I received a postcard in the mail today from Americorp asking that VISTA Alumni reply by going online and registering.  VISTA was established in 1965 and is short for Volunteers in Service to America.  I talked a little about it earlier.  What caught my eye was the statement that it didn’t matter whether you served in 1965 or presently, they wanted us to register.

It was then I realized that I was a volunteer in 1965 and we were among the first 500 volunteers to be trained.  We trained at Mt. Angel College in Mt. Angel, Oregon and lived in a migrant camp for three weeks.

I got to be good friends with a couple families and went out and worked in the fields with them and ate dinner at their one room cabin.  I was there to give and they gave to me.  The cabins had tin roofs and were very hot.  They cooked the tortillas on a wood stove and the heat was terrible.  We all ate together and laughed and talked as if we’d known each other for years.

We lived in tents and had a portable radio for the news and music.  While we were in the camp, President Johnson came on and told the nation that we’d been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin and we were going to war in Vietnam.  It was a big mistake just like Iraq.  I went to San Francisco State after my year working in Michigan and was 1A and was later classified as 4F because of high blood pressure, so never was in danger of being drafted.  Anyway, I’d already given service to my country

They always talk about illegal aliens, but this Mexican American family was from Texas and followed the crops until the season ended and then went back to Texas.  One family had a 12 year old son and I took him to town one day and he refused to walk through the park because he was afraid.  I’m not sure what had happened or what he’d been told, but he didn’t want to walk through the park.  I’ve never forgotten that.  We walked around instead.

I went out to work with his father, who drove truck.  We went out in the morning and worked into the dark of the night loading string beans from the machines into the bed of the truck.  The big problem was that the truck listed to one side and the farmer refused to fix it.  We expected the truck to break down anytime when we were on the highway.  Fortunately, it never happened.

Other VISTA volunteers were working in other migrant camps.  I remember visiting one of the other migrant camps and there were 13 people living in one room.  The screens were knocked out of the screen doors and the room was filled with flies.  The farmer complained about what slobs they were.  Evidently he never heard about the study of what rats did when many of them were confined in a small space.

The barns and garages for his cars, horses, and farm equipment were much nicer than the places he gave his workers to live.

I went back to find the migrant camp where I worked a couple years ago, but it wasn’t there.

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