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Show Boondoggle Marrs Head Start Program By J. BAUMAN In a few terrible weeks of July, 6 1967, armed insurrection exploded across the heartland of the nation "crowned ... with brotherhood from sea to shining sea." Paralyz- when everybody's eating.) Two days before classes were to begin an undersized shipment of equipment arrived at a center in thirty-miles-distant Berlin. We all drove to that town and indulged in a wild free-for-all for the material. One center hoarded most of the see- ment oozed along in the stiffling second story of a white wooden annex to the county courthouse. We spent two or three days strangling and watching grainy movies of Humphrey talking about Head Start (the sound system was screwed up: the lips never matched the garbled words) and hearing condescending white social-working women with hairlips mouthing idealistic crap about the "Joys of Childhood" and "Learning through Play." (Large mouth gaping wide in the stuffy room, strands of saliva hang from her roof to her tongue; her eyes roll and there is no sense to the repeated words, the sweat tickles down your collar and the lady behind be-hind you fans herself with a palm fan.) We then ran out of things to do. Our equipment hadn't arrived yet and most of the centers weren't ready for occupancy, so we couldn't teach. We were told to scoot our folding chairs together and "get to know one another now" and after we'd got to know one another now for a couple of hours we ran out of things to say. Migrant School We were then taken to a school for migrant children. It gave us something to do, but no light was shed on anything because the kids were much older than ours were to be! besides, the administration had arranged for us to arrive at lunch-time. lunch-time. (A favorite ploy of the O.E.O., I later discovered. This is because the food is good and it is next to impossible for a visitor to spot educational ed-ucational - technique deficiencies construction had hardly begun. So I was sent to another church-center without equipment or an aide. I had to steal a floating aide from the other teachers there and bum equipment, which was scarce in the first place. First Day At the start of my first teaching day, I had two tables borrowed from the church, three or four small Head Start-provided chairs, ten church-loaned chairs, one cardboard card-board "Superduper Market" and little else. The center had fifteen cots to sleep forty-five children; chil-dren; one of our two johns leaked; we had far too little floor space and no playground equipment; we . had few toys; and we were about as close to total ignorance of what was expected of us as possible. f f i n g frustrations erupted into blazing blaz-ing r e v o 1 u tion. (Sickness hid in all the oblivious billboards, slid through the black-slimed black-slimed rivers, p a c ed reflected in the grimy plateglass pawn-hop pawn-hop windows of i'J 1 i - i saw boards but no fulcrum s. Much bad blood resulted. Next day we saw our centers for the first time and were told to set them up. When I got to the annex tacked onto on-to the back of . Mt Zlon Methodist Metho-dist Church for my use, I found that all the dark and dying cities: and when one siren too many shrilled past a tenament five degrees too hot a revolution staggered stag-gered into consciousness. Could it have been otherwise?) But I didn't want to believe it: I was afraid that I too would become be-come twisted by one of the sicknesses sick-nesses rotting in the bowels of my country. So I joined the teaching staff of the newly-formed Worcester Wor-cester County Head Start program. Grainy Movies The ration of Negroes to whites working in the project was seven to one. Our first week of employ- |