Reformers to Radicals (15 page)

With plans for the short-term future seemingly set, the Volunteers turned their attention back to the mountains. As their reports illustrate, they made an effort to get beyond school repairs and address other issues. At Upper Thousandsticks, in Leslie County, for example, the AVs helped local residents dig a new well to improve the clean water supply and worked on repairing the road into town. Leslie County, in fact, became a focal point for the Appalachian Volunteers that summer as workers descended on the communities of Lower Thousandsticks, Hurricane, and Persimmon Fork, among others, focusing on similar road and water projects. Slone Fork, in Knott County, also noticed vast improvements. Volunteers renovated twenty-one houses and collected and disposed of trash that lay about the town. At the small hamlet of Red Bird, near the Red Bird River in Clay County, the Appalachian Volunteers reported that the people held a succession of community meetings to determine a set of priorities for Volunteer work. In what was, perhaps, the high point of the summer, AVs cooperated with the people of adjacent Saylor and Spruce Pine to build a small picnic area and park.
²⁸

The road and water projects in no way replaced the school programs. A significant amount of AV time and energy went into the Mill Creek summer school program. Moreover, the Volunteers utilized a group from the central Kentucky–based Wilderness Road Girl Scout Troop to conduct a two-week educational program in Leslie County. After a short training period
in Berea, the scouts arrived in Leslie County on August 10, 1964. Dispersed to eight different communities, the girls spent the first week of their stay managing recreational activities for the rural children. Their second week was also the grade schoolers' first week of classes. During this period, the volunteers acted as teacher aides by distributing textbooks and doing other jobs that made the instructors' tasks easier. Other mountain locales received Volunteer enrichment or renovation projects. AVs at Urban, in Clay County, virtually rebuilt the local school, while other volunteers treated the youngsters in Bear Creek to both a recreation and an academic enrichment program. In total, of the thirteen communities identified in the AV reports of June and July 1964, nine had at least some part of the programs offered them rooted in the local school. The impression that the key to abolishing poverty in Appalachia was education was still very much alive in the summer of 1964.
²⁹

As the Girl Scouts returned to their Bluegrass region homes, the Appalachian Volunteers, as an organization, began to get ready for a return to the weekend projects that characterized their modus operandi during the academic year. Part of that preparation included promoting the Volunteer program on college campuses again. Interestingly, those returning Girl Scouts provided the Appalachian Volunteers with another strategy for gaining student support. Reflecting on their experiences, one scout stated that she thought the AV program was “one of the best ever”: “I wish everyone could have this wonderful experience.” Another “found this project one of the most rewarding, enjoyable, and educational opportunities ever offered by the girl scouts.” A third echoed these sentiments, which focused, not on what the girls had
done
for the poor in Appalachia, but on what they had
gained
from this type of volunteer work: “I wouldn't trade these two short weeks for anything in the whole world. The experience gained by working with the people [was] greatly appreciated and every girl who didn't get to go . . . miss[ed] a great opportunity.”
³⁰

While it would not be accurate to argue that each Girl Scout who participated in the Leslie County program did so for purely self-centered reasons, Council leadership recognized that many potential volunteers would need something more than just an altruistic desire to help the poor to sustain their interest in the Appalachian Volunteers. Students should be involved “in the planning and administration of the program,” the Council
declared, and they must develop a “system of rewards so that they can be made to feel that they are part of a ‘movement.'” Further, according to one AV, part of the success of the school renovations was the sense of immediate satisfaction and accomplishment that went with seeing a previously dilapidated schoolhouse transformed into one fit for habitation.
³¹

While a certain degree of personal satisfaction, especially in a program as demanding as the Appalachian Volunteers, may have been necessary, the AVs needed to be careful so that personal satisfaction did not become the primary goal of the program. Unfortunately, it appeared as if this happened. While those charged with administering the program wanted to believe that these “young, flexible, energetic” students were “motivated solely by a personal concern for the conditions they are combating,” this perception was not quite accurate. Even the AVs themselves, in a statement that contradicted their own ideas about the students' activism, declared that “for them the work is not a job, but a
duty
.”
³²

In other ways, mountain reform leaders reasserted the importance of the individual volunteers, but not because they gave freely of themselves. Rather, the students were important for what they represented. By exemplifying success, college students, the Appalachian Volunteers board declared in August 1964, raised the mountaineers' expectations for their children: “When the [mountaineers] see girls like the Volunteers and look at their girls that are the same age, . . . they will see a new example which they want their girls to follow.” So impoverished were the rural Appalachians, this attitude implied, that they had no idea that a better life was possible. Simply by going into the mountains, the Volunteers provided them with previously unknown aspirations.
³³

When the Appalachian Volunteers went back to the mountains in the fall of 1964, they abandoned development projects in favor of a renewed concentration on renovation and enrichment. Still, they initiated the Books for Appalachia project when they realized how inadequate libraries in the local community schools were. Some, they reported, had no books at all. One AV, Roslea Johnson, remembered trying to write a note for a mountain teacher whose school the Volunteers had earlier repaired. While searching for a piece of paper and a pencil, she noticed that this particular school had virtually nothing with which to work—no paper, no writing utensils, no books. As she visited other mountain schools, she noticed that they were in
like circumstances. This, she later recalled, was “an eye opener.” Arguably, other student workers felt the same way, and these experiences gave rise to the school library project. The AVs collected books donated by publishing companies, schools from outside the region, and the national Parent-Teacher Association and shipped them by the boxcar to places such as Berea and Barbourville for distribution to rural mountain schools.
³⁴

Ultimately, the book project resulted in a great deal of publicity and prompted the expansion of the overall AV program. In order to help distribute the books and to provide shelves in those mountain schools that had none, the Volunteers convinced the industrial arts classes at the region's colleges to construct interlocking “book boxes.” These boxes allowed the AV workers to pack the donated materials in containers that, after delivery, could be converted to stable bookcases. One effect of this aspect of the book project was to allow those college students involved in the construction of the book boxes to become “Volunteers” without ever leaving campus. Another was that the nationwide appeal for books—one volunteer claimed that the organization collected nearly 1.5 million—made people from every corner of the country aware of the Appalachian Volunteer effort. Jack Rivel, one of the first college volunteers and later an AV field man, claimed: “National PTA people from all over came down [to Barbourville] and spent a day or two days helping us sort books.” By November 21, 1964, Knox County alone gained thirty-one “libraries” in its mountain schools. The next week, schools in Leslie and Jackson counties also acquired AV book boxes. Financial support for the program came from the National Home Library Association, which donated $15,000 in early 1966 to purchase encyclopedias for the schools. With the library project, the Appalachian Volunteers took a significant step toward becoming a national program.
³⁵

The success of the Books for Appalachia project was not the only boost the AVs received in the fall of 1964. That August, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act. Though this act benefited the Council of the Southern Mountains and its Appalachian Volunteer program in terms of economic resources, in other ways it served to limit and delineate the CSM's thoughts and actions. Speaking before an AV Special Advisory Committee meeting in Berea, Ralph Caprio, representing the newly created Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), stated that, in order for the AVs to secure federal funding, their plans must be “crystal clear.” In addition, college administrators
needed to declare their commitment to the Volunteer project, and county school superintendents must proclaim their desire for and need of Appalachian Volunteers. Just as important, echoing the requirement for cooperation expressed in the act, the Volunteer organization and the local officials had to announce that they would work together in the fight against poverty. This was of primary importance because the county superintendents' offices were the agencies through which the AVs operated.
³⁶

For their part, the Appalachian Volunteers certainly were “crystal clear” in their plans to continue renovation and enrichment programs in the mountain schools. As their reports of the previous spring illustrated, these efforts brought the local people and the student volunteers together, and “the success of the school renovation [was] virtually assured.” Anything more complex created the potential for failure. Failure was anathema because it would “return [the mountaineers] to their former apathetic state.” Further, the AV Board of Directors reiterated the necessity of working with the elected county officials, especially school superintendents. “You must work with the school superintendents,” a board member declared, “and make sure the programs are desired in the school[s] . . . and do not come in unwanted.” Another board member, the
Louisville Courier-Journal
columnist John Ed Pearce, urged the Volunteers to meet with county officials so that each would know the others' plans.
³⁷

Specifically, those plans called for curriculum enrichment. After eight months of concentrating on renovation work, the AVs decided that enrichment would, as much as any other Volunteer program, “influence more and more youngsters to stay in and finish their schooling.” Additionally, the Volunteers, by submitting one of the first proposals for an OEO demonstration grant, moved to take advantage of the newly passed federal antipoverty legislation. Though it would be about six months before the AVs learned the fate of their proposal, they still had time and money left from the original ARA grant. With these funds, plus the reinforcements of the lessons from the Mill Creek summer school project and a belief in their own ability to end Appalachian indigence, the little army of Appalachian Volunteers again marched off, in early autumn, to vanquish poverty.
³⁸

During September 1964, Milton Ogle contacted numerous local superintendents and announced that AVs would be available for work in their rural schools. Generally, the responses were favorable. David Craft, the head
of the Letcher County school system, embraced the enrichment concept but dissuaded the Volunteers from doing renovation work because of the county's plans to consolidate its smaller schools. William Gilreath of the McCreary County system and George Alice Motley, the superintendent of the Menifee County schools, heartily encouraged AV participation in their mountain schools.
³⁹

September, unfortunately, also witnessed the beginning of a relatively quick process of change within the AV organization itself. Along with creating CAPs and a funding base for them, the Economic Opportunity Act had created the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program. This invention was a national version of that domestic Peace Corps that the AVs, up to that point, had emulated in eastern Kentucky. When the Volunteers requested OEO funds, they also requested VISTA volunteers to conduct a “health project” for residents of the Red Bird Valley, near the border of Bell and Clay counties. This represented a departure from the original conception of what an “Appalachian Volunteer” was. First, the VISTA volunteer was required to
stimulate the interest
of the people of Red Bird in the project. In other words, the volunteer, not the community, had to take the lead. Most important, however, was that the the Appalachian Volunteers program began to move away from its Appalachian constituency—at least when it came to the recruitment of volunteers.
⁴⁰

Some of the same conditions, including massive unemployment and the resulting poverty, that motivated the AVs spurred others—local Appalachians more concerned with quantitative issues, particularly income—to action as well. Commonly referred to as the “roving pickets,” the Appalachian Committee for Full Employment traveled from nonunion mine to nonunion mine protesting the high levels of unemployment and the loss of United Mine Workers union health benefits. Because individuals associated with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) joined the picketers as they moved through eastern Kentucky, it was easy for many of those local officials with whom the AVs hoped to establish close working relationships to associate the student AVs with the SDS members. Apparently, this was a concern of the Volunteers as well. One AV member actually wrote the AV office asking advice about how to deal with that “supposedly communistic” group known as the “Appalachian Volunteers for Equal Employment (or something to that effect).” For their part, the Appalachian Volunteers,
fearful that they had “become confused in the public mind with another footless, pointless aggregation of ‘rousers' . . . who had caused considerable confusion in some mining towns,” assured local county officials that, while they “hoped to change the bad conditions in which some people live,” they did not intend to “enter into every . . . embroglio that may arise out of people's reactions to those conditions.”
⁴¹