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One of Lindsey's notions was to concentrate on what he called oasis areas. Another was to spend about half his time working with repair crews in the streets of such areas, even in private yards. "I wanted the people in the projects to see the man in charge," he says. "When people asked what I was doing, I'd say, 'The first time, I'm cleaning it up for you. The second time, I'll be cleaning it up for the new tenant.' " Lindsey had remarkable authority not only to evict tenants while he renovated buildings in oasis areas but also to permit only "good people" to move in. "A good person to us was someone who made some contribution to where he was living, someone who would respect the rights of his neighbors," says Lindsey. "The bad people are the people who don't do those things."
It worked, both because Lindsey had won a lot of neighborhood support and because he used a variety of methods to make each oasis grow. He started a tutoring program, for example, that now teaches 150 youngsters reading and arithmetic, plus a variety of "coping skills." He started a plant nursery in what was once a junkyard, where tenants can pick out trees for their yards. With the help of Ronald Range, a black detective from Boston, he organized "X-ray units," small tactical police squads that worked closely with community leaders to protect each oasis.
Having doubled the amount of housing for the poor and reduced crime rates to the same levels as those of rich white districts, Lindsey now presides more or less benignly over some 2,000 housing units. Washington is putting up $200,000 to try his oasis system in another city, possibly Houston. But to Lindsey, who now has a $52,000 salary and no beard or ponytail, the big danger is that Government still tends to favor what he calls a failure model, imposing expensive programs on the poor and then blaming them for the predictable problems. "Public housing must be a privilege," Lindsey sums up. "You don't get in just because you're poor. You get in because you're poor and willing to accept responsibility."
Kathy Kolbe
"If it's good, people will pay"
The problem: how to educate gifted children when their own teachers seemed interested mainly in ordinary children.
Says Kathy Kolbe, whose children, Karen, 8, and David, 6, were feeling bored in grade school in Scottsdale, Ariz.: "It was just obvious to me that they were being dragged down because they were being made to feel it was almost an impertinence to know the answer to every question, or to read a book that was above their grade level, or to draw a picture that went out of the lines and into their own imaginations."
Kolbe, 45, had a special reason for feeling angry. She was born dyslexic, and even today she has difficulty in telling left from right, or in reading the time on a clock. "Almost every day of my life," she says, "I will do something that puts me at right angles to the world." She insists this is not a handicap but a help. "My disability is one of the greatest advantages I have," she says. "It helped me become a student of the thinking process before I was even in kindergarten. It now helps me understand the way other people think."