I realized that I could not put those kinds of personal decisions into the hands of a collective.

Sorry for the diversion but it was to explain the inspiration for what turned out to be one of the more successful projects at the center. I came up with the idea of having a community dinner every Friday night. You see at the kibbutz all meals were taken collectively and there was a certain comfort and community building that occurred as a result. Since we had so many ethnicities at the center in Chicago I asked for volunteers to work with me on Friday afternoons to bring their recipes, go shopping with me and then cook the meal. The community building that resulted was great as was the time I was able to spend with individuals during the preparation process. We were able to break down some of the cultural barriers that were so predominant in the neighborhood. We had upwards of 80 folks attending during the heyday of the project.

One particular feast (we called them Friday night feasts) I remember was when I worked with a young woman whose family had just escaped from Eastern Europe. A couple of those moms used to teach needle point. I wish I had a picture of the Chicago street girls with their piercings and tattoos sitting around in a circle doing needle point. And the food that evening was to die for...

Here comes the part you are invited to partake of or simply leave on the plate.

I seem to be talking a lot about food. So, when last I wrote I was describing the Friday Night feasts. They were the highlights of the time I spent at the after school program.

One of the services our agency provided was very controversial. It was testing drugs. There was a lot of ugly stuff on the streets in those days. If someone brought us a sample we would bring it to a drug testing lab to see if it was poison or not. It was a dumb idea back then and would not be tolerated today. It certainly lent legitimacy to drug use and abuse. But it also led to one of my more bizarre moments at the youth center (although the kids tossing 45's out the windows ranked up there with the bizarre).

One day I was multi-tasking (you will remember that we did multi-task just did not have a name for it). Talking on the phone, dealing with a staff person, several kids in the office (a situation which I am sure is not difficult to imagine for folks at Lithia, CrossRoads, Dunn House, etc.) and this guy in a three piece suit walks into the office. Three piece suits never came up the steps to our loft. I thought that he must have been lost. But he wasn't, he knew exactly where he was and demanded to meet with me right now. I politely asked if we could make an appointment for another time since he could clearly see I was in the middle of multi-tasking already. He was not having any. He wanted to talk with me NOW and as I looked more closely at him and ignored the three piece suit I noticed that he had this slightly (and maybe more then slightly) crazed look about him. I realized that I was not going to move this guy unless I spent some time with him. So I took him to another room and listened to his story.

So, he came by his three piece suit legitimately, he was an attorney. He spoke quickly, passionately and, (using all his litigation skills, I am sure, to him--) convincingly, about this new drug that he discovered. By the speed of his speech and the size of his pupils I began to make my calculations. He said that since he began taking this wonder drug he had not lost a case. In fact, he had a perfect record of a 100 wins out of a hundred cases. He only needed one or two hours of sleep a night. He had discovered a drug that turned normal humans into super humans. (So, I am thinking two parts Dexedrine one part cocaine with a pinch of PCP.) So, I said to him if you have this super drug in your hands what are you doing talking to me. "Oh", he said, "well one of my friends who I turned on to the drug when catatonic last night". (I revised my pinch of PCP to a teaspoon) He wanted to have us do our analysis of the drug. I told him what I thought it was and he was adamant that it could not be so mundane. He was sure it was derived from the oils of an exotic tree in South America or something. Only having not quite a degree in English Literature with a minor in music I am proud (I suppose) to say that my chemical analysis of the drug was spot on.

Besides the Friday Night Feasts and my work with kids in the graphic studio and kitchen, I think the work I am most proud of was developing peer counselors for our teen line. Every Friday and Saturday night kids answered calls from other kids needing help or just a friendly voice. (Many, many years later I was peripherally involved in a Teen Line at the Grove.) Working with those kids teaching active listening, values clarification, etc., I learned some very important lessons that have been the core of my philosophy and values ever since. The main lesson is that kids will perform to our expectations. If we believe they are incapable and untrustworthy that is what we will get. While it often seems they don't pay any attention to us they are actually fine tuned to all our non-verbal communications. They will know immediately if you are the kind of person who looks down on them. On the other hand if we believe that they are capable of being responsible and caring individuals they will respond in kind. Another lesson is that the most damaged youngster is often the most empathetic and the most capable of helping others.

We purposefully mixed the group with some pretty high achieving kids and what we now call high risk kids. The high achieving kids had a very difficult time doing the active listening exercises. The high risk kids generally took to it like a duck to water. We also had to deal with the integration of the two groups. The high achievers looked down on the others and the more that happened the more the high risk kids would act out again responding to that level of expectation. We came up with a rather simple and I think elegant idea. We began our trainings with life stories. We would go around the circle and each youth would speak to their history. The high achievers gradually began to realize that it was a miracle that the other kids survived at all and conversely how lucky they were. The battered, beaten and neglected kids began to take some pride in the fact that their survival was recognized as being quite an accomplishment. So, the high achievers learned something about empathy and the high risk kids gained considerable self esteem. As, not only were they esteemed by their peers for their courage and survival---they were clearly better peer counselors.

I used the peer counseling training in many other venues over the years and believe it to be an excellent strategy for working with kids who would not normally do well in a therapeutic milieu. It’s a sneaky way of getting to some kids who would not otherwise sit down to be counseled. It has the additional value of expanding in the milieu and changing the culture. If the adults and their peers have similar expectations, much change can be realized.

This is the next completely and totally optional episode of how I work up one morning and found I was a social worker. (Apologies to Kafka).

In the last episode I was reporting on how the center was really hopping with many activities including a peer counseling training program that taught me some of my most important and enduring insights into working with kids and families.

On day while I was trying to manage a number of different requests from staff and kids and work on my own projects a well dressed buttoned down man came into my office. It seemed he was starting a gay rap group for university students and wanted to know if he could use our space on Sunday nights which happened to be the only night we were closed. For those of you who haven't heard the phrase "rap group" well, too bad because it makes me feel so old to even remember those groups that I haven't the energy to explain. He was a professor from Loyola University which was just down the street. It seemed like a reasonable request. Since they wanted to serve coffee and cookies I said its OK but please clean up after yourselves and proceeded to forget all about it.

What he didn't tell me was that the group was going to advertise by putting up leaflets on every telephone pole in the neighborhood. A woman who was a power in the local precinct (and remember - this was still Mayor Daley the First's reign) saw them and complained to the chair of the agency's board. The agency operated three programs in three neighborhoods on the North Side. As the director of one of the programs I had never been to a board meeting nor had I met any board member. So, when I was summoned to appear before them I knew I was in trouble.

I arrived the night of the board meeting and had to wait in the reception area of the main office until they were ready to confront me. They kept me waiting about forty five minutes. By the time I walked into the board room my anxiety level was through the roof. These were they days when smoking was a socially acceptable activity. The room was filled with cigarette smoke. The questioning began. How could I be so stupid as to allow a gay rap group to meet at the center? Didn't I know that this would give those gay people opportunities to recruit the young people who came to the center? And other generally hateful stuff. I was totally blindsided because my boss would not tell me why I was being called on the carpet and I was hearing all this for the first time. I had seen the fliers but our agency was not identified - just the address. And like any big city, particularly in those days, there were so many pieces of paper adorning the poles that one tended to ignore them all.

By this time the cigarette smoke was beginning to make my eyes water. About the only thing I remember telling them was that the group was using our building at a time when kids were not present. I had the feeling at the time, although I could have been mistaken, that they thought they had made me cry and were beginning to feel a little sorry for this kid who was way out of his league. So, they admonished me one more time, told me never to do anything like that again, and escorted me to the door. The group kept meeting and the program kept thriving.

Following is the next completely optional episode of How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Being a Social Worker. (Apologies to Dr. Strangelove)

When last we saw our intrepid young social worker he was being berated by his board for allowing a gay rap group to meet at the center.

Life went on. The center was still hopping. The kitchen was cooking. The printing press was printing. The ceramics wheel was spinning. It felt like we were on top of our game. The ceramics teacher had a Master's from the University of Chicago in counseling and did some of her best work at the wheel. She and two others were disciples of Carl Rogers and were using his teaching and going beyond. My instinctive community organizing was going great guns. It was one of the best experiences of my life. We were all good friends. Our work was our passion. We loved coming to work. We loved playing together. It was, of course, still Chicago. Mayor Daley was still the Mayor. The Intergalactic Survival Committee was still lurking. And if any of you have read Woody Allen's book Without Feathers and remember the chapter entitled "Retribution", you will have some appreciation for what happened next.

It began about as mundanely as you could imagine. I was asked by my boss (I should explain that the ex-heroine addict had long since been forced out because of tax problems and my new boss had absolutely no background or experience in the field) to submit a budget for the year. As I recall our total expenses were $75,000. In order to meet those expenses I would have to raise an additional $10,000. I was confident that I could since by this time I was already receiving about that much from the local Kiwanis club. The Lutheran minister who was the President of the club had all but promised me most of that. But my boss would not accept that revenue line item and insisted I submit a budget without that amount.

Well, the work has not changed in the one fundamental fact that most of our expenses were and still are related to personnel. In those days cutting $10,000 would have meant laying off one of the therapists. I refused. I was fired.

The personnel policies stated that I could appeal that action by appearing before a committee appointed by the board comprised of board members and staff. I was encouraged not to take advantage of the appeal option by one phone call from a board member who was also chaired Mayor Daley's Police Commission. She said something like if I did appeal I would find myself regretting it without actually describing the nature of that regret. I received another whispered call over the phone with a much more detailed description of my regret, saying that if I didn't leave the city I would have my @#@#@!!!XXX head shot off. I took both these calls very seriously since I had already had a bullet come through my living room window and had my car vandalized. And as I wrote in one of the first installments I never knew if it was the Mayor's people or the Intergalactic Survival Committee but now realize they were probably one and the same.

I opted to appeal.

You may recall that the center was located in a second story loft facing one of Chicago's main north/south streets. Broadway Avenue. Some of the kids made a sign that stretched the length of the building front that they hung up that night. It said, "Save Arnie Green".

When last we left our totally out of his depth social worker/community organizer he was appealing his firing before an ad hoc committee of board members and staff. The year was 1974 and the place Chicago.

The two board members on the appeals committee were the neighborhood community police officer and the chair of the police district's citizen review committee. The word on the street was that officer was placed in that position after accidentally shooting himself in the foot. The chair of the citizen committee was the self-same person who called me up one night and told me that I needed to get out of town and not appeal or I would regret it. Can you say kangaroo court? But we put up quite a battle. Weeping parents, the Lutheran minister who was also the president of the Kiwanis club saying "save my boy", and lots of kids testifying to the great work I was doing. The other side presented one witness and she appeared by way of a tape recorded phone call. She testified that I had dissed (I doubt that diss was in our lexicon back then but you get the idea) the program at a meeting of the Jr. League when I was trying to explain the funding for the center. You will recall that the funding came under the methadone maintenance line item of the state's drug agency.

I had one ally on the committee who told me afterwards that although the two board members would not say it in public they claimed that my real crime was allowing the gay rap group from Loyola to meet at the center. But as I have been trying to describe - my real crime, I believe, was being too successful at community organizing in a neighborhood Mayor Daley was trying to tear down to make room for high rises and fancy boutiques.

I have been describing this experience with some feeble attempt at humor. But it was to that point the most difficult time of my life. I was witnessing the destruction of a lot of hard work. I truly believed we were "strengthening lives to change community and strengthening community to change lives". I was in fear for my life. I could not help but believe at some level that it was all my fault. I was brought up to believe that everything bad that happens in the world is my fault so this was not a giant leap. I have shared with you over the years that while Eskimos have one hundred words to describe snow my people have one hundred different ways to say "I'm sorry - it’s all my fault".

In short I was devastated by my first experience in social work. Within a couple of weeks Jeri (my partner in crime at the time) and I packed all our belongings including two cats into our pick-up and headed west again. I remember as if it were yesterday pulling over by the side of Highway 66 which we turned on to outside of Peoria in a blinding snowstorm. (Chicago is a big sprawling city and it takes over an hour to get out of it headed in that direction) I looked over at Jeri and said, "We’re alive".

Now for the next totally optional chapter in the life of the accidental social worker. (Apologies to Anne Tyler)

When last we left our accidental social worker he was pulled over by the side of the road on Highway 66 thanking God for being alive and escaping the wrath of King Daley.

As I said my self esteem was at an all time low. I was completely unsure of what I wanted to do next. So, when all else fails - head west young man. The one thing I was sure of was that I did not want to work in any profession that meant having to work with people. So, upon my arrival in the Bay I enrolled in electronics courses at a community college in Oakland. After a year I receive two associate degrees in broadcast engineering and industrial electronics. To give you some idea how much those degrees mean today: In order to complete the work for the broadcast engineering degree I had to take a certification test for my "ticket". In those days in order to be an engineer in a TV or radio studio you needed a "Class A Ticket". 90% of the test required a substantive knowledge of vacuum tubes. For those of you who haven't heard of vacuum tubes they were - oh never mind.

After receiving my degree I headed down the valley to Mountain View and went to work for an outfit called Med-Sonics during the day and went to work on a third degree at night in bio medical industrial electronics. Med-Sonics was out on the forefront of developing ultra sound for medical diagnostics. I did enjoy the learning but probably could have been diagnosed with a serious depression. On top of still reeling from the Chicago experience Jeri and I had split. We had been together for ten years mostly living in collectives (OK hippie communes) usually with other couples. I was now for the first time in my life totally on my own. It was not a pretty sight.

In the spring of '77 I decided that if I stayed in the Bay I would do serious damage to myself or others and much to the dismay of my teacher and my boss I gave notice. My teacher was a doctor and engineer who had made it his life's work to train technicians in the repair and maintenance of electronic medical equipment. His wife had almost died while undergoing minor surgery because a piece of equipment was not properly calibrated. The program he created was the only one west of the Mississippi at the time. He really wanted me to go on to Stanford and get a BS and maybe more. He had arranged for a job in Stanford's research labs for me. My boss at Med-Sonics also had plans for me. By the time I left I had gotten off the production line and was working with the engineers in the company testing prototypes of new products. I occasionally wonder where I would be today had I stayed.

Three little anecdotes that stand about that period or as I call it Arnie's silicon period: One week I was given one of the prototypes and told to test it out. Well, for the life of me I could not figure out what was wrong. I took out and replaced every part including the board they were attached to. My foreman spent a day on the circuit. The engineer spent a few hours with me. Finally, he called over one of his colleagues who spent some time with it and then walked away telling us to wait. He returned with an Indian medicine bag and began chanting. Now, you must understand that besides wanting to have as little as possible to do with people I also wanted some surety in my life. I wanted things black and white, on and off, one or zero and I was deeply disappointed that little electrons might be influenced by the supernatural.

In that same vein: In the very last book, in the very last chapter, in the very last paragraph of my bio medical electronics text book was the following instruction. "If you have performed every diagnostic test and still cannot find the source of the problem - lift the device twelve inches off the work bench and drop it." I did not like facing the fact that not every problem had a simple and elegant solution in my new found career.

Finally, my workbench was across the aisle from Paul's. I was twenty-something and I guess Paul was in his late forties. He was one of the most misogynistic guys I had ever been around to that point in my life. He would say ugly things about the women in the factory and every day several times a day he would make some reference, always bad, about his wife. Over the year working there I presumed that he and his wife had recently divorced hence the reason for his bitterness. I admit to cowardice in not wanting to confront him - no excuses. Finally, on my last day there after yet another nasty comment about his wife I asked, "Paul, how long have you been divorced?" He replied, "Seventeen years." I was speechless at the depth of his hatred and totally reinforced in my determination to stay as far away from social work as possible.

The experience was not a total loss. It really honed my analytical skills.

One of our favorite things to do in the evenings while living in our serial collectives was to mull over books like "Finding and Buying You Home in the Country", the "Whole Earth Catalogue" and those real estate guides to land in the country. Some of us went so far as to travel around Canada one summer looking for our dream place. But as fate would have it all the couples split up and Steve (the male half of one of the four or five couples who had planned on building our utopian dream in the country) and I were only ones left with the dream. He had discovered the Rogue Valley and landed in Jacksonville. We talked a lot on the phone and one day I loaded up my humped back '59 Volvo with all my worldly possessions and headed for what would become my true home.

I actually received an email from someone who not only reads these serials but enjoys them. I won't embarrass them by revealing a name but it did give me some encouragement to continue. Sorry about that. But remember these are totally and completely optional…

We are coming to the end of my first and last attempt to do something other than social work. I had loaded up my humpbacked '59 Volvo and set off for the Rogue Valley. I had every intent to become a bio medical equipment technician at one of the three hospitals.

My dad liked messing around with cars and I inherited that trait. Somewhere along the line I took an automotive repair class at nights at a Junior College in Colorado. I knew just enough to be dangerous - literally. The '59 was my second of that stripe. My first died one night in Downtown Chicago. I was driving a group of friends (its amazing how many people could fit in that little car) home from a Holly Near concert. We were on the Outerdrive which was very busy with all the concert goers, play attendees and movie watchers all getting out at once. The Outerdrive is four lanes wide and runs along Lake Michigan. I have been fiddling with the carburetors (they are very unusual beasties and may not technically even be called carburetors) and must have left a connection loose. 'Cause when the fuel hit the manifold I heard my friend in the passenger seat calmly ask if I knew the car was on fire. I was caught between burning up and taking my life and those of my friends in my hands and trying to change lanes. Chicago's drivers are a special breed. It didn't matter that my car had flames leaping out of the hood. They were not about to allow me to move over. Of course I did and lacking a fire extinguisher we used the sand on the beach to put out the fire. But the combination of the sand and fire spelled the end of my Volvo.

Not one to learn easily from my mistakes I bought another one in Mountain View and replaced the carburetors, the brakes and other assorted pieces. Driving up I-5 was a scary proposition. I expected a break down at any moment. Through some miracle of sorts I made it to the Siskiyou Summit. I leaned back in my seat felt the tension drain because I knew it was all down hill from there. Smug that my work had been at least competent I began the descent. Ah, and pride goeth before the fall. Once again I must have failed to fully tighten a connection to the carburetors but this time instead of a fire a line got tangled up in the line that controls acceleration. The accelerator was stuck in the full open position.

So, the picture is thus. A '59 Volvo screaming down the mountain, the back (fully loaded with all my belongings especially my very large and very heavy tool box) swaying wildly from side to side, the accidental social worker standing up in his seat in an attempt to stop with his newly self installed breaks, and white smoke streaming from the wheels. All I really remember of the trip down the hill is frozen in time and in mind. There was a state trooper parked by the side of the road. I remember him doing a cartoon like double take as I passed. Great, I thought, if I don't die I will surely get a ticket for speeding. Luckily he must have thought he was hallucinating or had a weak stomach and didn't want to be the first on what was likely going to be a very gory scene.

I don't know how but I made it down but I did. I pulled over by the side of the road at the first opportunity. The poor Volvo shuddered once and died. I was alive but had killed my second '59 humpbacked Volvo. And thus the very reluctant social worker made his grand entrance into the Rogue Valley.

Optional readings from the life and times of the reluctant social worker.

When last we left him he was standing forlornly by the side of I-5 by the side of his Volvo at the bottom of the Siskiyou pass.

As you will recall I had every intention of going to work for one of the hospitals as a bio medical equipment technician. However, I quickly learned that there were only three or four people working in the field. They were all young and looked to be very settled. It did not look like I would be able to go to work in my chosen career any time soon. So, I began to look for work in related electronics jobs. My first job was as a cable TV guy. I did not last very long. I discovered that I could not climb telephone polls. I could do it physically but I seemed to have developed a serious fear of heights over the years that I didn't know about. But I sure found out soon enough.

My next job was as a CB radio repair guy. The shop I worked at only serviced CB's. So, it made sense that there would be a CB radio going all day every day. I began to feel as if my brain was leaking out my ears. I began to look for another job.

I was living in Jacksonville and met someone who sang at the Jacksonville Inn on Friday and Saturday nights. Every now and then I would jam with him or relieve him at breaks. It turned out he was working at Star Gulch Ranch. Star Gulch was a co-ed residential treatment center on the Applegate for sixteen kids. I applied on a Monday. I arrived for my first day on Friday. I was hired to work a pretty weird weekend shift. I started at 2 PM on Friday went home at midnight. I turned around and began at 8 AM on Saturday and worked until midnight and did the same on Sunday.

Ahh!!! I was a social worker again. How did this happen?

The first few notes of "The Twilight Zone" are ringing in my ears. As you will recall when last we looked in on our "oh no I can't believe it I'm a" social worker again he was beginning a new job at Star Gulch Ranch. This morning just as I was about to begin the latest chapter a woman appeared at my door looking kind of lost. She said, "I guess this isn't the way out". Then she looked at me again and said, "Do you remember me"? I got up from behind my computer to say hi. I did not recognize her because the last time I saw her was almost thirty years ago at, you guessed it, Star Gulch Ranch. She was the teacher. She has since retired but was here to apply for a case management position because she was bored and not really ready to retire altogether. Whew.

Let me describe Star Gulch. It was up on the Applegate. Being a city boy what did I know about gulches? Well, in this particular gulch in the winter the sun did not appear over the hill tops until ten or eleven in the morning and disappeared around two or three in the afternoon. (For someone with serious Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) this was not good. (Of course, back in those days no one had come up with that name for it so I guess it was OK.) It was an old ranger station. It consisted of two dormitories, a mess hall, an eight by forty mobile home (that served as the administration office, group room, etc.) and a one room school house.

It could house up to sixteen kids and was full most of the time. There were generally seven or eight girls and seven or eight boys. There were only two of us on the weekend shift I described last week. It was a recipe for trouble. My first partner was a woman under five feet tall. Since I am somewhat vertically challenged myself there was the need to assert my authority immediately. Luckily, I was not very far removed from the mean streets of Chicago. Back then the kids at Star Gulch could not hold a candle to my Chicago kids. They looked tough and talked tough. But every time I was challenged I couldn't help thinking "oh let me just drop you off on the corner of Wilson and Broadway and come back in twenty four hours and see if you still think you're so tough". It was a mean thought I know but as I found myself chest to chest (or head to chest in my case) with a six foot tall sixteen year old it was all I could think.

One Sunday morning after I had been working a month or two I found the kids in a pretty good space. So I herded them into the trailer and I suggested since it was Sunday morning and all why don't we share our religious upbringings. We went around the circle and there were the usual Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, etc. Some of the kids really got into it and described religions I had never heard of before. There were some who were in rebellion from what they considered to be too strict parents. There were some with no religious backgrounds at all. Finally, we came to the last young woman who happened to be a Mormon. She was from the backwoods of Cave Junction (on one of my conference calls yesterday there was a reference to Cave Junction being rural. I took some offense and said, "All of Southern Oregon is rural". I was immediately and rightly put down when the speaker said, "Not like Cave Junction".) So by saying the backwoods of Cave Junction I am meaning what I say.

When she was done she paused a moment and when it seemed like I wasn't going to share (I had no intention of getting into Orthodox Judaism with them) she asked me about my upbringing. I hesitated and she asked again. Finally, I replied that I was in fact Jewish. While I was hesitating she had turned her head distracted by who knows what. But no sooner has the syllable "ish" passed my lips she whipped her head around. She looked at me with what I can only describe as a shocked expression. After a moment she said, "Where are your horns"? When I realized she was serious I thought to myself, " Oh kiddo (actually I thought "bubele" which is Yiddish for kiddo), you are definitely not in Kansas anymore".

So, here goes the next episode in the life of "the desperate to get out of social work social worker". Its utterly optional reading.

Prejudice is, was and probably always will be with us regardless of the time or place. To be fair I had encountered enough hate and bias in Chicago to last a life time. So, when the young woman from Cave Junction asked me where my horns were I was not as rocked as I may have indicated in the last installment. When accosted on the streets of Chicago it was often due to the fact that I wore a head covering (kepah in Hebrew, yarmulke in Yiddish, skull cap in English). Some of the accosters were sure that the purpose of the kepah was to cover my horns.

Star Gulch was my first encounter with residential treatment. While much of the effort in my Chicago work was to get the kids through the door there was no such problem in residential. We had a captive audience. There was a psychologist on staff who taught me the good side of group work. You may recall that in Chicago I encountered the dark side of group work. Jerry was stupendous with kids and seemed to have a limitless tool box of techniques.

As in Chicago I walked into a role for which I had no training or education and within a very short time I found myself moving from weekend youth worker to weekday work to unbelievably treatment coordinator. I believe this says a lot less about my skills then the fact I was willing to work long hours for very little compensation. Be that as it may I needed to learn a lot quickly.

One of my roles was doing intake. I had no idea what that might entail. As fate would have it I heard about a training in Salem on a new intake model for residential treatment. The training was sponsored by the Oregon Youth Care Center Association (one of the predecessors of the Oregon Alliance of Treatment Programs) you may appreciate that irony as the story unfolds.

So, I arrived in Salem for the first time in my life (little did I realize how much that city would occupy me in the future) to learn all I could about intake. It's probably hard for many of the staff to appreciate my shock at starting off the training with a series of "ice breakers" which included, if memory serves, the now almost mandatory sheet of paper on our backs, the now ubiquitous falling over and "trusting to be caught", the doing something with crayons, etc. I had never done anything like it in my life. You will recall that my Chicago experience was around tearing each other up until the first person cried group model. Somewhere between the sheet of paper on my back and the falling over part I walked over to the trainer and said that I would be leaving now and would someone be so kind as to come outside and get me when the actual training started. That went over very well as you may imagine. That person is now the director of Catholic Community Services in Marion County and I imagine our relationship never fully recovered from that first encounter.

So much for my introduction to the state wide association to which I have devoted over twenty years and endless journeys up and down and up and down and up and down I-5.

When last we spoke I was talking about the power of groups for both good and evil. It’s been a theme in my life that I find myself coming back to again and again. Even though I came to Star Gulch knowing very little about the positive power of groups, there came a time after about a year when I believe I got it and did some of my best work. I also happened to be fortunate to be working with a group of people who cared deeply about the kids and genuinely liked each other. For about six months we were operating as a well oiled machine. Then one after another, folks started leaving for various reasons and it was no longer fun.

But before I leave Star Gulch, let me describe one incident that has stuck with me all these years. I had already been projected into the role of treatment coordinator. With the promotion came the luxury of working weekdays. One beautiful morning I arrived at work at about 8:30. It was spring and the sun was shining. The drive from Sam's Valley to the Applegate was stunning. I was in a very good space ready to seize the day. Right up to the moment I parked my car and could hear screaming coming from the trailer. I took a very deep breath and prepared to confront chaos. When I opened the door to the trailer I was confronted with mayhem. The poor overnight staff was in the middle of sixteen shouting, screaming, crying teenagers.

I quickly assessed the situation and told the staff person to take everyone but Kathy down to the mess hall and begin serving breakfast. Kathy was one difficult teenager. She was brilliant. She was often bored. Her solution was to push as many buttons as she could and then enjoy the ensuing fray. I asked Kathy to come with me to my office. Before she could sit in her chair she began yelling at me telling me that she didn't start the fight it was Johnny's, Billy's, Susie's, etc's fault. She began to talk about the harm done to her in excruciating detail. After quite a while of this non stop listing of her complaints and excuses and explanations of how nothing absolutely nothing was her fault I had my head in hands. I was unsuccessfully trying to recapture that wonderful sunny-spring-day-in-the-mountains space I had been enjoying only moments earlier. She finally paused for a breath and looked at the picture of the hopeless and hapless social worker sitting in front of her. She joyfully looked me in the eye and said, "You must hate this". The non verbal communication was not enough reinforcement for her. She reveled in making people sad, angry, or frustrated, in fact, any emotion other than that wonderful sunny day in the mountains feeling. She wanted the whole enchilada. She wanted me to start yelling and screaming and crying. From some unknown space in my mind came the following: I looked back at her and said, "No Kathy, you don't understand. If you didn't act this way I would be out of a job." Her eyes opened wide and her face reflected shock and utter betrayal. Then I smiled. Then she smiled. Then we both burst into helpless laughter.

Thereafter, whenever she started winding up all I would have to do is smile at her and she would start laughing and stop pushing whoever's button she was pushing. I became a firm believer in the power of humor and laughter in treatment. Since some humor can be at the expense of others, like groups, it needs to be used with care. Since then there have been numerous books written on the topic but, having come upon it by accident that day, it felt like a revelation.

When last we spoke I was talking about the power of groups for both good and evil. Its been a theme in my life that I find myself coming back to again and again. Even though I came to Star Gulch knowing very little about the positive power of groups, there came a time after about a year when I believe I got it and did some of my best work. I also happened to be fortunate to be working with a group of people who cared deeply about the kids and genuinely liked each other. For about six months we were operating as a well oiled machine. Then one after another, folks started leaving for various reasons and it was no longer fun.

Well I thought I was done talking about Star Gulch. But writing this has triggered more memories, and I realized how seminal the Star Gulch experience was to so much of my future work. I am also realizing that the closer I get to the present the more difficult this will be, as this is a small valley and I really don't want to write a "tell all" biography. But I do need to tell this story.

Remember we are back in about 1978. Star Gulch had a one-room school house where the sixteen or so kids received what academics we could provide. The teacher worked for the Jackson County Educational Service District (ESD). At the time the ESD only had two programs for the kind of kids who were at Star Gulch. The other was at the kid shelter. Being the small world that this is, the teacher at the youth shelter in Talent was my roommate (remember how we were the lone survivors of the back-to-the-land hippie commune in Chicago and we were now in possession of the dream - twenty acres in the hills above Sams Valley) and the teacher at Star Gulch was one of my closest friends. All the other class rooms run by ESD teachers were for severely impaired kids. The ESD developed what I imagine to be for the time, a state of the art guide to teaching severely impaired students. It was called the Adopter’s Guide. It focused much attention on the behavior of the kids in the classroom and no attention to whether or not they had actually learned anything. You could understand that for the majority of students served by the ESD. Unfortunately, it had absolutely no relevance for teaching the emotionally disturbed and behaviorally challenged kids at Star and the shelter.

It’s my belief that the leadership of the district did not really understand these programs and did not really want to operate them.

The evaluation procedure for judging a teacher’s performance was very, very odd. The evaluator would sit in the classroom for about a half hour. He would hold a stop watch in his hand. Every fifteen seconds he would look up and note how many kids were not being attentive. He would judge attentiveness by assessing how many kids had their heads down - pencils in hand - working on their assignment. Based on this scale, if a kid looked up to focus his thoughts, that would be a mark against the teacher - and so on.

Now, although I know I was biased, the teacher at Star Gulch was one of the best I have ever known. Her gift was her ability to motivate students. She cared deeply about them and they could not help but feel that caring. Of course, they resisted her as is the wont of all teenagers. They screamed and yelled and griped and moaned in a futile attempt to escape the hard work demanded by her. Folks walking into her classroom would have the first impression of one of Dante's circles of hell. But real learning was happening. For many this was the first time they were pushed to excel. This was the first time they were exposed to a love of learning.

As her evaluation approached, I knew that she didn't stand a chance. So I did something that probably went against all I had been taught to that point about appropriate boundaries. The morning of the evaluation, I pulled all the kids into a room in one of the dorms. I told them that I knew how much they hated their teacher for making them work. At the same time I told them I knew how much they cared for her for making them work. I told them about the evaluation. I told them that their teacher's job was in their hands. I told them what they needed to do if they wanted her to continue teaching them.

Then I held my breath. I couldn't resist sitting in the class observing the observer observing the kids. The only kid who didn't respond was a kid who shouldn't have been in the program. She was severely developmentally delayed. She had an IQ in the mid seventies. She was certainly not a candidate for the kind of therapy we performed. She was doing her usual routine of talking and complaining and looking around for someone to talk to, since everyone else was surreally working on the assignment - and she was very confused. Sitting next to her was a really tragic young man. One day he awoke to discover that his parents had left in the middle of the night to parts unknown. The abandonment so disturbed him that he developed a severe case of bed wetting. He had no ego. He was sure he was worthless. Since he was left with nothing but the clothes on his back he became compulsively attached to a vest that he wore all the time. Since he was a bed wetter and wore the vest in bed, he smelled bad which, of course, endeared him to the other kids - further convincing him of his worthlessness. He leaned over to the young woman who was verging on the brink of a full scale tantrum and successfully calmed her down.

The only other incident of note that morning was furniture-related. As most non-profits, we were furnished with hand-me-downs. One young woman was sitting at a table with a rickety leg. She inadvertently leaned against the rickety leg and it fell off. This normally would have been an excuse for a ten minute riot. Not even one student lifted a head. The girl who had knocked the leg off calmly picked it up and, with one hand, held it in place.

Even with all that miraculous behavior the teacher failed the evaluation. The evaluator took points off for the young man-with-the-smelly-vest's comforting of the developmentally delayed student. He took points off for the young woman's picking up the table leg. He took points off when one student got up to sharpen his pencil. He took points off for several students looking up from their assignment, presumably thinking about their next response.

So, my good friend and fabulous teacher was fired. The kids felt miserable and made life hell for her replacement. And I began a long and bitter relationship with ESD management. Not wanting to leave the wrong impression, I want to remind you that I just finished a four year term on the board of what is now known as the Southern Oregon ESD. I have nothing but admiration and respect for the current administration. But, as you will read, the ramifications of that morning at Star Gulch echoed far into the future.

Well it’s been about two weeks since the last episode - just to recap. I am still at Star Gulch. The year is 1978 and one of the better teachers I have known has just been fired and I am about to begin a long acrimonious relationship with the Superintendent of the ESD.

A few unrelated memories: Star Gulch was located up on the Applegate River. Kids who wanted to run only had two real options. They could run to the highway and try and hitchhike. We would normally catch them in short order because few folks were going to pick up our kids on the highway and back in those days traffic was infrequent to say the least. The other option was to go over the hill on a path that ended up at Cantrell Buckley Park. Over time we learned how to deal with that one too. We would simply call the Sheriff's department which would have an officer waiting at the trail end. Looking back I know this was too mean but a few of us made up some signs and about half way to Cantrell Buckley we put up one that said "you are now 2 miles from Cantrell Buckley". We did the same at the one mile mark and at the half mile mark. At the quarter mile mark we put one up that said, "you are now one quarter mile from the park and there will be a Sheriff's officer waiting to pick you up".

One Monday morning I arrived to discover that one young man had brought pot back to the ranch from his home visit. A bunch of kids smoked on Sunday night, were busted and it was now my responsibility to deal with it. Practically the whole group had indulged (I know it doesn't speak well to the quality of the graveyard shift but that is another story for another time). So, I loaded up the crew in the van and brought them to the juvenile department. The director of the department at the time was George Brown (may he rest in peace) and George was a piece of work. We bonded immediately since we were both Chicago boys. And we could talk endlessly about Chicago. George had the biggest collection of drug paraphernalia and law enforcement patches I had ever seen. The combination was surreal. The sad part was how much George wanted to be doing almost anything else. At the time he had over ten years remaining 'till retirement and he could and would, as part of any conversation with me, let me know to the hour how long he had to retirement. Anyway, George also acted as a judge when the juvenile court judge was not available. We trooped each and every kid into the court room. George read them the riot act. At least for a time we had a fairly stable and malleable group of kids.

Finally, some time later the group had turned over almost completely a young boy brought some airplane glue back from a home visit. This was when you could still by airplane glue off the shelf at your corner store. He huffed with another young woman who reacted so badly that she had to be sent to the emergency room. It was touch and go for a while. Now the young man was the leader of the pack. He was intelligent. He was handsome. He had long blond hair and the girls were gaga over him and the boys looked up to him. We did what we normally did in those days. We grouped. Now I have already spent considerable time talking about my feelings about group work so it should come as no surprise that while he heroically resisted our attempts to break him out of his seemingly smug unrepentant indifference to his role in the near death experience of one of his peers - he finally broke and began sobbing uncontrollably.

Let me back up just a bit. Coming from the streets of Chicago. Living through the anti war demonstrations, civil rights marches, and Grant Park in 1968 I was very anti authority. I sided always with the underdog. I wanted the kids to understand that I was on their side. So, to give myself too much credit, I was a lousy authority figure. I always wanted be what the Bill Riley's and Rush Limbaugh's of the world expect us to be. Like officer Krupke in West Side Story. This episode was a conversion experience for me. We asked the young man, after he had stopped his body racking sobs, why he was crying. Because nothing prior to his breakdown indicated that anything like it would happen. He said something very simple. "No one has ever said no to me". He grew up on a commune in Tekelma. He had been smoking dope since he was five or six. Literally, no one had ever said no - had ever chastised or scolded him. It seems so incredible now that I could have come as far as I had without understanding that the way kids internalize this lack of parental or adult control is to believe that they are not loved. That all kids need an adult regardless of how hard they fight us. They are asking for someone to identify the boundaries.

So, Star Gulch ceased to be fun. A job opened up at a newly formed agency called YouthWorks. The Educational Service District had been contracting with the Job Council to provide youth employment services. The ESD decided to drop the program and the group of employees who had been administering it formed their own non-profit and was awarded the contract. By the time I joined up in '79 or '80 it had been in existence for a year or so. The new agency received a small $11,000 juvenile justice grant. On the face of it the grant was to deliver employability services to at-risk youth. The sub text of the grant was much more complicated.

A new state agency had just been created - the Juvenile Services Commission. Its goal was to reduce commitments to the two training schools (read kiddy prisons) in the state. In order for a county to be eligible for funds the county commissioners and the county juvenile court judge had to agree to accept the funds. It seemed like a no-brainer but the state had recently rolled out a similar adult corrections program that the counties hated. Both had complex formulae for pay backs if the county exceeded commitments to the correctional facilities. The sub text of the grant was the expectation that the person hired would rev up support so that the county would enter into the program.

I have already described my first encounter with service clubs in Chicago. So, when I came to Oregon I assumed that the way to get support for my work at Star Gulch was to join a service club. I joined the Jacksonville Kiwanis Club. It met at 6:45 AM in one of the old honky tonks in Jacksonville. The smells of the honky tonk and the greasy eggs and sausage served for breakfast were daunting on those early mornings. However, it was worth it because it just so happened that there were three or four school principals in the club who I got to know.

So when I took the job at YouthWorks I told the principals that I would be getting in touch as soon as I got my feet on the ground.

On my very first day I arrived bright and early eager for the new challenges ahead. The offices were old Quonset huts across from Sherm’s Thunderbird Market (they've long since been torn down). I went to introduce myself to the only other person there that morning with a smile on my face and my hand outstretched. You can imagine my surprise when this woman whom I had never met before planted herself inches in front of my face and proceeded to scream at me. Her deprecations went something like, "who do you think you are you arrogant SOB, what gives you the right to infringe on my territory, etc. etc. etc.) for about five minutes. I was lucky I had been inoculated in Chicago from this tearing a person down until they are in tears technique.

It turned out that this woman was part of a group (I won't call it a cult in deference to anyone reading this who may have participated) of folks who called themselves Reicheans. Now there are probably many of you reading this who know a lot more about Wilhelm Reich than I do but here's my understanding. Reich was a contemporary of Freud. He was not impressed with Freud's therapeutic model. He went in the exact opposite direction he believed that by manipulating the body instead of the mind he would get better results. He went through several different phases in his life and tragically himself went insane in the end. He believed that the fluorescence on the hands of wrist watches was part of a Martian plot to take over the planet.

The Ashland Reichians did the body manipulation stuff along with the Essalen in your face till you cry stuff and were very very disciplined. My first encounter on my very first day at YouthWorks with one of their ilk was only a portent of things to come. As her rant was winding down one of the few people I did know prior to my coming into the agency walked in on the encounter. I smiled and said, "Hi, and oh by the way do you think I am an arrogant SOB". He laughed and said, "Of course not". The combination of not engaging and using humor totally disarmed her. When I could finally get to the substance of her grievance it turned out that she was providing services at one of the schools in Medford. The principal told her of our conversation and she was upset that I was somehow challenging her by speaking with the principal without clearing it with her. I calmly explained that we were fellow Kiwanians and it seemed only natural to tell him about my new job. It was not the first and certainly not the last time I would unwittingly offend someone by doing what I thought was the right thing.


So, I am now at YouthWorks, and its 1980. YouthWorks was a brand new agency. Most of the work it did was centered on employability training for youth and a huge summer jobs program. For many years, the summer youth jobs program was one of the major political footballs in Congress. The program started in the late sixties. Its main goal was not to improve the workforce, but to keep kids off the streets in the summer. You see, those were the summers of the riots. Most of those rioting were kids. Get kids jobs for the summer and voila! no more riots, went the thinking. Year after year after year the summer jobs money was held back to the last possible moment when it could do any good. Then bang, we would find out if we would have jobs for 300 kids or 3000 kids.

I was brought to YouthWorks as an experiment. The management wanted to see if I could diversify the agency so they wouldn’t have to be 100% reliant on the jobs money. I told you last week that I had two goals: one was to teach employability skills to high risk youth and the other was to get the Juvenile Services Commission approved by the County Commissioners and the County Court Judge. Well, there was one more - but I'll get to that later.

In those days, the Juvenile Court Judge was a county employee, and was not only the judge, but also the administrator of the juvenile department. This created some momentous battles between the commissioners and judges around the state. Because, although the judges administered the department, it turned out that the commissioners approved the departments’ budgets. (Now, the judges are all state employees and no longer have any administrative authority. The game has changed considerably.)

The commissioners and the judge had veto power concerning whether or not the Juvenile Services Commission should come to town. The Juvenile Court Judge, in particular, was vehemently opposed. So, I spent the first few months learning as much as I could about the model. I used my Kiwanis contacts to have most of the Kiwanis clubs in the valley conduct a phone survey of several hundred residents. Stewart McCollom was a partner in a marketing firm that designed the survey and tabulated the results. (Stewart, for those of you who don’t know him, is a gentleman of the first degree. He went on to become a County Commissioner.)

The survey asked about a dozen very simple questions. The results were unsurprisingly overwhelming. 90% of those surveyed thought that if funding was available to prevent juvenile delinquency - then, by gum, we ought to get the money down here! I am oversimplifying the politics but the survey, in combination with some intensive lobbying, convinced the judge to change his position.

All of this took some time and then more time to get the wheels of the Juvenile Services Commission moving so that money could begin flowing. So, even though I spent a good deal of time on the politics - most of my days were spent doing direct service.

One of my favorite experiences was working with an alternative classroom at Ashland High School. I was given about twenty five kids. They were a good group of kids but there was a reason they were all in this alternative class. I was teamed up with a woman doing her internship out of the college. I realized early on that I couldn’t do any of the pedagogy until I could gain their trust and begin to change their classroom behavior. The classroom was in the center of the school. At times it felt like being in a zoo and I was in the cage. Kids walking by would make fun of the “special kids” in the “special class” and the “special kids” responded in kind. On the worst days, they would jump up and down squealing like monkeys at the kids passing by. Of course, to add insult to injury they were not allowed to share the same breaks as the “normal” kids.

So, after my second encounter with them, I said that for what I wanted to do I would need to split them up into two groups – boys and girls. They went nuts. They ranted and raved for ten minutes. I put my hand up in the traditional time-out sign and got their attention. I said, “OK, OK you win (for now, I thought to myself) - let’s talk about something else.” I asked, “Does anyone know what a double standard is?” No one responded. “OK let’s try this:” I turned to the boys and said, “What would you think of a guy who goes out with a different girl every week?” The guys did the usual macho thing. “Stud, too cool for school!” (OK that was long before that expression was born - but I wanted to impress you with my hip-ness. Although, even though I just learned that expression (which has probably been around for years and years) – it’s more a reflection of my anti-hipness!)) … and they carried on and on for five minutes.

Then I said, “OK, what would you think of a girl who goes out with a different boy every week”? “Slut, whore, etc.” - and so the response went for another five minutes. In the meantime, I had turned my attention to the girls whose mouths were getting very, very tight and I could just about visualize the steam rising from their collective heads. When the boys had finally wound down, the leader of the girls looked at me and said, “I think splitting up would be a great thing to do.”

Bingo!

Very early in my YouthWorks experience, I received a frantic, very early AM call at home, from my boss. She had worked for the Educational Service District (ESD). You will recall that when the ESD jettisoned the youth jobs program, she and some of her cohorts - who had been managing the program - created their own non-profit. My boss told me that the Superintendent wanted us in his office at 9 AM.

So, I told you the whole story about the firing of the best teacher I have ever known by the ESD. She subsequently won a small settlement from them. To this day I can’t exactly remember how, but I was befriended by an employee of the State’s Department of Education. I confided to him about my friend’s atrocious treatment and apparently word got back to the superintendent. He was a very intimidating figure. He was a big man with a booming voice.

My boss was certainly intimidated. I could hear it in her voice when she told me I needed to go to this meeting with her. I was certainly befuddled when I entered his office. His desk was situated on a podium-like platform. My boss and I sat at a table looking up at his munificent presence. He also had summoned his finance and human resource directors. He proceeded to yell at us for 45 minutes. The more he yelled the more befuddled I became. The substance of his tirade was that if we didn’t behave he would destroy YouthWorks and each of our professional careers. I inferred that my talks with the guy from the State Department of Education were what triggered him.

So, for the second time in days, I was being yelled at by someone I had never met. But having been inoculated by the yell-at-you-till-you-cry-sobbing-into-a-fetal-position folks, I began to rebound. It just so happened that at that week's Kiwanis meeting we had challenged the Superintendent’s Kiwanis Club to a softball game. After the tirade, he rose from his throne and clearly expected us to fall prostrate at his feet. Instead, I got up and said, “So, I am looking forward to seeing you on Saturday.” After a bit of huffing and puffing he said, “Uh, what do you mean?” I reminded him that our clubs were playing ball on Saturday. It was like a switch went off in his head. It was very scary. What was just a red-faced, pompous dragon of the old school management style was transformed into a hail fellow well met hand-shaking, hand-clapping, joke-swapping Kiwanian.

Had he not just ranted and raved, I would probably have just let it all alone. But now the battle was engaged. I wish I had read the Chris Matthews book; Hardball (Of course, it hadn't been written yet, as Matthews was still a legislative aide to House Speaker Tip O'Neil). He has a chapter in it entitled: “Don’t get mad, don’t get even, get ahead.” He then recounts how one politician destroyed his life by engaging in a vengeful crusade to take down another politician who “done him wrong.” I didn’t destroy my life, but I certainly wasted a good deal of it in my crusade to expose the damage the Superintendent was doing and the wasting of the enormous potential of the ESD to do good.

Last week, I interrupted my tale of the Ashland alternative classroom with a cautionary political one. I would like to get back to the kids. It’s a bit scary to think those kids are now in their forties. Whew! By then I had honed my group technique to a pretty simple formula (I worked with the boys and the female intern from the college used the same with the girls). I would start with a brief description of “active listening” - the main contribution of Carl Rogers to the field. You will recall that most of the folks I worked with in Chicago were disciples of Rogers, so I was pretty well trained. Then I would go to life histories. This was always an interesting process with boys - listening and watching as they struggled to maintain their macho disguise, while telling harrowing stories of growing up in dysfunctional or abusive families. I then took them quickly through values clarification and several of the other standard exercises of the day. There was always a lot of role playing.

We finished the semester with a fish bowl exercise. For the first time since the beginning of the year, we brought the boys and girls together. The girls formed a circle in the center of the room and the boys formed a circle around them. The exercise started OK, until one of the girls spoke about disclosing to the girls-only group that she had been raped by one of the boys at a party. The boy was one of those “too cool for school” types that had been my hardest project. It turned out that the rape was known by almost everyone, but there had been a tacit agreement not to talk about it. There had been a lot of drinking and drugging at the party and I think keeping the rape quiet was so they wouldn't have to deal with the consequences.

There was (maybe still is) something powerful about the story telling - particularly when used in the context of active listening. Normally, story telling can be a very difficult process, since the usual response of the listener is to say something like: “Wow! The same thing happened to me when I was eight and I still remember it as if it were yesterday” - and then proceed to talk for ten minutes. Using active listening, the speaker is the center of attention. Questions are only allowed that further illuminate the speaker's point or elicit how the speaker was feeling during that particular incident or event. The speaker begins to feel (all right I can’t think of a better word) empowered. The listeners can’t help but feel differently about the speaker. We all have our stories and they all contain profound pain, joy and wisdom. It adds exponentially more depth and dimensionality to our view of people.

So, after several months of this work, I had a very different group on my hands. Instead of running out of the room or screaming denials, the boy broke down and cried. When he stopped crying, he apologized to the whole group. It was a very moving experience.

We reported the crime and he paid whatever consequence he had to but accepted the punishment with, what I would like to think, was a very different world view.

I'm still in about 1980, at YouthWorks. I do want to acknowledge the work of Bob Scheelan who was my partner in bringing the Juvenile Services Commission (now the Commission on Children and Families) to the County. Bob worked for Child Welfare and is now retired, but was a relentless advocate for neglected and abused children. Once we obtained the approval of the Board of Commissioners and the Juvenile Court Judge, we spent a good deal of the following year working with the State Commission and recruiting commission members who would be acceptable to the County Commissioners.

Once the Commission was approved and started its work, I wrote a grant in behalf of YouthWorks to provide school based counseling. The grant was approved and I hired the first school based counselors in Jackson County. I remember my first meeting with the team. As we were getting to know each other and telling our stories, we discovered that we had all had some contact with religious training. There was a former nun, two Christian seminarians, a former missionary and me - the product of twelve years of Orthodox, Jewish religious training. Although I don't think any of us would have been considered religious in the institutional sense, we all had a deep commitment to doing good -- which reminds me of a story that I learned while studying the Talmud. I have since learned that it is also attributed to Jesus. But in my version, the story goes like this:

There were two competing religious schools in Jerusalem in the early years of the first millennium. One was led by a rabbi named Shami. Shami did not suffer fools easily. So when a man who had fallen from the practice of Judaism came to him one day and said, "If you can teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot, I will come back to the fold," Shami threw him out on his ear.

The same man approached the leader of the other school, Hillel, with the same challenge. Hillel looked at him and said, “OK, get up on one foot.” Hillel then said, "Love thy neighbor as you would thyself.” He then told the man to get back on two feet. The man was puzzled and told Hillel that he didn't understand. Hillel said, "Everything else is commentary.”

That has certainly been my credo throughout the years.

I have a distinct memory of spending some time walking through Lithia Park on that first day, with my new team, pondering on the coincidence that we all had similar religious backgrounds.

A quick story about one of the team: His name was Bruce. I took to calling him Brother Bruce for reasons noted above. Bruce worked Central Point, and was one of the most non-threatening, affable and empathetic human beings you could imagine. We would staff cases every week. One case that Bruce brought to the table was a young girl about twelve. He would sit her down in a chair in her office. She was a very slight girl and couldn't have weighed more than 70 pounds. Her affect was way off. She would sit scrunched in her chair with her head down and would not make eye contact. She appeared afraid of Bruce and would not respond to him at all. Bruce would seek input from the group as to how to get her engaged. Nothing we recommended worked.

Then one day, like magic, she was transformed. She was smiling and open. She was chatty and upbeat. Not wanting to break the magic spell, Bruce did not comment or ask about her transformation. After a few weeks of some really good work together, he decided that the time was right. He asked her what had happened to transform her. She smiled and said, "I realized you weren't going to make me talk to chairs.” Now that is probably the punch line for you clinicians reading this. I probably need to explain it to the “lay in the congregation:”

A technique widely used back then was to have clients role play conversations with the person(s) they were having issues with at the time. So, if you were having problems with your mother, the therapist would have you say what you wanted to say to an empty chair which represented your mother. The poor twelve year old thought her prior therapist was crazy, and it scared her. What person in their right mind would encourage you to talk to an empty chair?

The lesson I learned is that there is no cookie-cutter model that will work with everyone. We need to tailor our work to each individual. The best clinicians have a very large bag of tricks they can pull out to work with the wide variety of issues and personalities they confront every day.

One of the accomplishments I am most proud of is the development of the Direct Services Network Teams. Looking back, that little Juvenile Justice grant sure had a lot of expectations. Bring the Juvenile Services Commission to the county, provide direct services to at-risk youth, and create Direct Services Network Teams. It seems like a no-brainer some twenty six years later, but at the time it was quite an innovation. I had to spend a good deal of time convincing superintendents and principals that it was the right thing to do. We also developed something called the Youth Services Management Team that was comprised of the directors of the social services agencies, the juvenile department and a representative from the county’s superintendents.

One story stays with me. The case came up at a meeting of the Medford Direct Service Network Team. It seemed that a student, in the spring of his senior year, came up to a school counselor and asked to drop out of school. The counselor, without asking the simple question “Why?”, gave him the paperwork and that was that. One of my counselors told me about it and explained that he had been working with the student who, by the way, was a straight-A kid. This was when the timber industry was downsizing and his father had just been laid off from a well-paying job at the mill. The father was home drinking all the time and was abusing his wife. The kid felt that he had to stay home to protect his mom.

I brought the case to the management team and we were able to get the kid back in school the next day and provide him with the needed support services. The Medford Assistant Superintendent was a member of the team and was appalled and embarrassed - but it illustrated the power of the Direct Service Team Network coupled with the Youth Services Management Team.

I am proud to say that Direct Services Network Teams still exist and the Youth Services Management Team has morphed into the Jackson County Service Integration Team.

Community Works now has over one hundred separate grants and contracts. During my tenure at YouthWorks, we operated on just one major grant. And so this fairy tale story only grows more and more magical with time. We were running across more and more homeless and runaway youth and there was growing pressure to do something for this population. I heard about a potential source of funding in Salem. It was the State Juvenile Justice Advisory Council. Our staff did some research and the model with the most potential was in Florida. It was a new program but seemed promising. It used volunteer foster homes to house homeless kids.

Being the first time going for funding from this source, I was very conservative. I asked for $15,000 to provide for a part time coordinator and stipends for the volunteer homes to help defer the costs of room and board. I drove up to Salem in my beaten and battered 1974 Datsun (remember my 1959 Volvo had long since died) to present my proposal. There was only about $45,000 total available and there were only two proposals. So I thought I had a pretty good chance. But my competition was the Boys and Girls Aid Society, one of the oldest and most venerable children's programs in the state. To make matters worse, presenting their proposal was one of the smoothest and most articulate advocates around. He subsequently went on to become the director of DHS. Those who watched him in action called him the silver fox. Depending on the point of view, that could be a compliment or not. And to make matters ‘worser’ he was asking for all the moola.

So, as I listened to him present, I began thinking of my drive back, problems with the clutch, and if the rains would hold back for the length of the drive. I had a window that leaked. He was masterful and, although I didn't know his sobriquet, he truly was the silver fox. When my turn came, I did the best I could without much hope. The chair thanked us and we were asked to leave.

The meeting was on a Friday. When I got back to my office on Monday, there was a message to call the chair. I did. She told me that she loved the proposal except for one fatal flaw. I thought to myself: Yeah right! It’s that I had to go up against the silver fox. She said, "You haven't asked for enough money. Can you redo the grant and apply for the full $45,000?" I thought to myself, "Hey, grant writing can be fun".

As you can imagine, that was the first and last time anyone ever wanted to give me more than I asked for in a grant. I later learned that the rationale for my luck was inadvertent. It seemed that the chair and the silver fox had a long standing feud. She would have done anything to not support him. I think if he had been the only applicant, she would have found a way to move the money elsewhere. I had given her a perfect opportunity. So much for my superb grant writing and presentation skills.

Thus the genesis of our HART program.

When last I reported, I was telling you about a trip to Cow Creek to receive a check from the Tribal Foundation for TLP. I also recounted the first funding for the HART program. Well, the woman who started it all was Ginger Casto, who is now in the private sector (all the smart social workers have long since gone into financial planning or real estate - Ginger is in real estate). She is serving on the board of the county's Art's Council and was at Cow Creek to accept a check on behalf of her group. I hadn't seen her in too long and we couldn't help but sit next to each other and talk. I told her what I was doing with these weekly updates and she reminded me of several stories that I had forgotten. I offer this last story before I leave YouthWorks.

We were hiring a coordinator for the volunteer shelter program as Ginger was moving up to bigger and better things. We picked out several resumes that looked promising and Ginger and I began interviewing the prospective candidates. One gentleman, who looked very good on paper, walked in and it was all that Ginger and I could do to keep from losing it. He looked like he had been spending some time on the streets himself. He was very disheveled. He wore a trench coat throughout the time he was with us. The coat was a mess - torn and stained. Since we were social workers, we treated him with respect even though it was immediately clear that there was no way this was going to happen. We went through the usual interview questions. He didn't do too bad a job when suddenly, about 15 minutes into the interview, he jumped up and began screaming at the window. He spun around and left the room running. It seemed he had left his son in a pickup truck in the parking lot and as he sat there answering our questions he saw his son leaving with his truck.

The last we saw of him was trench coat flapping, running down the middle of the Jacksonville Highway at Sherm's, screaming for his son to come back.

At any rate,I wanted to remind folks that Ginger was the founder of the HART program. She went on to become the Executive Director of the Northwest Homeless and Runaway Youth Network. She served on the national board and was a consultant for the Federal Youth Services Bureau for some years. Somewhere during that time, she authored a report on the state of homeless and runaway youth in Oregon that became a seminal document in the movement.

When I left YouthWorks in the fall of 1982, both the shelter program and the school-based counseling programs had grown significantly. My replacement was the Executive Director of Parents Anonymous, which became Family Focus, which subsequently merged into Crisis Intervention Services, which became part of Community Works in 1996. There is a part of this that is beginning to sound like Genesis - and Abraham begat Isaac who begat Jacob. But it is a small valley and, being the history buff that I am, I hope that understanding the roots of Community Works will give us all a greater appreciation of what we have built.

I know I promised to leave the YouthWorks story for now (it will reappear consistently through this narrative), but since last I wrote, I remembered an important piece of the agency's history that took place back then. Somehow - and for the life of me I can't remember how it happened - I was introduced to a progressive foundation back east. The foundation agreed to fund a study that would determine the efficacy of a merger between YouthWorks, Star Gulch Ranch and the Jackson County Youth Shelter and Evaluation Center. I contracted with Dennis Morrow who was then and still is the Executive Director of one of our sister agencies, Janus Youth Programs, in Portland. Dennis is one of my heroes and mentors. We have subsequently contracted with him to come down and lead workshops on "values-based management" which is his specialty.

At any rate, Dennis came down and conducted interviews with board, staff and community partners over a period of a month or two. He determined that the merger was a great idea but that it was not going to happen. The boards and staff at the shelter and Star Gulch were adamantly opposed. Looking back, I am mystified as to why they agreed to participate in the study in the first place. Thus ended the first of at least five attempts at merger that I was involved in - until the final, successful, lucky sixth attempt, ten years ago, that created Community Works.

My last six months at YouthWorks were stressful ones. The Job Council had decided to bring the youth jobs program in-house. At the time, it represented more than half the funding for the agency. A great debate ensued as to whether or not the job counselors (who had seniority but were losing funding) would bump my school- based counseling staff. I won the battle but at great cost. So, when a job at the State Juvenile Services Commission opened up, I applied.

The Juvenile Services Commission (JSC), as I have noted, was the first iteration of what is now the Commission on Children and Families. At the time, it was all of three years old. The Executive Director had resigned and the County Grants Manager had moved up into his position. I was applying to replace the County Grants Manager. At the time, the entire budget of the commission was about $4 million a biennium. There were only three program staff and two administrative staff. The role of the County Grants Manager was a difficult one. It entailed working with all 32 or 33 county JSC's and the county commissioners who had the actual power. As is true today, the county commissioners appointed the JSC commissioners who made recommendations to them for the use of the state funds. The Grants Manager was also responsible for staffing a couple of state commission subcommittees and preparing reports to the legislature. Finally, he acted as the Executive Director in his absence.

I drove up to Salem for the interview, having little expectation that I would get the job. I was interviewed by the new Executive Director and several state commission members. I think my weakness was also my advantage. As you will read, the commission was highly politicized and attracted controversy and attention far beyond its relative economic position in the system. I was relatively unknown in Salem circles so I had none of the baggage the other applicants carried. I was for all intents and purposes a clean slate. My strength was that I was a true believer of the model. In my efforts to create the Jackson County JSC, I had learned to love the concept. It fit in with all my prior community development work in Chicago. It created a county and state-wide constituency for kids that simply did not exist prior to the formation of the JSC.

The combination of my enthusiasm and lack of political baggage landed me the job. No one was more surprised than I - that September of 1982 - when I learned that I was going be living in Salem.

I arrived in Salem in September of 1982. I was nervous, but I believed I was going to have a chance to make a difference in the lives of children and their families. I most vividly remember the first time I walked up the marble steps of the Capitol building. I stopped to read the lofty words engraved in the stone about justice, wisdom, and equality. I remember getting goose bumps. I remember thinking that this was what I had been meant to do with my life. But I am getting a little ahead of the story.

The offices of the Juvenile Services Commission (JSC) were in a bank building. My office, on the second floor, was surrounded on three sides by glass. After a while I began to feel like an exhibit in a zoo. But at the beginning, I was eager to jump in and get started.

After a day or two to get acclimated, my boss came in with my first assignment. It was to prepare a report for the Legislature on the activities of the JSC. Remember, the agency was only two years old and was especially concerned about justifying its existence. Probably the most vulnerable time for an agency is in the first few years. So, I said that the assignment would be a great way for me to learn my job. I asked him where I could find the data I needed for the report. He said that there was no data. I said, "Well don't we (at the very least, I thought to myself) know how many boys and girls were served with our funds"? He again replied that there was no data.

I began what was a long and frustrating process of calling each of the 125 programs funded with JSC dollars to ask some basic questions. I discovered that few programs were collecting any data at all. By the time I had gotten half way through the list, I began freaking out. I wondered if my boss had given me a job he knew was impossible for ulterior motives. But I slogged on. Finally I began asking if folks could estimate how many kids they were serving and what services they were providing. I put a package together and was brutally honest that all the numbers were estimates.

There were several issues that this experience raised. The JSC had no universal format for grant proposals. Therefore, every county made up its own or, in the case of the smaller counties, had no format at all. (For those of you who have written grants - especially Commission on Children and Family grants - [the third iteration of the JSC] - can you imagine a funding source today that didn't ask how many clients you intended to serve?) The second was that there was no client management information system. I soon discovered that the beauty of the JSC model also had its beast side. The beauty was the decentralized semi- autonomous nature of the county JSC's. The beast was that fact they hated "Salem" mandating anything. In this case, it was clear to me that unless we could present the legislature with the most basic data, we could easily lose the agency. Little did I know that this, my first experience developing a client management information system, would leave a deep, indelible scar on my psyche. It has resulted in my breaking out in existential hives every time I find myself in a discussion of client management information systems.

So, for the first time in my career I had become the evil bureaucrat. My next major project was developing a grant proposal manual and subsequently taking it around the state to sell it to each and every JSC. Over the next two years, I would be spending six months a year on the road visiting, selling and cajoling local commissions and programs. The bonus was that I was able to visit every nook and cranny in the state and gained an appreciation of the grandeur, stark majesty and lush beauty of Oregon. And I got to meet a lot of interesting people.

It’s 1982. It’s Salem. It’s raining. All the time.

I should back up a little bit and explain the origins of the Juvenile Services Commission (JSC). Its prime movers were Vera Katz who, at the time, was Oregon's first female Speaker of the House and subsequently went on to become Mayor of Portland; and Ted Molinari who was the Juvenile Director of one of the counties around Salem. There had been several studies up to that time regarding the state of services to children. One of them resulted in creating a separate children's agency: Children's Services Division (CSD). But the problem confronting the Legislature and juvenile departments was overcrowding at the two training schools, Hillcrest and MacLaren -- (for training schools read kiddy prisons).

The obvious option was to build more buildings. But the state was in the middle of a fairly deep recession and that would not fly politically. Therefore, the primary purpose behind the creation of the JSC was to provide incentives to counties to reduce their commitments to the training schools. The logic might have been good but there was simply not enough resources put into the program to make any real difference. As you might imagine, this created much of the political controversy around the commission that I have alluded to already.

The most vocal and active enemy of the JSC was a juvenile court judge up north. He was a leader in the Juvenile Court Judges and Directors Association. You may recall that I have reported that the judges, back then, worked for the county and the juvenile court judge administered the juvenile department. He believed that the funding should go straight to the juvenile courts, thereby eliminating the local commissions. There was a system like that in Ohio and therefore much talk about the "Ohio Plan."

He did not prevail and subsequently did everything in his power to undermine the state JSC. One of the main threads throughout this part of the tale of “the accidental social worker” is: the better I did my job of strengthening the commission model, the more I attracted the attention of the judge.

I must have done a pretty good job because, by the end of my tenure in Salem, I was very near - if not at the top - of his list of folks he was trying to destroy. But I am getting way ahead of the story.

So, it’s been a while. I am still in Salem. It is still raining. My brain must have begun to mold because I bought a convertible. Buying a convertible in Salem is like buying long johns in Hawaii. Of course it leaked. One fine day I was driving to work in my convertible with my going-to-testify-before-the-legislature-suit. The leak, of course, was right above the driver’s seat. I had a towel draped across my lap to protect (sort of) the suit. I don't usually listen to AM radio but this morning for whatever reason I was and the DJ was in best DJ voice. I was very depressed. I had been at the job for months and was realizing that working with thirty plus county commissions, the state commission, the other state bureaucracies, the Governor's office and the legislature was not going to be as exciting as I had initially presumed. I was in no mood for a perky morning AM DJ. And I was drowning or at least wet. The DJ in his best morning perky DJ VOICE said, "In case you've been wondering its been raining for 75 straight days". I thought to myself, "no wonder I'm depressed".

I have noted earlier when describing Star Gulch Ranch that I am a self diagnosed victim of Seasonal Adjustment Disorder. On another occasion I was driving to Portland for a meeting. It was raining. For those of you who saw Steve Martin's weather man in Love in LA you can appreciate that there is little need of mentioning the fact that it was raining. But it was and the towel on my lap was doing little to protect me. (Some of you more practical folks might be asking yourselves why I didn't just get the top fixed. Well, I am embarrassed to say it was an Alpha and although fun to drive with a great engine and transmission everything else was very poorly engineered. The only Alpha mechanic/fixer upper in Salem was Ivo. Ivo and I developed a very close relationship over those two years.) Anyway, I was listening to NPR and my guess it was Science Friday on Talk of the Nation. The interviewee was a software developer who had created software for folks who wanted to check out the weather patterns as they were making choices about where they wanted to live in the country. By chance the developer mentioned that the Willamette Valley had only 115 days of sunshine per year third only to Seattle and some city in Alaska. I should have known my days were numbered.

I seem to be having a little writer's block describing my two years (1982-'84) in Salem. All I can seem to recall is the rain. I have said that my job took me all over the state. I met many great people - some of whom I still see to this day. Most of them were staff people for the newly created Juvenile Services Commissions. One of my favorites was Ellen Rogers who staffed the Clackamas County Commission. She was a tower of support during some of my later travails.

Many years later, while sitting by the bedside of a dying dear friend, we talked about the grief process. It turned out that during the intervening years Ellen had gone to work at an AIDS hospice in the Bay area. There she met Kubla-Ross who wrote some of the seminal grief work. Ellen was leaving and they were enjoying a goodbye dinner. As my friend recounts, (and I don't remember what the context was), Kubla-Ross said that her main regret was that everyone was taking her stages of grief linearly and literally. Something like, "OK, I'm done with denial and now I’m ready for anger - and OK, I am now ready for acceptance". At the time we were talking, I had already lost both parents and some very close friends. So, I had ample opportunity during brief lucid moments to observe the patterns and depth of grief. I have come to the conclusion that, at least, my grief can be described as electrical waves. The amplitude does not necessarily decrease over time. The time between the waves eventually becomes longer. I can be listening to a song or driving down a particular road and grief will overtake me and be as strong as if the loss occurred yesterday. It will only last a fraction of a moment, but it will be deep.

OK - so now I seem to be in a stream of consciousness state. Maybe it’s because this is the first cloudy day in months and we even had some rain this morning. Rain.

I think I have already said that one of the biggest projects I worked on was a client management information system. It took a year of intense wrangling. Of course, as I have learned, it is practically impossible to create a client management information system that works well and pleases even most of the users. And this was with early 80's technology. All to say, one of my clearest memories of the time was receiving a call from a former director of the Josephine County Juvenile Department who was yelling so loudly I had to hold the phone several inches from my ear. He did not like the form. He did not like the fact that the state was mandating its completion. He did not like me very much. Although, after I returned from Salem to the valley we met on a number of occasions and developed a mutual respect for each other.

I think it’s time I took a long walk in the rain.

I am currently in Salem. It is 1982 and 1983. It is raining. In my memory, it is always raining in Salem. When last I wrote, I told you that I was having writer’s block about those two years. I think it is more that I have blocked out a lot. They were two very intense years.

So, I think I will cut straight to the end. My main battle was with the Juvenile Court Judge of Marion County. He hated the Juvenile Services Commission. He had strongly advocated that the funding go directly to the Juvenile Courts. He hated me for doing a good job organizing local commissions. He was also the Chair of the Juvenile Court Judges and Directors’ Association. The Association was very political. As the Chair, he and its executive director actively lobbied the legislature to dismantle the Juvenile Services Commission.

A little recap may be in order: When I arrived, the Commission was only two or three years old. It was very vulnerable. There was only the Commission Director and yours truly out in the world trying to build the local commissions and protect the model in the legislature. The Juvenile Services Commission eventually morphed into the Commission on Children and Families. Governor Kitzhaber also tried to dismantle the Commission. He zeroed it out of his budget every chance he got. But the power and beauty of the model are the local commissions which are required by statute to have a majority of lay members. These citizens have time and again stood up to protect the model and, in my estimation, increased the knowledge and understanding of their communities about children's issues exponentially.

It was my job to travel the state to build and support the local commissions.

The state commission received a small pot of federal funds which it allocated every two years through a competitive grant process. Most of those funds went to support the Juvenile Court Judges and Directors’ Association. I encouraged local commissions to compete for those funds.

So, we are at a meeting of the State Commission in Salem. The audience is mostly staff and members of local commissions who have made the trek to Salem to present their proposals. I am sitting as staff listening to the proposals. The Judge and his director come to the table to make their pitch. Now you need to know that the legislature was in session. We had a bill in the process that would have ensured the survival of the model for at least another two years. The Judge, in his role as Chair of the Association, and his director, who was paid for with those federal funds, were actively lobbying against the bill. I waited and waited for one of the Commissioners to make that point. (I had planted a few seeds). But no one did.

I had talked to my friends and supporters and told them that I could not work in this position any longer. Some of it had to do with my battle with the Judge. He had been calling Juvenile Court Directors around the state to try to dig up some "dirt" on me to get me fired. I knew this because a few of the Directors liked me and told me what was happening. But I was also fed up with state government. It was very difficult to change even the smallest thing. Anyway, I was ready to leave and knew what I was about to say would seal my departure.

I asked the Chair of the Commission for permission to speak. I looked at the Judge and his Director and said, "How does it feel to take funding from the Commission and then work to destroy it in the Legislature"?

When I arrived at work Monday morning, my boss came in to my office and shut the door. "OK", he said, "You have a choice. You can resign or I can fire you". "I resign", I said. Thus ending my brief employment in state government.


When last we saw our accidental social worker, he was resigning from his job at the Juvenile Services Commission in Salem. When presented with a choice of being fired or resigning, the first buds of maturity showed themselves. For those of you following this series, you will recall that no such maturity was apparent when he was fired from his last job.

I called all the State Commissioners and thanked them for their support. I called all my local county commission contacts and did the same.

A lot of folks were pretty upset. They knew I had been forced out for supporting the Commission model and, in particular, advocating for the county commissions. OK, so I was obnoxious at my last Commission meeting for calling out the Judge and his association director for lobbying against the Commission. I didn't say that my maturity was fully flowered - just that first spring budding.

I was still living in Salem and was pretty depressed. I applied for jobs in Seattle and Ashland. While I was waiting to hear, I received a call from my friends in the Commission Office. They said that the Director of the local juvenile department was trying to get a hold of me. This was very curious. It was that selfsame Director who, at the behest of the Judge, was trying to get some "dirt" on me from his fellow Juvenile Department Directors across the State.

It was particularly curious because the Willamette Week had just run an article about my untimely resignation. With my newfound buds of maturity I did not say much to the reporter. But she had plenty of folks who were willing to speak out. The article, to say the least, was not very flattering of the Judge.

So, out of all this curiosity, I phoned the Director and asked what he wanted. He said that he wanted to offer me a job. Curiouser and curiouser. I said I was working on jobs in Seattle and Ashland but hadn't decided yet - so tell me more. He said that I should come down to the department and meet with him.

I went down and met with him and learned that I was being offered the job of a supervisor in a remote part of the county. The pay was close to what I had been making. During this conversation the Judge came sauntering into the room. He had a German Sheppard on a leash. Sitting there (and having had some pretty ugly encounters with dogs during my stint at the Post Office) I thought it was a very, very big dog. There was a pair of French doors leading out to a small patio and a very large lawn. Mowing the lawn was a man who I took to be Latino. The Judge opened one of the doors and instructed his dog in German to what I concluded to be "sic him, sic him" since the dog began barking and straining at his leash. The man on the mower must have heard the dog over the noise of the lawn mower because he looked up and took on a startled and worried look when he saw the dog straining on the leash. The Judge started laughing pulled the dog back in and left the room. It was not hard for me to realize that the show was all for my benefit. Showing me who exactly was boss.

So, I looked at the Director - who had the grace to show a degree of embarrassment - and said, "OK, what's the catch"? He said that if I took the job I would be forbidden (on pain of who knows what torture as I was still reeling from the German Sheppard incident) to speak to any reporters without the Judge’s permission.

Apparently, the Judge was willing to give me, as it was described, a sinecure position, a job just to keep me quiet.

I decided I needed to leave quickly. The next week I accepted the job at the Ashland Adolescent Center.

So, the brief excursion of the accidental social worker in Salem has ended. He has arrived back home in the Rogue Valley to become the Director of the Ashland Adolescent Center (AAC).

AAC was founded in 1974. It began life as a four-bed group home for girls. (It eventually evolved into the Lithia Springs Girls Program). The founders were members of a group of folks who self-described themselves as Reicheans. I have described my feelings about those folk earlier in this travelogue. Only to say, they combined some of Reich's teachings with a heavy dose of Essalen. While I didn't approve of some of their practices, some girls benefited from their work. They relaxed what I thought were some of the more egregious stuff several years before I arrived on the scene, and most of them had moved on to other work.

In 1977, the program was upgraded to what was then called a "youth care center" and three beds were added. It was a step above a group home. At the same time, the program was moved to what is now the Lithia Springs Girls House on Siskiyou Blvd. in Ashland.

I arrived on September 14th, 1985. I had been told what my salary would be (substantially less than my Salem job) but, on the day I arrived, the board chair told me that they could only afford to pay me several thousand dollars less than their promise. He went on to say that if I could raise the funds I could have the original offer. But I was so glad to be back in the valley, and so happy to be in a program again, I gladly agreed to work it out. Working in Salem, besides all the issues I have previously described, had robbed me of my center. Even though I worked for an agency that funded children's programs, days could go by without even talking about kids.

I should also mention that I had a plan. Before I accepted the position, I began a conversation with my old pals at YouthWorks. I believed at the time that the only way I could make a seven-bed residential program work was to merge with my old agency. They were very open to the idea.

The economics of residential care have changed little over the decades. There is an economy of scale issue. When you are operating a 24/7/365 residential program, you need three shifts. In some ways it matters little if you are housing 4 kids or 14. It turned out that 14 was considered to be the break-even point.

I had made a major contribution to the lot of residential programs when I was in Salem. When I arrived in Salem, I discovered that one third of the funding of the Juvenile Services Commission was subsidizing residential care. Upon further analysis, I discovered that most of the funding was going to programs outside the "power" corridor (I-5, from Portland to Eugene) - the reason being that those programs cut better deals with the state agency. The differential between those programs inside the "power" corridor to those outside was $15 to $20 dollars a day, per kid. Ten kids times ten dollars times 365 days - and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

I pointed this out to the Commission and recommended that they phase out residential funding over a period of two years. You see, the major goal of the Commission in those days was to reduce the number of kids going into the kiddy prisons. While residential care did that, it was the responsibility of another state agency to maintain those community beds.

This action - on the part of the Commission - forced the child welfare agency to create a universal rate model. The new rate model kicked in the year after I arrived at AAC and increased our budget by thousands of dollars.

Funding aside, my first real problem when I arrived was that there were only four girls in the program. (A quick admission: in all my prior writings I could safely assume that there would be no one extant to question my memory. But Suzanne Slavin, our Quality Assurance Director, started at AAC six months before me - so I expect her to contradict much of my recall.) The prior director had so alienated the state agency that their workers were not making referrals. During much of my early days, I would spend every Friday afternoon at the juvenile department and the child welfare office trolling for referrals. While the funding came from child welfare, many of those early referrals came from the juvenile department through child welfare. I had some good friends in both departments from my days at Star Gulch Ranch, so it was pretty easy to fill the house.

When last we left the accidental social worker, he had just landed back in Ashland in 1984 to take over as director of the Ashland Adolescent Center (now Lithia Springs Programs). At the time, it was a seven-bed youth care center for teenage girls. I had the choice of a bigger program in Seattle. Part of my decision making process was that I loved the valley and hated the big city (my Chicago experience seared the soul). But I also had discussions with the leadership at my old agency, YouthWorks, and was reasonably confident that they would agree to a merger.

You may recall that in my last chapter I spoke to the economy of scale in residential treatment. The financials require a minimum of 12 to 14 beds. I thought that a merger of the two agencies would mitigate the economy of scale issues or at least provide me with a larger footprint to go after additional beds.

And so began my second merger dance. The first was in 1980 when I worked for YouthWorks. A grant fell from the sky to pay for a feasibility study of a merger between YouthWorks, the Jackson County Shelter and Evaluation Center and Star Gulch Ranch. The study found that the merger was a good idea but that the existing management and boards would not agree to it.

I spent the next eleven months working with the YouthWorks leadership and my board to develop common By-Laws, personnel policies, etc. After all the work was done, the director of YouthWorks said he didn't want to do the merger. After spending almost a year on the project, I was furious. I was never given a direct answer (that I could accept) as to why he changed his mind. I suspected at the time that since I had hand-picked him as my replacement, he may have felt intimidated. I was not after his job. I was going to continue to work Salem and be something like a COO. I have to admit that contributing to my anger was a degree of hurt. I had hired much of the staff at YouthWorks. We hung out together a lot. I considered them to be close friends. I did not understand and could not accept the rejection. It took me some time to get over it - especially since I had no choice and had to continue working closely with YouthWorks.

The only strategy left to me, after the unsuccessful merger attempt, was to grow the program. In order to do that, I felt I needed to use all my Salem experience and contacts to develop additional capacity. I had been appointed to several state task forces, council's and advisory committees while in Salem, and continued my involvement while in Ashland. I was in the Children's Work Group, which was an advisory committee to children's mental health. I had been appointed to a council by Governor Atiyeh that advised him on youth jobs programs. There were others, including a regular monthly partners meeting with the Children's Services Division (CSD). CSD operated all programs for state wards in those days. This was before the creation of the Oregon Youth Authority.

I had been in the job only six months when my board chair called me and said he needed to talk. The tone of his voice informed me that this wasn't going to be a happy talk. It seemed that one of my staff had gone to him to complain about my absences from the program. I told him that I was doing what I believed needed to be done in order to save and grow the program. Luckily, he had enough faith in me to allow me the freedom to continue my efforts up north.

To jump ahead a few years: I believe it was late 1986 when there were several incidents at Star Gulch between boys and girls which forced the state to move the girls out of the program. I managed to convince officials at CSD to give us four of the beds. We quickly contracted for the expansion of the girls’ house (we continued to operate the program with part of the roof off!) and, within several months, did expand our contract to 11 beds, which was close enough to manage the economy of scale problem.

Neil Goldschmidt was elected Governor in '87. One of my peers in Portland was friends with his Director of Communications (Ginny Burdick is now a State Senator and I believe is running for either county commissioner in Multnomah or Portland City Council). A group of us who were friends and advocates thought that the time was right to really have some influence on the direction of children's policy in Oregon. We had a progressive governor who purported to care about kids and a connection in his office.

And so, the Menucha Seven was born.

When last we saw our accidental social worker, he was back in Ashland. Through a series of events and connections he was able to bring an additional four beds to what is now the Lithia Girls' Program. It is now 1987. Neil Goldschmidt had just been elected Governor.

I had made a lot of good friends during my sojourn in Salem. We were all frustrated with the quality and quantity of services for children and youth. We saw Neil's election as an opportunity to shake things up. As I mentioned in the last chapter, we had a connection to his director of communications. We arranged a three day retreat at Menucha outside of Portland. Mencuha is an ecumenical retreat center. There were seven of us. Most of us ran programs - although we did have one person from the Multnomah County administration and a public affairs coordinator for Pacific Power.

Gradually our conversation moved us to look at successful movements around the country. We were thinking big. This was before Jim Collins wrote “Good to Great” and introduced the universe to BHAG's (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). We were BHAG-ing big time. We talked about the civil rights movement and the environmental movement. We observed that what they both had in common was a variety of groups spanning a continuum. The civil rights movement had the Black Panthers on one end and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the other. The environmental movement had Earth First on one end and the Sierra Club on the other. We envisioned a movement to further the advancement of services to children and youth that would have a similar continuum.

Some of us were in on the creation of Children First of Oregon (our Sierra Club). I am happy to say that it is still alive and thriving. Another group of us created Kid PAC. It was a Political Action Committee intended to support candidates who would buy into our agenda. Sad to say, Kid PAC is gone. Two of the central players passed away and the rest of us lost spirit. Although, Duncan Campbell who is a major philanthropist (he is now serving on the Oregon Community Foundation Board and has his own children's foundation in Portland) and was the key contributor to the PAC is still active on children's issues. Those of us serving on the two children's program associations pushed for a merger of the two and steered the new agency towards being more of a trade association. For a brief period, we had three entities of our movement's continuum: Children First, Kid Pac, and the Oregon Alliance of Children's Programs - with interlocking directorates.

There were several retreats at Menucha. During one of them, we developed a white paper outlining some immediate actions that the new Governor could take to improve the service system for beaten, battered and abused children. We hoped it would serve as an introduction and that we would be welcomed with open arms into public policy discussions with the Governor and his staff. I guess we were pretty naive. Not only were we not invited to speak with the Governor or his staff, but he also proceeded to go in a totally opposite direction than we were recommending.

One of our key recommendations was to call for the consolidation of the state children's agencies. His major children's initiative was to create yet another state agency. Thankfully, Great Start was folded into the Commission on Children and Families by his successor.

As part of our strategy, I was delegated to contribute op-ed pieces to the Oregonian. After one such piece (which I honestly don't remember but must have been critical of the Governor), the Governor wrote a rejoinder to my opinion piece. I suppose it was some measure of our effectiveness or lack thereof that it annoyed him enough to respond.

In any event, I have many stories about our unsuccessful attempt to convince Neil to listen to the professionals - but I will spare you. I cannot say that I knew there was something kinky about him (he was outed by a Eugene legislator for having had sex with his children's babysitter some years back, and then paying her off not to tell) but I always felt there was something off about his oratorical call for helping kids.

Following chapters will continue to speak to the original work of the Menucha Seven and our efforts to fix a dysfunctional, fractured and fragmented system of care for children. I will spare you any suspense. In case you haven't noticed, we were not successful. But we did try. Oh how we tried.

I thought I might quit this part of the update. Kind of like Forest Gump just stopping his cross- country running. Bob said that some of you actually look forward to these back dates. So blame him.

When last we left our accidental social worker, he was feuding with Governor Goldschmidt on the opinion page of the Oregonian. My total disillusionment with Neil led me on a very strange trip. As many of you know I was born in Chicago. I lived my developmental years under the reign of Da Mayor. I am a registered Democrat. I like to say that I was probably voting Democrat before I was born. I would not be surprised if I were still voting Democrat in Chicago and will still be voting Democrat after I leave this cycle.

I had a close friend who was part of the Menucha Seven named Rose Otte. Rose was a Republican activist and organizer. She ran for the legislature down here and lost by fifty votes to Nancy Peterson. In large measure, we have Rose to "thank" for the last fifteen years of Republican control of the House. She and her counterpart Meredith traveled the state helping organize Republican candidates in the seminal election that saw Larry Campbell rise to the Speakership, ending 18 years of Democratic control.

Though Rose lived in Ashland, I met her when I worked in Salem. She was a member of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Council which I helped administer as part of my job there. We became fast friends and had endless debates about our politics. She was a Rockefeller Republican and I had been on the streets during the civil rights and anti-war days. Even through our fights we always respected and genuinely loved one another. Rose was a teacher by training and had a deep commitment to the disadvantaged kids. After she succumbed to breast cancer, the Oregon Alliance of Children's Programs created an award in her name to recognize Oregonians who have made significant contributions to the children of the state.

Rose was delighted that I couldn't stand Neil and introduced me to David Frohnmayer. The Frohnmayer family is a well known one in the valley. David is now the President of the University of Oregon. David was going to make a run for Governor. We met and I became (and still am) a big fan. (Last session he and I were waiting to meet with Senator Bates. He was there with a group of his folks from the university and I was there by my lonesome. When the Senator came out I just assumed that the University President would bump me. David said that since I had the appointment first, I should do my meeting with Alan. He embodies the definition of gentleman or, as they say in my country, he is a real “mensch".) He offered me a role in his campaign as one of two advisors on children's issues. The other was Robin Karr Morse who has since made a name for herself as a disciple of Barry Brazelton, the successor to Dr. Spock.

Well, as many of you know, Neil dropped out of the race over some allegations of an extramarital affair and Barbara Roberts stepped in to run against David. It became very difficult for me because I had worked with Barbara when she was in the legislature. She was a strong advocate for kids. But I kept my commitment to David and continued with his campaign. Maybe I am looking at the past through rose colored glasses, but I think I would have been offered a top state job if David had won. As it happened, a carpet bagger from California ran as an independent far to the right of David and captured 11% of the vote. David was far too moderate for those 11%. Barbara won. But the Republicans captured the House.

In the next episode we will continue my adventures with the Republican Speaker, Rose Otte, Robin Karr Morse and a cast of hundreds.

So, David Frohnmayer lost his bid for Governor to Barbara Roberts because of a third party candidate who ran to the right of David and picked off 11%. I had jumped on David's train because of my distaste for Goldschmidt. Much to my surprise he dropped out and Barbara jumped into the race.

At the same time, the Republicans captured the House for the first time in two decades. The Republicans elected Larry Campbell to the Speakership. My friend Rose Otte did a lot of grassroots organizing for the party and was in much favor. She was hired to be the communications director for the Senate Republicans. Rose was the person who introduced me to David. After he lost, she came up with the bright idea of introducing me to Larry Campbell. Larry who is now a lobbyist was and is a very large and very conservative guy.

My hobby horse at the time (I have long since given up) was the needless fragmentation of the children's services system(s). The session before legislative fiscal had published a report that showed 28 state agencies administering 135 separate line items in the state budget. You may recall that Goldschmidt's response to the report was to create another state agency. That's what finally drove me 'round the bend.

So, Rose got me an appointment with the new speaker. My idea back then was to merge five or six of the major agencies into one children's agency and move it out of the Department of Human Services (which did, and still does, manage the child welfare division, mental health, alcohol and drug, health, etc. etc. etc.). I thought this would appeal to a conservative Republican. My napkin calculations suggested the state might save $10 to $20 million that could be plowed back into services due to the elimination of much of the middle management at the state.

Probably the best way to illustrate the point is to look at the financing and management of Lithia Springs Program. Lithia has contracts with the state's child welfare, mental health, juvenile corrections, alcohol and drug, and education systems. Each of these systems requires separate accounting of funds, separate client management information systems, and separate biennial program audits - all to provide a comprehensive array of services to 30 kids. It’s insane!

Anyway, I did my spiel for Larry. He asked a few questions. He then looked at me in the imposing way he has and said, "Write a bill.” I told him I had never written a bill. He said that I shouldn't worry - that if I got the concept down, he would send it to legislative counsel who would put it into bill form.

I went home and wrote a paragraph describing what would have been the most massive change in children's services in the state's history. I brought it to legislative counsel. One of their attorneys put it into bill form. When that was done, I met with Larry again. He read the bill. He looked at me and said, "We can't do this.” So he did what all good politicians do when they lack the political will to make hard choices. He said that he wanted to create a task force and wanted Rose and I to do the planning. The planning included recommending participants, setting the agenda, and laying out hoped-for outcomes. To give him credit, it turned into a pretty impressive task force - as task forces go. It was comprised of six Senators, six Representatives, six advocates, six state agency heads, and six representatives from the business community.

I rallied quickly and, overflowing with way too much hubris, jumped into what turned out to be eighteen months of hard work and disappointment. Since I was one of the people setting up the task force, I easily got myself appointed. Again, to give Larry credit, he recognized that it could be construed as a wimp-out for a Republican railing against big government not to jump at an opportunity to take immediate action. He didn't want the words "task force" associated with the group. He also didn't want to set up a permanent commission or advisory council. So we settled on what had to be one of the more unusual names for one of these beasties: “The Children's Care Team.” I still shudder when the name comes up in conversation - with good reason as you will read.

I should have known this was going to be trouble. For one thing, I learned that having access to power is worthless unless you have the power to ensure the outcome. I went into this process believing that my ideas would be such no-brainers that they would, in the end, be implemented. Rose and I immediately reached out to the Menucha Seven and got two others appointed to the Children's Care Team. We were all blindsided.

There were two major problems going into this: One was the incredible inertia of the state agencies. The old truism about turning the Titanic cannot begin to describe how difficult it is to change the bureaucracies. (The front page of today's Oregonian contained an article concerning the dysfunction of the child welfare agency - which was the main complaint two decades ago.) The other issue was both ideological and personal. The other policy person for David Frohnmayer was Robin Karr Morse. Robin was evangelical in her belief that all human personality problems were developed in the first three years of life. We had raging arguments writing David's speeches and I had thought that we had reached an accommodation. The accommodation could be boiled down to "don't rob Peter to pay Paul.” Or, yes we needed to concentrate resources earlier but not at the expense of programs for older kids. The personal part was that her daughter was engaged to the Speaker's son which gave her a "little" more access to him. Shortly after my meeting with Larry sending us forth to create the Care Team, he added Robin and his chief of staff to our little planning team.

At one point in the process she had so brainwashed the Speaker that he was ready to sign on to a proposal to trash all the older kid programs and move the money into "zero to three" programs. I have been flip-flopping between Salem and Ashland. That is how my life felt back then. Working very hard on the big picture stuff and then coming back to Ashland to change screens and fix leaky faucets. When last we visited Ashland, we had just created the Lithia Springs School in partnership with the school district. You may recall that the reason I wanted to add the school was that much of our good work could go down the tubes if our kids had to attend the regular public school. Too much temptation. And we would have had too little time for treatment. Although most of our kids had/have serious educational deficiencies, the presenting problems are really the mental health and alcohol and drug issues.

And so, another major goal was to bring mental health services to Lithia. A running theme through this segment of the story is the desire to be in control of all these services. I wanted the ability to hire and fire. You may remember my Star Gulch story about the teacher who worked for the ESD and was precipitously fired one fine day. On other occasions, when outside agencies sent staff to any program I directed, there were almost always issues including incompetence, high turnover, etc.

This quest literally lasted decades and we still have to be very vigilant that we don't lose the funding.

The first foray into battle was to convince the state that our programs deserved blended funding from the state general fund and Medicaid. This model had been very successful with a group of programs called DART's. They had been created in the late 60's and consisted of both day treatment and psychiatric residential. I believe the first negotiation with the state lasted almost two years. The end result being that the state refused. The excuse was that it might jeopardize their Medicaid waiver (I won't begin to describe the whole waiver thing). So, after pursuing a collective solution, I began to head off on my own.

I remember my first staff meeting where I broached the possibility of providing mental health services. The response was not as enthusiastic as I had hoped. Mental health money comes with a lot of paper work and just a lot of work. After I gained grudging consent from the staff, I worked for another year or so gaining mental health certification which allowed us to bill Jackson County for outpatient mental health services. This actually worked well. This was before the Oregon Health Plan and before managed care of any kind. The reimbursement rate was very good.

After another year or two went by, the state went through one of its regular economic downturns. There was now an incentive to bring Medicaid into our rates. It would save the state tens of millions of dollars. Thus the waiver problem was forgotten and Residential Medical (RES MED) was born. There were nine or so agencies that had been billing Medicaid through direct billings to their counties. We all preferred the blended model. That's why we fought so hard at the beginning to make it happen. The problem was that the folks who were going to implement the thing were driven by a dollar savings motive more than let’s-do-what's-best-for-kids motive. We ended up losing a little money but simplifying the paperwork and billings.

During a subsequent economic downturn, the state realized it could save even more dollars by bringing the remaining thirty or so residential programs into the fold. Thus Behavioral Rehabilitation Services (BRS) was born. The problem for the nine RES MED programs was that the rate for BRS was far lower than RES MED. So we cut a deal with the state to allow us to bill for mental health services over and above the BRS rate.

This worked well until children's mental health was incorporated into OHP. Prior to that, we billed the counties (the same as the first iteration of our mental health services) who then received reimbursement from the state. Now the MHO's needed to be brought into the loop. The state neglected to write anything into their contracts with the MHO's to protect the nine former RES MED programs. So, each of us had to negotiate with our own MHO. We worked it out with Jefferson Behavioral Health. But every time there is a change in leadership, our little line item becomes a topic of conversation. All the other services are based on capitated rates, while ours is a fixed negotiated sum.

For those of you still reading...Congratulations! You have no idea what it was like having to negotiate the constant changes in our mental health funding. But if you thought that story was incomprehensible, stay tuned for the description of what it took to land alcohol and drug treatment certification.


But it took about a year for the crash to overwhelm us.




I have been describing my work at the state level recently. But I was working on a parallel track at the Ashland Adolescent Center (AAC - now the Lithia Springs Empire). When I got to Ashland, the program was essentially a seven bed group home. The first step was to add the four beds when Star Gulch ranch went all boys. The next steps were to try and add school, mental health, and alcohol and drug funding.

When I arrived there was a little pot of federal funding for a school program. We had just enough money to support a half time teacher preparing kids for their GED's in the living room of the girls’ house.

As this tale continues, you will hear many horror stories about battles to procure, save and increase school funding for Lithia. Buried in a file cabinet at Lithia School is a complete drawer with files named "school fiasco funding" 1 through 2,753. There is a continuation of the string starting at 2,754 in my new cabinet in the main office.

But this was the beginning. It turned out that there was a statute requiring districts that had residential programs within their boundaries to provide an educational program. The funding mechanism was horribly complex. The local district would send attendance records and bill to the State Department of Education which in turn would bill the youths' home districts. Then the home districts would send checks to, in this case, Ashland. Well, no one had bothered to trigger the program. I convinced Ashland to get with the program. But there was still a big, big problem. How could I support a program that only received reimbursements 18 months after the fact?

There was a banker in my Rotary club that some of you know named Bob Johnson. He convinced his bank to provide us with a line of credit based on this crazy funding system.

I used to work out and play basketball with the Special Ed Director of the Ashland district. One Friday afternoon, we were at the gym. It was June of '87, I think. He told me that they had been sending their difficult kids to the ESD alternative school. You will recall my battles with the ESD. His superintendent was no more enamored of the ESD superintendent than I. I had just worked out almost all the bugs in the funding for the girls and was preparing a September roll out of the new education program. He asked me to come to a meeting with him and his superintendent on Monday morning. I arrived at 9 A.M. By ten we had hammered out a deal. I would be combining our 11 girls with 14 alternative school students from Ashland. Once again it had nothing to do anything I was doing right - but everything to do with their antipathy for the administration at ESD.

So that left eight weeks to find teachers, develop curricula, and find a place for what is now Lithia Springs School. We found a home in the basement of the Congregational Church, hired a great group of teachers, and were ready for the first day of school.

So, I am moving back and forth between my work at the legislature and work at what was then the Ashland Adolescent Center. It's about 1987. Back in Salem, I was spending most of my time at meetings of the Children's Care Team. You will recall that the Speaker of the House, Larry Campbell, formed the group when he found himself unable to muster the political will to consolidate the state agencies serving children. I had two meetings each month. One was for the full committee and one was a sub-committee meeting. I was appointed the chair of the subcommittee on child abuse and neglect. My role was to lead the group through an exploratory process in order to understand the systems in place to care for beaten, battered, and abused kids. At the beginning I was still Larry's golden boy and could do no wrong. Of course, there wasn't a terrible lot I could do wrong listening to speaker after speaker list their agency's particular importance in the system.

You may remember that this all started with my modest proposal to the Speaker: Consolidate the state agencies. The agencies understood that genesis and when called before the group they spent much of their time trying to show how they were tirelessly collaborating with the other state agencies. This became almost comical in that each agency head would display a diagram showing the "system of care", "integrated service system", or the "comprehensive integrated system of care". All the diagrams were exactly the same. They contained a big circle in the middle with spokes moving out from the big circle to smaller circles surrounding the big middle circle. The only difference, in the eight or nine such diagrams, was that the presenting agency was always the big circle in the middle.

With every agency seeing itself as the center of the Universe, I held out little hope for change coming from the state agencies. (Parenthetically: As you have been reading in my current updates, if anything, the fragmentation of the system(s) has worsened.) But we plowed on. One of my most interesting encounters was at a two or three day retreat. I was assigned a room with a very conservative Republican Senator. He was probably twenty years older then I and we were truly an odd couple. But over than weekend I gained a good deal of respect for him. In the jargon of the day, I guess you could say we bonded. (I saw him last year at a State Chamber of Commerce forum. He was still in good health and we instantly picked up where we left off.)

One of the issues that came up concerned the privatization of the system. As it turns out, much of the system is already outsourced. The private non-profit sector provides almost all of the community-based residential treatment and shelter care. We provide much of the alcohol/drug treatment and mental health treatment. Government operates the child protective care, foster care, and the kiddie jail systems. Some of us had long been advocating for the outsourcing of the foster care system. There have been some feeble experiments in the northern coastal region of the state to privatize juvenile detention. My roommate was all for privatization, as you may imagine. During one break I told him that I agreed with him - with one exception. I said that I couldn't see privatizing child protective services. After all, I told him, these are the folks who go into homes and often remove children. I said - expecting complete agreement - that he wouldn't want someone from Singer Sewing Machine or Boeing taking his kids away. He looked at me very calmly and said he didn't have a problem with that. I was stunned - not realizing, until then, how far that ideology could go.

So, we are back in Ashland. I had been describing the history behind Lithia School and the mental health certification for that program. The next step was to bring alcohol and drug services into the program. We had been contracting with the local alcohol and drug program to provide services. There were two problems: The first was that they wanted us to transport the group to Medford several times a week. I realized the other problem one day when I walked into the classroom in which the contracted drug and alcohol counselor was conducting a group. The boys in the group were totally out of control. They were screaming and yelling. They were jumping out of their seats. They were bouncing off the walls. After doing a little digging, I discovered that the guy leading the group was trying to do the exact same exercise that the boys had already done that very morning in their mental health group. I knew then that the only way I could get control of the treatment and curriculum was to hire our own staff.

Thus began a two-year odyssey. There was a huge amount of paper work to complete. In addition, I had to bring the proposal to the county alcohol and drug advisory council for its approval. Understandably, the local alcohol and drug program was not thrilled at any potential competition. Back then funds were even scarcer than today. It was very awkward because a significant number of council members either worked for or were board members of the other agency. At any rate, the council eventually agreed to approve our certification as an alcohol and drug treatment center.

Months go by. I did not want to alienate the bureaucrats at the department from the get go, so I held off calling. Finally, I couldn't stand it any longer and called. As it turned out, it was lucky that I did. They had lost our application. Another week or two assembling all the materials again. Sent it to Salem. Months go by. Finally a letter arrives giving us conditional approval to begin providing mental health services. The key condition: successfully operating a drug and alcohol program for six months.

Six months pass. The folks from Salem arrive for the fateful site visit.

I need to step back a bit and remind you of the last Ashland episode where I described the ongoing craziness around mental health funding. Because of that, I considered our program to be a mental health program that happened to have a significant number of kids with alcohol and drug issues. They call that dual diagnosis. The reasoning behind the decision to go with mental health was all funding-related. There were a few alcohol and drug residential programs around the state but the funding differential was huge.

The problem was that the state folks had never funded an outpatient drug and alcohol program in a residential setting before. We were a very unique beastie. For years they were not able to get over that fact - and it still rears its head every now and then - although it is mitigated by the drug and alcohol treatment services we deliver at CrossRoads.

About three quarters of the way through the site visit, the lead auditor comes up to me in the hall with a very serious expression on her face. She said that we really needed to talk. I thought to myself, "Well there goes two years of work down the tubes.” So I guided her to one of our therapy rooms. We sat down. She looked me in the eyes and said, "These kids have serious alcohol and drug problems.” I think/hope I kept a straight face. But what I was thinking was, "What else in the world would have motivated me to work with (till that point) the most dysfunctional, cumbersome, incoherent bureaucracy in the universe other than the fact that my kids had serious alcohol and drug problems?"

She went on. "You really need to be an alcohol and drug treatment program!” I thought to myself –right! I will spend another two or three years working to get residential drug and alcohol treatment licensure only to have less funding to do the work. She never really got it. As I said, we remained an anomaly in the drug and alcohol universe for many years.

Thus, the birth of our alcohol and drug treatment services.

So, back in Salem with the Children's Care Team: It’s, I believe, 1991. The team had been practically rived asunder by Robin Karr Morse and her insistence of moving funding from programs for teens to programs for the birth-to-three population. The team was pretty evenly divided and so could come to no agreements.

Finally, a high level executive from one of the power companies who was serving on the team took charge. I won't go into the really brilliant way he pulled it off but it was a thing of beauty. Oh, we didn't leave singing old folk songs or anything, but he was able to tone down the virulence of the rhetoric. Those of us fighting to protect teen programs were able to reach an accommodation which we called the "rob Peter to pay Paul" clause in the bill. It essentially said that new programs for young children needed new funding. It has since been abandoned over the years, but it was a small victory and all we probably could have hoped to accomplish. Since no new money came with the bil,l the whole exercise seemed futile. But I met some great people and have been able to maintain some of those relationships these many years later.

At some point in the process, I was bound and determined to get something concrete out of all this effort. I had the idea to change the child abuse reporting statute. My recollection of what triggered me was an article that had the headline "Young Boy Suffers Abuse" or something like that. The article itself was a horrific rendition of sodomy, satanic rites, and torture of a nine year-old boy. Words mean something. This youngster did not suffer abuse. He suffered torture. He suffered rape. The existing statute had the reporting categories of physical abuse, sexual abuse and emotional abuse. I wanted to change the words. I wanted the first two categories to read physical assault and rape.

I had just enough grace left with the Speaker and the group to get them to endorse the proposed bill. I was not going to get - nor did I expect to get - any real political help. So, I took the bill through the process. My main challenge was the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. He was very conservative and was also very uncomfortable with the topic. I had two appointments with him. Both times he basically shined me on. Since I wasn't a constituent and had only a tepid endorsement from the Children's Care Team, he felt he was under no political pressure.

I made my third - and what I knew was going to be my final - attempt to get something out of two years of effort. I had begged the Speaker's son to go with me. He was also one of the Speaker's key staff. I was waiting outside the Speaker’s office for his son to accompany me to the meeting. It was about five minutes to noon. My appointment was for noon. The Speaker and his staff were locked into a meeting and could not be interrupted. I was despondent. I had driven up just for this meeting. I knew that if I went in alone, I was finished. With two minutes remaining to make the appointment, the Speaker and his son walked out of the office. I rushed up to them.

Remember, I was deep in the Speaker's dog house. But, he was/is one of those "hearty hail and well met guys", and so his first response was to reach his hand out to me and ask what I was doing up there. I told him that Craig had promised to go with me to meet with the Judiciary chair. During this short encounter, I watched his eyes shift. He remembered I was in the dog house. He said gruffly, "Well, good luck but don't make Craig late for lunch.” Then his eyes shifted again and began to twinkle. He knew that I knew that he had momentarily forgotten I was in the dog house. Somehow that mutual recognition must have kicked in some memory of when I was “golden.” With the twinkle in his eye he said, "Oh hell, I'll go with you."

We walked down the hall and the three of us walked into the chair's office. None of the waiting for staff to let us in, mind you. The chair was sitting behind his desk. Remember that the Speaker was/is a large imposing figure. The Speaker leaned over the desk until their faces were inches apart. He looked the chair in the eye and said, "Take care of my boy," and walked out.

The chair did his best to save face. He first tried to remember what in the world my bill was all about and what his objections had been. That lasted all of two minutes. Then he immediately capitulated and agreed that he would bring it up for a hearing and work session. The bill passed out of committee and the full House in days and, since I had the Senate wired, it was on the Governor's desk in three weeks. I am sure it is not a record, but it certainly beat any other experience before or since.

Like my daddy used to say rather ruefully, "It's not what you know but who you know".


Back in Ashland: It’s about 1990. A program called Star Gulch Ranch (you may recall that's where I worked when I first arrived in the Valley) was going to close its doors. The Ashland Adolescent Center (now Lithia Springs) had already picked up four beds from Star Gulch when the program stopped serving young women. The state agency that contracted with Star Gulch approached me with the possibility of taking over that contract. The subsequent months were totally devoted to putting this project together.

The process was complicated by two factors. You will recall that we reached an agreement with the school district to operate an alternative school comprised of the 11 girls from Lithia Springs and about 15 students from the high school. Simultaneous to the announcement that we would be operating an 11-bed boys program, the school district announced that it was going to pull its students out of the school. Also, I had reached an agreement with the YMCA that, in exchange for my writing the original grants to build their new building, they would include a space for Lithia Springs School. It was a good space and of course allowed access to all the recreational activities at the Y. After three years, the Y was already bursting at its seams and asked that we leave.

The addition of the 11 boys would provide for the critical mass to allow me to continue to operate the school but I had to find a space. Oh, and there was the small problem of finding a house for the boys. To that point I did not have the need to site a facility. Theoretically, I knew what the process entailed. It was lucky that I hadn't the experience, otherwise I might have told the state folks to find some other provider. We found what we believed was a perfect place. It was built as an intermediate care facility for seniors. Lots of bedrooms. The state folks were feeling generous and gave us $50,000 to expand the kitchen and build a few more bedrooms and offices. For those of you who have seen the current boys’ facility, you can see why we thought it would be a great fit. It is surrounded by play fields. It is situated between the middle school and an elementary school with even more play fields.

And so with some false confidence, we began by speaking with the neighbors. We sat down with all the neighbors surrounding the home and let them know who we were. Some of them were interested in seeing our girls' facility. All of them were convinced that the boys would not be a threat to them or their property values. However, when we officially began the conditional use process, the roof fell in.

(A short digression: During the time we were negotiating for the sale of the home - and with the deal in escrow - Ashland experienced a severe freeze. The folks who were supposed to be taking care of the home for the absentee landlord forgot to empty the water pipes and shut off the water. The water pipes are located in the ceiling. When they burst, the roof actually did fall in. It’s a little eerie that sixteen years later a very similar event occurred at our Talent facility, which is to be the future boys’ home.)

But the metaphorical fall began at the first conditional use hearing. Word had gotten out and a very vocal group argued that locating the facility between the elementary school and middle school would put all those kids at risk. We explained that they should be more worried about the kids not in the program as our kids had twenty-four hour supervision. They were unpersuaded.

I don't mean this to be pejorative, but the dissent was coming from an evangelical church group. Many of you know that I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish tradition. Although I have back-slid, my three sisters and their families all remain in that tradition. So, I have a good deal of understanding and respect for their beliefs.

After several one-on-ones with the leadership of the group, I decided to set up a town hall meeting where they could all vent their concerns. Two of the girls in our program were upset that there was so much antagonism towards the placement of the boys’ house. They wanted to attend the town hall meeting and support the effort.

Now you need to know that I used to bring the girls to Salem every legislative session to testify in front of one committee or another. I never coached them on what to say. I gave them context. I told them what the hearing room looked like and what the issue on the table was. But I never told them what to say. I was never disappointed. As I said early in this story, one of my most important life lessons is that youngsters match our expectations.

So there we all were one weekday night in the library at the middle school. There were some supporters. I brought a few staff and the two girls. But the room was mainly filled with those folks who were vehemently opposed to the siting of the school. Everyone had a chance to talk. The tension and anger in the room was palpable. Finally, the two girls asked to speak. The first young woman spoke to the way the girls’ home operated, and why she believed that boys deserved the same opportunity. The second young woman stood and pretty much repeated the same sentiment. And then she paused and said something like, "But that's not the real reason I think you should support this home. It's because they helped me find Jesus!" The effect was astounding - maybe I should say miraculous. The opposition melted completely.

A word of explanation: We are forbidden from promoting religion. But we do provide opportunities for the kids in our program to explore and/practice their spiritual path. This young woman had found an evangelical youth group with a charismatic youth minister and attended groups regularly. In her mind we had helped her find her faith.

Next: A not so miraculous search for a home for Lithia School …

So, in the last episode I described the effort to site the Lithia Boys house. Another adventure was the effort to find a home for Lithia Springs School. You will recall that we had found a great home in the newly built YMCA. Then, the YMCA began growing exponentially and they needed our space. Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) was exacerbated by the zoning laws. There were only so many places in Ashland were it would be legal to locate a school, without a lot of planning department and public hearings hassles.

We must have looked at two dozen places. The people at the Y were getting a little cranky. I think that they thought that we weren't working hard enough to find a new space. Finally, we found the existing facility. I don't think I can describe how desperate we were and how much imagination it took to see a school through the rubble, rubbish, and cobwebs. The site was an abandoned factory that had manufactured dental chairs. It looked as if it had last seen service in the 1920's. It was dark, dank and stank.

But I was intrigued because I long had a dream of building a TV production studio and teaching our kids how to make videos. I thought that we could make a little income producing PSAs for the non-profit center. It was a takeoff on my Chicago sojourn, where we taught kids graphic arts and made a little revenue printing newsletters and the like.

You may recall that I had received an associate degree in broadcast engineering and thought I could work my way through the technical parts of the studio. We had already made a small start. Through some small grants, and collaboration with the Arts Council, we had purchased some cameras and a rudimentary editor. The Arts Council supplied an artist-in-residence to teach kids how to produce video. Howard Schreiber was the guy, and I still see him every so often as he works at RVTV. As much as I loved being in the Y, there was little room to do the work.

So, when I saw this large empty space, I was able to look past what looked like a bombed out building and see a studio with a real control room, professional lighting, and lots and lots of space.

While all this was happening, I had written a friend of mine who lived in the Bay area about the TV studio dream. She wrote back to tell me that Madonna was going to have a baby and decided she would turn her life around and start giving back. She gave me an address back East and told me that I should give it a try. I thought, "Right"!

I went back to my grant writing. After writing twenty or thirty grants - to get the big studio going - I paused and thought to myself that I probably had as much chance with Madonna as I had with some of the foundations I was working on. So, I pared my thirty page proposal down to two or three, and sent it via snail mail back East. It was a Wednesday.

When I walked into the office on Monday morning the phone was ringing. I answered, and a guy asked if I was Arnie. I admitted as much and he went on to say that "MO" had read the proposal and she loved it. Not only was she going to give me the full $300,000 I was asking for to build the studio, but she wanted me to appear on a marathon fundraiser at Universal Studios. I would have a half hour to make my pitch and anything that came in during that half hour would be donated to Lithia Springs. And there was more. She was so moved by my description of the girls' program that she wanted to hire me to start programs like it across the country.

When I picked myself up off the floor all I could say was: if two or three pages made that much of an impact on "MO," maybe she would like to see the full on thirty-page job. He said that he was sure she would. This time I over-nighted it.

There ensued quite a few letters and phone calls going over more of the details. The marathon was approaching. I was being pressured by my staff to buy a new suit.

As the time approached, I called back East to get more info on my transportation and hotel plans. All this time I had been talking to this guy who purported to be her manager. This time a woman answered the phone. When I introduced myself, she gushed about how much she loved the proposal and how much she admired the work I was doing. She then proceeded to tell me an absolutely horrific story of rape, torture and abuse.

The bottom line: Shortly thereafter, I received a letter from my friend who had originally turned me on to "MO". It contained an article from the Examiner saying that the DA had decided not to press charges against a woman who was masquerading as Madonna. She had duped a production company in London - they had invested tens of thousands of dollars in preparation for the fundraising marathon. They had made contact with dozens of bands, booking them for the show. She had duped the State of California. Based on a fax that promised to match a million dollar state grant to a child development program in SF, the state dutifully sent the program a check for one million dollars.

The DA said that the woman was severely disturbed and should not be charged. I believed that the woman I spoke with truly believed she was Madonna and had undergone severe rape, torture and abuse.

I felt that I came out OK. At least I hadn't invested in a new suit.

I thought I would try and put together a short history of the mergers and merger attempts I have been involved in over the years. If you are easily moved to tears, you might want to skip this installment.

I wrote earlier in this account of the first attempt in 1980. Star Gulch Ranch, YouthWorks and the Jackson County Shelter and Evaluation Center received grant funding for a feasibility study. The study found that it was not only feasible but would yield significant improvements. However, the study also found that it would not happen because the boards were not ready to yield control.

The next attempt was in 1984. When I returned to Southern Oregon from my educational but painful and wet sojourn in Salem, I did so with the understanding that there would be a merger between YouthWorks and the Ashland Adolescent Center (now Lithia Springs). After a year of building organizational charts, personnel policies, by-laws, etc. the management of YouthWorks decided that they did not want to go through with it. As I was close personal friends with some of them and I felt that I wasn't given the real reason for their (dare I say) betrayal. I felt miserable. I had spent most of a year working hard to make it happen at the expense of not spending time on growing my agency.

And they say that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome!

I cannot remember the exact years, but there were two unsuccessful attempts to merge Lithia with the Shelter and Evaluation Center. Again, I spent a good part of two years planning the infrastructure for the new agency. Each time the director pulled the plug. Like Charlie Brown - trying year after year to kick the football held by Nancy.

The next attempt was probably in the early nineties. There was a program in Rogue River called Ploughshares. It was a day treatment program for kids under 12. I met the director at Jackson County Community Services Consortium meetings (oh my, I haven't even written about the Consortium - there's a good two or three episodes of material there - which is a good thing because I was thinking that I was getting perilously close to the present). He had heard my rap about mergers and approached me after one meeting suggesting we go out for coffee and talk about the potential. This was, I thought, a major breakthrough. No one until that time had ever approached me suggesting merger. I was pretty excited. The agency was located on a beautiful piece of riverfront.

Another 11 months of meetings with staff and boards. Another 11 months of planning the infrastructure. Another 11 months of building by-laws, personnel policies, health care plans, and on and on and on. Now would be the time for Lucy to pull the ball away. Well she did, but not in the usual way. The usual way was for management to get cold feet. This time I was blindsided from a totally different direction. It turned out that the board - while negotiating with me - were (unbeknown to me) also negotiating with Family Friends out of Grants Pass. Those of you who have been around a while will find it hugely ironic that the negotiator for Family Friends was none other than our old friend and colleague, Lois Widen. The board fired the director and sent me a two-sentence letter announcing their intention to merge with Family Friends. Ugh!

Another merger I was only involved with on the periphery, was the merger between Dunn House, the Rape Crisis Council (now SAVS), HelpLine and Parent Anonymous (now our parent education program). I dipped my foot into this one, but realized early on it wasn't going to work. I know that Gerry Sea can recount merger pathos that would equal or exceed mine.

In 1994 I was approached by the Director of Crisis Intervention Services (the merger referred to in the above paragraph). He thought it would be a good idea to merge our agencies. Thoroughly conditioned by now, I led him to a file cabinet in a corner of my office. The file cabinet had one drawer completely dedicated to my failed merger attempts. He said he wanted the contents of the drawer. I gladly piled his arms high with the files. I helped him to his car. I told him that I would support any process, but that I would no - under any circumstances - be the point person. I would not under any circumstances prepare to kick the ball held by Nancy.

So, here we are. Maybe insanity has its moments.
So, last week’s installment contained an egregious error. Instead of Nancy pulling the ball away from Charlie Brown it is, of course, Lucy. I hope I can be forgiven for mixing up my cartoon characters.

I thought since Passover is approaching I would reach back further into history and recount one of my young adult experiences.

Many of you know that I was brought up in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. I rebelled for a variety of reasons and was expelled from my parochial school in my senior year. It was particularly difficult as I was then serving as the president of the student council. The main reason I was given for my expulsion was that I was a heretic. During one bible class, we were studying the invasion of Canaan. The bible says that Joshua held his arms in the air and stopped the sun in order to give his troops time to finish the battle. I pointed out that we now know that the Earth revolves around the sun and it is the spinning of the planet that allows for night and day. I also pointed out that it is the centrifugal force created by the spinning that keeps us all hanging on. Therefore, if Joshua stopped the sun he was actually stopping the spinning in which case why didn't everyone and everything simple float off into space?

I should have been expelled for simply being obnoxious. I later learned that my expulsion actually had political roots - but that's another story.

So, in the fall of my senior year, I found myself in a public school for the first time in my life. After studying Talmud for five years from 8 AM till noon and not starting secular studies till 1:30 PM and finishing at 5:30 PM, I now found myself starting at 8:30 AM and being done by 2:30 PM. After reading the Russians, and debating how many angels could dance on the end of a pin, I was now asked to draw a map of the US (outline provided so all I had to do for the assignment was to color in the states). Grades were awarded on our color scheme and ability to stay between the lines.

I was bored, had way too much time on my hands, and was clinically depressed. One of my aunts was a “balla busta”, which loosely means a mover and shaker in the community. She loved me. She was worried. She managed to convince the Yeshiva (a Jewish seminary) to take me in. It was a grand mistake, but I was too depressed to do anything but do as I was told.

Talmud class was taught by the heir apparent to one of the major Hassidic tribes in New York. He was paying his dues teaching the senior Talmud class in the Chicago Yeshiva.

All I wanted by this time was to graduate. So, I decided I would do the minimal amount in order to achieve that goal. It’s probably hard for most of you reading this to understand how difficult it was to sit through four hours of Talmud everyday - and stay sane.

The Rabbi held a very dim view of my performance, but probably thought that I was just incapable of learning. The Talmud is written in several different iterations of Hebrew, Aramaic, and a host of pigeon dialects. Commentaries surround the central piece. The library had a substantial collection of another 2,000 years of commentaries.

In February I decided (mostly out of boredom) to show him that I was choosing not to participate. So, I woke up just long enough to study one of the central questions in Orthodox Judaism. The question? Whether or not to have four or five cups of wine during the Passover Seder. We spent a full week and a half studying this burning question.

It turns out - in case you are interested - that the bible says that God took the Jews out of Egypt five separate times. The debate centered on the fact that four of the entries are synonyms. The fifth is a repeat of one of the four.

In order to make my point, I not only studied the commentaries in the Talmud itself but also went to the library and did even more research there. He was dumfounded. He was even more dumfounded when after that week and a half I went back to sleep.

Shortly thereafter, I was seen in a car with my girlfriend, her girlfriend, and one of my classmates. This was a Sunday afternoon. Sunday afternoons were the only free time we had. We studied Talmud on Sunday mornings. On Monday morning I was called into the principal's office and, for the second time in a year, was expelled. Apparently I was considered to be a very bad influence.

Crestfallen, I went to say so long to my Talmud teacher. I broke down. I could not deal with not graduating. He felt sorry for me and helped me cut a deal. I could graduate with my class as long as I didn't come to school. Thus ended my senior year.

In case you are wondering, the Talmud concludes that we will have to wait for the coming of the Messiah to answer the four or five cups question. Looking back over the decades, my answer would now be it would depend on whether or not it’s Mogen David or some Oregon merlot.



So, in the last update I went way back into prehistory to talk about my early upbringing with the intention of telling a Passover-related story. I thought I might go a little forward from where I left off last time.

You will recall that I was expelled from the Yeshiva in March of my senior year but allowed to graduate on the condition that I didn't physically attend classes so as to not negatively influence my classmates.

After graduation, I attended the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus. I was still reeling from the experiences of my senior year and was not really ready for school. The Circle - as everyone called it - was one of those schools built to accommodate all the folks coming home from World War II with their GI Bill school funding. In other words, it was a working class school. Nothing wrong with that. Only it seemed to me to be an extension of the Chicago public school system which I had already briefly and unhappily experienced.

In any case, I ran away to what I thought was the safest place a nice Jewish boy could run: Israel. I saved up and bought a one-way ticket. I arrived in Tel Aviv. I was seventeen and totally freaked out. I had done just enough research to know that the way to get to a kibbutz - which was my goal - was to go to one of the eighteen political party offices. I have previously told the story of finding the party office closest to the hotel where I was staying, and picking a spot on a map.

I ended up at a kibbutz called Beth Keshet (literally: House of the Rainbow). I have already reported that on May Day I discovered that the political party I had chosen was the Communist Party. OOPS!

There was something comforting about not having to worry about money, food, clothing or any of the necessities of life. The work was hard but after getting in condition I actually thrived. I did everything. I washed dishes. I culled sunflowers. I picked oranges, grapefruit, lemons, plums, and apricots. Lemons were the worst. I could never get the hang of not getting skewered by the thorns.

Being seventeen, I was somewhat tone deaf to the politics swirling around the region. I did perk up when the Arab English radio stations began playing martial music, interrupted only by rants exhorting their listeners to drive the Israelis into the sea. I also began to realize this might be something I ought to be paying more attention to when I was moved from the orchards to building steps for the air raid shelters.

One morning I rose early to catch the bus to Tiberius. My visa needed to be renewed. I arrived in Tiberius in no time and had my visa punched and was back at the bus station by 9 AM. Suddenly, the air raid siren began to wail. Now you need to know that all the time I was growing up in Chicago, every Tuesday at 10:30 AM there was an air raid siren test. I just presumed that this, too, was just a test - until I started to notice the people in the station beginning to run. Then I began hearing the unmistakable sounds of artillery shells whistling through the sky. Then the impact of the shells crashing into buildings.

To be honest, I think I must have gone into some sort of fugue state. I vaguely remember hugging a concrete post. The whole event couldn't have lasted for more than a few minutes. I got on the bus and was dropped off at the foot of the hill. I began the trek up to the kibbutz and was greeted by the sixteen and seventeen-year olds rolling down the road in the huge farm tractors. Although the kibbutz was ostensibly communist, there was definitely a pecking order. The guys (mostly guys) who got to drive the biggest toys were on top of the heap.

They were smiling from ear to ear enjoying the honor of driving the big toys. When they saw me they started shouting, "War! War! War!"

As it turned out - throughout the night before - the Israeli radio stations had been broadcasting secret codes that instructed soldiers to report for duty. For some reason (I don't know if they thought I was a spy) they didn't tell me as I was getting on the bus for Tiberius. By the time I arrived back at the kibbutz, all the males and most of the females between 18 and 60 were gone.

I later learned that the five or six other "zemanim" (foreign non-members of the kibbutz) had been told and offered the opportunity to take the last planes out of El Al Airport. By the time I arrived, the airport was closed to commercial traffic. So, prior to becoming the accidental social worker, I accidentally became involved in a war.

As my luck would have it, the safest place for a nice Jewish boy to run to, turned out to be "not quite" - as the year was 1967.

… to be continued …

So, when last we left off, I had just returned to the kibbutz after living through a shelling in Tiberius. The war only lasted seven days, so my memories are a jumble of impressions.

With most of the workforce off to battle, the kibbutz needed labor to get the farm work done. Hence, groups of city kids from Tel Aviv showed up to work in the fields. One day, a group of these youth and I were culling sun flower plants. It was back-breaking work. One needed to stay hunched over a row of six-inch sunflower plants and cull them so that we were left with one plant per foot. By this time in my stay, I was in great shape. I had spent several weeks throwing bales of hay onto a trailer and then into the barn. I had gained 35 pounds. I was trying to impress the young women from Tel Aviv and so was far out in the lead.

Well, you need to know that in '67 the population of Israel was only about two million. Every time a plane flew overhead (and they were flying over constantly) the group would look up and be able to tell the make, model year, and who was flying every plane. "Look, there goes Uncle Shmule in a French Phantom that came off the assembly line in '58". OK, so I exaggerate a little, but not by much.

At any rate, there I was out in front, culling sunflowers for all I was worth, when a plane came over the hill. It was flying lower than any I had ever seen - maybe two or three hundred feet over our heads. I had watched enough World War II movies as a kid to recognize it as a B17 or B52 bomber. Since so many planes were in the skies, my first instinct was to just keep on 'a-cullin'. Some survival instinct must have kicked in, because I turned around to see my fellow cullers on the ground screaming at me. Since the noise of the bomber was so loud, I could not hear them. But from their gestures and their wide open mouths I could only assume they were screaming something like, "Get down, imbecile!”

We learned later that it was the only Arab plane that got through to Israel proper. It was a Syrian bomber that had just dropped a bomb on Haifa. Fortunately, the bomb was a dud and did not explode. Unfortunately, it knocked a woman off her balcony and killed her.

In the meantime, I had dropped to the ground. This whole episode could not have lasted more then thirty seconds. We need not have worried about the Syrians paying us any attention. As soon as the bomber cleared the hill, it was immediately followed by two Israeli fighter jets who blew it out of the sky practically over our heads.

Not knowing it was the only plane at the time, we were immediately taken back to the kibbutz.

Thus was my disdain for war and violence reinforced. But the real visceral exposure to what battle could do, even to the victors, was yet to come.

I haven't explained the purpose of these writings for a while, and some of you newer folks might be wondering. I first began telling the story of my life in social work over a year ago to give you all some idea of my roots in the field. I have entitled it “the story of the accidental social worker.” In the last few weeks - for no conscious reason - I have begun to delve a little deeper into my history. For you psychotherapists reading this, it should give you all a rich field of insight into my character.

The time: 1967 - the place: a sunflower field in Israel. A Syrian bomber had just been blown out of the sky by two Israeli jets. The seven days of war are a blur to me. Just a series of episodes that stand out.

The Israelis felt they had the external battle well in hand. Their real fear was for "fifth column" attacks. That is, they were afraid that the Arabs living in Israel would attack. There was a substantial Arab town near my kibbutz. So, being one of the few guys left on the kibbutz under 60 and over 15, I was given guard duty. The silos in Israel doubled as watch towers. I had to climb up and spend the nights watching for attacks. They gave me an Uzi, although I don't remember anyone actually teaching me what to do with it.

I do remember an Uzi going off accidentally in the mess hall one evening and freaking everyone out. Those things had hair triggers. I also remember the stark terror at climbing up the outside of the silo. The experience probably was the genesis of my fear of heights.

Once I got up, I was "treated" to an incredible fire works display. The wars with Egypt and Jordan were over after a day or two (the war with Jordan for Jerusalem was to go on till the bitter end). So, mostly what remained was Syria.

A little bit of geography. The Golan Heights were owned by the Syrians. Think of the Golan as a massive Table Rock. It is a large plateau with a steep drop off on the Israeli side. The Syrians had been digging in the Golan since the '48 war. They had artillery placements and bunkers on the plateau. More troublesome for the Israelis, were artillery placements embedded in the face of the cliffs overlooking Israeli settlements on the east bank of the Tiberius. It was a normal occurrence for them to lob shells into the kibbutzim below. This area was (is) the banana belt of Israeli agriculture. It was (is) beautiful and extremely productive land.

So, as the United Nations was trying to broker a cease fire over the last few days of the war, Israeli jets were flying over my head in three minute intervals on bombing runs - intended to take out the bunkers and artillery placements. It was a terrible and awesome sight.

After the war, we were taken on a tour of the Golan. It looked like a moonscape. The Syrians had built underground cities that the Israelis were determined to destroy. And they did.

But the bitterest fighting of the war was in Jerusalem. The Israelis could not employ the Golan strategy in Jerusalem. There were far too many holy sites in the city. So, fighting was building by building and often hand to hand. We knew that something must have gone terribly wrong when the top general got on the radio and warned that any atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers would be punished by death.

There was an American I used to hang out with on the kibbutz. He was a couple years older and had made the decision to live there permanently, and so was in the army. He was a typical kid from New York. He had shockingly red hair and blue eyes and a smile that seemed tattooed on his face. A very happy-go-lucky guy. When he got back from the war, he had undergone the most dramatic change I have ever witnessed. In seven days, he had been totally transformed. He had been in some of the worst fighting in Jerusalem. He refused to talk at all. It was tragic.

Thirty years later, they are still fighting. It is beyond tragic …