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

[Ann Shafer]

Marion, Thank you so much for the story. I think Martha should write a book.
What a courageous life! As well as we thought we knew Hubert, how little we
knew. Ann Shafer

 

From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf
Of Marian Karpoff
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 4:42 PM
To: OrderEcumenical
Cc: Kayfulkerson at getnet.com; Tim Karpoff; Martha Karpoff
Subject: [Oe List ...] A Tribute to Hubert Fulkerson

 

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.         

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20110117/e11595ea/attachment-0001.html>