People and Events

It never hurts to flesh out one’s resume, but new Cal State Long Beach President Curtis McCray’s principal reason for doing some other jobs around the campus is apparently to find out what it’s like to work for him.

He recently toiled as a custodian from 4 to 8 a.m. and he plans to get a taste of other chores from time to time--helping the landscape crew, doing grunt work for the electricians and riding around with the campus police on night patrol.

McCray wasn’t certain at first how the professorial types would take to it when a newspaper article described his early morning stint alongside custodian Bessie Hadley. Here was their new president cleaning urinals and emptying trash barrels.

“So far,” McCray says, “the faculty on campus say they really like the idea. My vice presidents, of course, say they like it. They aren’t going to say anything else.”

The affable, white-haired McCray, 50, did the same sort of thing at the University of North Florida, where he was president before being selected to replace Stephen Horn at Long Beach. In Florida, he says, he also worked for four hours as a secretary. “I was terrible,” he admits. “It drove me crazy. But it did give me an appreciation for what one goes through--writing schedules, getting coffee for people. . . . “

Management people, he has concluded, “are chauvinistic.”

Although he concedes that some may view his efforts as a gimmick, McCray says: “There’s nothing like getting into someone else’s shoes. It’s sure better than doing nothing at all.”

While we’re on the subject of job qualifications:

After working out for several years in the weight room of the Los Angeles Youth Athletic Club (formerly the Lincoln Heights Jail), 31-year-old John Diaz was hired five years ago as a part-time instructor.

“John’s originally from Lincoln Heights,” says Stephen Bustillos, who oversees the club for the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks, “and a lot of our kids are very hard-core. He’s a real asset to our program. He is very forceful.”

One other thing: Diaz was born with cerebral palsy and does his job in a wheelchair.

He has full use of his upper body, however, and helps supervise other activities, such as boxing and karate. He has been known to spurn offers to carry him when the elevator isn’t working. He prefers to climb five flights of stairs on crutches.

Just try getting him to talk about himself. He has perfected the one-word answer. Here was his longest sentence in response to a question about how kids at the club react to him: “They treat me like everybody else.”

Bustillos says that one street-tough youth made a cruel remark about Diaz being on crutches and that Diaz quickly shut him up by challenging him to duke it out in the ring. Diaz claims not to remember any such incident.

“That’s just the way he is,” insists Bustillos.

Another of Diaz’s longer observations:

“Handicap’s in the head.”

An 80-year-old Australian named Wally Doe is in town and says he is looking for the relatives of a Yank flier who crashed in the New Guinea jungle in 1943 so he can give them the silver dollar he found on the pilot’s body.

“It was in his wallet, so I’m sure it was some kind of luck charm,” says Doe, who adds that at the time he figured the coin would never get to survivors if he turned it in. “I thought, ‘One day I’ll get to America . . . ‘ “

Doe says he worked as a gold miner in New Guinea before World War II, then was assigned by Australia to aid American intelligence there during the fighting. He recalls that he reached the wreckage of the American plane after being told of it by friendly natives. “I got sufficient remains to identify the lad,” he says. “But now I realize I made a mistake in not getting his regimental number.”

He is winding up a round-the-world trip and finally he is in America, but has no idea whether the flier came from Los Angeles or where. He only recalls that the surname was Cash. He has yet to ask military authorities for help but says he will do it when he gets home.

Cash? Doe? Is this a put-on?

“Doe is my real name,” he insists.

A bunch of county Department of Children’s Services social workers decided to carry to an extreme their protest over a hiring freeze and what they say is severe understaffing.

They worked several hours overtime for free.

That’s showing ‘em.

“Working through the night is not unusual for us,” declared Annette Jeffries, a field representative for Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, Local 535. “It’s just that this time we did it together.”

She said 100 to 150 employees held their “work-in” in the department’s cafeteria at 2707 S. Central Ave. on Tuesday evening “to dramatize that a 40-hour workweek is insufficient to adequately service the needs of neglected and abused children in Los Angeles County.”

Jeffries said the protesters had to vacate the building by 8:30 p.m. Emery Bontrager, executive assistant to Director Robert L. Chaffee, said that the number was more like 50 to 100 and that most were gone some time before 8:30.

He and Jeffries agreed on one thing, though: Both said that the social workers are expected to solve problems in “a creative way” and that this demonstration apparently met the criteria.