The Administration: My Neighbor Needs Me

• Share

The President's war against poverty took shape and substance last week. In St. Petersburg, Fla., the first regular class of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), the domestic version of the Peace Corps, graduated. And in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains, 45 miles west of Baltimore, the first Job Corps training camp was officially opened.

Lady Bird Johnson, in St. Petersburg to give diplomas to the eleven men and eight women of VISTA'S graduating class, explained the idea behind the organization. Said she: "America is many things. But above all, more than any nation in the history of man, ever since the first frontiersman picked up his musket to help protect a neighbor, we have been a nation of volunteers. We have been a land in which the individual says, 'My neighbor needs me. I will do something.' " After the ceremony, Lady Bird toured the nearby Negro communities of Ridgecrest and Old Baskins's Crossing, where some of the VISTAS got field work experience.

To the Ghettos. By June 30, VISTA officials expect to have 2,000 volunteers in training or on assignment around the U.S., with 5,000 at work a year later. So far, VISTA has announced 49 projects in 20 states, has promised a total of 239 volunteers to work in Job Corps training camps, migrant-worker camps, on Indian reservations, in big-city ghettos, and mental hospitals. Last week's graduates, including a 57-year-old divorcee from Columbia, Mo., a former personnel supervisor for the Chrysler Corp., and a 19-year-old California co-ed who had never before been away from home, will be stationed in such places as Appalachia, the Missouri Ozarks, a Negro slum in Las Vegas, and a migrant workers' camp in California.

Three VISTAS will become part of the cadre at the Catoctin Mountain Job Corps camp that opened at a ceremony presided over by Sargent Shriver, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the coordinating body for the overall anti-poverty fight.

"Don't Come Back." Catoctin Mountain is the forerunner of some 100 Job Corps centers that Shriver hopes to have under construction or in operation by June 30. They will be home for 25,000 underprivileged youngsters ranging in age from 16 to 21. So far, 130,000 boys and girls have applied for admission, but even when it is going full tilt, by the end of 1966, the Job Corps' limit will be 100,000 trainees.

The youths at Catoctin Mountain are a pathetic lot. One is Robert Collier, 16, a pale, skinny boy from Big Stone Gap, Va., who had hardly got settled in camp when he had to have 14 teeth extracted. Asked when he had last been to a dentist, he replied: "I ain't never been." Another is Ray Martin, 18, who hails from "a holler" near Isom, Ky., where he lived with his widowed mother, six brothers and sisters. At six, Martin was gathering coal in an abandoned mine shaft to provide the family's fuel. At 16, he went to work in the mines as his family's chief wage earner. When Martin left home to travel to Catoctin Mountain, his mother told him: "Don't come back, son. There's nothing for you here." Still another is Clyde Melton, 16, a Negro from New Haven, Conn., who wants to become a cook. Says he: "I need a little bit of schooling. I need a little bit of everything."