The Fifth Day
Early Days at Winston-Salem
The fourth decade had been for me an outstanding period of fulfillment. I began it a "retarded adolescent", an intraverted type characterized primarily by fear of people; I ended it a self confident extrovert--accustomed to influencing people in various ways and filling an important role in society. Through all this the manic depressive cycle continued to be a real part of my life. Periods of intense physical, mental and spiritual activity were followed by periods of lethargy, boredom, meaninglessness. Being more or less self employed--that is without supervision, I could get away with working much or little.
Going to work for the Probation Department affected my life in a variety of ways. For one thing I was glad to escape the role of public man, which had restricted the energy I was able to expend on family affairs. I felt that Ellie was very glad to get out of the parsonage. (She always denied this.) I hoped to spend more time with her and with the children.
In our last year in Wilkes County she had had a pretty busy time. She spent nine months commuting to Boone, taking education courses to prepare herself for public school teaching. During the entire nine months she was carrying Rob; he was born just at the end of the school year. She also had responsibility for Mark, still pre-school age. The entire experience must have been pretty hard on her. I was so wrapped up in what was happening to myself that I functioned poorly as husband or father.
Regret! People like to say they have no regrets. That's just a fairy tale; I'm convinced that everyone who gives it any thought at all is conscious that he did lots of things he wished he hadn't, and that he didn't do lots of things he wished he had done. Why do people want and need to deny that? For me to say you have no regrets is equivalent to saying you lived perfectly. I have to be sceptical.
I have to judge myself a poor father. In spite of that all three of our sons seem at this point to have turned out extremely well. They have all achieved really significant things; none of them are unduly materialistic; they all have good, functioning intellects and spiritual possibilities. Help us all, Lord.
The first days and weeks as a Probation Officer were undoubtedly stressful. This was perhaps the biggest adjustment I've ever had to make. As a minister I had gotten into the habit of wearing a smile most of the time. In court I soon found I was the only person smiling, and a short time later I realized that smiling was simply inappropriate in most circumstances in court. When somebody is about to be sentenced to work on the roads for a couple of years, someone else smiling will seem pretty offensive. Like smiling in the presence of a dying person.
Court officials in general were sceptical of me. Judge Sams, the primary judge of our court, had no intention to use me for any purpose. Judge Burns was an old, marginally competent person probably not qualified to use probation intelligently. Luckily for me there was also Judge Harper, a fairly young, bright, fairly good man, a member of Knollwood Baptist Church, where I met him one Sunday at some sort of special event. Judge Harper held traffic court, and he assigned quite a number of drunk drivers to me.
Most of my fellow P.O.'s were simply doing a job, I thought. However I had come into this profession for humanitarian reasons. Nevertheless I soon adopted attitudes similar to theirs. At some point during this decade I read a statement to the effect that by the time a person has worked for an institution for 5 years, his values have become largely homogenized with those of the institution. I didn't want to believe that, but I must confess that I found it to contain a considerable element of truth. (It may have been Greenleaf in his Servant Leader pamphlets who made the statement.)
For example before my time as P.O. was over I had become pretty thoroughly convinced that the people who walked into court as defendants were guilty. This is probably close to inevitable for law enforcement officers. You knock yourself out to protect the citizens. Some one messes up 3 different ways and puts you to a lot of trouble to protect yourself and society from them. You finally get the guy in court; he has a smart lawyer, and the judge turns him loose. Every law officer has this experience, most of them repeatedly. It tends to nurture a certain amount of disrespect for the legal process.
After I left the area and the job, a man who had been a federal prison chaplain told me that in Sweden one could not work but ten years at that type of job. To me that makes a lot of sense. Some people have respect for law enforcement officers, and many others affect contempt for them. Society has given them a dirty, thankless, dangerous job, and we have every reason to expect that a fair number of them will become casualties of one kind or another---some physical ones, some psychic or spiritual ones. I never saw a judge function very long without becoming pretty much of a jaded human being. Of course some do succeed in compartmentalizing their lives so as to preserve a semblance of normality when not on the bench.
My father-in-law, a judge for many years, used to spend every minute he could find in a boat fishing. When I first met him, I couldn't understand why he would devote his entire life to something that seemed to me fairly inconsequential. Later, when I started working in court, I understood; he simply fished in order to keep his sanity.
One of the beneficial things abut my change of vocation was that it helped me to even out the mood swing that had afflicted me so long. Reporting to work every morning is a most important discipline, which I had not experienced as a minister. To be accountable to others is an obligation we often choose to avoid whenever possible, preferring our "freedom", but having to report is something people seem to need.
After my decade in Winston-Salem the mood swings were no longer a source of trouble for me.
When I took the job, I had a strong sense of the challenge; it seemed awesome. What we were doing had not been tried before, and our success or failure would have great consequences for the course of Corrections in the state, and even beyond. I also knew that few people would have any depth of understanding of what I was trying to do. I was attempting to serve as a minister, but I would be seen as a functionary of the court; with few exceptions this is what happened.
(One notable and very gratifying exception was a young man named Lloyd Brinson, a reporter for the local paper. He interviewed me and wrote an article on what I was doing. One sentence he wrote will live in my heart forever. He said, after describing the nature of my work, "He came down out of the pulpit to do this work." That almost became the theme of my life. I've been more of a minister since I "came down out of the pulpit", and my young friend helped confirm my awareness of that in the face of popular misunderstanding and indifference. Since that day I've understood the term minister as completely other than preacher. I became a minister in the sense of Paul, the tentmaker. Paul and I both realized that ministering to people involved not burdening them.)
With the best intentions in the world many influences made it difficult or impossible to be a true minister. First of all the court had its own agenda, not often greatly congruent with mine. I was more apt to be called as a part of an agreement between an attorney and a judge than for considerations of rehabilitation. The first, and almost only probationer Judge Sams gave me was Bobby Coffee, a steeplejack who worked for his next door neighbor.
Bobby Coffee had made a lot of money for his boss. He was one of the few men who would go out on a girder 300 feet in the air and do the required work. When not working he pretty generally remained in an alcoholic condition. Judge Sams hoped I might keep him sober to improve the profitability of his neighbor's business. Well I put Bobby in the House of Prayer, and eventually I encouraged him to change jobs, which I thought might further his recovery. He's an example of the flavor of my relationship with the court.
When we moved to Winston-Salem, we found a small house to rent on Sunset Drive very near the interstate. We spent almost a year looking for houses before we settled on the house on Jersey Avenue. I was ready to buy about the first thing we saw, but Ellie had much more discrimination about such a major investment. We did finally make an offer on a really handsome old house on Hawthorne Ave. across the street from Hanes Park. We almost closed the deal, but the owner tried to extort a little more, and I refused on principle. Soon afterward we bought our home; I never expected to have such a nice home. It was so big-five rooms upstairs. Our bedroom was like a two room suite; the older boys had a large, elongated room where they staged many a battle--especially Civil War and War in the Pacific.
A legacy to Ellie of $12,000 had made it possible for us to buy the house; and we in fact paid cash for it, which prompted Mr. Clodfelter to opine that I was a pretty conservative fellow. Little did he know. There's a story about the $12,000, which came from Ellie's cousin Eleanor, but it properly belongs in the fourth day. $12,000 was a lot of money in those days. During the decade while we owned the house it grew in value to three times that much.
I was able to walk to work and did a few times. I might have more often, but the state car I drove was an integral part of the job. The best place to park it at night was at home. We had to be in our office from 8 to 9 every morning. During this time we might hear from Lexington, where the district supervisor worked, or Raleigh, the state headquarters. At 9 o'clock all the PO's went across the street and had coffee and a sandwich at Jimmy's, a Greek restaurant. Through this period I found the conversation increasingly banal.
It centered on cars and sports.
Whitey Bell had been an outstanding basketball player at State, when they had an outstanding team. Later he played briefly for a professional team. (That was long before their salaries had gotten strastopheric.) Everybody in the county knew and liked Whitey, and wanted to talk basketball with him. He was obliging and polite, but he probably got pretty tired of those conversations.
After our morning coffee some of us would go to attend court (in a rotation) while the rest of us got in our state cars and began making rounds. We had probationers all over the county and everyone had a car to make his calls. (By the end of this period we had twice as many PO's as I started with, there was a financial pinch, and the cars had to be shared. The general level of the job had deteriorated.)
I started with a single probationer and gathered more one at a time. It was probably a year before I had 50. Meanwhile some of the other guys had large case loads. Mine were supposed to be harder; they were older and for the most part compulsive drinkers that no one really expected to change. In spite of this Clodfelter was avid for probationers, and he let it be known that the success of the program would be proportional to the number of probationers, and further that we could expect advancement only through getting more probationers than we could handle. That was the tried and true way the department had expanded through the years of his career, and he saw no reason to make an exception for alcoholic probationers; he was really a rather thick headed man.
He had been a probation officer most of his adult life. He worshipped the department, thought it was the next thing to heaven. I'm sure he wanted to help the people under our care. He had become so crusty that he treated everyone like a probationer. His general technique was to make accusatory insinuations and watch you for signs of guilt; he was a kind of walking lie detector.
Someone said that Mr. C had a heart of gold under about two inches of concrete; that very aptly described his character and personality. When I had been with the department about 5 years, I looked at myself in the mirror one day and said, "oh my God, I'm getting just like Mr. C." I knew then that I'd better find something else to do, but I fiddled around for several years before making another change.
Mr. C had a special problem with me; he felt I wasn't tough enough; he couldn't see a minister possibly being tough enough. So he extended himself to toughen me up. Every time he saw me he would give me some sort of cold, contemptuous treatment (difficult to describe from this distance, but very real in emotional tone to me at the time.) I endured this as long as I could and got so mad I considered resigning, but I hung in there.
One afternoon he caught me at the wrong time. He began his insinuations, and I reciprocated with interest.
Things became more and more heated. Several younger men were looking on with interest and a certain amount of awe. I had reached the point where I was not going to take any more of his crap. Every card he played I trumped. I really had him sweating; he just didn't know how to deal with the situation. One small example: he sniffed that he worked long hours on the job for many years, insinuating of course that the rest of us were slackers and me in particular. He also liked to talk about being a faithful husband. I replied, "Mr. Clodfelter, if you had worked less hours for the department, you would have been a better husband and father, and probably a better P.O." I took the high ground completely away from him. The conversation finally came to an end.
Much earlier in the marathon job interview I had told him something he needed to know. He was so slavish in his admiration for the Probation Department and strongly implied that we should give our heart and soul to it at the very least. I said at that time, "Mr. C. I can imagine things happening that would make you turn away from the Probation Department and never look back." I wanted him to understand that he owed (and had in fact) a higher loyalty.
Sure enough about ten years later the Republicans got control of the state administration, the governor announced his intention of "shaking the old apple tree", and Charlie lost his job. He was kind of pitiful.
Charlie had served a year or so as state director, then moved back to his former position as Lexington Division supervisor. The state job had actually been his "level of incompetence"; it had led to a good bit of stress related poor health. We heard that he had terrible arthritic pains, hurt all over. Veritably it seems he was turning into concrete. He was smart to move back to Lexington.
The first four years at Winston-Salem were focused, as best I remember on my job. That was about long enough for it to begin to get old. I played along with Charlie's compulsion to get more probationers, and when I had 180, they hired another man to take some of it: Victor Watts. A Baptist minister, he retained pastorate of a small church in the area, needed all the money he could get, wanted to amount to something. He had two brothers who were doctors, so he had something to prove to his family. They were from Wilkes County originally, but apparently had outgrown it some time back.
I spent a good deal of energy trying to train Watts. He had some values I didn't admire, but he probably made about as good a P.O. as I was. He was anxious to prove to the others his machismo, and one way he did that was to go hunting in Montana; he really aspired to a more affluent life style than I did. At the end he was promoted to PO2, and I left for Washington. But that's getting a bit ahead of the story.
One of the main things I did as a PO was to try to find professional help for my poor suffering alcoholics. I learned two things through experience: First it's a progressive disease, and the sooner treated, the better chance for success. This flies in the face of the truism that they have to hit bottom. They do have to hit bottom, but hitting bottom is a subjective thing, and most of them in fact have hit quite a number of bottoms before they start toward recovery. Those periodic 'bottoms' are the critical times when help may be effective if applied in a timely way. Lacking help they go right through that bottom and continue dropping toward the next bottom. For example one person's bottom may be having a spouse leave; that's a powerful impulse to get help if the marriage had any meaning. But not getting help he (she) may progress to the next bottom, which might be losing a job, or getting in jail, or a hospital, or killing someone, All these are the various 'bottoms' at which various people begin to get help.
Judge Sams was a long term alcoholic. He was habitually taken home from the country club by police. But in his mind you had to do more to qualify as an alcoholic. He came to work regularly; that proved to his satisfaction that he was no alcoholic. Being poured into the squad car every night and taken home was just light stuff. That's the way they deny it: "I'm no alcoholic I can quit any time I want to. I've quit a thousand times." How often was I to hear that kind of sentiment, often from people in jail at the time.
The second thing I learned was that the men who improved were the ones who got the most help. A PO was some help (Someone came out with a modification of the 23rd Psalm that went something like this: "The Lord is my Probation Officer". It was gratifying to see that someone else had a grasp of the theological dimension of the work I was doing. In general people had a peculiar blindness to it.) Since that time I have continued to think of myself as a minister, but few of my friends and associates have been aware of my ministry. People in general have a naive and simplistic and utterly wrong concept of the meaning of the word.
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