[Oe List ...] A Tribute to Hubert Fulkerson

[Don Cramer]

Thanks Martha for the wonderful string of stories that only deepen my
appreciation of Hubert and my remorse over his dying.  He was a gem.  And
thank you Marion and Fred for sending this along.  Hi to Tim.  Don

2011/1/16 Marian Karpoff <fmkarpoff at comcast.net>

> Dear Colleagues--Tim and Martha Karpoff express their gratitude to the many
> who shared their experiences in working with Hubert in the various ICA world
>  locations. Colleagues saw him in action as a caring and committed person,
> yet possibly unaware of the often difficult  journey he endured in his
> younger days. His sister Martha has chronicled some of those events in a
> loving tribute to his life, -a copy of which is included in this email.
> Memorial services will be held in Phoenix on Jan 22 and Muskogee on Feb 5.
> Please refer to our 2nd email for details.
>
> Grace & Peace,
>
> Fred and Marian Karpoff
> 6522 20th Ave NE
> Seattle,WA 98115
>
> *A Sister’s Tribute*
>
> By Martha Fulkerson Karpoff
>
>
> For those who knew Hubert (and I’m not sure many did, including myself),
> they know that he had a rather rough life—or was it a fortunate life? A
> lucky life, or a sorrowful life?  It’s hard to know actually.  One thing it
> was, was a tested life.    There are those who know more about his life in
> Chicago, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Oklahoma City or Phoenix.  I would love to
> know all the stories they know.   Hubert was all about stories, about
> looking at events, giving them a twist, and making a story of them.  Often
> these stories were ironic.  Often they were jokes.  Maybe his life was a
> joke, maybe not.
>
> Hubert was born in 1938 in the Depression, in one of the heartlands of
> Depression, Oklahoma.   His dad was a wholesale milk man in Muskogee and son
> and brother of men who worked in the oilfields of Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas
> and New Mexico.  His mom was daughter of a pecan orchard planter and pecan
> variety developer.   His dad’s nickname was Mick or Big Mick and Hubert’s
> nickname was Little Mickey. Both his parents were pretty tough hard-core
> realists.  Little Mickey bucked that realism thing really quickly by
> creating his imaginary dog Blackie.  Blackie and Little Mickey roamed the
> town figuring out what was really going on.  His parents realized he was
> kind of smart.
>
> In school, it turned out that Mickey was pretty good at mathematics.  By
> high school he was being offered several scholarships by universities, and
> finally chose Park University in Kansas City, Missouri.  Park University was
> a private university with a good reputation.  Mickey worked in the cafeteria
> in order to pay for some of his expenses at school.  He was well on his way
> to becoming the first college graduate in the Fulkerson family, first son of
> a first son.
>
> It wasn’t meant to be.  Instead, he got to go prison.  There were a series
> of fires and poisonings on campus.  Hubert was among the poisoned, and in
> fact had the most severe case of poisoning and was hospitalized for several
> days.  Later he was accused and convicted of the crimes of arson and
> attempted murder (for having attempted to murder himself, it seems).   The
> sentence was for 30+ years.
>
> My sister Kathleen and I, 6 years old and 8 years old, were with my
> grandmother the day Hubert was convicted.   My dad phoned in the sentence to
> her from Missouri.  My grandmother walked outside to our acre-sized yard and
> walked and cried for six hours. (My parents said that the jury seemed very
> sympathetic until the last day of the trial.  They suspected somebody got
> paid off.)  We had a brief time with Mickey at home where he played card and
> board games with us.  He was always a fun-loving, caring and mischievous
> person-- a skinny 19 year old by then with lots of dark brown hair.
>
> The Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri, was considered
> the toughest in the country in 1956.  Mickey’s  first week was probably also
> one of the toughest.   He was a nineteen year old white boy in a largely
> black facility.  Some bad things happened.  The prison authorities thought
> it best to give him several electric shock treatments to help him face
> reality.  That ought to do it!  By the end of the week his dark hair was
> mostly grey.
>
> [Tim’s Note: The Missouri State Penitentiary, known as “The Walls,” or “The
> Big House,” was proclaimed “the bloodiest 47 acres in America” by Time
> magazine because of a prison riot in 1954 and literally hundreds of assaults
> and stabbings inside the prison in the early 1960s. Sonny Liston was an
> inmate in the early 50s. James Earl Ray was an inmate when Hubert was
> there.]
>
> My sister and I went to visit him once in prison.  In Jefferson City, which
> has steep hills, there’s a road up above the prison where the whole prison
> is displayed for the merry traveler.  It had the look of a large medieval
> castle, designed for various forms of torture.  And actually it was.  I’d
> say I was ten and Kathleen was eight.  Mom had dressed us in our sweetest,
> cutest outfits.  The doors were massive and clanged loudly behind us.  The
> “viewing” room was a series of booths where thick glass with chickenwire
> separating the prisoner from the visitors.   My grandmother had sent Mickey
> a small portable typewriter because she couldn’t read Mickey’s handwriting.
> Very shortly afterwards, he was back to writing his letters by hand.  My mom
> asked why.  Mickey said that somebody took it.  “Well, did you report it to
> the guards?” my mom demanded.  Mom, grandmother and all of us on the outside
> didn’t comprehend where he was living.
>
> He worked in the library where someone was stabbed to death one day.  He
> learned to sew suits.  He saw Sonny Liston, a former inmate, conduct a
> boxing match.  And, he was out in the yard one day when a race riot
> occurred.  Mickey, being rather short (5’10”) and skinny and not wanting to
> be killed, ran as fast and as far as he could away from the riot.  Several
> people did likewise.  He was charged with “leading a charge on the wall”.
> (I’m not sure what damage he could have done to the wall.)  For this, he was
> given 18 months of solitary confinement with dietary restrictions in an
> abandoned elevator shaft.  This shaft did not have a toilet, just a hole
> above the sewer that was directly below.   Several years later, through
> others’ efforts and lawsuits, this shaft was declared unconstitutional as
> inflicting cruel and unusual punishment.
>
> When John F. Kennedy was shot, the Missouri Executive Office, including the
> Governor of the State, was, oddly enough, moved to the basement of the
> prison.  Mickey, who was sort of a news junkie and pretty much a model
> prisoner, was down there and recognized the Governor.  Mickey asked the
> Governor what he was doing there.  The Governor told Mickey that Kennedy had
> been shot and that as a precaution the Feds told all the governors to go
> somewhere safe.  And Mickey said, “And you came here?”
>
> Finally, and surprisingly, after a year in jail from the charges and the
> trial, and six more years in prison, the prison officials said that Mickey
> was free to go because someone else confessed to the crimes.  The “someone
> else” was the son of a very rich man in Kansas City.  The only problem was
> that the son had been committed to a mental facility by his father, and the
> son’s confession, as a mental patient, was not good enough for a pardon.
> The rich father had recognized a problem with the son, but did not want his
> son to go to prison.  If only he had had as much concern for a poor boy from
> Oklahoma.   Mickey was innocent. Mickey was only paroled. This led to many
> continuing problems for the rest of his life.
>
> Back home, Big Mick put Little Mickey back to work as a driver on one of
> the milk trucks.  He and Mickey went to the County Clerk’s office to get him
> back on the voting rolls, as felons were not allowed to vote.  This was a
> favor to my dad, who was pretty well known in Muskogee.
>
> Mickey felt most of the black people in the prison were there mainly
> because of lack of adequate counsel at trials.  He worked with them on some
> of their cases in the library at the prison.  When he came home he became
> active in the NAACP and eventually became president of the local chapter.
>
>  In the years between prison and the Ecumenical Institute, 1964 to 1969,
> Mickey alternately drove a milk truck and commuted to Tahlequah, Oklahoma to
> Northeastern State College, receiving a degree in mathematics.  By this
> time, my mom and I had moved to Texas, so the details of this period are a
> little speculative.  Mickey wasn’t a good long distance driver, tending to
> talk to the passenger while not looking at the road, or falling asleep. (I
> drove with him enough as a passenger to know.) One time he totaled out his
> car, broke his arm and walked about ten miles to get help.  Possibly through
> the local Methodist church, he attended a weekend course called Religious
> Studies I (RSI), conducted by the Ecumenical Institute.  He became an intern
> in the Oklahoma City House and Office of the Ecumenical Institute.  Later,
> after February, 1970 when Big Mick died at age 55, Mickey got me interested
> in the Religious Studies courses.  I joined the community in March of 1971.
>
> Mickey was transferred to the Chicago Office.  After some lecture or study
> on Søren Kierkegaard about claiming your own self through how you address
> yourself, Mickey dropped his long-time nickname and used his given name
> Hubert.  I think it symbolized putting the past behind and becoming a new
> person.  Hubert felt acceptance and excitement within a very dynamic
> community.  He was finally having the time of his life.
>
> The Ecumenical Institute staff self-funded most of its administrative
> costs.  This largely consisted of some staff members getting paying jobs
> with other organizations and contributing their salaries to the operating
> costs of the entire group.  This was one of the first plans for what Hubert
> could do.  For months he looked for work.  Lyn Mathews , the wife of the
> dean of the Institute, took an interest in Hubert and became his guardian
> and mentor.  Several times she had to go get him because he had landed in
> some kind of fix.  If he told the potential employer that he was an ex-con,
> they wouldn’t hire him.  If he didn’t tell them and later they found out
> through having to bond him, he was then fired. This happened in the case of
> a phone sales job in downtown Chicago.  The building where he worked was
> several stories high and had large plate glass windows.  His office was up
> several floors.  The offices were arranged where two desks faced each other
> to motivate the sales staff.  Each desk had a rolling desk chair for the
> employee.  Each had a different land line that could only be answered by
> actually physically answering the phone.  One day the employee who worked
> across from him was away from the desk and his phone rang.  Hubert leapt to
> his feet and flung himself across the two desks to get to the phone.
> Meanwhile, his desk chair rolled backwards, shattering the plate glass
> window and falling onto the street below (fortunately not hitting anyone).
>   The company tried to bond him, found out he was an ex-con, and fired him.
> Later, Hubert was assigned an in-house job at the Institute, taking care of
> the “mechanicals” at the west side facility.  I never felt that he was a
> mechanical person.  I’m certain he had many adventures there.
>
> Around this time, the Ecumenical Institute(EI) established a sister
> organization called the Institute of Cultural Affairs(ICA) to be able to
> offer training around the world without having a Christian religious slant
> that could block interactions in Hindu, Moslem or Buddhist countries.
> Hubert was fortunate enough to be transferred to Africa to begin working in
> one of the experimental outreach programs of the Institute of Cultural
> Affairs called a Human Development Program.  These programs were based on
> the community outreach program in Chicago in the African-American
> neighborhood where the Ecumenical Institute was located, called Fifth City.
> Basically, the idea was that life, in general and in particular, gives
> people and communities all the resources they need to live a fully human
> life and that engaging in the efforts to be fully human together causes a
> greater awareness of the goodness of life and of people.  Hubert was ideally
> suited to this sort of demonstration because, once he knew what the decision
> of a group was, he committed.  It was similar to a Star Trek episode, where
> the captain would say (after the course was laid in), “Engage”.  Hubert was
> the ultimate engager, able to overcome any fears, and to work directly with
> people and have fun doing it.  He worked in Nigeria, Kenya and Zambia for
> the next ten years.  I only know a few stories from his work there, but know
> there would be hundreds if not thousands of stories from staff members and
> community members that knew him.  Hubert was analytical.  Here two stories
> from Nigeria reflecting his extreme sense of wonder and irony.  (I’ll try to
> tell these as Hubert would.)
>
>    1. Traffic in Nigeria was in its formative stages.  Cars and highways
>    were just coming into being.  People didn’t really know how to drive.  The
>    rules of the road were not reflected in general knowledge.  This led to
>    massive problems.  Cars darted in and out.  There were many accidents.
>    Chaos reigned.  Finally, the government of Nigeria posted men along the
>    highway who would beat any person who committed a traffic infraction.
>    Traffic flow improved right away.
>
>
>
>    1. I was working and living in Ijede, a Moslem village in Nigeria,
>    training local women to be community health workers. I was extremely happy
>    and proud of the work that I had done. A few nights after the training, a
>    gang of men raided the village.  There was a lot of screaming by women.  I
>    ran out of my hut to see women being dragged away, some carried over the
>    shoulders of men, crying out to me.  Some of the older men prevented me from
>    interfering.  The next day I found out that all the young women I had
>    trained to be community health workers had been taken.    The chief of the
>    village approached me.  “Finally we’re seeing some concrete results from
>    this Human Development Project.  Because of your community health training,
>    we got much higher bride prices for our women.”
>
> These types of experiences might have led others of a weaker constitution
> to abandon their work, but in fact it just gave Hubert a greater perspective
> on good intentions and unforeseen consequences, greater perspective on the
> how the values of different cultures may be totally different from your own
> values.  In fact, Hubert continued to work in the village and was eventually
> made an honorary chief before he left.  He once showed me the beautiful
> robes and head dress of a chief that they had presented to him.   They were
> of white muslin with a delicate dark brown batik pattern of lines across
> it.  His first village assignment and he became chief.  Not something that
> happened to everyone.
>
> In this time period in Africa, sometimes I think he felt very alone.  He
> had done a lot of child care for staff members in the times when he wasn’t
> working at a job in Chicago.  He thought that he could be a good father and
> that despite his past he should have a wife and family.  He set out to get
> married.  Fortunately, he found a woman who accepted and loved him and who
> already had a child, Kay Schnizlein and her daughter Dara.  What a joy and
> lucky coincidence this was for him!  Later he adopted Dara and she became
> Dara Fulkerson.  Dara was a very loving and joyful child and very smart.
> Hubert would encourage and help her in mathematics and science throughout
> her school years.  I think he felt like the luckiest man in the world.
>
> He worked in many villages in Kenya and Zambia.  He went for a brief trip
> to India to help explain and expand the ability to work with more than one
> village at a time.  After ten years in working with indigenous people in
> Africa, he returned home to his one early ambition and love, mathematics.
>
> The estate of Hubert’s father, Mick, had given Hubert a few thousand
> dollars.  On his and his family’s return to the United States to Oklahoma
> City, he again had to think of a way to be employed.  Being a computer
> programmer seemed a good choice at the time.  He attempted to enroll in
> Central Oklahoma State University, but was blocked by his felony conviction
> for some reason.  He needed people to vouch for him.  I think several
> people, including Tim Karpoff and Evelyn Philbrook, wrote letters of
> reference for him at that time.  After completing his degree in Computer
> Science, Hubert, Kay and Dara moved to Phoenix to work with the Phoenix
> branch of the Institute of Cultural Affairs. Hubert got a job with a major
> technology employer in Phoenix.  He was now in his fifties, competing in an
> industry with young people.  When the computer industry decided to outsource
> jobs to India, massive layoffs hit him first because of his age and lack of
> seniority.  He went through at least two companies; and then the entire
> local industry declined and his age began to be a real barrier.
>
> One of the great stories from this time of work concerned a contract to
> design the landing program of one of the largest new planes ever produced by
> a major US airplane manufacturer.  He worked on the team that designed this
> program.  To the computer company’s credit, the program design team worked
> in a collaborative and communicative way.  When the due date for the
> program’s completion approached, the company had apparently fulfilled its
> contractual specifications and was ready to hand the program over to the
> aircraft company.  Hubert vociferously objected to this because tests of the
> program indicated that planes utilizing the program would land 200 feet
> underground!  He also had thought of ways to fix the program.  With his
> help, the deadline was extended and the team was able to correct the
> problems still associated with the program.  A few years later, this same
> program landed a plane safely in Paris with several hundred passengers on
> board with both pilots in the cockpit passed out because of a chemical leak
> in the cockpit.
>
> One memory I have is of Hubert sitting at his tiny little desk in his
> apartment, with two large posters of Einstein on the wall, reading about and
> working through fractals.  He had a mathematical and analytic brain mixed
> with a big sense of humor.  One habit, which tended to drive people wild,
> was his reading through every part of the morning paper.  Where others might
> not see the humor, he would comment and show the absurdity of the news
> reporting.  He had lots that amazed and disturbed him in Arizona politics.
> He was disbelieving, for example, that John McCain could continue to be
> elected after being part of the Keating Five who had concocted the Savings
> and Loan Disaster of the 1980’s, where many Arizonans had lost their life
> savings.  I think that the selling of the State House to private investors
> and then renting it back to the state alarmed him. I think his review of the
> news and trying to engage others in reading it was a way of saying, “Wake
> up! This stuff is not just funny—start reading it!”
>
> With Hubert’s inability to find another computer job, he became a
> substitute math teacher in the Phoenix public schools.  Not directly
> associated with the Institute of Cultural Affairs by this time, which had
> changed its staffing model, Hubert and Kay had to rely on their own
> activities for income.  Unfortunately, this caused conflict as Hubert became
> less able to contribute to household income.  Eventually, Kay and Hubert
> divorced, although Kay remained his loyal friend and protector for the rest
> of his life.  Meanwhile, Dara was continuing her school career with flute
> playing, volleyball, school activities, and good grades.  To date, she has
> earned a degree in civil engineering, a masters of business administration,
> and her professional engineering certificate.
>
> Dara’s graduation ceremonies, and even her wedding to Marcus Griffith, were
> attended by Hubert in a wheelchair after he suffered a serious stroke in
> 2006.  He lived in a nursing home for the rest of his life.  The stroke
> affected his right arm and leg, and his speech and memory.  Once I said to
> him, “You were a good mathematician and computer programmer.”  He looked
> over in wonder and with a little puzzlement and said, “Who, me?”   The
> little speech that he retained gradually declined until there was very
> little by the end.  He communicated by frowns, cries, smiles and tears. The
> man who loved to talk and comment on the news now mainly communicated
> through emotion.  Once, in a period before his speech really lessened, Tim
> and I found that, though he could speak very little, he could sing “Amazing
> Grace” through several verses.  We were always sorry that we could not
> afford to provide him with on-going funds for physical and speech therapy
> after the short period of time that was funded by Medicaid.   Meanwhile,
> Kay, even though divorced from Hubert, cared for him through visits,
> organizing transportation to holiday celebrations, medical and dental
> appointments and graduations, and recruiting friends to visit to offer
> massages and “light” for Hubert.   She never gave up on him.  Dara became
> his legal guardian, visited often, cheered him up and saw to his medical
> needs.  In the final few months of Hubert’s life, he was able to see his new
> grandchild Marcus Mikala Griffith.  So begins a new life as his ended.
>
> So what does one say about such a life?  Did I mention that he contracted
> malaria while in Nigeria and suffered several malaria attacks throughout his
> life?  At almost every turn he was slammed against a wall (sometimes
> literally), and yet he laughed, shrugged his shoulders, loved and served the
> people around him, and went on.  I have this vision of everyone’s life being
> like living in a giant pen with a rampaging bull.  In some people’s life the
> bull is off merrily munching on grass in a faraway field and only
> occasionally brushes their shoulder, perhaps while they sleep.  Finally, at
> the very end, the bull comes over, gently knocks them on their butt and they
> die.  Everyone says what a nice bull that guy had.  But Hubert’s bull was a
> more attentive bull.  “You think you’re going to go to good college and
> become a great mathematician?  I’m going to knock you down.” Bam!!!  “You
> think you’re going to get out of prison unscathed.”  Bam! “You think you can
> keep a job…a wife…your speech…your sense of wonder and humor?”  And yet he
> did retain that wonder and humor.  I picture the bull, exhausted, in awe,
> finally bowing in homage and love to a worthy opponent.
>
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