Sonny Montes and Mexican American Activism in Oregon

The Revolution

76 The Revolution On April 7, 1967, the day Will Pape’s resignation went into effect, the VML board of directors began a search for a new executive director. Several internal candidates stepped forward, among them Bob Wynia, the assistant executive director who had been loyal to Pape up to the end and was also on close terms with the OEO program analyst assigned to monitor the VML. Wynia lobbied hard for the job, but the board ultimately offered it to John Little. One important point in Little’s favor was that many members of the board were sympathetic to his community development approach. A second was that, since he was fairly new to the organization, he bore no scent of the Ford Galaxie scandal. Little began his new job in Woodburn in the first week of May 1967.1 Almost immediately, Little had to turn his attention to preparing the organization for the arrival of the approaching migrant army. Additional staff members had to be hired for the summer months. Plans for the VML’s component programs had to be finalized. Little also had to deal with the continuing fallout from the Oregon Journal’s exposé of the VML. Following the appearance of those stories, both the federal government’s General Accounting Office (GAO) and the OEO had announced that they would conduct investigations into the VML’s finances and procedures. The GAO quickly launched an audit, completing its on-site investigation before Little began his tenure as executive director. But the OEO auditors, slower off the mark, hadn’t even started. Once they did, Little’s workdays became much longer. Auditors peppered him with questions about past operations. Since Little knew almost nothing of the particulars, he found it necessary to immerse himself in the VML’s files in order to provide the answers. The experience proved to be both time consuming and frustrating for Little, an investment of much energy in cleaning up a mess left by the former administration.2 Then there were personnel matters. As executive director, Little was surrounded by members of the old regime who had been his opponents during the VML’s internal struggles in late 1966 and early 1967. The two he considered most problematic were Wynia and Sam Granato. Wynia, he felt, was philosophically hostile to The Revolution 77 community development. In his campaign to get the executive director’s office, Wynia, aware that the board wanted to prioritize the participation of farmworkers, had tried to convey the impression that he had become a convert to community development, but Little doubted his sincerity. Granato was objectionable on two counts: he was not keen on community participation, and he nearly drove Little crazy with his efforts to quantify the VML’s performance.3 During the Pape regime, the VML had been fixated on quantitative measures of performance. The fixation stemmed to some degree from the organization’s dependence on grants from the OEO, an agency that, like most federal agencies, was also fixated on numbers. OEO directives and manuals required grantees to provide a wide array of quantitative data in their reports and grant renewal applications. One number the OEO was particularly interested in—and which OEO-funded agencies were instructed to provide—was the number of the organization’s “contacts” with the people served. Neither the OEO nor the VML defined the word contact precisely, but, in most manuals and reports, it referred to interviews or meetings of VML employees with one member, or several members, of the target population. Contacts included house meetings, camp meetings, job counseling sessions, and at least a dozen other kinds of interactions. Some of these were transitory, some lasted several hours, but all were supposed to be counted.4 Under Pape, the VML’s unofficial director of counting had been Granato, who, in addition to running the day-care program, John Patrick Little, at the time of his appointment as executive director of the Valley Migrant League, May 1967. Photograph courtesy of John Little. Sonny Montes and Mexican American Activism in Oregon 78 supervised in-staff training. Granato had devised a system of counting contacts, which he explained at excruciating length in the training sessions he conducted. All VML employees, including John Little, were given pads of printed forms called contact slips. The pads were supposed to be attached to the employees’ belts, assuming they wore belts. Whenever a VML employee had...