My Sunday column

Back before I was hauled kicking and screaming into the adult world, my summers were about one thing — fun.
Except for the one summer when I was in junior high and my mom decided summer was going to be about something entirely different — work.
Through some conniving on her part I got a job with the local CETA program. CETA stood for Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. It was a mid-1970s federal jobs program designed to boost employment during the recession and get some politicians re-elected.
CETA was supposed to target the chronically unemployed — young, black males for instance. To some extent this was how it worked. But in the case of my hometown, the young black males in the CETA program were coincidentally almost all high school football players and mostly starters.
I was not a young, black male who played football. I was a young, white male with connections. My parents were friendly with the powers-that-be who decided who got the CETA jobs so I was moved to the top of the list with several other young. white males with similar connections (or who played football).
This, by the way, is how government programs REALLY work.
The CETA job I worked that summer was a real job. I wish we had just sat around drinking chocolate milk and reading dirty magazines, but we did actually work.
Each day we met at the county work camp, which was known far and wide in Chattooga County as “the chain gang” because for years that’s where the county prisoners who worked on road crews were housed.
On the first day all the CETA workers gathered and were read the riot act by our bosses, one of whom was former Phoenix High principal and then Chattooga County assistant football coach (surprise!) Fred Toney.
We were then told to pick out our work tools. Most of my fellow workers bolted to the tool shed and snatched up the big, red, macho-looking axes. Being lazier than I was macho, I selected a much less fearsome looking blue sling blade.
Immediately I was ridiculed for not using an axe. The joshing went on until my fellow workers realized how much effort it took to swing an axe in the hot summer sun. On the second day of work, the “pick up your tools” stampede was directed at the sling blades.
As I said earlier, the CETA program may have been a scam in many ways, but we did work. The bosses took us all over the county. We cleaned roadsides, trimmed limbs, cut brush, hauled off junk and debris and did just about any hard work needed to spruce up Ol’ Chattooga.
As hard as the work was, there were some good things about it.
Best of all was we got paid. Money from that job supported my comic book addiction, put gas in my motorcycle and eventually allowed me to purchase my very own eight-track tape player. I even saved a few bucks.
Riding around in the back of the big work truck was also very cool. There would be a dozen or so of us on the back of the truck whooping and hollering at girls in blue jean shorts as we sped down the backwoods byways.
I learned a very important lesson that summer.
Our work crew was about half white and half black. Everyone got along fine, but every day the crew split up along racial lines.
One day the bosses took us to a particularly nasty looking field next to a creek. They told us to split into two groups and clear off the land on both sides of the creek. When a group finished its field, it could go swimming.
Well the black guys started walking across to the other field while the white guys stayed together on the near side — the usual defacto segregation.
Having seen the work habits of both groups for several weeks I made my choice. I picked up my sissy blue sling blade and walked over to the field with the black kids.
One of them looked at me quizzically and said “Why are you over here?” I pointed at the big, lazy, slow moving creek and said, “That’s why.”
Ninety minutes later my dark-hued co-workers and I were lounging in that chilly water while those hapless honkies were still hacking away at briar bushes and cussing mosquitoes.

Jimmy Espy is executive editor of The Daily Citizen. He blogs at Espysoutpost.blogspot.com