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Into the Future: Rambling Thoughts as I Bring This Story Up to Date 9 to 5 Leaving the PDI, the commune, and the Georgeville Community Project to reenter the world of 9 to 5 was far more difficult than I imagined it would be. It didn’t take long to learn about job openings. Bob Beecroft, with Mutual Radio in D.C., called me with a description of a job with an organization called Offender Aid and Restoration (OAR) in Charlottesville, Virginia. They flew me to D.C. to meet the board of directors. They knew everything about me. I knew nothing about them. Once again it seemed I had to live with a reputation that I knew what I was doing. I was hired. An interesting move to Virginia followed. I drove a large rental truck with a Chandler and Price hand-fed press and seventy-five drawers of hand-set type. Sharlane and Charity followed me in an old ’53 Volvo I’d traded for the pickup. With me in the cab of the truck were our dog Sam, a cat, a hen with sixteen chicks, and an attitude. On the last leg of the trip, coming down the Blue Ridge Mountains just west of Charlottesville , the brakes failed on the truck. As the truck picked up speed and pulled away from the other drivers, I glanced back at Sharlane, and as I pulled away I could see this “What are you doing?” look on her face. When I finally came to a stop, the Virginia highway patrolman who had been trying to get my attention asked if I knew how fast I was going. I told him, “The culprit was gravity,” and explained to him about the brakes. By the time he finished checking my license on his computer and returned to the truck to hand it back to me, Shar and Charity had caught up. We drove into Charlottesville. Charlottesville was a few comfortable steps up from the commune. Our home was situated so we could look across a valley at Jefferson’s Monticello. I loved the work, although I was never convinced that a national program director was a position OAR needed. Then, shortly after I arrived, Jay Worrell stepped down as director and joined the board, and a Protestant minister was hired to take over. At the first staff meeting, everyone was asked to stand and bow our heads. The new director began praying. I watched and thought to myself, “WTF!” Another speed bump on the road to employment. One of the OAR staff members was a hard-working young black woman, with a young 204 | Into the Future daughter a couple of years older than Charity, whose pay was being subsidized by the feds during her year-long training period. When the year ended, the director replaced her with a pretty blond airhead. There were other problems. Money was tight. Our offices were in a home next door to the old Charlottesville jail where the last execution by hanging in Virginia had taken place. The jail was empty and clean. I checked around and found that we could take over the jail for our offices rent-free. We would look good having our offices in cells, and the move would give us national publicity, I told the other board members. I even had the terminology worked out. No one working to help offenders was operating from a location that afforded us a better perspective on the plight of prisoners. The response was, “That is absolutely ridiculous.” Two years later they made the move. I appeared before the board and explained that money was going to get progressively more difficult to raise and that we should consider adding one small element to our volunteer training program to ensure future funding: We must train our volunteers to not only counsel offenders but be exposed to the plight of victims. Once again the answer was, “That is absolutely ridiculous.” Big mistake on their part as funding slowed. With Worrell out of the picture, I didn’t last two years. When the preacher fired me, it came as no surprise. There were too many conflicts. There was the scene when he fired the black woman. When I told him I would be arriving thirty minutes late for staff meetings because I was not interested in his proselytizing, he asked me what I believed in. I gave him a line from a...

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