2007-05-26 8:24 PM
About Them Drugs; Slippery System Stuff

O.K. You're not going to believe this anyway but here are the facts:

It was June 15, 1969 and I had just graduated college in March of that year.

Some weeks or months previously I had applied for a Social Work Trainee 07 position with the State of Michigan Social Services Department. My scores were high enough to get me a job in Jackson, about 45 minutes south of home.

The first week was busy with introductions to the staff and the new hires which numbered about 8 or ten. Then, during a break, Bill, the General Assistance guy who was the one who disbursed emergency funds for those in sudden need asked us over coffee if any of the bunch of us trainees had ever tried LSD.
A few volunteered that they had tripped on acid and I said no, and that I wasn't interested in trying it, ever.

He next asked us if any of us had any collections. I volunteered that my husband collected comic books and toy cars but that I didn't collect anything at all.

What an odd pair of questions to ask us. I couldn't figure out what he was up to at all. So I asked why he wanted to know if and what we might be collecting. He answered that when people collected stuff it was a mark of a certain kind of sophistication. Maybe he was just trying to stimulate conversation, I don't know.

In the middle of the second week Bill and another senior case worker, who called each other close friends, invited me to go to his home and have lunch. She was the person to whom I had been assigned for orientation to their agency. Her job was to give me an overview of the work loads available, to show me the different areas from which I was to get my case assignments.

She introduced me to the range of needful cases. We visited the elderly, non-support mothers, institutionalized individuals and there was some discussion of there being a great need for people who could work with abused children Many of these were being taken from their homes and placed in foster care.

We did go to his place for lunch that Friday. They showed me his computer set up which was located in his basement. The year was 1969, mind you. Not just everyone on the block had a computer in those days, it was a kind of specialization that was indeed quite rare among the general population.

I didn't mention, did I, that Bill was a short, very black, Afro-American man. His friend and my temporary supervisor, Lois, were an odd pair of ducks, and to this day it gives me the creeps to bring them to mind.

Lois was very soft-spoken with a breathlessness to her speech patterns that was very marked in intensity. She always sounded as if she had just run a mile, or that she had just hurried up a couple of flights of stairs. Her hair was very curly and red, which, of coarse, was paired with a billion freckles that covered her face and limbs.


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