Accidental Careerist Part 2

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When last we met I was unfolding most of my early childhood and adolescence trying to lay the groundwork on how I came to choose a career in my adulthood. Let’s get right to it shall we.

In my quest to show the world I had a brain I decided I wanted to go to college, not on a sports scholarship but on the strength of my academic record. I was recruited to play basketball by all the local junior colleges and a few small colleges. Interesting enough one of the schools that showed the most interest was Occidental College in Los Angeles. Had I gone there I would have just missed our current President Oback Barama by one semester. Had I gone to the school when he was there we would have surely become friends since there were very few blacks at Oxy and he was a basketball fanatic. According to the book From Promise to Power by David Mendell, when Oback was at Oxy he was in search of his black identity and made an extra effort to become friends with the entire black student body (not that there where a whole lot of them). Well that will be left to a life in an alternate universe. I almost ended up going to Lewis and Clark University in Portland. The small school approach was not one of selling me an NBA dream, it was about connections. I could attend one of these small, prestigious schools and meet lots of people who could be beneficial to my future in terms of business and career.

The truth of the matter is I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself after high school. Career counseling at St. Francis was a joke. It wasn’t all that important because most of the students career counseling came from their parents and it was all about following in the footsteps. When it came to college my parents really couldn’t help me. Having both grown up in the segregated south they never attended college. My father wanted me to play basketball at a local JC and get a scholarship to a major Division 1 school. I had an older brother who was in college but it he wasn’t in a position to help. College for him was an escape and that’s what he did. He started out local but eventually landed at LSU where he joined the Omega Phi Psi fraternity. He’s Omega branded and still bleeds purple and gold to this day. Despite going to a college prep school I was completely clueless about college. I applied to Arizona State, Marquette, USC, and UCLA. How I chose the schools is a mystery to me even to this day. I really only wanted to go to UCLA. A lot of my friends were applying there and the UC system had a good reputation and it seemed affordable compared to the private schools. USC was out of the question. The cost was something I could not relate to since I knew I would be paying my own way to go to college. I ended up being accepted at all the schools and of course I chose UCLA.

My freshman and only year at UCLA was a success in many ways but a disaster academically. I declared Art as my major having no idea what the Art Dept at UCLA was like. The campus and classes were massive. I had classes in auditoriums that had more people in them than the entire student body at St. Francis. I lived in an off campus apartment, this being my first time living away from home. One of my rooommates played the electric guitar as a hobby. He had a Fender Stratocaster and he taught me about Les Paul, guitars, and the great and soon to be great guitar players like Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Michael Schenker, Yngwie Malmsteen, Angus Young, and Joe Satriani. Up to then I only knew Jimi Hendrix because everybody knows Jimi, Andy Summers because the Police was my favorite band and Eddie Van Halen because he was from Pasadena. I worked a part time job as an intramural referee and came to really dislike fraternities but I ended up becoming good friends with some frat guys from a fraternity called Acacia. They were outsiders in the fraternity system lacking greek letters and a frathouse. The fraternity was christian based and the guys were what was considered “geeks” and that’s what I liked about them. I never joined the frat but they treated my like one of their own.

Half way through my freshman year I started getting recruiting calls from Redlands University. Because of my sub par academic performance I knew I wasn’t going back to UCLA. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with myself so I agreed to attend the University of Redlands and reboot my basketball career. My father still wanted me to attend a JC and get a scholarship. One week before I was to begin classes at Redlands I gave in to my father’s wishes and enrolled at Pasadena City College to play basketball. I played basketball for PCC. We made it to the state finals and lost to Merced in triple overtime. We had a great year but my heart wasn’t in it so that summer in 1983 I quit the team and basically wandered the streets for the whole summer. It was the lowest point of my life. I lost touch with my friends and was struggling with thoughts of suicide. I just didn’t feel like my life had any meaning. Music saved my life. It was the heyday of KROQ and I would spend hours alone listening to music by U2, Talking Heads, English Beat, XTC, Echo and the Bunnymen, Style Council, OMD, New Order, The Specials, and many other mostly British bands. In America I couldn’t relate but I could to these bands from Thatcher’s England. What I was feeling was in their music. I knew I wasn’t alone out there. There were a lot of people across the pond feeling just like me.

My younger brother Kenny was working for the YMCA as a day camp counselor and he invited me to attend their end of the summer staff party. At first I was hesitant. My impression of the YMCA was the people who worked there were a bunch of square Christians who didn’t party. Kenny didn’t party much but he did seem to enjoy his job quite a bit. I wasn’t hanging out with my friends because I was depressing to be around so I decided to go out of sheer boredom. I was totally wrong about this YMCA staff. When I arrived at the party the music was blasting and people were having a great time dancing and playing drinking games. In the backroom there was a group of people smoking joints and taking bong hits. This is where I met my brother’s boss, a red haired woman with freckles named CJ. We hit it off right away. I ended up having a real good time at the party and ran into a guy name Craig Catimon who had played Pop Warner football with my older brother Keith. Craig and I later would become best friends and partners in crime. For the first time in a while I felt good hanging out with people. I liked this group of people. It wasn’t college and it wasn’t sports, it was just regular people. The next week I received a call from CJ. She asked me I was interested in being a group leader for the After School Program at the YMCA. She thought I had the right kind of personality to work with kids. I decided to take the job. I was enrolled in classes at Pasadena City College and thought it would be the perfect part time job to have while I was going to school.

My only experience working with kids had been babysitting which I had done extensively since the age of 12. I was a natural working with the kids at the YMCA. I absolutely loved it. It was challenging and fun and I threw everything I had into the job. I looked forward to coming to work everyday. It was just a part time job so I was just enjoying it for what it was. I wasn’t making plans on doing it for more than one school year but summer came around and I applied for a job as a day camp counselor. That was even more fun because we had the kids all day and we went on adventures to the local parks, to the beaches, and hiking in the local mountains. The following school year CJ asked me if I wanted to be a Site Director in charge of one of the school sites. There were others who had been there much longer than I had but she felt I would be good at running things and providing leadership for the staff. I was a successful Site Director which was almost a full time job. I ended up having all kinds of jobs within the YMCA which was one of the things I liked about it as an organization. I held a ridiculous number of jobs in my 11 years at the Y:

After School Counselor

After School Van Driver

After School Site Director

After School Program Director

Day Camp Counselor

Day Camp Site Director

Day Camp Director

Youth Sports Referee

Youth Soccer Coach

Youth Basketball Coach

Resident Camp Maintenance Engineer (janitor/trash burner)

Resident Camp Cabin Leader

Resident Camp Ropes Course Instructor

Resident Camp Assistant Director

Resident Camp Branch Director

Summer Youth Employment Coordinator

Youth Director

Program Director

Senior Program Director

By the time I reached Senior Program Director I had seen it all when it comes to the YMCA. I could probably write a book about my experience. The YMCA is really big on training. They have a national training program that covers everything from life guarding at pools to raising millions of dollars for capital campaigns. Because the trainings were national I got to meet people from all over, from Boise to St. Paul to Orlando to Denver to New York. The best part about the whole thing was meeting all the kids. I met and got to know thousands of kids from preschoolers to high schoolers. I saw kids grow from fresh faced five year olds to take-themselves-way-to-serious teenagers. I was fortunate as I had the privilege to teach these kids about life as an authority figure and a trusted friend, it is a unique position to have in the life of a child. I did so many outrageously fun things with kids sometimes it was hard to even call it a job.

Working with kids put me in direct contact with the people who are the real heart and soul of this country and that is working parents. When you work with parents a partnership is born. You get a certain amount of respect from people who know you value their child’s welfare just as much as they do. You get to see parents at their worst (right after a really bad day at work) and at their best (showing up with big smiles and the their child for Pot Lucks, Talent Shows, and Haunted Houses). It was a good balance for my own personal life which leaned more toward the hedonistic and bohemian.

For about the first 6 years I didn’t consider the YMCA a career but by the time I made Program Director I decided it was what I wanted to do. I went to management trainings and certification trainings to mold myself from clock-punching-jack-of-all-trades to salaried, pensioned, credentialed professional. I went from small suburban branch to large metropolitan association. By the time I reached Senior Director I was just one step away from Executive Branch Director, it was the next and perhaps final stop on this particular trajectory. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be an Executive Director. It was far removed from working directly with program staff and parents. It was a suit and tie job that required attending lots of Rotary Club type lunches and securing large donations and grants from local businesses and corporations. I was a guy who rode a bicycle and a sported a mohawk. I just wasn’t there yet. More than that I had plenty of years to watch all the politics involved at the management level. The Y is a large non-profit but its bureaucracy is just like any other. As an organization the YMCA became more and more focused on the health club business. All the new branches were primarily health clubs with state of the art equipment and facilities. The primary business was no longer serving the community, the business became selling memberships and selling memberships was driven by marketing. That’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to build facilities and start programs that would serve the community, primarily youth and their working parents. If that was your agenda you didn’t have much say and you were on the lower end of the pay scale. Executive Directors at branches with large health and fitness memberships made a pretty good salary and had tons of perks like housing and vehicle allowances while small community based Executives struggled to balance budgets and get funding for their programs putting in more hours for less pay.

I started to become disillusioned with my foreseeable future with the YMCA. It would have been a secure future. I had a good reputation and knew lots of directors around the country. I could work anywhere in the country, even abroad as the YMCA is an international organization. But I wasn’t feeling it. I was just 30 years old and still had young man’s view of the world. In my mind there was still some romantic adventure out there for me. I wasn’t ready for the life of a non profit administrator. I still had a touch of the wild in me. I felt I was still firmly planted in the field of anti-establishment. Becoming an Executive Director would have been like killing off a vital part of myself.

I wasn’t exactly sure where I could go from the YMCA. I had ideas about opening a school/camp using progressive methods like experiential learning. I was starting to warm up to that idea when my life took another unsuspected 90 degree turn. Out of the blue, or rather out of the low lights and hip hop beat of a San Francisco jazz club, I found a new career, or it found me, I’m still not sure how to call it. I’ll save that thought for the next blog, part three. Once again thanks for tuning in. Same bat time, same bat channel.

To be continued…