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by Gail Powers

being vocal about it, they were rejected by society. I learned so much from those kids, and established some friendships that are still very firm today.

People who were coming there were hlack and they were white, and they were smoking marijuana, and they were doing acid, and they were writing We used to have a "sound-off" protest songs. whenever anybody wanted to sound off either to read their poetry or to give their view on something, or just call for silence. Anyone could have the floor for 20 minutes. Those kids kept me in touch with what was going on. It also sent me back to school. A lot of them were joining W.E.B. DuBois clubs. I. didn't even know who W.E.B. DuBois was, so I went back and took some Black Studies courses and some early American history. I had to get with it. History never was one of my favorite subjects, but I really wanted to be able to know where these kids were coming from. The courses taught me a lot, and the kids taught me a lot. The reason I know so much about street-drugs is from the kids, not from the medical profession.

What happened after the Coffeehouse? The Coffeehouse was eventually evicted from

photo by Janet Century

there. It was too much of a threat to the community. We took over the Outpost, which had been sort of a coffeehouse further down Euclid Avenue. The Outpost had also been a place where people could come for some food, clothing, and temporary shelter. They couldn't keep that going any more financially, so we took over that house. Eventually we just went broke,

Who's "we"?

It was an ecumenical thing that started through the churches the East Cleveland churches

people who were interested in social reform. There were some Catholic nuns, people from the Catholic Diocese, ministers from East Cleveland, especially Dewey Fagerberg, who was a Congregational minister, Unitarians, Presbyterians, and Methodists. It was the churches finally deciding to do something about social reform which finally brought me back to church. It had taken some of the hypocrisy out of it. Actually; I got involved in The Well, and then I got involved in the social reforms of the Congregational Church -sort of backwards. At this time were you seeing kids with drug problems?

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At first it was just experimentation, but then it became problems, Problems because some of the kids decided to go on to higger and better stuff, such as heroin, speed and so forth. It became a problem because some of the kids that were really into acid were dropping out of school. Most of these kids were very bright young kids. I'm not seeing groups like that around today kids at 15, 16, 17, really thinking and paying attention to what is going on in the world and with the government. Today I see sort of an apathy. I'm sure there are some groups around, hut they certainly are not as visible as they were in the mid-'60's. What I've seen happen to most of those kids is that they got their lives together. They took a hiatus. Most of them are college graduates today and have a profession of some sort, but at that time they dropped out, and all they did was prolong their education. I really feel that maybe they're better for it because they did some experiential living.

How did you move from taking part in this coffeehouse, The Well, to what is or became the Free Clinic?

Actually, it was the forerunner of the Free Clinic. More and more kids got in trouble, and my house became the Free Clinic. I was doing some extra-legal things. The law at that time said if you gave anybody under the age of 21 drug information, it was called "contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I wasn't only giving information, I was holding classes. I was trying to make them drug-aware by bringing the street people who had a lot of drug experience and could tell them this drug does such and such, and this drug does such and such. Street people like Jim Young [Director of Drug Education at the Free Clinic ]. I treated the overdoses at my house, I treated the abscesses from sbooting at my house. It's sort of scary now when I think about it.

When you think of what risks you took?

Yes, but I was in a position at that time to take the risks. Skipper had graduated from high school .. I didn't have to worry about the reflection on him. didn't have to worry about my husband losing a job, because Bud had died. I was my own person, It scares me that I took the professional risk that I did. I think it would have broken my heart to have lost my nursing license.

But you did it anyway?

Yes. There was no place for these kids to go. Absolutely no place, and I just felt they were salvageable. I just wasn't willing to throw them away, and time has proved that I was right. But the rest of society certainly had turned their back on them. Some of those kids turned into great friends.

Aside from your involvement in drug education

couples we knew were going together or co-habitat. ing and discuss birth control with them.

Is that when you started looking around for a medical facility?

No, a group of us had met even earlier than that and were just about laughed out of business. At that time drug use wasn't as prevalent as it became. We were told we wanted to cater to the "1 percent lunatic fringe," "crazy hippies," "black musicians," or "those people down in the ghetto". What we were saying fell on deaf ears until drugs started hitting white suburbia, and all of a sudden everybody was crying, "Oh, my God, what do we do?" But it had been there a long time.

At what point did it actually hecome necessary to provide medical services to the kids that you had been talking with?

In 1968 when it became full-blown.

Was this confined to the drug issue that nobody was interested in picking up on or recognizing problems until they hit the suburbs?

Oh, no, Kids that came out early, against Vietnam were thrown out of their homes for their opinion. Kids who were dating interracially were being put out on the streets by their parents. One of the reasons that The Well was closed down was that people said we encouraged this. Instead of people recognizing that we were meeting the need, they'd rather think that we were "causing the problem". That's just another way of people keeping their head in the sand,

Then in 1969 the same group of us, with a few additions, started talking of opening a free clinic again. This time the time was right, hut it still looked as if nothing would happen. At that point I took $200 of my own money and started the Together Hotline. Reverend Dick Andrews, Pastor of the Congregational Church on Magnolia, gave me a room in Friendly Town. The street people who were so ''irresponsible" as far as society was concerned worked every night from 8:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m., answering the phones, writing out sheets on everybody that called, and really keeping good records and statistics.

Every Sunday night I'd use the East Cleveland Congregational Church, and we'd role play some of the cases that had happened. It was always well-attended. Our paranoia ran very high, with good reason, because we were doing something illegal. I remember once the Pastor of the Church of the Covenant on Euclid Avenue wanted us to come and do some drug education with his people who were interested in helping out, and we had to do it in his house, blinds drawn. It was legitimate that we had the blinds drawn because there were some young people there. Some of the young people who

"What we were saying fell on deaf ears until the drugs started hitting white suburbia.

and helping people who were having problems with drugs, did you see any particular problems arising because of more sexual expression in the '60's?

That went along with the drugs. We saw young people getting VD, and they were petrified to go anyplace. If you went to one of the city health services, their mandate was to drag in the sexual partners, even if this meant dragging them out of school or out of the home. At that time, you had to have parental consent to diagnose or treat. The kids weren't willing to expose themselves that way, so there were problems as a result of untreated venereal disease.

Birth control was unavailable to them, so there were many unwanted pregnancies. One of the things that many of us who volunteered evenings serving at the Well did was sit down with young

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were under 21 were giving other young people information regarding drugs, VD, birth control. All this was not legal.

What did you do with the statistics you gathered from the Hotline?

That's what I feel finally got us the Free Clinic. We'd been to the foundations already, and they had said, "We'll see, we'll see. I wasn't sure it was ever going to happen. One night a couple of us were trying to stay awake while working the Hotline, and we decided to see how many bad acid trips we had on a full-moon night, how many males or females there were, how many people were doing which drug and were from which suburb compared to other suburbs. We made all these graphs, and the information was continued on p. 12

November, 1978/What She Wants/Page 9