A few of you who have read more than three of the over 100 offerings contained on this website, all of which are enlightening and some are entertaining, know that the objective of UPLC is to help end urban poverty one person at a time. I pulled back on my modest philanthropic work last year after the homeless chap I gave the $20 to was found dead in a park in Jackson, Tn. Seems he scored two dime bags of meth and shot both into his blood stream and the Madison County Coroner said his 55 yr old ticker exploded like JFK's head with that third shot from the grassy knoll. Horrible!
I wasn't even able to raise the $1500 C Batsell Bateman's Funeral Parlor and Flea Market over on Hwy 45 towards Medina required for a decent cremation. The poor fellow was cremated with the euthanized animals at the Madison County Inhumane Society. I was in a funk for over a year because of it and was not able to do my best on this site, but the curtain, no fog of despair is lifting and I am thinking I must get back on this horse and ride again.
A 51 yr old black man, I will call him "Barry" as that is the name his grandmother gave him when he was very young, approached me and asked for a job. He is illiterate and neither reads nor writes. He graduated from one of our famous southern high schools with honors where reading is an elective not a requirement for a diplomat. He told me of his hardships beginning with his infancy, when his stepfather was so cruel his grandmother took him in to raise him as she felt sure the stepfather would have killed Barry if she did not intervene.
He lived out in the country near a big time farmer, we will refer to as Dick, but Richard was his Christian name. He was a large white man who took a liking to Barry, everybody does who meets him, and gave him his first job at age 10. Barry-say
when he was in school during planting and harvest season, Dick would get him after school and he would drive a big John Deere tractor and break ground from 3p until 11p go home bathe, sleep for a few hours and back out on the tractor for another 4 hrs before school started. He did this for Dick until he was in his early 20's when he got a job operating heavy equipment, trackhoes, backhoes, dozers for a construction company. He bought an over the road truck when he was in his 30's and drove it until the energy prices, read cost of diesel, made driving a truck unprofitable.
Barry married his sweetheart from high school, "Liv" and they had two daughters. She works for the county where they live and they barely get by. Barry had a phone with the bottom of the barrel plan from Verizon, and they kept upping the cost to him saying he was texting and getting on the Internet and he finally quit Verizon, because as Liv said to me "Barry don't know how to read or write, how is a black man with this problem gonna text!"
The world is full of cheats! Shame on you Verizon Wireless!
Anyway, I need to raise some money so we can put some money down to buy Barry a dozer which he can use to eek out a living here in West Tennessee. He can use my father's old international dump truck with the flatbed trailer to haul it around and I can come up with some of mother's SSI check money to buy him some fuel, and we will place an add on Craigslist and hope for the best.
If you read this and are or consider yourself one of the "winners of life's lottery'
please consider sending a check to the "Help Barry, the poor black man, fund" c/o The Urban Poverty Law Center, Cedar Grove, TN.
If we raise enough money to get that dozer and anything happens to Barry because of it, I swear I will never try to help another person in need. That would be two and I do not think I could go through all that pain again.
Your donations are tax deductible as long as the IRS doesn't call you on it.
God has truly blessed me by sending Barry into my circle. I consider him my friend and I am enriched by his presence.
He told me one day "I wants to works for you, Dr. Mayboat." That is how he says my name. And he is very funny.
I am Jackson Delano Maybolt, President, Urban Poverty Law Center
"Loan a man a dozer and feed him for a day, give him a dozer and feed him for a lifetime." Mother Mayboat
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