Before we begin, a story. Like all the stories you’ll get from us, this one is true. I walked off a battlefield onto a college campus, Rutgers University in Newark, a commuter school in the heart of a gritty city, in the turbulent year 1969. I was a working-stiff, a veteran holding down several part-time jobs to supplement the miserly support of the G.I. Bill. During the school year I worked in fast food joints and tutored underclassmen in English composition. Summers I was full-time at the county parks department, running a playground in a large park in the western section of the city near a large public housing complex.
I knew Newark and thought I knew the problems my staff would face. Heroin, gangs, toughs up to no good. And indeed there was some of that -- pushers who would move on only when I dialed the local precinct for a patrol car; muscled thugs hanging around the basketball court looking for trouble instead of a good game of two-on-two. But my biggest problem turned out to be the kids, the little ones, who showed up every day by the dozens in the morning, left by men and women who ran for buses or hurried off on foot to jobs as cleaning ladies or battery mechanics, bus drivers and boiler makers. Read more »
