The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk
The Wanderings of a Texas family on the road to nowhere.
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Many of them were unemployed, but only a few qualified for unemployment since they had never worked for anyone except themselves. The ones who were old and disabled like Troy Tucker and his wife Sara lived on food stamps and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a federal program for the needy who couldn’t qualify for Social Security or state welfare. As in the case of unemployment insurance, only people who have paid into the program are eligible for Social Security. A few of them, such as Cynthia’s sister (whose husband died from the shotgun blast), drew AFDC. Almost all of them were eligible for food stamps, but some hadn’t got around to applying and others simply refused. Jake Polk never said it out loud, but you could tell that he’d rather die than accept welfare. At one time in his life, Henry Polk must have shared that aversion. Even now, when he heard someone bellyaching, Henry would say: “If you look around, you’ll always see somebody worse off than you. God didn’t make everybody to be rich. It would be a dull world if everybody was the same.”
The house in South Austin, once so government-issue sterile, was gradually taking on a personality. Cynthia found some patches of cloth and sewed curtains. One of those velvet bullfighter paintings that you see in Mexican border towns appeared on the wall in the living room. Henry constructed a coffee table from some pieces of plate glass found in the city dump. They got an old king-size mattress and box springs from Goodwill. The two little girls, Kathy and Lanette, shared a cot at the foot of their parents’ bed, the three older girls shared a second bedroom, and the two boys slept in the dining room (although the house was supposed to have four bedrooms, the two rooms at the back weren’t heated). Apparently the Polks weren’t familiar with thermostats, or maybe they were cold-natured—whatever the case, the house was always uncomfortably hot and smelled of used lard and burned sugar. Spectacular amounts of trash accumulated. Billie Jean and Colann swept the kitchen and living room two and sometimes three times a day, and still the floor was littered with crushed candy canes, spilled milk, partly eaten sandwiches, chicken bones, and cigarette butts.
Cynthia Polk had measured out the food stamps carefully, loading up initially on staples like sugar, flour, potatoes, and lard, then falling back on a lifetime habit of planning and shopping one day at a time. While the food stamps lasted, there was always meat or chicken, always fried. Every meal included potatoes, beans, and cake. (Henry’s favorite meal was red beans and chocolate cake, mixed together.) Nobody in the family liked tomatoes or lettuce, and they weren’t big on fruit either. In the afternoons when the kids came home from school, Cynthia would drive them to the bakery outlet and treat them to day-old fried pies, purchased ten for 99 cents. There was one particular supermarket that the Polks visited daily, the chain that sponsored the TV sweepstakes show called Let’s Go to the Races. Cynthia would select four or five items, then they would each head to a different checkout line, thereby multiplying their allotment of sweepstakes cards. On Friday nights, Cynthia and the kids would gather in front of the TV and cheer home their horses.
Henry thought this was foolish. Henry’s motto was to “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” It was like the stories about the Mexican silver and Comanche gold. He’d never seen any of it. He had crawled inside every cave along the west bank of the Colorado River and he had never seen any gold. He remembered one cave in particular. It was located straight across the river from the old Deep Eddy grocery store near Clarksville. Henry, Obie, and Troy Tucker discovered it one day as they were hauling rocks across on a rubber raft. In his memory the cave was large as a house, and right in the center, partially covering a seemingly bottomless well lined with cedar posts, was an enormous boulder. The ceiling of the cave was black, suggesting ancient tribal camp fires. He thought about this cave. He thought about it a lot.
“One of these days,” he told his two boys, “we’ll go look for it.”
IN THE TRENCHES
Marie McAdoo was one of twenty-one AFDC caseworkers assigned to the DPW’s Austin office. Each caseworker was responsible for 95 cases. Though she thought of herself as a social worker, her official title was Welfare Service Technician II, the bureaucratic way of saying that her monthly salary was fixed at $820. In a few months she was scheduled for promotion to Public Welfare Worker I, and though her duties would remain the same, her salary would increase to $876. That’s tops for a full-time caseworker in this state. Considering their qualifications and work load, DPW’s social and clerical workers are among the lowest paid state employees. Many of them are teachers who couldn’t find a teaching job. Few started out to be social workers. They majored in math, English, history, economics, in the subjects and skills that the market has little use for. The workers who deal in the food stamps and AFDC programs are the most overworked and the most criticized. “Nobody in those two programs has a good job,” says a DPW executive. “Their work load is staggering. They come in daily contact with people who have very serious problems. Quality control is always looking over their shoulder, just like a factory. It’s not surprising that they don’t last too long.” Marie was an exception. She had been with DPW for more than three years and she liked her job. Before joining DPW Marie taught grade school and worked with retarded teenagers. She’s 48, a grandmother, and a compulsive problem solver. Her husband makes good income as manager of an insurance company, but Marie works because she enjoys it.
When Marie first learned of the Polks in early December, the family was camped on Slaughter Creek. She contacted them by telephoning one of Polk’s sisters, and an interview was arranged. “The immediate problem was to get them food,” she recalled later. “They were down to one can of lard.” Normally, emergency food stamps can be obtained in two or three days, but there was a technical problem. Rules set down by the federal Department of Agriculture, which funds the food stamp program (DPW only administers it), require that a family have cooking facilities, and a campfire along Slaughter Creek didn’t qualify. Marie requisitioned groceries from the Travis County Department of Human Services, from a church, and from the goodwill of another social worker who was quitting and requested that her fellow workers donate food instead of throwing a going-away party.
Then she contacted David Keene, administrator of the HUD-funded Austin Housing Authority—known in the industry as Section 8. Section 8 is a federal program designed as an alternative to the dreary public housing projects that were in vogue during the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. Poor people who qualify are allowed to find low-cost rent property in whatever section of town suits their needs. If the house satisfies government standards, payments are made directly to the landlord. The program is confidential. Since even a next-door neighbor would have no way of knowing that rent was subsidized by Section 8, there is no stigma. It is a very simple, direct program that helps both landlords and poor people and involves a minimum of red tape. The catch is there are never enough suitable houses to go around. In the case of the Polk family, a four-or five-bedroom house was required. But David Keene’s office only had allocations for 31 four-bedroom homes and five five-bedroom homes. Maybe it was a miracle, as Mrs. Polk insisted: at any rate, the Polks located the frame house a few blocks from Polk’s sister, and on December 13, after the landlord made some minor repairs, the family moved in.
Now that they had a roof over their heads and cooking facilities, the Polks immediately became eligible for emergency food stamps. Since their application for AFDC had yet to be approved, the food stamps they received were classified as Non-Public Assistance (NPA), which is not to be confused with Public Assistance (PA) food stamps, which go automatically to AFDC recipients. What it meant was that Mrs. Polk paid only $36 for $336 worth of stamps. Later, when their first AFDC check arrived, they would pay $108 for the same amount of stamps. If the Polks came across any additional income, they would pay more.
Meanwhile, Marie McAdoo was pursuing the Polks’ case through reams of paperwork. Before their odyssey, the Polks had applied for welfare in Stephenville. For their new application to be accepted, the old one had to be denied in order to “clean the computer.” The Stephenville office of DPW had forwarded the Polks’ records, but the file was stacked up somewhere in the Christmas mail rush. Marie had verified from her interview that the Polks needed immediate help, but first she had to get Henry Polk’s medical records from Brackenridge Hospital. That required a written release. On December 18, she carried a release form to the hospital, but Polk’s doctor was out Christmas shopping. She telephoned again two days later, and nobody at the hospital could find the release form. She took a second release form to Brackenridge. She called again on December 23. She was told that the release had been signed, but they couldn’t find it. “I told them this was an emergency, so they looked again.” Late that afternoon they finally located the form—it had been sent by mistake to the children’s section. By the time she got her hands on the release form all state offices had shut down until December 28. It was January 6 before all the records arrived.
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