So How Was Your Summer?

An e-mail from my cousin Betty in Texas is probably responsible for this posting. She was concerned that she had not received any message from me since June with an entry on my Blog. Wow! Someone actually has been reading these and someone missed reading about my journey! Then the thought came to me that, at my age, most likely the concern has to do with my state of health and whether I was still “with it,” physically, mentally, or both.

My summer has been full, not of writing, but of visits to and from kids and grandkids, friends’ 50^th wedding anniversary celebrations, playing with Norma Jean, a little swimming, and helping son Robb move into his new home in Riverside.

June was a trip to Portland for a week with Eric, Tina, and getting to attend our 5 and 8 year-old granddaughters Katy and Grace’s dance performance extravaganza.

In July 6 year-old (now 7) granddaughter Samantha from Iowa made her second solo flight and stay for two weeks, a swirl of non-stop grand-parenting including two trips to the beach, one to the desert and mountains, and a day at the San Diego Zoo, capped off by a 7^th birthday party by the pool.

August was consumed with Robb having two hospitalizations after a month or two on the streets in Riverside and San Bernardino, followed by our taking charge and moving him from his Perris home to a big old transitional living residence near downtown Riverside.

Today is Labor Day and I am relaxing while reflecting on the summer that was after a traditional trip to Oak Glen for hot dogs and pie with our gang. I promise to resume my regular posts to Mellow Milan’s Musings beginning this coming week, even if only one of you is reading them.

I hope your summer has been full of life’s rewarding experiences.

Journey of Awakening – 35: I’m a Mainer

September 1977. The sun’s rays streamed in the east-facing window of my room at Harry and Ellis’ beautiful home in South Portland. The seagulls swooped around the lighthouse, so close I felt I could almost reach out and touch it. Harry had already left for the hospital. Ellis was up and had a light breakfast prepared for me. It was my first day on the Maine Town Meeting circuit. I pulled on my jeans and long sleeved sport shirt and my red and black plaid lumberjack shirt which I wore every day that fall. I had driven up from Boston on Sunday night so I could get an early start and have a full week of calling on townsfolk before making the drive back to Boston Friday night. I chatted briefly with Ellis as I gulped down orange juice and coffee and inhaled a hardly chewed piece of toast. I was ready.

Jumping in my trusty rusty green Nova, I headed out “downeast” as true Mainers would say, and with my AAA map on the seat next to me, came upon my first town that looked like a likely prospect, York, Maine.

YORK, MAINE

I had passed by York on the way to Portland and was struck by its rugged beauty, set on the ragged Maine coastline, which I would see a lot more of and come to love. York County is the southern-most county in Maine. The county seat town is Alfred, a little ways inland from York.

 

Alfred, Maine Town Hall & York County Courthouse

I thought it might be a little easier to find my way around there, so I stopped at a gas station to ask where I might find the Head Selectman’s house. I got the typical New England directions:

“Ya go down past the Dunkin Donuts and take the fork to the right, then when ya come to the schoolhouse there’ll be a roundabout and ya go all the way around it to the last road, then you’ll go a ways and come to a 3-way stop. After that ya take the first right after and when ya come to the graveyard ya take the first right after and Janet’s house is about the 5^th one on the left. It’s a big white one but ya can’t see it from the road, so if ya go past her driveway and come to a dead end, ya’ve gone too far. Turn around and stop at one of the farm houses and ask where Janet lives. They’ll tell ya.”

I did have to stop and ask a farmer and discovered what my colleagues had told me about Mainers. I found him out by his machine shed and told him who I was, why I was there, and that I was looking for the Town Head Selectman, Janet. “Two driveways up that way on the right.” I thanked him as he turned on his heel and headed around the back of the building, leaving me standing. I thought I hear a faint ‘A-yeh’ as he turned. So that was a good lesson for me in a nutshell. Mainers are not unfriendly, just no-nonsense folk who go about their business and don’t spend a lot of time chit-chatting, at least until they’ve decided you are not there to waste their time.

I found Janet and gave her my letter of introduction from the Governor of her state and asked a few questions about Alfred, being careful to mention a few things I’d picked up about the history and uniqueness of York County. I was a little surprised and then delighted when she expressed interest in having one of the 16 community forums as part of Town Meeting ’76 in Alfred. She said she would talk to the other 2 Selectmen and some of the other community leaders, but thought they would be interested. This was more than I could have hoped for. Janet was the right person. I had been lucky. We would not always approach the Selectmen first, because we emphasized that the forums were not to be political gatherings but a chance for townspeople to meet to celebrate and give voice to their concerns, hopes and dreams for their community. Our usual strategy was to ask “Who is the one person in your town who, if you want to get something done, you go to?” Often you would get “Oh, Josie Adams, the chair of the annual town picnic” or “you need to see Rev. Johnson at the Congregational Church.” We would usually get 3 or 4 names to begin our approach. Then we’d go to the first person and say “Rev. Johnson, we were talking with Josie Adams and she said if you were for doing this in your town she’d help and get the word out and organize the food.” Then we’d go to the Selectmen and say “Josie and Rev. Johnson think this is a good idea for the town and if you’ll support them, they’ll do all the work on it.” And so it would go until we got enough support to make it public, get flyers up and get it in the local paper.

Now I had the first of 16 already scheduled, on my first day. “This is going to be a breeze.” I went back to my South Portland B & B and reported to Harry and Ellis at dinner on my successful day, after calling Linda and reporting to the House and the Strike Force leaders of course. I couldn’t wait to get on the road to the next town.

Journey of Awakening – 34: New England Welcome

Fall 1977. Our new home at 27 Dartmouth in Boston was just a six block walk from Copley Plaza and in the shadow of the recently built John Hancock building, a massive skyscraper made almost entirely of blue tinted glass.

One problem the architects had not anticipated was that in the extreme temperature variations from winter to summer in Boston, combined with the winds at the top of the 60 story structure and the bonding used to keep them in place, these huge 500 lb. panes of glass would, without warning, pop right out and fall the forty or fifty stories to the walkway below. It is a wonder that no one was killed or even injured during the time they were figuring out how to reinforce the frames so as to prevent their popping out.

It was quite a contrast to see this tall modern obelisk of blue mirrored glass against the skyline of Old Boston, overlooking the Charles River and Beacon Hill, not far from Quincy Market and the Old North Church.

We loved Boston and enjoyed hearing stories from our colleagues whose families had lived there for a couple of hundred years. It did not take us long to settle in and get our House assignments made. Eric started 4^th grade in a school down the street within walking distance of our House. He loved his new teacher and wanted to invite her to his birthday party the House hosted for him. And she showed up. It was just five of us adults and Eric but he had a ball and so did we, playing birthday games like grade schoolers.

Nancy Trask was a librarian and got a job at the M.I.T. library. Linda was quickly hired as an office secretary at Boston University.

And Tom Reemtsma had a job, I forget where, but he had the task of driving all three to work in Nancy’s big Chevy station wagon. One thing we learned well in the Order was how to build a strong resume and acquire jobs very fast.

An additional aspect of our assignment complexity was that we were as an organization entering the culminating stages of the Town Meeting campaign. The Area Priors based in New York assigned two staff to organize a team of volunteers to complete New England, which had barely been touched by the campaign the previous year. We were to alternate between our Hartford and Boston Houses on successive weekends, which meant that Linda, Nancy and Tom had to host a group of about 10 additional bodies every other weekend, arrange lodging and meals, and prepare the teams for the next week’s foray into the New England wilderness.

Nelson Stover and Larry Ward were our two “Strike Force” coordinators. Larry was an impressive black man who had grown up on the west side of Chicago. Today he is an impressive meditation teacher and author. Nelson was a creative white guy who today is a prominent advocate and supporter of the ICA’s work in India, which was begun in the early 1970s. These two always planned grand celebrations whenever our Town Meeting teams would gather for the weekend. One unforgettable one of these was the weekend in Hartford when we all went to see the opening of the first Star Wars movie and then returned to the House for a meal and movie conversation, followed by a ‘star wars line dance’ in costume, where we all took turns making up weird movements as we danced between lines of clapping ‘aliens’.

My assignment was to arrange for 16 Town Meetings in Maine (one per county), to be completed by Thanksgiving.

Tim Karpoff, the Hartford House Prior, this tall, handsome, ex-all-American wrestler from one of the Ivy League colleges, was assigned to finish off New Hampshire and Vermont. Another woman had Rhode Island, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Connecticut and Massachusetts actually had teams of two assigned. I was warned by some of the locals about how standoffish “Mainers” could be and how difficult my task would probably be, and how they didn’t “cotton to outsiders.” Another complication was the name Town Meeting. New Englanders invented the Town Meeting. It was the local governance structure for almost all towns. There were three “Selectmen” chosen to run things in between Town Meetings. But whenever major issues needed to be decided, a legal Town Meeting had to be called and all voting residents were notified so they could be in on the decision. So we had to use the term ‘community forums’ and assure local leaders and residents that we were not trying to usurp their decision-making structure when selling them on Town Meeting ’76.

I headed off early in September in the House’s only car, a beat-up old Chevy Nova, to win over these standoffish Mainers. Fortunately, we did have a handful of colleagues in the state, but they were in Maine’s largest city, Portland. Harry and Ellis Bliss lived in South Portland, in a big colonial style house overlooking the ocean. They had agreed to put me up whenever I needed a place to stay overnight. They gave me my own key and made me more than welcome. They became dear friends and enthusiastic Town Meeting supporters. Harry was a prominent Maine cardiac surgeon. Ellis was a daughter of an old established Maine family. They were members of a local UCC church, which was an added connection. One story I heard about the sort of man Harry was, that during the Vietnam War he took his lunch hours, most days, to stand on a street corner, many times alone, holding his sign in silent protest.

Well, not all Mainers were going to make my task so difficult. And at least I had the most comfortable and hospitable bed and breakfast in the state as my home away from home. How hard can this job be?

Stay tuned.

Journey of Awakening – 33: Boston or Bust

Summer ’77. It was time for Troy to enter the “Student House,” an experiment in which 6^th through 8^th grade kids were housed in our Chicago headquarters building under the supervision of some “responsible adults,” to spend the school year in the Chicago public schools. Linda, Eric and I received our assignments at the end of July. We were to be Priors of the Boston Religious House. Along with this came an added benefit. We got to rent a very large U-Haul truck and drive it across the country, making stops at half the Houses in the U.S., picking up and dropping off belongings of other re-assigned families. We could take our family “discontinuity” time (our term for vacations, a concept that was not in our vocabulary) along the way, as long as we showed up in Boston by the end of August. We decided to make an adventure of it. Even Eric got into the spirit and we were to have many “tailgate picnics” as well as those in city/town public parks. Our journey took us to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver, Wichita, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New --York, Hartford, and ended in Boston, all during one of the hottest summers on record. Our only expenses were gas and meals, for which we were reimbursed. Lodging wasn’t a problem, since each House put us up for a night or two, requiring very few motel stays. At today’s gas prices that trip might have bankrupted the Order, but a gallon was only about 70 cents that year, compared to 4 dollars today.

It was truly a family adventure, as we tried to soak up a little of the local culture and history of each town and state as we passed through. We imagined ourselves “reverse pioneers” retracing the steps of our forebears who made the trek west by wagon train. Amazingly, there was not a single breakdown of our trusty steed, not even a flat tire, the whole way. The weather was hot but without storms, except for that one huge dust storm we observed but thankfully were not caught in as we drove through Utah.

We arrived at our new home at 27 Dartmouth, Boston, Mass. on time and intact, greeted by the outgoing Priors, the Wiltses, who were heading for their new assignment in Seattle. We were soon to be joined by our other two House members, Nancy Trask and Tom Reemtsma, with whom we would spend the next year.

Journey of Awakening – 32: House Priors

1976-7. We settled in to our new room in the San Francisco House, organized our living space as comfortably as we could, with a queen-sized box spring and mattress on the floor, a small desk and chair with a lamp, and a commode that served as a headboard and wall for privacy from the entry door. Troy and Eric were at summer camp, provided by Order staff. Linda and I were now assigned as House Priors. At the end of the summer Eric started his 3^rd grade year and Troy was in 5th grade at Starr King School.

Bob and Cynthia Vance had full-time assignments as Area Priors. Bob was travelling constantly, researching sites for potential human development projects, while Cynthia was responsible for securing in-kind donations and overall administration. One unforgettable result of her fearless approach to likely donors was the day Cynthia drove up to the front door with a station wagon full of half-gallons of rainbow sherbet. She ran frantically up the steps yelling for us to come help unload the sherbet and find space in our two or three freezers. Since there was not enough room for it all, she began handing out sherbet, which was by now getting a little soft, to neighbors and people passing by on the street.

San Francisco was a stopping place for people travelling overseas. And since the ICA had projects either in full swing or in preparation in the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Japan, and Korea, we were making regular trips to San Francisco International to pick up staff and volunteers and put them up overnight. We also hosted a number of our travelling fundraising staff for periods of a few days, or in some cases, weeks. This in addition to housing our staff and a group of senior high students whose parents were assigned overseas. These were, by the way, incredible kids who participated fully, with only the normal amount of teenage rebellion, in the House life and community activities, while being full-time students. Some of the best of these were David St. John and his sister Ann, John Wainwright, Doug Haman and Hendrik Idzerta, all of whom have grown to be successful adults and productive and creative contributors to society.

Me and John Wainwright

The fall of ’76 kicked off with a flurry of preparations for a major Town Meeting initiative in San Francisco. Linda was in charge of coordinating twelve neighborhood forums to be held on the same Saturday. We had the support and endorsement of Mayor George Moscone and the Board of Supervisors, then chaired by Dianne Feinstein, and a who’s who list of community leaders, churches (including the now infamous Peoples’ Temple), service organizations and businesses. Training sessions were held in all 12 neighborhoods for workshop leaders in English and Spanish.

Eric, Karen Reese, Barbara Prather, Tim Goodger: Town Meeting San Francisco Promotion Team

On the day of the forums McDonald’s supplied hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and fries for every meeting. Local soft drink suppliers provided sodas. Other businesses donated door prizes. It was a massive undertaking. Some of the more memorable forums were the Tenderloin (San Francisco’s night life district), the Haight-Ashbury (where one of the participants ripped our flip charts off the wall and proceeded to jump up and down on them while shouting dis-establishment statements), the Castro District, and a special city-wide senior citizen Town Meeting that 500 unruly seniors showed up for. And we had prepared enough workshop leaders for half that number.

 

We received lots of publicity. The press showed up at several of the meeting sites. Politicians of all stripes attended, and many even stayed for the whole day and participated, even though they realized they were not going to be allowed to make long speeches. It was a fantastic demonstration of citizen participation and community empowerment. Every meeting produced a set of proposals that residents could take action on and not wait for the politicians. Each one had actually written their own brief story of what the community meant to them, its history, present challenges and future hopes. Every neighborhood created a symbol, displayed at the plenary session at the end of the day, and wrote a song that the whole community could sing.

The bicentennial year ended and we were still a ways from the 200 Town Meetings in California, and even further from the 5000 across the U.S., which some crazy persons among us had proposed as our ultimate goal. But we as a group had never shrunk from impossible tasks, so we simply extended the bicentennial for another year or so and created the image of completing at least one Town Meeting in each and every county of the U.S. This would be a challenge worthy of a crazy group like ours.

Journey of Awakening – 31: An Order Wedding

June 1976. My dad was in a nursing home—dying. My kids were in Minneapolis. Linda’s sons, Troy, a 4^th grader and Eric in 2^nd grade, were living with her in Los Angeles. I was on the road in California for much of the spring. Linda had the whole burden of planning for our June 6 wedding while working full-time and organizing a Town Meeting on weekends. We were assigned a weekend or two to prepare our “missional family document” which included designing a family symbol to hang in our room as a reminder of our covenant with one another, the Order, and G-O-D. There was a resident artist in the San Francisco House, Dean Ellis, who put the final touches on the symbol that would be displayed on our banner.

Finally the week of the marriage celebration came. It was to be held in the Los Angeles Religious House, a large three-story home, built by the actor John Barrymore, on 11^th and Magnolia, just a couple of blocks off Olympic and Vermont. Linda’s mother came from Green Bay, Wisconsin to help her get ready, along with Linda’s cousin, Mary Anne Schefe, who lived in Redondo Beach. I was on my own, except for the members of the LA House and my mother, who lived in Van Nuys, so I had a place to stay for the week.

We had gold rings made with the center of our family symbol, a “St. Andrew’s Cross” repeated all the way around, and silver bands for the right hand signifying a commitment to a life of service. Linda had made the acquaintance of Percy Henkelman, a bishop in the Moravian Brethren Church, a local supporter of the Institute (who also happened to be Andy Griffith’s pastor) and asked him to officiate. Jann McGuire, whose family had lived with us in St. Louis and now lived in Lindsay, California, was the matron of honor. I asked Lyn Oden, an LA House member, to be best man.

Bob and Joan Knutson, LA House Priors, made sure it would be a grand and elegant, but simple, wedding celebration. We had a simply elegant pre-wedding dinner with the House members and several local colleagues present. The day of the wedding arrived. My mother showed up with surprise guests, my cousin Jan O’Grady with her family from Council Bluffs, Iowa (I had officiated at her wedding back at Trinity Church in Lincoln in 1967– now she had two little girls of her own). The marriage service was held in the large living room (we wondered whether any of the Barrymore kids had been married there), with a reception in the back yard.

Linda and I left the next morning on our “honeymoon trip” which consisted of pulling a trailer with her few belongings, and a wire cage with Eric’s pet black rabbit in the back seat of my dad’s blue Ford, heading for San Francisco, our next year’s assignment. We were able to arrange to stop for a couple of days’ stay in Carmel on the way. That was our honeymoon. But we were ready for the next challenge and approached our life together with hopeful anticipation and excitement, just like any newly-wedded couple.

Journey of Awakening – 30: Re-engagement

Although San Francisco was a great place to be, 1975 had been a tough year on the family. During the year my first marriage was officially ended in divorce. I had tried to keep in touch with Leslea and Robb by letter and occasional photos. But my emotional life was pretty much a mess and I spent a good deal of time insulating myself from feelings. I could hide in my day-to-day obligations. Still, the deep reflection on just how much my self-image was bound up in being significant, being some-body, had not yet begun.

Linda Tuecke, now divorced from Dan and having spent a year in Chicago at the ICA international center, was transferred to Los Angeles for 1975-6 assignment year with her two sons, Troy and Eric, both in elementary school. We began communicating during the year about our future and requested permission to marry. While awaiting the decision of the Panchayat (the designated spiritual leadership group of the Order: Ecumenical) I was put in charge of the newly formed Town Meeting California team.

The ICA had received a $50,000 grant from Bank of America Foundation to organize and conduct 200 forums in communities across the state. The initial phase of the campaign involved sending individuals out to spend eight weeks training local community workshop leaders in selected towns and neighborhoods, culminating in an all-day forum to identify community issues and challenges, formulate proposals, write a story, create a symbol and song to celebrate the history and hopes of the community, and present a document at the end of the day that citizens could take action on to implement their proposals.

I worked with the towns of Napa and Marin City (a demonstration integrated town in Marin County, north of San Francisco). These both drew several hundred residents. We also held a forum in the Mission District, our own neighborhood, at which more than 200 residents showed up. The Mission was fast transitioning to a Hispanic neighborhood, which meant that we had to produce materials in Spanish and recruit and train bi-lingual workshop leaders.

I was also sent to form teams in Sacramento, the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles, which were to go out and visit communities in hopes that we could reach the goal of 200 Town Meetings by the end of the year. We had endorsement letters from politicians from “Governor Moonbeam” on down, from service organizations, religious leaders, the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Jaycees, as well as from mayors of the towns which had held the first of the Town Meetings. We thought we would be welcomed with open arms, but encountered the entire spectrum of resistance from the established leaders passive “we don’t really have any big issues” to “Who exactly are you and why are you here?” to “We need to keep commie organizations like you out of our town.” None of the open hostility and accompanying publicity ever stuck. But things were still not going fast enough to reach the magic 200.

In the early spring of 1976 permission was finally granted by the Order for Linda and me to marry. Linda was assigned out to work and was in an office manager job in LA. On weekends she joined the Town Meeting campaign focused on neighborhoods. Two of the largest of these were in Pico Union, the neighborhood adjoining the LA House, and Huntington Park, which Linda coordinated. The school year was winding down and we were planning a June wedding while trying to keep up the momentum of the Town Meeting campaign.

It was a whirlwind spring. It would be good to pause for a lively wedding celebration and glorious honeymoon.