The Cross and the Switchblade

  To my surprise, we eliminated only twenty.

  Now I left the choice to the faculty at the school. By the time I left Springfield, we had chosen sixteen young men and women to come to New York as workers. Four more were chosen from Lee College in Tennessee. One by one, a few weeks later, they began to arrive. They came carrying their suitcases and craning their necks. They were all a little frightened, I think, at the strange new sights of New York, and were wondering what they had gotten into. Here are extracts from a letter written by one of our girls shortly after she arrived:

  My dearest family:

  Greetings from New York City! I arrived in the Great City at eight fifteen last night. The place was full of people, but God helped me. Teen Challenge wasn’t listed in the phone book, but I found out the number and someone came with a car and all my friends came right after me. I had no trouble on the way. None of my buses were late. From Chicago to New York we stopped for three meals and two stops, so it was comfortable.

  My job and plans here are as follows:

  1. Personal evangelism among girls.

  Monday—Free to do as I wish.

  Tuesday—Street evangelism and street services.

  Wednesday—Hospital visitations to teenage girls.

  Thursday—Jail visits to girls.

  Friday—Street evangelism and street services.

  Saturday—Work with denominational churches.

  Sunday—Work with Pentecostal churches.

  2. In charge of girls as dorm counselor. See that the rooms are clean and homework done, etc.

  3. In charge as music director.

  We are praying for a person to pioneer the girls’ evangelism with me.

  There were three murders in Joe’s section this week.

  I must go help cook supper. Don’t forget to go to church. I love you.

  I’ll never forget the evening when I was finally able to say to Gwen, “Honey, we’re open for business.”

  We were standing in the chapel of the center. This room had at one time been the formal drawing room of the old house, and there was a large fireplace against one wall. A richly carved mantel stuck out into the room, and as I talked to Gwen, I leaned up against this mantel.

  I reminded her of the evening a year and a half earlier, when I’d stood in the moonlit churchyard in Philipsburg, watching the wheat wave in the breeze. Now the Lord had brought us to the harvest field. He had given us the tools: twenty fine workers and a belief in the power of the Holy Spirit to change lives.

  “Darling,” said Gwen, “look!” She pointed to the mantel.

  Beautifully carved into the fireplace in our chapel was the bas-relief of a sheaf of wheat, brought in, tied, and harvested.

  16

  As soon as we got our workers settled, I took them into the chapel and, standing before the bas-relief of the harvested wheat, I gave them a briefing on the makeup of a New York fighting gang.

  “Violence is the key word to remember about these gangs,” I told the young workers. “It can express itself directly in street wars or indirectly through drug addiction or criminal behavior. These ugly things are the rule, not the exception, among the jitterbugging gangs in New York.”

  It was important for our young workers to know the reason for this pathetic state. “We preachers speak of lost sinners. As I got to know these gang members, I couldn’t escape the feeling that they were literally acting as if they were lost. They wandered around, looking furtively over their shoulders. They carried weapons, ready at a moment’s notice to run or to fight for their lives. These lost boys group together for protection, and there you have the making of a gang.”

  Virtually without exception these boys had no real home. Their slang words for home were prison and horror house. I wanted our workers to know this situation from personal experience, so I took a few of them into the home of one of the street boys I knew.

  When we arrived, the door was open; no one was at home.

  “You can see why they call it a horror house,” whispered a young worker from a Missouri farm. It was true. A family of five lived in this single room. There was no running water, no refrigeration, no stove except for the single-burner hot plate with its frayed wire that sat on a chest of drawers. Down the hall in a single, stinking stall was a toilet and a faucet that served eight families on the floor. The ventilation in the apartment was poor, and a strong odor of gas hung in the air. The room’s one window looked out onto a blank brick wall, eight inches away. For light, the family had a single forty-watt bulb that hung naked from the center of the ceiling.

  “Why doesn’t the family just move?” another young worker asked. “Can’t they get into one of the housing projects?”

  To answer this question, we got in the car and drove a mile away to a great complex of apartments. These projects, many people thought, were the answer to New York’s slums. Bulldozers moved into an overcrowded area, like the one we had just visited. They tore down the old tenements and built towering new buildings in their place.

  Now there was a completely uprooted neighborhood. Everybody in it was lost. None of the old institutions were left, none of the older and more stable population of professional workers, and none of the known neighbors.

  The project we visited was a few years old but already showed serious signs of disintegration. Lawns had long ago been abandoned. Windows on the ground floor were broken and unrepaired. There was obscene writing on the walls. The halls smelled of urine and cheap wine.

  We visited a family there I knew. The mother was drunk. Dirty dishes lay on the kitchen table. The boy we had come to visit sat on a torn hassock staring, never speaking.

  Once we were outside again, I said, “Usually that boy is out on the streets. Thrown out. He can only come home when his mother has passed out, drunk.”

  This, I pointed out again, was the making of a teenage fighting gang. Lump a thousand tortured families together in a single neighborhood, and you have a population of teenagers who are hostile and afraid, who flock together looking for security and a sense of belonging. They will create a home for themselves by fighting for a turf that is theirs and that no stranger can violate. This is their fortress.

  Many of these boys are degradingly poor. I met one fourteen-year-old who had not eaten a real meal in two days. His grandmother, who took care of him, gave him some change each morning and chased him out of the house. For breakfast he had a Coke, for lunch a hot dog from a street vendor, and for supper he laughed and said he was going on a diet. All evening he nibbled on penny candy.

  Strangely, although the boys I met never seemed to have enough money for food, they always had enough for a bottle of wine.

  “It really frightens me to see how much drinking these young people do,” I said to our workers. “Many of the street boys drink wine all day long. They are seldom really drunk nor are they sober. They start drinking as soon as they meet, at ten or eleven in the morning, and continue until the money runs out.”

  When we got back to the center, I took our workers into the chapel again and told them the story of Martin Ilensky. Martin was a high school senior who worked part-time to help support his invalid mother. One day when he was not working he went to a vodka party at the horror house of another high school boy. Ten teenagers were there, six boys and four girls. After an hour of drinking, the vodka ran out. The boys took a collection for beer, but Martin refused. A fight followed. A twelve-inch sword appeared from one of the boys’ waistbands. There was a swift jab, and Martin Ilensky lay dead on the kitchen floor.

  “Now then . . .” I knew the words I was about to say would bother some of our workers, fresh from the seminary. “Suppose you could have talked to Martin Ilensky on some street corner for a few minutes. Remember: It is his fate to die if he goes to that party. What would your first words to him be?”

  “I’d tell him that Jesus saves,” piped up one boy.

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  Young eyes looked up, puzzled.r />
  “We’ve got to be very careful,” I said, “that we don’t become parrots. I try to keep my ear tuned for phrases—religious terms—that I’ve heard before. Then when I’m on the street I never use such a phrase without first saying a prayer that I can give it all the power it had when it was spoken for the very first time.

  “What,” I said, “do you really mean when you say ‘Jesus saves’?”

  Of course these boys and girls knew the answer to that—they weren’t just mouthing often-heard answers now; they were talking about something that had happened to them.

  “It means,” said one girl, “that you’re born again.”

  Still, the words didn’t have that ring of freshness we had to capture if we were going to touch Martin Ilensky before he was stabbed to death.

  “What happened to you when you were born again?” I asked this girl.

  The young lady hesitated a moment before she answered. In a voice that caught the attention of the entire room she told about a change that had come into her life one day. She talked of how she had been lonesome and afraid, and of how her life didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  “I’d heard about Christ,” she said, “but the name was just a word. Then one day a friend told me that Christ could take away my lonesomeness and my fear. We went to church together. The preacher invited me to come forward, and I did. I knelt down in front of everybody and asked this ‘Christ,’ who had just been a name, to work a change in my life. Nothing has been the same since then,” she said. “I really am a new person, which is why they say you’re ‘born again,’ I suppose.”

  “You lost your lonesomeness?”

  “Yes. Altogether.”

  “What about your fear?”

  “That, too.”

  “Christ is more to you now than just an empty word?”

  “Yes. A word can’t change things.”

  The room was silent. “Nor could empty words have changed things for Martin,” I said. “Keep this boy in mind when you go out onto the street tomorrow.”

  By late spring 1961, the Teen Challenge Center was in full operation. Every day—even on Mondays when they were supposed to be off—our young workers were out on the streets of Brooklyn and Harlem and the Bronx, looking for teenagers who needed them. They went to hospitals and jails, to schools and courts. They held street meetings in Greenwich Village and in Coney Island and in Central Park. And as they worked, the flow of kids coming through our center grew from a trickle to a flood. During the first month of operation, the lives of more than five hundred boys and girls had been radically changed; they left the gangs; they sought jobs; they started going to church.

  Of this five hundred, perhaps a hundred came to the center for special counseling. Of this hundred, a handful were in such trouble that they needed to live with us at the center, absorbing directly its atmosphere of love.

  ———

  As the summer wore on and more boys passed through the center, we began to face a moral problem. At one time or another, all of our boys had broken the law. What should they do about that?

  It was not a simple question to answer. It would be relatively easy for a boy who had become strong in his new life to take his punishment in jail. But to become strong takes time. There are many crises to pass, many dry periods to ride out, much to learn about the art of being a Christian. If a boy confesses to the police too early and is put in jail, isn’t there the risk of losing him? On the other hand, when he has offended society’s law, it will hold him back spiritually if he harbors guilt.

  I have come to feel that there is no answer that will cover all cases. Often I am puzzled as to what recommendation to make. Pedro, for example, had been living in the center for several days when he came to me complaining, “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep at all.”

  “Why, Pedro?”

  “I feel the weight of all my crimes. I have to go to the police and confess.”

  I listened to him and came to the conclusion that he really did have to confess to the police. Pedro didn’t detail his crimes for me because he had too much trouble with English and I could speak very little Spanish.

  So I contacted my old friend, Vincente Ortez, to interpret, and together we took Pedro down to the police. The sergeant behind the desk looked up and said, “Yes?”

  “I’m Reverend Wilkerson, director of Teen-Age Evangelism,” I said. “I have a boy here who was a member of the Dragon gang, and he has some things he wants to confess.”

  The sergeant asked me to repeat that. When I did, he put down his pencil. “Reverend, we have people coming in all the time to confess things they never did. But if you think the boy’s in his right mind, take him upstairs to the detectives’ room.”

  So we went upstairs and waited. Pedro seemed composed. Soon a detective came in and asked me right away if I had forced Pedro to come.

  “No,” I said. “He’s here of his own accord.”

  “You realize he might go to jail.”

  I asked Vincente Ortez to explain this to Pedro in Spanish. The boy nodded his head. Yes, he understood.

  The detective got paper and pencil and settled back. “All right, Pedro. Suppose you tell us what you want to confess.”

  “Well,” said Pedro, through Vincente Ortez, “do you remember that stabbing . . . ?” and he proceeded to describe a knifing that had taken place in Central Park two months earlier. The detective put his pencil down and called in another officer. They remembered the incident, and their interest picked up considerably. Pedro detailed the events that led up to the knifing. He was on drugs and he needed a fix. He was with two other boys. They spotted a young man sitting by himself on a bench, circled him, robbed him, and then put a knife in his stomach.

  Pedro then went on to confess two robberies. The detectives kept him there from six o’clock until twelve o’clock, checking and rechecking facts. They found the boy who had been stabbed, but he had a record and wouldn’t press charges. The store Pedro robbed twice also refused to press charges.

  In the end the police couldn’t find anyone to press charges, and they released Pedro into our custody. We went back to the center, and the next morning, Pedro was up before anyone. He woke the entire house by singing at the top of his lungs, and he greeted everyone with such cheeriness that we couldn’t complain. Pedro was a different boy. His heart was filled with a truly amazing joy.

  17

  As the thermometer on our back porch mounted higher with the summer heat, our twenty workers were busy from early morning until late at night. This was the schedule for the day:

  Rising bell at 7:00

  Breakfast at 7:30

  Dishes and cleanup

  Personal devotions until 9:30

  Group chapel from 9:30 to 11:30

  Dinner at 12:00

  Dishes

  Prayer

  Street work from 2:00 to 6:00, eating sack suppers together on the street

  More street work until 7:30

  Back to the center for evening services until midnight

  Bed

  Over the months we built up a cadre of experts in specialized fields who ran the center together. Howard Culver became our administrator. He saw to it that discipline was maintained. This was not always an easy task with twenty lively young collegians and an ever-changing number of young gang members on his hands. Howard’s wife, Barbara, was a registered nurse. Her presence was so important for undernourished youngsters and especially with addicts whose bodies go through horrible withdrawal.

  If I had a special place in my heart for the next member of our staff, I think it is understandable. He was Nicky. What a day it was for me when Nicky walked shyly through the front door of the center with a beautiful girl on his arm!

  “Davie,” said Nicky, “I want you to meet my wife, Gloria.”

  Nicky and Gloria met on the West Coast while they were both in Bible school. I rushed forward to greet them, wringing Nicky’s hand and slapping him on the back, and welcom
ing Gloria so warmly she was a little startled.

  Nicky, Gloria and I sat in the office and talked. This was the same boy who had threatened to kill me just three years earlier! At our first encounter, Nicky had impressed me as a hopeless case. Yet here he was, sitting before me a new person—a licensed minister, bursting with plans for the future.

  “What I want, Davie,” he said, eagerly, “is to work not just with kids, but with the parents. What’s the good helping a boy if he’s got to go home to a miserable family situation?” It made sense.

  Gloria wanted to work at the center, too. She loved children, and when Nicky told her about the eight-, nine- and ten-year-olds who ran on the periphery of the gangs, Gloria pointed out that reaching these kids before they got into serious trouble was even better than trying to pull them out of trouble later.

  ———

  We came at the problems of the street kids from all angles. I was working with the boys, Nicky with the parents, Gloria with the younger kids. But there was one large gap: We had no one whose special interest was in the Debs.

  The role of the teenage girl had been growing in importance in the makeup of the gangs. She was known as a Deb. She grouped together with other girls to form auxiliaries to the boy-gangs. Often these girl-gangs took names echoing the names of their male counterpart, as in the Cobras and the Cobrettes.

  The girls, I quickly discovered, were often the cause of trouble on the streets. I knew of one rumble that started because a Deb from one gang complained that a boy from a rival gang made a pass at her. Later the girl confessed that she was lying; she made up the story so there would be a fight.

  What we needed was a girl on the staff with a strong faith who could gain the Debs’ respect and not be shaken by their taunting.

  And we found her. Her name was Linda Meisner. She came from a farm in Iowa, and I hoped the city girls wouldn’t frighten her.