Harold Allen

After retiring, Harold Allen began teaching prison inmates the skills they would need to find work after being released. In his early 60s, he retired for a second time and joined Experience Corps where he mentors children in Philadelphia, PA.

Photo: Thomas Roma

"I came up at a time when we thought we were going to change the world. And you dedicated your whole life to that. But at a certain point, there was just the feeling that nothing was happening anymore. It just stopped; everything stopped. But when I heard about Experience Corps, it was like a wake-up call.

For 30 years I worked for the Philadelphia Water Department in waste-water treatment. I got in at the right time because in the 1960s they started to become ecologically conscious, and the job was upgraded from semi-skilled labor. We received training and certification, learned lab processes. So it became a challenging job, and it gave you a feeling not just of making a living, but of doing something you could really feel good about.

When I retired from the city in 1988, I wasn't ready to retire. When I was working, I was involved in decision making; there were certain standards to meet. All of a sudden you don't have a specific time to get up. You read the paper...do crossword puzzles. People look at you and say things like, 'I can't wait until I can retire, so I can sit around like you.' But in reality, you wake up in the morning and wonder why.

So I took a job with the state, working with guys who were in prison, helping them develop a trade so they could go back into society. I taught them about waste-water treatment. A number of guys got their licenses.

But it's sad to see life in prison. Most of the prisoners were not professional criminals. And none of the guys I was working with was any threat. They made stupid mistakes. It taught me compassion. One of the guys I was helping was scheduled for early release. Just before you're released they give you a drug test. When they checked him he tested positive. I realized, he did not want to go out! He didn't have one visitor the entire time he was in prison. Here's a guy who had no family to go home to. Prison inmates were the closest thing to a family for him.

"There are children, just like this, who have given up. They feel like there's no point. They don't know how to overcome adversity. That's where we, the Experience Corps members, hope we can help."

There are children, just like this, who have given up. They feel like there's no point. They don't know how to overcome adversity. That's where we, the Experience Corps members, hope we can help. We may not be able to do anything about this parent generation, but we can help these kids feel some sense of worth, some sense that 'I am somebody.'

For me, the work in Experience Corps has a special significance. It deals with the problems of the inner city. The family has been just about demolished in our neighborhoods, and the young people considered just about expendable. They're supposed to be our future, but they have literally been cast aside.

I was drawn to Experience Corps by the possibility of being able to effect some kind of positive change. Like most of the people here, I heard about it through AARP. But once I got into the program, and into the classroom, and began to relate to the children one-on-one, I began to really see the depth and scope of the issues – to become aware of the enormity of the task. So many of these kids have tremendous potential. Their natural abilities are unquestionable, but they live in such negative environments that they have already given up on themselves.

One kid I was working with was put into a program for slow learners, which he is not. But the system cannot deal with a kid that doesn't read and refuses to try. He lives with a single mother. And when you meet that mother, when you're finally able to break through and communicate to her, you see how negative she feels. In a lot of cases, the parents take out their frustrations on the child, particularly if it's a young mother who feels her life has been terminated by this child.

And the children are so starved for attention that they just latch on. When you arrive, they run to you, and when you miss a day, right away, it's 'Why weren't you here?' They are practically writhing for attention.

In general, we are able to supply two main things the children are missing: that family tie they are not always getting at home, and the individual attention that's impossible for the teacher to give in the classroom of 30. And in so many of the classes now, you have even more, because they're not putting the necessary money into the public schools. We also teach the children respect, especially respect for the teacher. I like to tell the children that when I was coming up, the two people who I could not talk about were the teacher and the preacher.

I graduated from South Philadelphia High School in 1947, and at that time there were college scholarships from Coca-Cola. You had to have certain grades to get them. I remember one day, this guy sitting behind me asked if I applied for the scholarship. I told him I didn't get my grades. He said, 'I got the scholarship, and your name was ahead of mine on the list.' So I went to the counselor and I said, 'I didn't get my grades back. I understand that I'm on the scholarship list.' He said that he thought the only colored boy in the college curriculum was another student, and he didn't make the list. So I asked if I could put in for the scholarship then, and he said it was too late. I was about 17 years old then.

But things have changed. In 1971 my son graduated from high school, and he went on to Yale. Besides, I don't regret what happened with me. By not going to college in 1947, I got involved in civil rights and the Progressive Party, and that changed my life. Henry Agard Wallace, Roosevelt's vice president, was the head of it. It was an interracial party. One of the main speakers at the convention was Paul Robeson, and I was part of the honor guard when Paul Robeson came in to the convention here in Philadelphia.

Later I became an organizer in Easton, Pennsylvania, and here in Philadelphia. One time I was leading a picket in front of the Kresge's in Point Breeze. We were trying to get them to hire blacks. The police picked me up and took me to the station house. In those days, if they arrested you, they were supposed to take you to the jail downtown, but instead they took me to the basement of the police station. They put me in the middle of a circle of cops with nightsticks, and the Captain yelled in my face, 'Let me hear about all your rights! You were talking a lot about your rights in front of the store. Why don't you tell me about your rights now!' I was no dummy, I said, 'Right now, I have no rights.' [Laugh]

When I was younger, I had no patience. I was intolerant. You had to be ready to stand up and change the world. Everybody else was a compromiser or a sellout. But by the time you reach a certain age, you realize real change requires time, work, and patience.

Patience does come with age. You realize that things don't happen as fast as you'd like. When you're young, things are supposed to happen tomorrow. It seems the more time you have, the less time you want to take, and the less time you have, the more time you are willing to take!

Now, you're less self-involved. You're able to look back in retrospect and understand better what happened. And death is something that you come to realize is part of life. It is not something you dread, think about. But you want to leave good memories of yourself, and you hope to leave something behind that's worthwhile.

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When we started out, it was just to be involved, to participate. It was something you wanted to join. Now there is an awareness that we can do more. I have started a program after school, the 'A-Team.' What triggered it was this one kid who was very quiet, always completed his assignments, never raised his hand. I remember when, if a child knew the answer to something, he or she would be the first to raise a hand. But there was no challenge for this child, or for a number of the students. We have kids that are behind, but we also have kids that need to be moved up. So in the A-Team we give them more challenging things to do. While the other kids were beginning to learn the alphabet and do sound and letter recognition, these kids were ready to do problem solving. So we started picking them up. We have about 12 kids who made the cut, who made the A Team. And once the kids started coming, especially the guys, they really wanted to come every day.

I try to reach out to every child. You get involved with them, and you find out about their personal lives, and you're aware of what's really going on with them. Sometimes you're the only one that these children can talk to...tell what's going on in their lives. You need to ensure them that they are all right. Children think that they are to blame in a lot of their situations. They need a lot of praise, and love, and recognition.

We also need to take the steps necessary to bring about more systemic kinds of change. The school system here has no money. Kids don't even have books. If more people were active and created a new awareness of these conditions, there would be a change. There has to be a rebirth of involvement. This is basically a struggle for survival.

In the meantime, we'll take the one-to-one approach – to help one child, or a small group of children at a time. Hopefully, they will remember this group that got together to help them. These kids are the potential organizers for change in the future."

Harold Allen, now in his late 60s, grew up in South Philadelphia, one of a small number of African-Americans in a neighborhood that was overwhelmingly white. After being denied a college scholarship that was rightly his, Allen was swept up in the civil rights movement and became a community organizer in the 1950s and 1960s before settling down into a more conventional life as a city water department worker. After retiring from his career with the city, Allen moved into a new phase, teaching prison inmates the skills they would need to find work after being released. Finally, in his early 60s he retired for a second time and joined Experience Corps®, a new initiative mobilizing neighborhood retirees to help transform struggling inner-city schools. Allen is part of a team of 15 Experience Corps members at the Taylor Elementary School in North Philadelphia.