MY LIFE BEGAN IN KENTUCKY

     Two years before I would move to Kentucky the only thing I knew about the state was that Daniel Boone was intimately connected with it and the grass there was blue. All of it, I was pretty certain. Correct or not it was more knowledge than I had about what I wanted to do professionally with my life, now that I'd finished college.

     I did know, however, what I DIDN'T want. I didn't want to go to Vietnam. So, when I got invited to join up, I told my draft board that I was a conscientious objector, opposed all wars and would certainly not be travelling with them to Southeast Asia. After they finished laughing at me and asking insulting questions they met alone and decided that I was, in fact, a CO and was excused from serving in the armed forces.

     But not from serving. I was ordered to do two years of community work in the national interest and it had to be FAR from home. Farther from home than Stony Brook, my Long Island university? Apparently yes. And that's how I came to be sent to Kentucky as a VISTA Volunteer. Cool! I was excited about seeing all that Blue Grass!

     Though I found no blue grass in the Ohio River town of Newport I did live on Boone Street, so I wasn't entirely wrong in my vast understanding of the state.

     I saw a lot of poverty in Newport. I saw white poverty for the first time in my life and I saw pretty open and blatant segregation. I lived with a poor family on Elm Street before a short journey to a little apartment...the first that was ever just mine...on Boone Street. I was among and working with the poor. Sympathetic but not a part. It was, of course, temporary. New York was ahead of me once my time there was up.

     I began to organize. It wasn't that easy because we had, literally, no leadership. The VISTA supervisor resigned just a few weeks after my group arrived. He was really bad anyway. Once, in the midst of a staff meeting, he interrupted planning to ask who could help him install snow tires. His mind and heart wasn't in it. He wasn't replaced for months.

     But I organized. I organized a program to train people to gain their high school diploma. Newport had a population largely made up of Appalachian migrants, people who'd come to this urban area as the coal mines of the state automated, looking for work. Often they had very limited education so the GED program could meet a large need. I visited the University of Cincinnati, told the middle class students about my intense involvement with poverty (I'd been there a month), provoked, I think, a lot of guilt and arranged for tutors at their reading lab who would work with those who needed to improve on their literacy.

     I organized a crafts recreation program for the kids in the two public housing projects there. Really, it was just an excuse for me to play football and softball and tag and racing with them. Of course I left the crafts part to someone else. Kids came and I had FUN!

     I organized a basketball league with teams from different towns and we got on TV. Then an all white team tip toed nervously into the Booker T Washington Housing Project for a game against the all black team there. It didn't go well. I didn't anticipate this tension and I didn't handle it well. The league didn't survive.

     It was 1972 and, in my spare time, I got involved in the McGovern For President campaign, rising to the exalted position of area captain in charge of 5  "priority" precincts including the one in which most of the large population of sex workers lived on Monmouth Street. Turns out many of them were for my guy but not many of them were registered to vote.

     The regular Democrats refused, in Kentucky, to even SAY McGovern's name. "Let's support the ticket, from top to bottom," was as far as they'd go. I refused to support the Democratic nominee for the Senate, Dee Huddleston. Instead I threw my support and organizing energy to the third party candidate, Jim Buckley.

    McGovern was crushed, of course, in the state which was the first one projected for Nixon. We did carry the precinct with the sex workers but not, sadly, by enough of a margin. I recall my heart falling when I saw the poll workers open up the voting machine to reveal we'd won our "priority" precinct by 3 votes. McGovern, however, did a whole lot better than my candidate for the Senate. I won't say what share he got but I guarantee that he'd have been ecstatic to have won anywhere by as much as 3 votes.

     Meanwhile, the high school equivalency program was struggling. We had good turnout but hardly ever with the same folks. People were doing well and then they were gone. Why was this happening? What could I do about it? I didn't know.

     The crafts recreation program struggled around racial issues as one public housing project was all black and the other was all white. If one group happened to show up first the other wouldn't participate. The white controlled city government, hostile, I think, to intermixing, tried taking away our permit for the community building we were using for crafts and to store our (really important) sports equipment. We did fight them off but, after the time we were closed, attendance fell badly for a while.

     I really liked organizing. What I didn't like was how ineffective I felt. And I especially didn't like not knowing what to do about it or who to ask.
 
     So that's how my life began in Kentucky...now I knew what I wanted to do. And I knew that I sucked at it (not so much, really) and that I had to do something to get better (really!). So, as my time there wound down, I applied to graduate schools in community organizing. To my surprise I got responses from schools of social work which had CO programs. To my further surprise several accepted me and I ended up at Columbia. Ha! Imagine me in the Ivy League!!

     And so my professional life unfolded directly from the Blue Grass State. When organizing for 10 years finally wore me down I decided it would be nice to become a psychotherapist.  And, incredibly, my inadvertent social work degree (never fully understood how community organizing was a part of an MSW social work school), was my ticket into psychotherapy school. So, a bit indirectly, Kentucky helped me become a therapist.

     Kentucky, strange to say...or perhaps not so strange has always felt like a big part of me.