In addition to being involved in these citywide and national issues, I began to put more effort into upgrading the worsening conditions in the Frog Hollow neighborhood of Hartford. SINA’s mission was to improve the neighborhoods surrounding the three member institutions. The objective was to provide a better, safer environment in which these entities might flourish. There was no more urgent place to begin than in Frog Hollow. The SINA board and I started formulating plans but decided on two key steps to accomplish before we went further. First, the community needed its own voice, so we assisted in starting a community newspaper called the Southside News (renamed later the Hartford News). We recognized that launching a newspaper was risky business, and the success of the venture rested with Robert Pawlowski, SINA’s previous part-time director, who had become the newspaper’s publisher and editor. In his memoir, Something in Common, Bob summarizes the challenges we faced in those early days:
Before we actually started taking on the financial burden of the editor’s salary and the printing, typesetting and layout expenses that were staring us in the face, we had to get a little money. We needed at least enough for two issues, we thought. We then would have enough advertisers—or Ivan would figure something out—we were sure. He did convince SINA to put up $2,500 “seed money” and we figured that kind of left him on the hook for more if we got short further down the line. Then there was the challenge of selling ads.
SINA did put up a little more money, but in very short order Southside News was on its own.
The second need was to address the physical condition of the Frog Hollow neighborhood, which was riddled with closed stores and abandoned buildings. In cooperation with HART, the community organization, and a group of Park Street businessmen, SINA helped found a nonprofit real estate development corporation named Broad Park Development Corporation or simply Broad Park. This was an important step. I became a board member and stayed on the board for more than twenty years, relying on Broad Park as the primary vehicle through which SINA addressed the neighborhood’s housing and commercial development needs. One of our major achievements was building an enclosed market called El Mercado that housed several merchants and became one of the hubs of the Puerto Rican community. Broad Park also renovated and managed almost five hundred units of low income housing, and its success continued despite many vicissitudes along the way.
I participated in several efforts to upgrade Park Street, the commercial spine of the neighborhood. I met frequently with business representatives to discuss improvements—better lighting, repaired sidewalks, more available parking, more attractive store facades, and increased safety. We were disappointed that none of these plans came to fruition, and I was learning how hard it was to raise money for poor neighborhoods. Disappointments were frequent, but I could not let my personal feelings slow down the work I set out to do. Eventually we were successful in obtaining funding from the Federal Streetscape Improvement Incentive Program to complete the project.
The relationship between HART and me oscillated between cooperative and adversarial, depending largely upon who staffed HART. One of HART’s troubling techniques was applied at annual congresses to which city officials and other leaders, including me, were invited. In the proceedings we were asked about our commitments, but no details or explanations could be voiced as HART allowed only a curt “yes” or “no” answer. It was my view that when HART found it convenient to depict SINA as the “bad guys” they did so, but at other times they would treat us as useful allies. Relations with HART improved markedly in the early 1990s when SINA began to fund an organizer who worked for HART.
Education, especially the preparation of students in elementary and secondary schools, was particularly important to all three SINA institutions, and I spent much time discussing and planning with leaders how to address this issue. Trinity College wanted well-prepared students, and the two hospitals needed competent employees to hire and train. In the early 1980s, SINA began to design and implement some programs. Early on, a successful partnership with the Betances Elementary School, which had a particularly dynamic principal, was formed.
An educational program titled Scholar of the Month was initiated and proved quite successful. It started with an idea proposed by a SINA board member that I was able to develop into a program. Actualizing an idea and making it workable is something I did well and enjoyed doing. The intent was to recognize local academically achieving high school students; we’d select them based solely on their grade-point average since no other award program centered entirely on academics. Eight students were chosen, one each month from October through May, from each of the four high schools in the city, including a Catholic high school, for a total of thirty-two students each year. The students and their parents were honored at a banquet at the end of the school year where I got to meet and congratulate the chosen students.
Building on that experience, SINA began a special relationship with a large high school which serves SINA’s target neighborhoods. We chose and paid for one of its teachers to be SINA’s representative to recruit students to visit SINA institutions, to set up shadowing opportunities for students with professionals and learn what they do, to participate in tutoring and mentoring, and to provide a course on study techniques. After several years, we decided to expand the program and sponsor college scholarships each year at Bulkeley High School for three students based upon their community service. Stipends were one thousand dollars for each of the four years in college. After I retired, to my great surprise and delight, SINA named this program Ivan A. Backer Scholarships.
All of these educational efforts culminated in the development of The Learning Corridor, which SINA later spearheaded. An entire one-block site between the campuses of the Institute of Living and Trinity College had been a trolley barn in the early part of the twentieth century and later became a garage for buses. The noise, traffic, and air pollution were a source of great annoyance and disruption to neighboring residents, who started to agitate for the removal of the bus garage in the mid-1980s. The fact that the facility had grown too small for the larger fleet of buses meant the buses that could not be housed inside had to be parked outside with their engines running all night during the winter. HART and SINA supported the push to have the garage moved. We succeeded in convincing our congressional representative, Barbara Kennelly, to obtain federal funding for a new bus garage in a more appropriate area some miles away, which was completed in 1991.
The question of what should happen to the abandoned bus property was hotly debated. In light of the housing shortage at the time, plans were originally drawn up for low density, owner-occupied housing. But first the severely polluted land had to be cleaned up. Waste of all kinds had been dumped on the ground from the trolley depot days, and after the conversion to a bus center waste oil was poured out to add to the already polluted earth. The State of Connecticut, which owned the property, eventually appropriated six million dollars to clean up the site. However, by the mid-1990s the housing crisis had eased and a new vision was put forth—to group several schools onto the large site. When the project was completed in 1996 it was named The Learning Corridor and became home to an elementary Montessori School, a magnate middle school, the Greater Hartford Academy for the Arts, and the Greater Hartford Academy of Mathematics and Science—all of them serving students from both Hartford and the suburbs.
Whatever SINA accomplished in the seventeen years I led it was due in equal part to an active and very supportive board of directors made up of two representatives from each of the three-member institutions. Later, membership was increased to include two then neighboring institutions—Connecticut Children’s Medical Center and Connecticut Public Television, and I headed a five-member organization.
This last part of my career, which involved other assignments where I needed to develop, organize, and manage programs and projects designed to help people in the Hartford community, is summarized below by Bob Pawlowski in his memoir, cited earlier. I am touched whenever
I read it.
Ivan Backer contributed in some way to almost every Hartford venture I got involved in for more than three decades. I don’t know why this was. Personally, we had little in common. He was one of the few people I knew who devoted his life to things he believed—mainly civil rights. I always told people that Ivan did things and got things accomplished because he believed. Most often he had little money and no power, but that never stopped him. He was relentless and would attend meeting after meeting after meeting to achieve the smallest of things. Other people I knew called him a missionary. I guess that was true.
I had finally developed the meaningful career I sought after those years of casting about and met goals I once feared were unachievable. Now I considered retirement. When I turned sixty-five, I reviewed the retirement benefits to which I was entitled and realized that we could manage with my pension and Social Security. The stock market boom helped immensely. I was tired of the constant round of evening meetings and felt some discouragement that weighed on me about the slowness of achieving results, the bureaucratic difficulties that had to be overcome with each project or new idea, and the small incremental steps that realistically could be expected. I was starting to burn out. I signaled to the Board that I would retire by the middle of 1995, although that period was prolonged until the end of the following year because a successor had not been found in time.
I was honored at two retirement parties. The first, in the neighborhood at a local bar owned by Bob Pawlowski and a couple of his friends, is best described by him:
When Ivan retired in 1996, we had a roast for him at Camila’s that included a dance by the Ivanettes, female impersonators organized by our resident “wise guys” who were big fans of Ivan. … The Ivanettes all wore polyester suits hunted down at Goodwill. Not to be outdone, Ivan, who somehow got wind of the spoof, appeared through the back door dressed in a cowboy outfit. Father Dave MacDonald, a Jesuit priest and one of the co-founders of HART and often one of Ivan’s co-conspirators, was the major roaster. Listening to his no-holds-barred delivery, you would never have known he was a priest—or one of Ivan’s strongest allies in making good things happen for Hartford people.
I will never forget that evening as I entered Camila’s. My crack of the rented whip commanded respect. A ten-gallon hat, cowboy boots, and a stick horse completed my outfit. The party was a howl! The more constrained official event, held at Hartford Hospital, was lavish, and had more people and a parting gift that made me do a double-take—a trip for Carolyn and me to a destination of our choice. A year later we fulfilled a long-held dream by going on an educational trip to Greece and Turkey.
I continued with SINA in a consulting capacity for four years, managing all the educational programs as well as the Neighborhood Service Award through which SINA recognized five outstanding people who worked to benefit the neighborhoods either as volunteers or professionals. The decision to move gradually into retirement by working part-time was a good one. It made for a smooth transition at SINA and allowed me to let go gradually. But by the end of 1999, I was ready to cut the tie and start the new millennium fully retired.
Chapter Thirteen: Being Retired and Still an Activist, 1999–Now
MORE TIME TO follow world events was what I looked forward to as one retirement benefit. In August 2001, less than a month before the 9/11 attacks, I put down the New York Times I had been reading and said to Carolyn, “You know, it can’t continue like this forever without repercussions.” I had in mind the great and growing gap between us in America who were prospering and those elsewhere in the world who were living in poverty. I agreed with those who criticized a growing American arrogance toward other nations, our careless use of precious world resources—water, fossil fuels, timber, open land—our exploitation of cheap overseas labor, and our disregard for how entire ecosystems were being endangered. I ended my rant with, “Something has to give. I’m afraid we’ll get our comeuppance if we continue this way.”
Little did I realize that in a few weeks it would happen. I had basked in retirement activities for over a year and was home that morning coping with the frustration of trying to log on to the New York Times website and finding I could not. I knew why after a friend called who was watching television—the Times was inundated with people wanting to read the latest reports on attacks by air on American targets—something most Americans never considered possible. The date was September 11, 2001.
I got to the TV in time to see footage of smoke clouds billowing from one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. The camera suddenly switched to show a plane aimed straight at the second tower, which exploded into a fireball on impact. A little later the first tower tumbled down upon itself as if it were a sand castle demolished by the tide. I could not believe what I was seeing. There would be thousands of victims. As I stared at the screen to get more details, I marveled at the precision of such a concerted and unprecedented attack not only on the Trade Center towers but, the voice rumbled on, the Pentagon as well. Suddenly another airborne attack attempt was disclosed. This fourth was foiled but obviously it was aimed at some other crucial target. When my shock subsided a bit, I speculated about the rage that must have motivated those suicide-driven murderers. Then it hit me that a short time before I had predicted America would experience its comeuppance—and here it was right in front of me.
I shuddered when the president declared a War on Terror. It is impossible to extinguish a concept by military force, I thought. But most Americans seemed to be going along even when the administration in 2003 didn’t hesitate to invade Iraq, without provocation. I felt helpless and depressed, unable to join the street protests since I was recovering from triple bypass heart surgery. I anxiously watched TV while exercising in rehab, lamenting every military strike and the growing number of casualties. I was still an activist, though certainly more of an inactive one in my recovery period.
Before my surgery I resigned from a number of boards of directors, selecting to continue on two which supported important social and physical improvements in Hartford. I also resigned from the City of Hartford Human Relations Commission, on which I had served for more than two decades. I needed to slow down.
To my immense surprise while recuperating that spring I was contacted by my alma mater, Moravian College, and informed that I had been chosen as recipient of the Haupert Humanitarian Award, named after Raymond Haupert, who was president of the college when I was enrolled as an undergraduate. As mentioned earlier, one of the jobs I was happy to have in those college years of scarce resources was doing outside chores, often beside President Haupert himself, in the extensive gardens at his residence. I don’t recall when I became aware of the existence of the award named for President Haupert. The award is a selective tribute and not given every year. Receiving this humanitarian award is the most gratifying acknowledgment I have ever received relating to my activism.
I was informed there would be a ceremony in October, at which I was asked to give an acceptance speech. Carolyn was looking forward to returning to Behlehem, the city of her birth, to see me so honored. But Carolyn died that summer unexpectedly in Yosemite Park, where we were vacationing. She had been diagnosed with heart disease years earlier, but was feeling well throughout our trip. One of the most difficult tasks I faced was calling each of my three children to tell them of their mother’s death. In the fall my two daughters accompanied me to the event. I was presented with a glass bowl etched with the college emblem and mounted on a jet black stand with a silver plate inscription. I display the bowl prominently in my living room. The purpose of the award is “to honor an alumna or alumnus who has rendered outstanding service in the cause of human welfare. The Alumni Association is honored to present the 2003 Haupert Humanitarian Award to Ivan Backer ’49 in recognition of his leadership in community revitalization.”
The remarks I made on that occasion were in a sense my valedictory:
I have been very lucky in life because I was paid for what I wanted to do. I
was able to live out my values, to work for causes I believed in, and make a living at it. Unfortunately, not many people can say that. And I found and developed some of these values here at Moravian.… When I began my work in Hartford in 1969, I felt that as a society we were going to make some headway in the struggle against racism, sexism, poverty, and injustice. For a long time that sense of purpose sustained me, as I and others slowly chipped away at these problems.
But today, some fifty plus years after leaving Moravian, I am far less sanguine. Poverty, injustice, entrenched privilege seem to be more intractable. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening within the United States but even more significantly between the first and third worlds. While we in America can spend thousands of dollars per person to get or to stay healthy, some of the world’s children can’t even get shots to prevent them from catching measles.
I fear for this country. Today, we in the US are too comfortable, too complacent, and too self-centered and arrogant. And I think that if we do not change, if we do not commit ourselves to bettering our society, to building a more equitable world community, and to helping struggling countries across the globe, that things will turn out badly for us.
Returning to Hartford a new activity grabbed my attention. It is called the Adult Learning Program (ALP). ALP is a member of the Network of Learning Institutes in Retirement, sponsored by Road Scholar/Elderhostel and under the auspices of the University of Connecticut. ALP opened its doors for retired local residents to share their love of learning. In addition to being able to take courses, participants also have the opportunity to teach a course or lead a session. ALP supplements its own resources by inviting community leaders and professors from surrounding colleges and universities to share their knowledge with us. The enrollment fee is minimal. A few other adult education groups have been organized in Hartford and some area communities, but their close connection with a designated college or university that pays speakers to give courses makes those programs too costly for many retired adults who do not have extra income at their disposal.
My Train to Freedom Page 12