Where's Glen?

 Where's Glen?

                 

     Before DEI there was just connections for the kids of South Gate families. On the grass roots level the system was fixed in favor of those who were here a long time. South Gate was a red-lined city and did not allow black people to  buy property within the boundaries of our humble hometown. I do not use people of color since lots of nice Mexicans slipped through the white filter and established themselves as worthy of owning land, even in the Gate. Part of our white privilege was that jobs opened up where our fathers knew somebody and the status quo went on for generations. With postmaster Sheehy in charge, myself, Bobcat and Johnny Knowlton found well-paid work for the USPO. Greg, Timo and again the Bobcat got cakey jobs with the South Gate Parks and Recreation department as landscapers and I got a great job at the park in the capacity of "recreation assitant." The Parks and Recreation department was beyond excellent and what they offered the citizenry boggles the mind now. My position as recreation assitant was to oversee the North Playground. This mostly meant putting out ping pong tables, caroms boards, handing out all manner of balls and actually playing with the kids. This was easy, since at 18 or 19 I was more of a kid than I was a man. The North Playground gig was a dream and I many times worked a perfect shift for a teen 2 to 8 pm or 10 to 2 or just show movies on Thursday evenings in the picnic grounds. There is a novel in the events experienced there but I only mention  Greg was a frequent visitor who stopped by the old cinderblock hut that had nothing in it but a couple of metal fold up chairs, a log book and a TEAC reel to reel tape recorder my brother had brought back from his Navy days. I lugged it over from home and played a lot of Beatles and Dylan. Home was actuallyt about a hundred yards away as the crow flies and over the Whitney's back fence to the Creason house at 9230 Annetta. Part of the wonderful job at the park was that I could get a telephone call from home, alerting me dinner was ready and I could walk straight through the Whitney driveway, past the Whitney rumpus room to the Whitney brick fence where a hot dinner awaited with tinfoil on top. I could take the meal back to the hut and chow down happily. Sometimes Greg would willingly sit on one of the metal chairs and take back loaned out balls and such until I returned from my dinner fetching. My boss was a long-suffering lesbian who gave me so much leeway I cannot express it on a screen. Being the head of Parks and Rec, she sometimes made the rounds to see how her operation was functioning. She stopped in on this Summer night expecting to see me but instead saw a 13 year old kid manning the fort. "Where's Glen? she barked and scared the young Craig half to death. He stammered "he...he...he...went to dinner" I was about that time I ran up with aluminum covered plate of meat loaf and tried to placate the red-faced Helen. I took some splainin' but I went on to commit much more serious crimes like leaviing for Europe twice and showing up for work dead drunk once.