The other guy also who was sentenced in the case was a guy, and I can't remember his name, but I'll call him Larry. I always had this thing of probation that if you're on probation you ought to be doing something to get your life together on probation, don't just go pee in a little bottle once a week, and then go on about sleeping all day long and watching TV. So, I'd construct these conditions of probation that would almost always have the guy working on a GED [General Educational Development] if he didn't have it already, looking for employment, most of the time employs a curfew and it would be those kinds of things. Sometimes I remember that there was one guy, his first name was Paul [ph.], I can't remember his last name. I gave him homework. He had, he was still in school and I'd give him homework assignments. I'd make him do a paper and bring it in to me every two weeks and I would look at the paper, and then I'd stop doing that 'cause I realized I can't be sure this cat wrote the paper, and then I thought well, if he doesn't bring me the paper, what am I gonna do, am I gonna put him in prison because he doesn't do a homework assignment basically? So, fortunately he always did the paper but I began thinking about it and I thought, well, it makes sense to do this, but it's just too risky because the penalties for his failure are just out of sight. If I'm not going to put him in prison then what's the sense of having him do this, and I'm not giving him a grade, so I just, I thought that, I hadn't thought it through well enough. I thought the probation officer maybe could do that kind of thing because the probation officer had more flexibility than I did. But I stopped doing that. There was this one guy, I knew I had given him a curfew. I had him work on his GED and look for a job, and he had to keep a diary so that when he came into court periodically and I had him report to me, I think once a month he came into court and in addition reported to a probation officer. I'd ask him how he was doing and I'd look at his diary and I looked at the diary and I tried to see what he was doing and he was trying to find a job and I'd ask him to put phone numbers of the people that he was contacting for a job, and once or twice I actually called these people to try to find to try to check to see if he was looking for a job, but with this one guy I imposed that sentence with a GED, find employment within a certain period of time, keep a diary while looking for a job, and there was no other condition in there. He looked at me and he said, "Judge, I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to get me to fix my life 'cause it's broken." He said, "If I could do all the stuff you're expecting me to do, if I was organized enough to do that, I wouldn't be here right now. I would never have gotten in trouble to begin with." I thought about that for a second and I said, "Damn. You're right. You are absolutely right." I said, "Look. Just work on the GED, all right? That, you gotta do that, and do that much. But forget about the looking for the part time job, forget about it--," and he totally changed my philosophy of sentencing. After that, I never, ever put those kinds of conditions on a probationer. I'd always impose GED if they had a GED, or high school thing. I'd impose some kind of employment search, but that was it because I realized the cat's right. You know, if he was structured enough to do all that, plus he was giving up urine because he had a history of an addiction, and if he could do all that, he wouldn't be in the criminal justice system. For him, it was a big enough challenge just not getting high. But I do want him to work on the GED and I couldn't tell him, look, if you just keep giving clean urine you'll be okay, 'cause I wanted him to go beyond that because he could lay in bed all day and give up clean urine. That wasn't going to help him get himself back together.$Race was, I think, a factor in the town [Scottsville, New York]. In fact, I had situations where I went to a barbershop when I was, I think I was a junior in high school [Wheatland-Chili High School, Scottsville, New York] and, no, I was a freshman because I remember I was on the JV [junior varsity] basketball team, and the barber wouldn't cut my hair. I did not want to go to him because I heard he wouldn't cut black folk's hair. I told my dad [Clarence V. McKee] that, and dad said, "Well, how do you know he's not going to cut your hair?" And I said, "Well, I don't think he'll cut my hair." We would always go to Buffalo [New York], which was about an hour-and-a-half bus ride for me to get haircuts. Later on, we'd go to Rochester [New York], which was a lot closer, but we had friends from the railroad in Buffalo and we'd go there, visit them, and I'd go get a haircut. So, dad said we'll go there and see if he'll cut your hair. I went in and when I walked in the barbershop, he looked at me and asked me if I had an appointment. I said, "No, I don't have an appointment." There were about four or five other people in the barbershop at the time, so I asked each one of them, "Do you have an appointment?" And they all said, "No." So, I said "Okay" and I went back home, told my dad. I don't know what happened. Dad didn't drive a car until I was older, but dad got on his bicycle, went up to the barbershop, (laughter) and he was really somebody you didn't mess with. He did not take a lot of stuff. But, dad called me from the barbershop and he said, "You come up here. He's gonna cut your hair." And I remember, it was getting close to the time I had to be at the school for a basketball game, and dad was very, very much into sports. In fact, what he said to me when I was leaving for college, his parting advice was, "Make the football team," because he knew I wanted to play football and I never played football in high school. So, I was concerned I was gonna be late to the game. If I was late getting to the game, I was going to get benched. So, I said, "Well Dad, I'm not sure I have time now to get the haircut, because I'm gonna not get to the basketball game on time." And Dad said, "Fuck the basketball game. You get up here. He's gonna cut your hair." I'll never forget that, 'cause Dad, he cursed a lot but he never used the F-word, and for him to use the F-word, number one, and tell me that getting this haircut was more important than playing in the game that night, it shocked me. So, I got up there as fast as I possibly could. I came in and there was incredible tension, but he did cut my hair and then he gave me this lecture about how he didn't think that a lot of people would like to go where they weren't welcome--where they weren't wanted--and I'm just gonna try to keep my mouth shut while I cut my hair.$$That's what the barber--$$The barber said that, yeah. Daddy wasn't there, though; he wouldn't have said anything. Daddy had gone back home. And he did an okay job. He didn't do a Mohican [Mohawk] or anything on me, which I was afraid of. I got home and Dad said, "Well, let me see what he did to your hair." And he was okay with that, and I did get to the game on time. I remember I got home and maybe ten minutes later, the folks that I was riding up to the high school with came by and I got a ride uptown. That's a very vivid memory. As I said, that's not that early. That's probably--$$Yeah. You could imagine. Did your father ever talk about what happened when--$$He never told me, no (laughter).$$He was apparently highly agitated.$$Oh, yeah. He was upset. Dad was very upset. He was somebody who had to go through so much stuff growing up, and he never wanted us to have to go through that, and he was very upset. For him to get on the bicycle and ride up to there, and he was not a young man when this happened, and then telling me basically, "If you get benched tonight, or you miss the game and get thrown off the team, that's all right and you're gonna get your hair cut." That was something I could not have imagined Dad ever saying to me, given how important he viewed sports.$$Yeah, he would have had to have been, if you were in high school, he would have been in his sixties; early sixties.$$Yeah, probably close to that.$$Yeah. Born in 1904.$$Yeah, late fifties.$$He would have been--$$Because I graduated in '65 [1965], so probably early sixties.$$Yeah, yeah.
