38 Albuquerque and Santa Fe Jobs

     When we left Detroit we had everything packed that we planned to use within 30 days.  The furniture was on the moving van.  It turned out that the van driver became ill.  He was in the hospital.  The moving company had no record of where he left our things.  It was 60 days later we got our belongings.  We managed with folding table and chairs and the few things we brough with us.
     Immediately Mom got a job as a legal secretary. Dad got a job as a meter reader for the gas company.  The first year living in New Mexico was hard.  Mom and Dad gave me $100.00 and told me I would have to earn the remainder if I wanted to go to college.  I got a job as Chisholms Ice Cream Parlor on weekends and one parttime job at the New Mexico Clipping Bureau.  this meant  clipping newspapers for the clippings.  I paid them $10.00 a week towards the family expenses
     Things started to brew in Santa Fe.  Senator Horace DeVargas and Neil Addington contacted Dad. There was a scandal about how the boys were being treated at the Boys Reform School. It was intolerable.  Senator DeVargas contacted Dad.  There was an article being written.  Even though more than 50 years have past you can still read the article by clicking "Neil Addington" in the Times Magazine on Google.  Horace was the State Senator and was instrumental in getting things started to straighten things out.  Dad was hired based on his ability to acquire data and do research in the Willow Run book.  He came up with recommendations as to improving the status of the treatment for both boys and girls in the state.

From my father's notes:

"New Mexico Commission on Youth - Addington"

      When the New Mexico Commission on Youth invited the press on a conducted tour of the state reformatory last spring, only one reporter took advantage of the offer. He was Neil Addington, 30, police reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican. Addington, a cigar-chomping exmarine, went on the "routine inspection" trip because the paper thought it might be helpful for a series that they were planning on juvenile delinquency. What   Reporter Addington found was far from routine. In the state reformatory at Springer (The New Mexico Industrial School for Boys), he discovered that 1) some boys were as young as eight, 2) there was no real rehabilitation program, and 3) the facilities were pitifully inadequate. If the reformatory looked that bad on a guided tour, reasoned Addington, what must it be like when not tidied up for inspection? By last week Addington's answers in the New Mexican had created a statewide scandal.

         Bread and Water. Addington tracked down parents of the boys, found one father who said that guards had tied his son to a carpenter's sawhorse while they whipped him with straps. Another parent said that her boy had been whipped with a fan belt split at the end. Addington paid a surprise visit to the reformatory, demanded that Superintendent Jaffa Miller show him the jail, where he had been told that boys were kept on bread and water for days at a stretch. The jail proved to be filthy, airless cells, one containing three emaciated teen-agers stripped to the waist. There was no toilet (only an uncovered pot), and the boys spread their blankets on the concrete floor to shield their bare feet from the cold.

     Miller admitted that guards used paddles on the boys, and some of them used belts to whip them. A former inmate told Addington: "They'd strip a boy to the waist and tell him to grab anything nearby while they whipped him loud with leather straps. We were told to watch, but we wouldn't. We would hold up our hands and cover our eyes."

     Ideals v. Communism. Addington's stories brought a flood of letters to the paper. One came from Victor Black, 30, a teacher at the reformatory. Wrote he: "Over and over again, boys come to our classes with deep cuts on their arms, faces or other parts of their bodies ... I attempt to teach the Constitution and American ideals, and I am laughed at, because these boys would prefer Communism to our system of handling youths . . ."

      Teacher Black's letter brought unexpected results: he was summarily fired by the local school board. Last week, at a hearing on the decision, the board said it was not interested in the truth or falsity of the letter, only whether or not he had written it. Meanwhile, the pressure was too much for Superintendent Miller: he resigned. But the New Mexican was far from satisfied. It planned to carry on its battle, hoped to persuade incoming Governor John F. Simms Jr. to start a state investigation of the scandal.