N.Y. to S.F.: From Corps to Shining Corps : Conservation Groups Cooperate in Ambitious Bicoastal Exchange Program

San Francisco and New York are 3,000 miles, a three-hour time difference and a five-hour plane trip apart. Manhattan is an island, and San Francisco, surrounded by water on three sides, likes to think of itself as island-like and exotic. Both have many tall buildings, bustling financial districts, elegant restaurants, outrageous real-estate prices and famous opera companies.

But anyone who thinks the two cities are otherwise remotely similar should talk to the nine New York City Volunteer Corps members and the 10 members of the San Francisco Conservation Corps who recently undertook an ambitious cultural, geographical and professional exchange program, switching places long enough to find out that life is very different at either end of the continental rainbow.

“That part over there is straight out of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood,” an incredulous New Yorker named Lisa Lyons said, waving toward the low-to-medium skyline of Bay Street, across from the SFCC headquarters in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge at Fort Mason.

Out of a Storybook

“Like it’s out of a storybook,” added a wistful Jarual (Junior) Green, 19.

Across the continent, preparing for a day of heavy-duty cleaning work at a Harlem senior citizens service center, San Franciscan Robert Paige, 22, was equally disbelieving about what he had encountered in the Big Apple.

“These people, it takes a lot to snap these people,” Paige said, shaking his head in wonderment. “They could see somebody walking down the street naked. They’d just keep walking, like it’s nothing new. Somebody could get shot, they’d stand there and drink their Coke, like ‘so what?’ ”

“There’s more of a variety of people here,” Linda Washington, 22, said, suddenly transported from her home in San Francisco’s Bay View-Hunters Point district to a center for mentally retarded and developmentally disabled children in the Bronx. “People’s attitudes are different here, in the sense that they are more aggressive. People are not as open-spoken as they are in San Francisco.”

Or this, from a decidedly diplomatic Kathy Royer, the SFCC work supervisor detailed to accompany her charges on their sojourn in New York: “There is something real exciting about New York that’s not in San Francisco. On the other hand, there’s something real comfortable in San Francisco that’s definitely not in New York.”

“Hands across the Rockies” was how one observer described this pioneering effort to expose these young participants to what generally are regarded as model national youth service programs. Two and a half years old, the San Francisco Conservation Corps employs an average of 80 to 85 workers at any given time, and most clock in at 20 to 22 years old. By contrast, the New York City Volunteers Corps, known most commonly as CVC, was first proposed in January, 1984, with the intention of training upwards of 1,000 young people in public-service capacities.

CVC members tend to be younger than their West Coast counterparts: Most average in the 17 to 20 range. Whereas SFCC members are paid $3.35 per hour for their 32-hour week, CVC’ers live up to their middle name and work on a volunteer basis. They receive, however, a weekly transportation-and-lunch-money stipend of $80, and upon completion of one year of service are promised a $5,000 scholarship for college or vocational studies, or a cash payment of $2,500. New Yorkers work five days a week, and are encouraged to take classes at night. In San Francisco, Friday is set aside as an unpaid, mandatory education day, where SFCC’ers brush up on academic and work skills.

Focus on Physical Skills

At the SFCC, the focus is primarily on physical skills. In seven work crews of a dozen or so members per crew, corps members build playgrounds, dig ditches, groom trails. City Volunteer Corps workers work in teams of 10 to 12, and focus almost exclusively on human services. They work in hospitals, senior citizen centers and at recreational facilities around New York’s five boroughs.

San Franciscans receive on-the-job training, while New York corps members spend their first week in a rigorous rural training program that many liken to the Marines and Parris Island. To simulate the City Volunteer Corps experience, San Francisco Conservation Corps members were whisked off almost instantly to the training center nearby in Tusten, N.Y.

“Tustin is in Orange County,” work supervisor Kathy Royer clucked facetiously. “Everyone knows that.”

Chest-deep in tule reeds at a drainage ditch opposite the San Francisco Airport, Dario Robertson, just turned 18, admitted he’d be glad to get back to his CVC job as escort to a social worker in the Bronx. That position is “pretty rough,” Robertson said, but compared to what he’s doing in San Francisco, it’s a picnic.

SFCC members call this particular project, designed to curtail freeway flooding, “the swamp,” and even SFCC chief Robert Burkhardt agreed the setting “is like a scene out of ‘The African Queen.’ ” Still, Burkhardt was quick to temper his sympathy somewhat, adding “It’s just the thing to keep teen-agers out of trouble.”

Workers wear waders, somewhat irrelevant since the water is shoulder-high in places. On this day, New York team leader and supervisor Frank Campagna brought Robertson back to SFCC headquarters early for a change of clothes, explaining that “Dario started shaking and turning purple.”

Said Robertson: “At first, I really didn’t understand how rough it really was. I can’t swim, but I can just keep jumping off the bottom and breathing. I never thought I was going to be in a swamp.”

Added Campagna: “In New York we do some physical projects, like fixing up parks, but not hard-core ones. We don’t do swamps.”

Meanwhile, in a cheery apartment deep in the heart of West Harlem, San Francisco’s Manuela Marquez, 22, grinned enthusiastically as she donned rubber gloves and armed herself with large quantities of Easy-Off and Mr. Clean.

“This is great,” she exclaimed as she set about scrubbing the Venetian blinds of Martha Chase, a 75-year-old recipient of the services of Harlem’s Mil-Gar Home Care Program. “In San Francisco, I’m used to picking up railroad ties.”

Later, at a meeting with CVC director Carl Weisbrod, Marquez gave this assessment of her day’s activities: “Today,” Marquez said, “I washed dishes.”

“Just what you always wanted to do,” Weisbrod deadpanned. “Three thousand miles to wash the dishes.”

But Tyrone King, the 19-year-old CVCer paired with Marquez for a day of working with Harlem senior citizens, had little doubt about the benefit of his work with older New Yorkers.

“I try to make them feel warm,” King said while polishing the tile in Martha Chase’s kitchen. “I talk to them, and I try to make them feel good. I remember there was one lady, I had to carry her to the hospital because she couldn’t walk. Afterward I said, ‘Hey, I helped somebody, maybe I’ll get a blessing.’ ”

“Some of the elderly people say ‘you shouldn’t trust a teen-ager,’ ” CVC member Alicia Johnson agreed. “When they let us into their homes like this, they’re giving us trust. That means some teen-agers, they’ll be able to trust us, they won’t be scared of us.”

Blind and recovering from a stroke, Martha Chase fairly glowed when “her” CVC team appeared to help in her apartment. “All the time when you come here,” she told them, “it gives me a lift. It really means a lot.”

Days on either coast are rigorous. At their home-away-from-home at the Yosemite Institute at Fort Cronkhite, just across the Golden Gate in the pristine wilderness known as the Marin Headlands, the New Yorkers are up early, roused perhaps as readily by the alarm as by the sounds of foghorns and barking seals. By 6:15, they are downing a hearty breakfast of sausages and French toast, hot and cold cereal, and soon the group is piling into vans for the 20-minute ride to SFCC headquarters at Fort Mason, a former Army base that is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

At 7:30 the New Yorkers line up with their San Francisco counterparts for half an hour of calisthenics, followed by a run whose length depends, said Robert Burkhardt, “on various things, including my mood.” At 8, the vans head for work sites around the city, one or two New Yorkers on each crew. At 4 p.m. the vans roll into headquarters again. The San Franciscans head for home, the visitors go off for some sightseeing, or back to the Marin Headlands.

Already veterans of the infamous New York subway system, San Francisco Corps members use public transport to scatter from their residence on the Lower East Side to their assorted work sites. Exercises, the dreaded “physical training,” are held at each work spot. With a CVC member accompanying them, most head for local fast-food hangouts for lunch, and later return home via public transportation. It is, in short, a kind of baptism-by-subway in the ways of New York City.

“Well there’s a kind of culture shock, sure,” 21-year-old SFCCer Athena Radetsky said. “But, I mean, when I get on the subway, people are the same. They look just the same as the ones on BART.”

CVC members expressed mixed feelings about the hard physical work, much of it outdoors, that is standard in San Francisco. Said Sergio Ortiz, “all this exercise, all this fruit we eat every day--I’ve probably grown.” But Andrea Lowe is asthmatic, “which doesn’t make it easy when we are having to run,” she said. “I puffed. I went to the hospital and got some medicine. Now it’s getting easier.”

Gina Young, 19, was preparing an empty lot behind the Wu Yee Child Care Center in Chinatown for eventual use as a play area. She described her work as “taking dirt from one place to another, and putting heavy bricks in a garbage can.

“I was willing to be flexible, but I didn’t expect it to be physical like this,” she remarked. “Let’s just say, my body movements are much better than before.”

Summing up, 18-year-old Ortiz

explained: “If we didn’t have to work, I feel I would have much more fun.”

While perhaps taking a somewhat healthier-than-thou attitude on the physical labor front, San Franciscans for the most part willingly conceded the value of their venture into the world of human-service work.

“This is pretty amazing,” Athena Radetsky said of her work at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, the Bronx. “It’s very different from what I’ve done before.

“Our work is on the outside,” Radetsky said, “and here it’s with people. I can tell my mind is tired, because I’m not used to dealing with people’s emotions as much.”

Sporting muscles that testified to her hard physical work in San Francisco, Radetsky was standing in the Hebrew Home’s dining area, chatting with a pair of loquacious nonagenarians. “Just to be with these older people makes me think wow!--everybody does get old,” Radetsky said. “It’s really good for young people to be able to do this. A lot of 17-, 18-, 19-year-olds just hang out on the street. To be able to do this really matures you.”

“Getting into a program like this is a real change. I’m really learning a lot,” Linda Washington agreed, chasing after a speeding 4-year-old on a tricycle at the Shield Institute for the mentally retarded and developmentally disabled.

“My brother,” Washington said, “he’s mentally retarded, but I’ve never worked with others like this.”

Washington said the experience was broadening her view of the world, not to mention her definition of conservation and its value to the planet.

“Conservation, according to my definition, is the preservation of life,” Washington said. “The services we’re doing in San Francisco deal with natural resources and buildings, not so much with people.”

Driving a Conservation Corps van across town during rush hour, the CVC’s Frank Campagna was amazed that in San Francisco, traffic lights change directly from red to green. In New York, he said, if there were not a few-second interval when lights in both directions were red, there would be a monumental pileup. “Everything here is kept pretty tidy,” he added. “There is not much litter, or graffiti, and there doesn’t seem to be as much drug traffic.”

To Gina Yong, “San Francisco is very romantic at night--all the lights in the dark.”

But Sylvina Acloque, 18, was less impressed. “It’s different here, that’s for sure,” Acloque said. “I think the pace is highly different--it’s slow, too slow. There’s nothing to do.”

She was seconded by Rhona Raison, 18. In New York, Raison said, “movies, discos--everything is open late. Out here, everything closes at 11 o’clock, and 11 o’clock is when everything starts happening.” Says Deara Jeeter, 19: “I would never leave New York because it’s lively all the time. At 4 o’clock in the morning you can still party.”

Wide-eyed at the nonstop bustle of the Big Apple, San Francisco’s Tony Pang, 19, was amazed that The City That Never Sleeps . . . never sleeps. “The people here in New York,” Pang said, “they’re out all night, every night.” Pang sounded nostalgic, or possibly just overwhelmed. “It’s not like that in San Francisco.”

In New York, the San Francisco crew was too fresh from its training session to have done much serious exploring. But after work in San Francisco, the New Yorkers had been hitting all the predictable tourist spots: Coit Tower, Fisherman’s Wharf, the “world’s crookedest street” block of Lombard. Favorites have been Alcatraz--”I’d never been to a jail house before,” Sylvina Acloque explained--and Chinatown, scene of some avid shopping. Sergio Ortiz, for example, said he spent “Everything I had in my pocket,” on a camera and a kimono--”one of those short robes that looks like silk, with a dragon on the back.”

But that’s not the real San Francisco, at least not in the view of SFCC member Adolphus Dwane Labaron (Chips) Bettis. Having heard about “all the different places to see in New York--Times Square, riding the subways,” Bettis was eager to conduct a tour of his own for some of the visitors. “I want to take some of them on BART,” Bettis said, “and they’ve never ridden electric buses. They’re seeing historical places, not exactly what I want for them.” He’d take them to the Tenderloin, and outlying sections like Daly City and to Pier 39, admittedly touristy but a place where they would “get a chance to meet some women.”

One starlit San Francisco evening, there was a barbecue for SFCCers and their visitors in the Great Meadow behind SFCC headquarters, followed by a baseball game, under lights, at a nearby park. While they waited for their hot dogs to cook, they got to comparing the two programs. Robert Burkhardt believes that “both groups will decide they like their own program better, and I think that is healthy.” Certainly there was an “anything you can do, I can do better” flavor to the dialogue.

S.F.: “You’re not as strong.”

N.Y.: “Yes, we are.”

N.Y.: “The emotional strain (of doing human-service projects) is very difficult. I don’t think you could handle it.”

S.F.: “I could handle it.”

Deara Jeeter says: “I think human-services work is good because you build your mind as well as your muscle. You learn to be concerned with people’s feelings, and you get more confidence in yourself.” Sergio Ortiz values the friends he has made at institutions, like hospitals, where he has worked.

On the other hand, Junior Green barely paused in building a concrete foundation for a wheelchair ramp behind the Park Headquarters building at Fort Mason as he praised the value of learning a skill. “I like this kind of work, building things,” he explained. Lisa Lyons likes the fact that the San Francisco Corps members are trained to be crew leaders. “We don’t have that,” she says.

Andrea Lowe is planting trees on what she calls “mountainsides” (Reed Hills) in McLaren Park.

“I come home so exhausted, I sleep in the van,” she says, “but I am really learning something. Planting trees, that is something I could do in my backyard some day.”

There are plans to expand the San Francisco program eventually to include social projects, and Frank Campagna says of San Francisco’s skills training--”carpentry, soil control, tree planting, we could do some of that.”

In fact, as Deara Jeeter puts it, “you grow when you do both kinds of work. Otherwise, it gets boring.”

Across America, in the CVC offices above the Village Voice, CVC director Carl Weisbrod was eager for some feedback from his San Francisco exchange workers. After a perfunctory introduction, Weisbrod found it took little prodding to uncover the opinions of the SFCCers.

“You have a problem with motivation,” Kenneth Whitaker told him in no uncertain terms. “You need to motivate the corps members a whole lot more. I saw at least three breaks before lunch, whereas we take one break before lunch, and that’s it.

“I heard a lot of complaints about the lack of learning things,” Whitaker went on. “One guy said that all he does is rake leaves.”

Peggy Jackson, who is black, looked Weisbrod squarely in the eye.

“Do you think there’s a reason,” she asked, “why this program is predominantly black?”

In fact, Weisbrod said, there was an explanation: “I think it has to do with the nature of unemployment in the city of New York, and also because there are limited options.”

Perhaps mildly roasted by his guests, Weisbrod nonetheless had a message of inspiration of his own for the SFCCers.

“Citizenship carries with it obligations and responsibilities as much as rewards,” Weisbrod said. “But we are now in this country at a time when citizenship is not highly valued, when Americans believe in the right to a jury trial, but do not believe strongly in their obligation to serve on a jury.”

National service such as the CVC or SFCC, said Weisbrod, “offers a shared generational experience.” Working on public-service projects provides “the sense that a generation can do something,” he said, “a conviction that is usually only a product of catastrophe.” Remembering the unifying qualities of such disasters as the Depression, World Wars I and II, even the Vietnam War, Weisbrod said, “This generation has not had a shared experience at all.”

This prologue reflected Weisbrod’s theory of the value of such national service programs, said his associate, John Beilenson. “One thing we believe is that rights are a two-way street,” Beilenson said. “You have to give something to get something, and this enables people to give.”

Finally, said Beilenson, speaking now equally of the CVC and comparable programs springing up around the country: “These people are going to leave a legacy.”

“Like the work of the old Civilian Conservation Corps members of the 1930s,” Weisbrod said.

In San Francisco, Mike Washington said the New Yorkers are not what he expected. “I expected just another worker from another city,” Washington said. “But they have more enthusiasm, they’re more interested in doing the job.” Darlene Rideout said she was partial to the accent. “I’m trying to pick up on it, like ‘Ma’hattan,’ ” she said.

Rideout said she wished the New Yorkers could stay on. “They made me feel good. They’re working people too, straightforward people. They get right to it.”

“I thought they were going to be maybe shy people,” said Lillian Dawson, 23, “but they were pretty open. They acted like, ‘Hey, I’ve been here before,’ but the majority haven’t, except for Frank.”

With the exchange period coming to an end, said SFCC chief Burkhardt, “the test will be to see who seeks political asylum.

“Some of our kids will defect,” Burkhardt predicted, “and some of their kids will defect; they will get on a bus and come back and apply for asylum with the San Francisco Conservation Corps. And that’s fine.

“This makes the continental U.S. real to these kids. They are citizens of the United States now, and that is a very important thing to have happen at the age of 18 or 19.”

Staff Writer Elizabeth Mehren reported on the story from New York. Free-lance writer Harriet Stix reported from San Francisco.