With my graduation weekend I had a friend whose father was president of a major international bank. Daddy was a big name. Yes, it must have been her graduation because she wanted him to meet Gaudino and Gaudino got into this, you know, this discussion about banking and different things and I remember my friend […]

I remember my father being concerned with my safety saying, “You’re going to Appalachia as a white, upper-middleclass kid and you’re going to live in their house?” So he was concerned I was going to get ripped off. Or, yeah, “You’re going to live in inner-city Detroit?” or “Are you going to live down in […]

We had our meeting of all of us at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Somehow it was arranged that we would stay in the dorms at Morehouse, maybe it was for a weekend, and the experience of being there on an all-black campus was my first experience at feeling what it would be like to be […]

We all got together at some restaurant eating frog legs and grits. And this guy, I think it was Perry McNeal, he basically said there are certain things you’ve got to be careful about and one of them was about hair. And you know, “Keep your zippers up.”

So I stayed in a little town called Alma, Georgia, which was by Waycross. I remember hooking up with a little local grocery store and I helped out in the grocery store. It was pretty much a black grocery store. I mean this was our very first day and as an individual from a white […]

So I was raised as a very quiet Congregationalist. The services were very quiet. So down in Georgia I got sick once and the family invited their minister over to visit. I had the flu or something at home. This black minister came over and said, “Can we pray with you?” And I said, “Sure.” […]

That’s exactly what she had thought, that I had seen God. I was thinking, “Why am I here alone in this place?” So again, I got myself into a cultural situation that I had no idea about and I wasn’t a student of American religion. I didn’t even know this existed, this kind of laying […]

I think as a student there were all these rich things that happened to me that totally went over my head.

We paid the families a stipend for having the student for probably about six weeks, so that helped buy our food. In Detroit and the other stays that was not an issue but for Appalachia that was very necessary. I remember sitting there and they said, “Well, what would you like to have? I’m going […]

I remember in Kentucky going to a settlement house or a school and this assistant principal came up and said, “Are you a social worker or are you something like a social worker?” Actually he didn’t tip his hat. He said, “Are you a social worker?” and I thought if I said something to that […]

CHAPTERS

Introduction
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Final Note