The Daily Herald from Provo, Utah • 35

Thursday, November 30, 1972 THE HERALD, Provo, Utah-Page 35 Former Prison Inmates Counsel California Parolees talk for two hours and 1 cool him down. "A VISTA job is a 24-hoar job Some guy call you 3 o'clock in the morning and he say. I can't deal with my old There's always the hidden thing, the other guy who's been making it with the old lady while he's in the pen. The love thing is a helluva thing. "So 1 tell htm to cool it while I get over there Then I put the guy in the car and ride.

That always cool them down. A VISTA Volunteer is in a hot. hot spot all the time, between the agent over there, and the guy in trouble over here. "But it also allows a VISTA Volunteer to get himself together," At a month, Lee admits, it's difficult to "survive I committed burclarv By MURRAY OLDERMAX SAN The call comes to Jim Lewis in the middle of the night. There's a frantic urgency in the strangled voice.

"I'm using." it pleads. "I need help." So Jim Lewis gets in his car, with the State of California seal on the side, and races to the grimy part of town. The guy's in trouble. He's done time. He can't contact his parole officer, who would have to turn him in for possession of narcotics.

But he trusts Jim Lewis. Why? Because Jim's not a peace officer. He's an ex-con, too. He's been there before, in trouble, needing someone to lean on. Jim is 32 years old and was raised in Dallas, on the streets.

At 16, he was sent to the School tor Boys at (Jy.es-ville. for having a gun. At 18, "I graduated to purse snatching and went to the penitentiary." For three years. He drifted to California, and wound up in San Quentin for various felonies such as kidnaping, burglary and armed robbery. He's dene them all.

"I was actually fascinated by being a crook," remembers Jim. The awakening came when a member of the California Parole Board said to him, "You didn't learn too much in Texas, did you?" Jim got his high school diploma in San Quentin and after his release last year veered dramatically to a new life. He would work in helping parolees adjust to the community after they leave prison. The chanee was achieved through VISTA (Volunteers Confessed Slayer Draws Sentence in California carefully screened 1STA Volunteers, he took a special training program at San FranciKCO State Now he and Lewis place three or four new parolees on jobs each week. I took Lindso Young." says Clark, "he was unskilled, low-educated, just out of prison.

I got him into the carpenter apprenticeship, four year program, certified through the union." "In Mann County," adds Lewis, "I got two cx-cons hired at the housing authority unheard of before." But Cla- also remembers taking a guy out of prison and getting him a job, depositing him there at 11 o'clock. "By 3:30 that evening," he notes, "the guy was already busted for pushing cocaine. "I've placed about 80 people on the methadon program. About 25 per cent of the people on parole are drug addicts. They seldom commit violent sex crimes.

They just want money to feed their habits." Clark was on heroin for 17 of his 36 years. Cleveland Hammonds, a big, brooding man, is also an addict. His older brother had become hooked on drugs during the Korean War. "We took to gambling in my family," he recalls. "I won all the dope from my brother one day and decided to try it.

My main thing now is working mth drug addicts. Money is the big thing. Why, they Mave to steal just to be on the methadon program." Warren Gomez, who works Ihe Mission district, predominantly Spanish, is also an ex-junkie, he emphasizes the confidence the VISTA Volunteers must inspire. They can't wear a "snitch jack The parolee must be abl. to contact his VISTA and say, "Hey, I slipped Without fear 'of being turned in.

"There was this guy nevi door to me in the pen at Sole-dad," he recalls. "I saw him again when I got out and he ignored me. He was afraid I'd turn him in The guy had been Tunning' ton the lam I almost four years. We used to shoot dope together. Finally, I convinced him, 'Hey, nothing's going to happen.

Go to your (parole) agent and thev can straighten it "They got him a driver's license, put him together. The guy was in the clouds." Lee Ashford, burly and black, with a wool knit sock-cap remembers a house call his first week as a VISTA Volunteer in Oakland: "This cat ask me at the door, 'Are you an 'No, a VISTA Volunteer. 'You from "He says, 'I goddam well don't like no ex-convict coming to my "He's a big guy and he get his shin off so I can see all his butter. I don't back down. I know all the answers.

We been 35 former convicts in this VISTA work 11 are still active, six were promoted to the Department Corrections, six went back to jail, three finished their year and went elsew here, nine resigned for personal reasons or became full-time students. There is one woman VISTA now and two in training. "A guy gets 40 bucks and some clothes," says Jim Lewis, "when he goes on the streets. We want to do more for him than that "You're not going to save everybody," says Hal Hubbell. "But in our area the violation rate (of parole) has gone down from 45 to 25 per cent." Santa Survey NEW YORK d'PI) -Working girls or shoppers, blue collar employes and teen-agers, in that order, lead the list of contributors who drop their money into Volunteers of America chimneys during the Yuletide season, a 10-city survey of the organization's Sidewalk Santas has found.

Officers of the national social welfare organization that has put bell-ringing santas on citv streets at Christmas time for the past 76 years say there's a good reason why businessmen are not among the top three categories of individual contributors. "There has been an increase in corporate and business gifts in recent years," they explained. because I liked the money." But he has a wife who works, which helps, and he attends Grove Street College Oakland Ray Wickliffe attends Mer-ntt College in the same city. For his VISTA work he gets the equivalent of seven hours of credit. Besides his own case work, lie participates in a training program for parole agents He's an expert on the "streets" and leads the future agent to various commumtv offices that can help him in his work.

"These guys," says Hal Hubbell. "are a real asset in dealing ith years and years of delinquency. They do a lot more than just get the ex-cons jobs. They provide residence, clothes, food and tools in the case of certain job skills." One VISTA graduate is on the verge of becoming the first former felon to be hired as a parole agent. He's already working as a consultant in the Department of Corrections, and a full pardon, expected in a year, will put him in line for the agent's job.

But there is another side. Not all ex-con VISTAs stay-straight. One of them went off and committed a kidnaping in soi.tnern California. The others then had a meeting about policing themselves and imposing fines for delinquent behavior. Since late 1970, when the program started in the San Francisco area, there have LOS ANGELES (t PI) A man who confessed to slaying three Idaho farmworkers last year has been sentenced to a second term of life imprisonment for the robbery-murder of a 19-year-old Sylmar, youth.

Michael "Evil'' Rennpage, 28, Sacramento, was sentenced to life for the killing of Joseph W. Warmuth, whose remains were found in the mountains 30 miles north of here. Superior Court Judge Pat Mullendorf, who handed down the sentence, directed Rennpage first be returned to authorities in southeastern Idaho. Rennpage was arrested in Driggs, Idaho, for killing the three laborers and was implicated in the Warmuth shooting by testimony from his traveling companion, Joyce Turner, Elko, Nev. Rennpage later confessed and was sentenced to a life term.

"Is" Poles Begin to See Light At End of Housing Tunnel He pleaded guilty here Oct. 12 to killing Warmuth, who was last seen October, 1971. when he drove off from his parents' restaurant in Saugus. The youth was shot when he picked up Rennpage and Mrs. Turner, while they were hitchhiking.

Old Corn-Poppers LEXINGTON, Ky. (LP1) -While moderan movie theaters reap a huge benefit from the sale of popcorn, it is believed the practice goes back to prehistoric times. M.J. Bitzer, a specialist at the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, says corn-popping probably was the first use man made of corn. The Aztecs have been known to have popped corn and some was found in America's midsection dating back to 4,000 B.C.

mtr. i ML HMUana 5 Bv HOWARD A. TYNER WARSAW (LTD -Like a million other poles, Herbert Terlecki wants most of all to have a new apartment. Like the rest, he will have to wait-possibly years unless a new approach to home building here in communist Poland can shorten the time. The government's construction plans borrow freely from such non-Communist notions as pay incentives and private ownership, and they could go far toward relieving this nation's chronic housing shortage.

That would be welcome news in a country where adequate living space has been lacking for 30 years and where it is not uncommon to find three generations of a family living together in a single apartment. Technician's Plight Consider the case of Terlecki, 29, a soft-spoken, crewcut Warsaw radio technician. "I moved in here when I was a bachelor," he said, looking around the book-strewn room where he has lived for the past 2 Vz years. The room has a kitchen nook tucked into the corner and a bathroom leading off another. The bed was a foldup couch and Terlecki said when he opened it, the bed was as wide as the room itself.

"A year later I married and my wife moved in" he said. "We could manage here. But now she is pregnant and when the baby arrives soon my mother-in-law is moving in, too. "With all of them in this room, I'll have to sleep downstairs with neighbors on a cot in their front room." Five year wait On average, the waiting time in Poland for a new apartment has been five years. Poland's heavy wartime damage is one reason behind the housing shortage.

Warsaw, for instance, suffered destruction of more than 60 per cent of its private homes and apartments in World War II. Later new units were built too hastily. Many fell into disrepair too quickly. In 1970 alone 640,000 apartments throughout the country were declared unfit for further habitation. In the 1950s and 1960s, while Poland's urban population nearly doubled, housing construction was erratic and poorly planned, and suffered from a persistent shortage of building materials.

"The result was stagnation and near chaos in the indus I SMOKERS I LIB! 1 Do you wont liberation from the Problems of Smoking Bring smoking friends and relatives to a "How- fo-Qoif" meeting. Dec. 1, Provo library, $: 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. i-i Dec.

4 or 6, American Fork Senior Citizens Center at 9 a.m. or American Fork City Hall, at 7 p.m. Dec. 5, Spanish Fork, 770 E. 100 So.

at 9:30 a.m. Dec. 7, Payson Hospital at 7:30 p.m. ij: try," said Housing Minister Alojzy Karkowszka who told a news conference that between 1.0 and 1.2 million Poles were waiting for apartments. Gomulka' Failure Some people say the failure to make headway in the housing field was a major factor in the downfall in December, 1970, of former Communist Party First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka.

True or not, his successors are determined not to make the same mistake. First, to ease the situation in building materials they decentralized production in the key cement industry. Local plant managers were given more day -to-day authority and permission to hand out bonuses to especially productive workers. Results were immediate. One newspaper reported cement output up 25 per cent within three months after the "revolutionary experiment" began.

The government also changed another traditional Communist policy, that of state or cooperative ownership of most housing. "We all know the right to own one's own accommodation gives one a sense of stability," new First Secretary Edward Gierek said in setting the tone of the policy. While Housing Minister Karkowszka says only 10 per cent of all homes or apartments in Poland presently are privately owned, that figure obviously is going to grow. Adopted Resolution On Oct. 19 Parliament adopted a resolution which said 34 per cent of the 1.1 million apartments scheduled to be built in the next four years would be privately-owned.

The government also authorized credits of up to 60 per cent for construction of private homes. Private home owners', however, remains an expensive undertaking for the average Pole, whose monthly take-home pay is 2,500 zloties The experts themselves admit Poland's housing situation will not be normal at least until 1990 and even that presumes all present construction ideas go adcording to plan. Still, the usually cynical Poles seem receptive to the government's attempts to solve the problem. People have the impression something is being done," young Terlecki said, "and for a change it seems like something really is being done." ELECTRONIC MINI CALCULATORS 119 00 OFFICE SUPPLY 69 W. Center, Provo 373-2430 191 S.

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Hub-bell, regional parole administrator for the California Department of Corrections. His office is in the historic Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street, and through the window you can see Alcatraz and imagine San Quentin a few miles to the north. In a different time, a different setting, it would be edgy for an outsider. Bo-cause these men in the room have all been criminals, some of them desperate dope addicts. Now they are consultants to the state Department of Corrections to help parolees adjust to the community.

They get $300 a month. A couple, like Jim Lewis and Tom Clark, have graduated to state jobs at $550 a month as Parole Service assistants. "I'm kind of proud of it," says Jim Lewis, who smiles easily and has a gold tooth up front, "not for going to the penitently but for being allowed to do what I'm doing." When the idea of using ex-cons as VISTA Volunteers was first proposed to the De partment of Corrections, several parole agents walked out of the meet'ng. Seven-years ago, notes Hal Hubbell, this department wouldn't even permit parolees to associate with each other. "It blew their minds in Washington," admits Willie Hall, the ACTION director for California, "when they saw the records of these VISTA Volunteers.

They thought they were getting some guys who stole a couple of hub caps." Even the ex-convicts to be helped were suspicious. "At first, the cat thinks the VISTA man, he's a snitch or a po-lees-man," says Tom Clark, who works in tandem with Lewis. "I show up and I'm driving that old state car. They're scared of the car. But the good you do gets around.

They don't run and hide no more." "These VISTA men are an inspiration to other convicts," nods Hal Hubbell. "In addition to helping other people, they get themselves cut of the criminal justice program." Clark a slim, fast-talking man of .56, spent 13 years in different penitentiaries on drug-related crimes. a drug fiend," says Lewis frankly.) Along with other carrying case when you buy any 500 or Custom 500 ends January 15, and cushion new Ford 1973 car or station wagon. Perfect warmer-upper for game-time or pre-game picnics! Offer See your Intermountain Ford Dealer GIVAN FORD SALES PROVO, UTAH.