Reformers to Radicals (16 page)

Nevertheless, the last few months of 1964 saw a flurry of Volunteer activity. AVs held enrichment projects in Knott, Knox, Clay, and Leslie counties. At a school in Knox County on October 17, Union College students dug a drainage ditch for the playground and a well, installed siding on the building, and performed enrichment demonstrations. AVs repaired the playground at Rye Cove, in Leslie County, and managed a general enhancement project at Lick Branch, in Knott County. During October alone, student Volunteers executed twenty projects, prompting the AV staff member Jack Rivel to assert that the Appalachian Volunteers “continue to provide new experiences in the rural school areas for the culturally deprived youths.”
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This intense period of work put a strain on Ogle and the Volunteer staff. In order to ease the pressure, Ogle again looked outside the region. Moving yet one more step away from his original position, he asked the president of Antioch College for help. Founded in 1852, and located in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Antioch was one of the first institutes of higher learning to establish a work-study program. Designed to provide real-world experiences that would enhance classroom work, the program had, by 1964, already sent Antioch students to work with the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Ogle believed that “the participation of [Antioch] students would be of immeasurable value to the Appalachian Volunteers program.” Coming directly on the heels of the recruitment of VISTA volunteers, the solicitation of Ohio students dealt another blow to the philosophy of local people helping their neighbors.
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To say that the Council of the Southern Mountains felt good about the school projects would be an understatement. The same could be said about the student volunteers and the federal government. According to a Volunteer report, the organization took for granted the receipt of OEO funds, and the Council began hiring additional staff solely for the AV program. That same report claimed that, on November 21, the AVs reached their participation
goal for a single weekend when two hundred student volunteers conducted school-centered activities in the mountains. Elliott and Jackson counties saw the bulk of Volunteer activity that month. The Lower Blaine, Roscoe, and Wright-Watson schools in Elliott all hosted enrichment efforts. Escorted by two Americans, two Morehead State College foreign exchange students—one from Iran and one from Hong Kong—traveled to Roscoe and Wright-Watson to enlighten the children there about life in the Middle East and the Orient. In Jackson County, AV workers brought art supplies (clay, crayons, paint, construction paper, and glue), teaching aids (dictionaries, maps, and globes), and playground equipment (bats, baseballs, jump ropes, and basketballs and goals) to the Adkins, Hisel, Huff, Kerby Knob, and Letterbox schools. Tom Davis, who participated in the Letterbox project on November 21, took particular interest in the school's bell. Because it lacked proper housing, its axle had corroded, making it extremely difficult to ring. The volunteer greased the bell, but he encouraged the Volunteer staff member Gibbs Kinderman to construct a belfry and to apply a more durable lubricant. “I think you will agree,” he wrote to Kinderman, “that a schoolhouse bell is an important part of the school's total function.”
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Other counties also commanded Appalachian Volunteer interest late that autumn. At Jones Creek, in Harlan County, twelve Cumberland College students and twenty local children cleared the school's playground of debris, built a slide, hiked the neighboring hills, sang songs, and played games. Six students from the University of Kentucky's South East Center in Cumberland, Kentucky, went to Persimmon Fork, in Leslie County, on November 28, where they installed a basketball goal and then grouped about twenty-five locals into teams. They also brought one hundred books in AV book boxes. Volunteers from Lees Junior College and Alice Lloyd College treated seven other Leslie County rural schools to similar programs. In short, the War on Poverty as conducted by the Appalachian Volunteers included basketball games, singing, tape recorder demonstrations, and foreign culture presentations. Though the more tangible projects, such as the renovation of a lunchroom at Lower Polls Creek, in Leslie County, and the distribution of books, continued, AV efforts were, in late 1964, becoming increasingly focused on enrichment.
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The onset of winter did little to slow the Volunteers' enthusiasm or work effort, and they received tremendous news in the form of a letter from
Sargent Shriver, the OEO director. Writing on December 15, 1964, Shriver informed Ogle that the federal government had granted the CSM's Appalachian Volunteers program $299,242 and assigned fourteen VISTA volunteers under Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act. Under the terms of this grant, the AVs agreed to “demonstrate the efficiency of an intense volunteer effort in inspiring disadvantaged people to work for the betterment of their condition through self-help projects in home management, sanitation, improving school buildings and libraries, tutoring, developing recreational and cultural activities, and motivating people to discover their needs and develop their potentials.” While the Volunteers interpreted this mandate as allowing them to continue handling the book drive and renovation efforts and presenting science, world cultures, and music programs, the VISTA volunteers focused on helping rural teachers, developing community leaders, defining a community's problems, and organizing the people around those problems.
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Though the grant created specific jobs especially for the AVs, the charge to “[motivate] people to discover their needs” was as vague as the desire to develop communities—creating a large loophole through which the Appalachian Volunteers and their VISTA allies would eventually jump.

Along with ensuring the continuation of its weekend programs, the OEO grant convinced the CSM that its Volunteer program was on the right track. Federal funding, moreover, allowed the Council to give serious consideration to expanding the program to the neighboring states of West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. Also, the Appalachian Volunteers established four Kentucky field offices, in Barbourville, Manchester, Morehead, and Prestonsburg. Each was responsible for eleven different counties. Of immediate consequence, however, the AVs began to make plans for weeklong projects.
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The Volunteers, nevertheless, did not abandon their weekend ventures. During the weeks prior to Christmas break, they worked feverishly. Adding a director of field operations and a library specialist, they again took to the battlefield. In the first week of December, five University of Kentucky volunteers and one adult supervisor went to Salt Rock, in Jackson County. In addition to building a bookshelf, the students cut down a nearby evergreen, moved it into the school, and made Christmas ornaments to hang on the tree with the paper, glue, and other art supplies they had brought.
Then the AVs hosted a “punch and cookies” party for the local children and sang carols, told stories, and distributed balloons. The following weekend, Tom Rhodenbaugh led over thirty volunteers back to Jackson County for projects in five additional schools. A Christmas program monopolized the Volunteers' attention at the Letterbox school, while basketball reigned supreme at the Huff school. At New Zion, the children had both, but the Adkins kids had to settle for spelling lessons. After no locals appeared for the planned Christmas program at Kerby Knob, the Volunteers went through the community and “rounded up” ten children to take part. In McKee, the AVs sponsored a production of
Amahl and the Night Visitors
the week of December 14.
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At a conference intended to assess their first year of operation and make suggestions for the next, the Volunteers closed out 1964. Held in early December, what was designated as the “Fall Conference” was a forum to discuss the overall effort and plan for the next year. Almost immediately, AV members voiced their concerns. Some complained about the escalation of enrichment as opposed to renovation efforts. One volunteer who took notes during the conference reported: “The typical volunteer tends to get greater feelings of accomplishment from actual physical labor projects such as school renovation, rather than intangibles such as school enrichment.” These anonymous notes also revealed a growing concern over the planning and organization of AV projects. Such complaints may have been the motivation for the creation of the four field offices. Most interesting, however, was the apparent focus of the convention. When asked, the volunteers responded with comments about themselves and their organizations, and about their sense of satisfaction, but not about those people they were supposedly trying to help.
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The conference was, however, more than just a gripe session. In the hope of improving the overall project, the organization sponsored a series of workshops geared toward the improvement of the volunteers' skills. Addressing such topics as storytelling, science demonstrations, arts and crafts, and recreation, these workshops indicated the direction the AVs would take in the next year and reflected the agreement between the OEO and the CSM over the proper way to attain the goal of ending Appalachian poverty.

If the reaction of the University of Kentucky AV chapter is any indication,
the Fall Conference certainly made an impact. Two days after the meeting, on December 7, 1964, the University of Kentucky chapter circulated its newsletter, which announced a Christmas vacation project scheduled to take place at the Lick Branch school, near Ary, Kentucky, between January 2 and 9, 1965. With less than a month until the project's scheduled beginning, the newsletter urged those who wished to participate in the effort to make immediate plans, yet tried to minimize the sense of urgency. “This [project] may sound like a lot,” the announcement reassured potential participants, “but actually it is not much.”
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With the construction of a basketball court, the organization of recreational activities and science demonstrations, and the installation of a sink in the local school as the major accomplishments of the University of Kentucky Christmas program, the reality of the newsletter's last statement was more real that any Volunteer would, or could, admit.
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The CSM leaders', the OEO's, and the Volunteers' own conceptions about America conditioned the University of Kentucky students to believe that this was the way to solve the region's problems. The schools were dilapidated because the people were removed, physically, politically, and culturally, from the achievements of modern America. Their task, their
duty
, as the AV leadership phrased it, was to bring those quality advancements to the mountains. Once they introduced even just a few antiquated, isolated mountaineers to, and integrated them with, modern, urban America, those left in impoverishment would readily embrace what the Volunteers offered. The mountaineers would then make demands of the political, social, and, most important, political systems, and rural Appalachia's problems would end.

As the AV Board of Directors reflected on this mandate and reflected on the organization's efforts in the mountains during 1964, they expressed a great deal of satisfaction. The greatest benefit that the people of the mountains gained from the Appalachian Volunteers was, they felt, not repaired schoolhouses, but a sense of community and a desire for a better education. Further, the volunteers themselves were good examples—excellent role models—for mountain children. Also, because the volunteers were college students, they were not a threat to local adults, which resulted in a good rapport between the two groups. Some Board members, nevertheless, expressed reservations as to whether they were really helping the poor or
merely covering up the outward signs of poverty. A second concern was the effect that the Appalachian Volunteers would have on mountain residents. Would it be positive and long lasting, or would it cease when the AVs had completed their work? With these reservations and expectations, the Appalachian Volunteers prepared for 1965.
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The mountain people, like all chronically poor people, are fatalistic—life is something that happens to a person, not an adventure to be undertaken and enjoyed. . . . The people living in these isolated mountain settlements have little knowledge of and almost no personal experience in the outside world. The Volunteers, through their enrichment program, their libraries, and their very presence, bring the world to these people, show them something of what their lives (or at least, their children's) might be like. Most important, they provide a model for the children to compete with that offered by the local school drop-out. Bringing the world to these children in such a personal way makes it seem nearer, something they themselves might someday be a part of.

—Appalachian Volunteers: The Gift of Hope

Jack Rivel and Flem Messer make an interesting pair, especially in the context of the War on Poverty in eastern Kentucky. Though both were Appalachian Volunteers (AVs) and were involved in some of the organization's earliest projects, their experiences and backgrounds highlight a transformation that the AVs underwent by the summer of 1965. While the organization still held to its philosophy of local people helping each other, that ideal was, by late 1965, becoming increasingly untenable. With the involvement of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in the antipoverty effort in the region, the Appalachian Volunteers underwent, within a year of its founding, a significant demographic shift, one that would remake its identity by the end of 1966. In fact, the presence of the New Jersey native Rivel, the first “president” of the AVs, undermined the ideal of local people helping each other from the very beginning. This is not to argue that Rivel, a graduate
of Union College, in Barbourville, Kentucky, was in any way a detriment to the Volunteers. Nevertheless, unlike Messer, a Clay County native and Berea College graduate, he was not a Kentuckian, let alone an Appalachian. Another difference between the two, and perhaps a more intriguing one, was the manner in which these two related to the Appalachian Volunteers and the people they were then working to help.
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