Chapter 2, Promises of Power: Hustling

Hustling

The poor boy's story is universal. The poor American boy's story is the starting point of the American Dream. The poor American black boy's story is no dream, believe me, but it does contain one. Mine goes like this: I am walking in front of a house. It is cold outside, and I can feel the wind cutting through my thin jacket. I look into the house through the big picture window and I see a white family sitting in the living room. The father throws his baby into the air to make it laugh. A fireplace is going, the family is warm, happy and alive. There is a fence in front of the house. I am outside.

I haven't the slightest idea how I ever picked up that mental image, whether it really happened once and stuck, whether I dreamed it or read it in somebody else's life story, whether somebody told it to me I just don't know. But, for as long as I can remember, that image has been the emblem of my need. I suspect that most black children develop such an image. Some learn to live with it, some try to escape it, some fight it. I have kicked around and been kicked around, grabbed and abandoned several careers, and through it all been driven by one demand: How do you not be on the outside? How do you not be poor?

Two years after I was born on June 21, 1927, my father died.

He was a laundry worker. His name was Charles. I have no memories of him. My brother, Louis, two years older than I, has taken it on himself to learn more about our father. But for some reason, and perhaps this says something about me, I have never really tried to learn much about him. After his death, my mother was forced to take on domestic work in the homes of white people for twenty years while she was trying to raise Louis and me. She worked hard and made so little that she had to accept welfare to scrape together enough for us to live. Louis and I saw in her an example of how our people are forced into not merely the labor but the style of servitude, with it superficial deceits. We all know that servility is an act, something we do with our faces and voices when we have to. It is generally assumed that the posturing is superficial, that there is a 'real' person underneath. But after a time the habit of the servant wrenches a man at the roots of his being. What had been superficial becomes a radical change, and a man's basic outlook on life is ruined. It takes a deeply felt, an abiding personal integrity to survive as a whole person. Fortunately for Louis and me, our mother is such a person.

So I grew up poor and black in Cleveland. The facts of our kind of big-city poverty have been fully documented in sociology and the fiction of James Baldwin and others. The world we knew, before we moved into a public housing project, ran from East Sixty-eighth Street to East Seventy-ninth Street going east, and from Cedar Avenue south to Central Avenue. Everybody in that area knew everybody else, knew what they were doing and most of the time knew what they were hiding. We had almost no notion of anyone's living beyond the horizons of out narrow patch of neighborhood. My mother, Louis and I lived on the first floor at 2234 East Sixty-ninth Street in a rickety old two-family house. We covered the rat holes with the tops of tin cans. The front steps always needed fixing, one of them always seemed to be missing. The coal stove kept the living room warm; we used heated bricks and an old flatiron wrapped in flannel to keep warm in the bedroom. The three of us shared one bed.

Poor people are herded into such neighborhoods, where survival too often means that they are forced to prey on each other. When my mother washed the clothes on Saturday night, she hung them in the kitchen to dry. Hanging then outside meant you didn't want them anymore. When Louis and I would take our wagon down to get the surplus dried peas, flour, rice and dried milk that was dispensed to welfare clients, we took along a baseball bat to get the food home past the other kids and sometimes even adults.

And we had some fun, but you won't catch me being nostalgic about those times or recommending that it is good for a boy to grow up in such conditions. I grew up with a strong, elemental hatred for poverty and a deep need to have things, nice things. We had a sense of community in that neighborhood, but it was not the kind of community in which people should have to live. There is nothing glamorous about stealing from a delivery truck, or bootlegging, or the numbers racket.

Yet, because the essential condition of our lives was poverty, the men who were successful at these things did have a kind of glamour. My uncle, Pughsley Stone, whom everybody called Dock, ran an after hours spot next to our house. It was a bootlegging and gambling hole, full of tough characters, but none of them tougher than Dock. As a child of eight, I saw them bringing Dock Stone home all busted up from some fight, and at other times I heard stories about him pistol-whipping somebody. He was a very rough man and I was proud of him. In a community where people live in despair and denial, the man who defies the rules and is able to make a living becomes a hero. Dock was one of our heroes.

We were delivered from the most oppressive physical presence of our poverty in 1938, when I was eleven. Cleveland was the first city in the country to construct housing for the poor with federal funds. For some time after the plans for the housing projects were known and Mother had made an application for an apartment, we lived in day-to-day anticipation of getting out of our rickety old house. She would tell Louis and me about

steam heat, painted walls, beds of our own, but I'm sure these things meant little to us at the time. We had no experience to give those words meaning.

The day we moved was pure wonder. A sink with hot and cold running water, a place where you could wash clothes with a washing machine, an actual refrigerator. And we learned what it was to live in dependable warmth. For the first time, we had two bedrooms and two beds. My mother for the first time had a room and a bed of her own.

For me, the most important advantage of the projects was the Portland-Outhwaite recreation center only a block away. The swimming pool, ping-pong tables, boxing ring, art classes -- these things gave us a structure for our time we'd never had before. The center was where I first learned to box, and I got good enough at ping-pong to be a member of the city championship team.

Adolescence hits a boy like a fist, and if he is at all close to more than one world of activity, he is likely to find himself shoved toward the seamier. Until I reached the ninth grade I had been the pride of the classroom, getting excellent grades, singing in the glee club, that sort of thing. But about that time I began to develop other talents -- lagging pennies, shooting craps, playing poker, forging my mother's name on a paper excusing me from school. I was caught, of course, and my mother was severely disappointed in me. I felt her disappointment, but didn't change my ways. Whether I would have changed in a different high school I don't know, but I went to East Technical High School, which offered the best vocational training in the city. It was located in my all-black neighborhood, but it was attended by white kids who commuted there from all over. The student body, in fact, was about ninety percent white. (I wonder how those white kids, now middle-aged feel about busing today.)

East Tech had produced a number of internationally famous black track stars in the 1930s and 1940s -- Jesse Owens, Harrison

Dillard, Dave Albritton. One of the reasons the black kids were so good in that one sport is that they were actively discouraged from going out for team sports, football, basketball and baseball.

I remember spending a good deal of my time in the afternoon beating up white kids. We'd go down the halls of the school in the afternoon, looking for white boys to beat up. A lot of times I would do that by myself. If I caught one white boy standing around by himself waiting for a bus, I would just run up and start hitting him. My motivation and rationale for this were as illogical and senseless then as were the unprovoked attacks on black boys who dared to venture into the white neighborhoods. It is impossible for me to recall now what was going on in my mind then, what I though I was accomplishing. Whatever it was, it had me out looking for trouble a lot of the time. I had been boxing at the Portland-Outhwaite recreation center and was developing a fair reputation; maybe I just saw those white boys as a chance to get in some training.

The other sport I was working on then was pool hustling. I ran with two fellows, starting when I was about fifteen; one, named Albert Williams, we called A. C., and the other, Alton Ausbrook, we called Big Al. A. C. was a great pool shot but only when he wasn't gambling. Once you put money on the game, A. C. fell apart. Atom wasn't as find a shot as A. C., but he was a marvelous hustler. I practiced constantly until I managed to learn the best of both their styles, and by the time I dropped out of school, at seventeen, I was one of the two or three best hustlers in the neighborhood. Pool is a wonderfully competitive game, in some ways a good analogy for political infighting. It takes a great deal of technical skill, a good eye and a smooth delivery. Beyond that, hustling requires a man to seize quickly upon his opponent's weaknesses.

During the year between the time I dropped out of high school and the time I enlisted in the Army, I learned how to live on the street. I badly wanted to be successful, and I was. But I came to see that no matter how good I was as a street hustler, it

wasn't a way out. At some point I would wake up still tied to the old ways and still not secure against poverty. But I also learned the values of the people who live that life, the forms of honesty they insist on from each other, the things they would and would not do. I learned much of it from a prostitute who became a good friend. I'll call her Ruth.

I doubt that this girl was typical. Her moral stance had a great impact on me. An ethics professor might not have little trouble finding flaws in her philosophy, but the ethics professor would not likely have been born black and a woman and poor in a big city. Ruth is now a member of the middle class and a grandmother. At the time I knew her she was twenty-five and had had the same boy friend since she was sixteen. She is still with him today. It was he who turned her out to make money with her body. If she hadn't, there is no way they could have saved the money to buy the small retail business that has ever since provided their income and enabled them to send two children through college and professional school.

Ruth had an unbargainable rate for her services, and performed no acts she considered perverse. She defined a difference between herself as a prostitute and other girls she called whores, the ones who worked the streets and would do it standing up in doorways, in the backs of cars, would take whatever they were offered and would do anything they were asked. She was even more contemptuous of the middle-class girls, both black and white, who were merely promiscuous -- they were doing the same thing she was and not getting paid for it. What she did, at least in her own eyes, was provide a service, a simple, negotiable physical service that did not reach below the skin and touch her fundamental self. As far as she was concerned she was faithful to her man, and I agree with her. Ruth's philosophy served me well over the years as I had to make one political compromise or another to achieve a desired and needed end. But I never compromised on anything basic and fundamental to my personal self and my commitment to my people.

The street life taught me much. I mastered every aspect of it.

I understood it well enough to know it led to nowhere, and on July 27, 1945, just barely eighteen, I joined the Army. This was no moral decision. The war was over. I just wanted to get the hell out of a world I had had enough of. The Army picked me up out of that world and dropped me, of all places, in Alabama, where I learned a clean-edged unadulterated hatred for whites.

We were first taken to Atterbury, Indiana, but that lasted only a few days, and then we were off by train for Fort McClellan, Alabama. We stopped to eat in Birmingham. The recruits were led through the depot; around a restaurant, into an alley and through a back door into a large room filled with wooden tables. I was one of four acting corporals, and the four of us were standing there while the rest of the men were being seated. A white woman in her early twenties walked in carrying a huge basin filled with silverware. She dumped the contents on the table with a crash and said, "Help yourself, boys."

I told her she was wrong to dump the silver like that. She turned, looked me straight in the eye and said, "You may not know it, nigger, but you're in Alabama now."

The stories my mother had told me about the South flooded my mind and I realized suddenly that I was helpless.

The effect on me was so strong that in the thirteen weeks we spent at Fort McClellan I never left camp. I was the only man there who did not go to town. I wanted the fun and the release as much as any man there, but I wasn't going to go looking for it at the cost of humiliation or worse. My mother, realizing that my general attitude in Cleveland would get me into serious trouble in the South, had told me all sorts of horror stories. The stories hadn't meant much to me, but I am sure I carried away the notion that in the South the white man could kill any black person he wanted to. The passing remark of the waitress had brought it all into focus, and my fears hardened into hatred.

After Alabama, we were taken to Fort Lee, New Jersey, where we boarded a ship for France, and from there we took trains to Germany. Armed with K rations, chocolate and cigarettes, we arrived, the conquering American Army. There was nothing we

couldn't get, from war souvenirs to women. The excitement of Germany for many of us black soldiers was the availability of white women. Back home there were always a few available white girls, but any time you spent with a white girl in Cleveland was stolen. You didn't tell your black friends about it, and you sure as hell didn't let any white people know about it. Suddenly, in Germany, willing white women were all around us, ready to come to camp and service us any time, any way we wanted. Most of us took advantage of it brutally. If most of these women were whore and camp followers, there were also some who were desperately supporting children out there somewhere in the war's rubble. And these women reminded me strangely of the street world I thought I had left behind me. These women kept their children as well as they could. Sometimes the children would be in bed with you. But these women kept a dignity of their own, inviolable because you could not reach it. The soldier got her body, but she got the food and clothing she needed for her children. It was Ruth's philosophy all over again.

But then I found Hilda. We had a kind of free and proud man-woman relationship that would never have been possible in America. We grew extremely close in the months I spent there, and as my time began to close around me I almost decided to stay in Germany. But the pull of home was too strong.

Almost immediately on arriving home, I was enveloped in everything oppressive about being poor and black and uneducated in America. The comforts I had in Germany were gone. I felt confined. I wrote the U.S. government, asking whether civilian jobs were available in Germany. I quickly learned that without a high-school education I was going nowhere. A couple days later I registered to return to East Technical High School.

My attitudes had been changed. The contact with educated black men in the Army had made me see a new value in going to school More important, I now had money I had saved, and I had the G.I Bill. I coasted through the last year at East Tech

and enrolled at West Virginia State, a black college outside Charleston, West Virginia.

West Virginia States was no doubt a typical Southern black college, giving Southern kids enough education to pacify their desire for status in the black community but not enough to arouse their desire for more. Fortunately for me, though, there was one professor at the school who was not typical. His name was Herman G. Canady. He taught psychology and philosophy and had a doctorate from Northwestern University. As I think back, I realize that in some ways I must have taken him as a substitute father. He had a kind of open-door policy, and he taught very informally both in class and at his home, goading his students as much as lecturing them.

"You little black bunnies," he would say in class, "you came down here to this black school for a nine-month vacation.

We would laugh, and he would laugh with us, but he meant it. If he thought you were good enough and serious enough, he would describe to you how the black faculties in black colleges have the function merely of turning over the same piece of dirt in a plowed field. All the black colleges do, he would say, is redistribute the ignorance. They don't have the money to attract and hold scholars, to set up adequate libraries or laboratories. There is no way to get a first-rate education in such a place. Go, he'd say to where the people who really run this country get their educations. Canady was brilliant, skeptical, sarcastically pessimistic. But the depth of his commitment and devotion was clear to me. I it hadn't been there, he wouldn't have stayed at that school. And I remember that after one of those interminable cosmological arguments about the origins of things and values, he shocked me by saying, "God made it that way." It had never occurred to me that such a rationalistic, skeptical man believed in God. But I knew by the way he said it that he meant it. I kept more or less in touch with Canady over the years. When I was elected mayor of Cleveland twenty years later, one of the first calls of congratulations I received came from this great old professor, crying like a baby over the telephone.

Canady convinced me I was wasting my time at West Virginia State, and so in September 1948 I enrolled at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Back home, I went to John Holly for a job. I drove him all summer in that Lausche campaign, which Lausche won, and then when school started in the fall he got me a patronage job as a clerk in an Ohio Department of Liquor Control Store in the afternoons. So I had time for morning classes, an afternoon job, and a little pool hustling at night.

I managed to keep my income up to a more or less livable standard, but my desire for more or more soon ate away at my sense of the need for education. Working for Holly had given me my first real look at politics, and it had given me just a glimpse of a way out, a way to not be poor and a way to not have to work for someone else. I was still casting about, with no sense of a particular ambition or vocation. Tired of being a part-time student, part-time clerk and part-time hustler, I went to Holly again in December of 1949 and asked if he cold get me a job with the state's liquor enforcement division. Within two weeks he had me on the force.

When I started as a liquor enforcement agent in 1950, I was twenty-three, with three years of college behind me. Still without any sense of direction, I just wanted some stability and enough money to live on without having to scratch for it. My two years with the enforcement division changed all of that. I emerged as very serious, if scrappy, adult. It hardened my will to take risks as well as my need to be out from under the thumb of the white man.

The enforcement division provided me with an elaborate mechanism of legality to back me up, and then it gave me a gun. My job, basically, was to assist in closing down bootleg operations in black neighborhoods in whatever city I was assigned to. It was never written that I would not be enforcing the law in white-run places, but it was understood. Sometimes I neglected to understand it, though, and that got me transferred to another

city. Over the months, even though I was wielding a certain quite enjoyable power, I found myself running into the same racism in the bureaucratic apparatus behind me as existed in the joints I was out to confront. It came to me, finally, working constantly with lawyers on liquor cases in court, that those lawyers were the only black men I could see who didn't have white masters. In time, that feel became a desperate need.

I had two guns, the short-nosed .32 revolver I wore, and a long-barreled .38 police special I kept in the car, Actually, I don't think enforcement agents had the legal authority to carry guns then, but we all did. I had been trained in some pretty rough arenas in my few months as a liquor agent.

The first town they sent me to was Canton, a town of about 116,000 just southeast of Akron. At that time Canton was like a tiny Las Vegas -- slot machines right along Main Street, houses of prostitution right behind it, open poker and blackjack games, all amazingly public and, of course, highly illegal. Why they sent me there I don't know. I was about six feet tall and hardly weighed 150 pounds, had a baby face and a moustache you had to be in the right light to even see. In Cleveland they had told me to arrest anybody with a liquor license who permitted gambling, and we had gone around to the different places and done just that.

Canton was my testing ground. I went into a large, neon-lit bar on Main Street, bought a drink, paid for it, and then called the bartender over. I showed him my identification and said "Mister, you're serving liquor here and that's against the law. You have to go to jail." He broke into laughter.

"Really, mister," I said, "I'm not kidding."

He called some people over and said, "Come here and listen to this kid. Now tell them what you just told me."

"I'm a liquor enforcement agent and I bought this liquor and it's against the law for you to sell liquor. Now you have to go to jail." There was more laughter.

"What are you going to do if I don't go with you?" he asked.

"I'm going to have to take you, " I said.

"Punk, get on out of here," he said. "You don't understand what's going on. You aren't taking anybody to jail."

"Yessir," I said, "I'm going to take you to jail, one way or another."

At that point I took out the pistol they had told me I could wear and hit him on the head. Blood popped out all over, and he hit the floor. I was as scared then as I ever expect to be. I turned and, waving my gun at the crowd, said, "Don't anybody move, please just don't move, I'm scared, I'm frightened, and if anybody moves around here I'm liable to shoot you."

That bartender went to the hospital before he went to jail, but he did go to jail. The word got around in Canton that when the young kid says you gotta go to jail, you go.

As my reputation grew, so did my attitude. Finally I provoked an incident that got me transferred.

The agent in charge of my district sent me to the neighboring county, to a small town that was supposed to have a number of bootleg joints. I was to meet a deputy sheriff and we would raid the places together. The two of us met on the edge of town in the middle of the afternoon, agreed to meet in a certain neighborhood that night, and parted. I wandered into town looking for a place to eat. I had a hamburger and started walking again. At the town's sole movie theatre, the feature was 'The Jackie Robinson Story'. I had never seen it, so I decided to spend the time watching that first of the antisegregation films. I was walking down the dark aisle when I heard my name called. I turned and there was the deputy sheriff. We walked back to the lobby and he explained to me that because I was a Negro I would have to sit in the last five rows on the left-hand side of the theatre. I could tell he was embarrassed to have to do it, but that hardly mattered. Here was one law-enforcement officer telling another that he was going to have to sit in a segregated section of a theater. It is only a heavy irony that 'The Jackie Robinson Story' was playing. But I suddenly understood what was going on in that town, what I was being called upon to do.

I still had some time. I walked out of the theater and into

the nearest bar. I asked for a drink and was told I had to go behind a pillar, all colored people had to get their drinks at the end of the bar.

"Are you kidding?" I asked.

"No, I'm not," the bartender said.

"Fine," I said, and showing my identification. Nicely enough, a black legislator from Cleveland, Chester Gillespie, a Republican, had some years before shepherded through the state House of Representatives a bill requiring any establishment that sold liquor to operate on an equal-opportunity basis. There were five bars on the main street of that town. Within a half hour, I had cited all of them. I drove back to Canton, wrote up the reports, put them into envelopes, stamped them and mailed them to the state capital.

The next morning, my boss, Stanley Cmich -- now the mayor of Canton -- called me in. He was steaming. He wanted to know why I had done whatever it was that I had done instead of what I was supposed to do. I said, piously enough, "They were violating the law, Chief, they wouldn't serve me down there."

"You had no goddam business down there trying to get served," he said. "You had an assignment to go down there on the bootleg joints in the Negro neighborhood."

"Well, it was still light," I said, "I didn't have anything to do and I went into these places and they wouldn't serve me. I had assumed that the department was interested in enforcing all the laws."

"Give me the reports," he said.

"I can't Chief," I said, "I put them in the mail to Columbus last night."

"Get out of here," he said.

Next day I was transferred to Dayton.

It was in Dayton that I met my first wife, Edith Shirley Smith, a refined, attractive middle-class girl, very remote from the ruffian's life I had led. We met in October 1951, at a political party. Ours was a brief courtship, we were secretly married two days after Christmas that year. Then the next month I was transferred

to Toledo, and we had a weekend marriage for the next half year, seeing each other only two days a week. Finally in June 1952 we had a formal wedding with a Greek ceremony in Dayton, attended by the cream of Dayton's black society.

Only one man on the force, Edward Payne, also from Cleveland, had a higher arrest record than I. Payne and I were transferred to Toledo at the same time to work together. There was bound to be trouble.

By the time I was assigned to Toledo, I had long been disabused of any notions of fairness in the agency's enforcement policies. I knew that some spots were allowed to stay open and others were routinely closed usually because of some sort of deal on the local level. The collaboration wasn't always a payoff; it could be as simple as the dropping of a dime -- an old street phrase for the practice of protecting your own operation by calling the vice squad and informing on other operators. When agents like Payne and me come in from out of town, it takes a while to master the particular convolutions of local politics.

In Toledo there was a black man named Jinx Green who ran a bar in an almost legitimate manner. I say 'almost' because he did have a pool table in the back room that was used, not for shooting pool, but for shooting craps. And I say 'manner' because, although the bar had the usual signs and furniture and openness of a legitimate operation, it happened that Green had no liquor license. He had been arrested on occasion, but never closed. Payne and I leaned from other bootleggers that Jinx was protected and permitted to operate virtually unmolested by the vice squad.

We noticed Green's odd record in the liquor department files. We never asked the Toledo vice squad about him, we just went out there.

It was in the middle of the afternoon. You could look in the front windows of Green's place and see the customers sitting at the bar drinking, and beyond them, through a curtained door,

you could see men shooting craps on the billiard table. We walked in, ordered drinks, paid for them, identified ourselves, arrested the bartender, confiscated some whiskey and walked out to Payne's car. I had just gotten into the car, next to the arrested bartender, and Payne was walking around the car when this middle aged guy ran up and yanked open my door. He reached across me and grabbed the arm of the bartender, pulling him in front of me and yelling. "What do these sons of bitches think they are doing? Come on out of there."

It was so startling that for a moment I just sat there, stunned. But before the bartender could get across in front of me, I grabbed him and hit the little guy's arm away. By that time, Payne was back around the car and he grabbed the fellow. It was an amazing sight. Payne was a thick, tough man, and he was having a tough time holding on to this wiry little whirlwind jumping around in his arms, swearing and raising Cain at the top of his lungs. Payne finally got him settled down enough to ask him if he knew who we were. He allowed that he understood perfectly well who we were, that he didn't give a good goddam, and we had no business arresting his bartender. We informed him that the bartender had sold us drinks, that it was illegal and we were taking the bartender to jail, and we would take him to jail, too, if he didn't quiet down. He quieted, and we took the bartender off to jail and booked him.

The next morning in municipal court, Jinx, the tough, wiry, little man, was there and it was at that point we discovered Jinx's political strength. The bartender was fined twenty-five dollars and costs, with the costs suspended. Green turned to us, right in the middle of the courtroom, with the judge and the police listening, and declared his place was going to stay open, "and if you ever come back I'll kill you."

Quite an amazing remark from a bootleg operator in the middle of an open court. One sees clearly what the word "political" means in the phrase "political reality." For the next six months, we left Green alone.

In June, the governor's office sent two young investigators to

Toledo, both white, to go out with Payne and me. They were new and inexperienced, and the state office wanted them to go around with us to get a little street-wise. Payne and I had the highest arrest records in the division, so it seemed we would be good teachers. What's more, we were going to be accompanied by the agent in charge of our district, Al Kopan. Kopan had told us he wanted to put on a good show for these young white fellows from the governor's office, so we set up three places. The five of us went out, made our arrests as clean and quiet as you could ask and began driving out of the ghetto.

Kopan said to Payne and me, "Well, that about cleans this town up."

"Not quite, Al," I said. "there is a place that has been running wide open, both liquor and gambling. But the man who runs it said if we ever come in there, he'll kill us."

Now Eddie Payne and I had what we wanted. Kopan coouldn't admit he knew about Green's place in front of these fellows from the governor's office, and he certainly couldn't refuse to go raid the place. And we would have the added advantage of the presence of two white agents from outside.

Kopan looked at me a long minute before he said, "we aren't going to have a place like that running in my district. Let's go get them."

The place was full of people. Payne went in first, followed by the two young guys and Kopan. I went in last, locking the front door behind me. I had changed guns, and was carrying the long-barreled .38 special. Payne walked to the back of the room, grabbed a full glass from somebody's table, held it up in the air with one hand and held up his identification with the other and said to the bartender, "You're under arrest."

Jinx came running out of the back room at full tilt. He ran into Eddie and hit him in the face at the same time and never broke stride. Eddie went sprawling on the floor, and suddenly there were two kinds of people, fighters, and fliers. The ones who weren't jumping out of windows and dashing for the back door jumped on Eddie. Jinx ran to get behind the bar, right over the

cash register, in plain view, Jinx had a Horse pistol, a Colt .38 on a long frame. I yelled to Kopan to stop him, and the two of us grabbed him just as he was getting behind the counter. Everybody was getting involved in the fight at this time, everybody but those two white boys from the governor's office, who were standing stock still in the middle of the room, in the eye of the hurricane.

Payne had struggles up from the floor, with a couple of guys hanging off him. He drew his gun and fired two shots into the ceiling. I held Jinx off long enough to get my gun out and yelled, "Get back!" Jinx grabbed the barrel of my gun and Kopan did too. Just for a moment, the three of us were standing there, all of us with our hands on my gun. I forced my arm up as hard as I could and fired. Jinx fell back, but Kopan had been holding the end of the barrel. The bullet went through the fleshy part of his thumb. I wheeled around and shot Jinx twice, one in the stomach and once in the thigh, and he fell. I turned and there was a guy coming up behind Eddie Payne, about to hit over the head with a bottle. I shot the man in the chest and he fell.

Suddenly the only people in the room were the five agents, all standing, and two men lying bleeding on the floor. It was over. We called the police. The ambulance came, and that was it.

Both men lived, and when they had recuperated and their case came up they were fined on one liquor-violation count and one count of resisting arrest. Payne and I were told not to leave town, that the county prosecutor was investigating the shootings. We were led to believe charges would be filed against us, or at least me. But the head of the state's enforcement division, Anthony J. Rutkowski, now a municipal judge in Cleveland, came to Toledo and had a conference with the prosecutor. Afterwards, Rutkowski told us everything had been cleared up, there would be no charges and the shootings would be ruled justifiable. However, Eddie and I would be transferred to other districts. I went to Cincinnati.

The Jinx Green incident was the last straw for me. I wanted out of the enforcement job. The job had brought me a number

of luxuries I had never had before, nice clothes, a car and a classier wife than I had ever thought I would be able to marry. Those same luxuries just gave me a taste for something better. The men I saw who had something better were lawyers. My brother was already in law school. A couple of lawyers I had worked with as an agent encouraged me, and so in March I had applied to the University for Minnesota and had been accepted. Shirley and I sat quietly in Cincinnati until September, when we left for Minneapolis.

My marriage didn't fare well for long. Shirley and I moved into a tiny apartment on the third floor of an old building in St. Paul. She took a job at a hospital in Minneapolis, but she wasn't happy. Almost immediately, we began to have arguments, and by January 1953 we had broken up. Ours had never been much more than a series of weekend affairs; we never developed a strong relationship.

After two years at the University of Minnesota I had a Bachelor Of Science of Law degree, which was about as negotiable as Confederate money. I came back to Cleveland with the intermediate degree, moved in with my mother and enrolled in night law school at the Cleveland Marshall School of Law. My brother, Louis, had just married, and he and his wife had moved into their own home leaving mom alone.

My degree qualified me for nothing, so I turned to Judge Perry B. Jackson about a job as a probation office for Cleveland's municipal court. The judges make those appointments. I was appointed in September 1954, and kept the job through the rest of law school.

The job as a probation officer enlarged my sense of social commitment and enraged me. Until then, I had been occupied keeping my own head above water. Now I felt relatively secure and headed for an independent future. But that job brought me again and again into contact with those who were not making it, people whose spirits had been broken by oppression, filth, and squalor. I was supposed to be their supervisor and guide, but I began to see that they needed more than that, they needed advocates

at the highest levels of government. Being a probation officer can be dispiriting, the feeling of helplessness can be overpowering. One night the wife of one of my parolees called to say rats had attacked her baby. I drove out there to their filthy apartment, bundled up the baby and took them to the hospital. The baby's nose and upper lip had been completely gnawed away. The doctors saved its life. There is nothing more to say. And what could I tell that poor mother?

I graduated from law school in the spring of 1956 and promptly failed the bar exam. I stayed on in the probation department until the results of the June 1957 exam were released. I quit the same day I learned I had passed.

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