This was our third summer as volunteers at Elm Brook Park on the US Army Corps of Engineers Hopkinton-Everett flood control project. It is our third year and we enjoyed the work. Last year Lynn and I gave up trying to support ourselves and applied for Social Security Supplemental Income and breezed through the process being found that we are indeed 100% disabled and entitled to the maximum benefit. We choose to live in a motorhome. We’re 59 years old and gay and married. We sort of owned our own home for over 20 years but finally lost our home due to medical bills and other help you can find elsewhere in my blog. So life was coming back together. We were learning to live within our diminished physical capacities, we had food on our table and a roof over our heads. Lynn had found us this job working as volunteer park hosts because the position included a place to park our motor home with water and electricity. So for four months out of the year we could live without worry. We really appreciated so we worked as hard as we could, which amounted to being as cheerful as possible while manning the entrance gate, and collecting the user fee from park guests. Homeless people are like this. We appreciate home, wherever it is.
All of this came to a sudden unexpected halt on Monday the 4th of August 2014. The weather wasn’t exactly ideal for a day at the park, plus it was Monday so I had little to do in the guard booth. I was prepared to fill the time however because our trusty Onan generator, our sole source of electricity when we are “on the road” was no longer so trustworthy and I was preparing to check all of its adjustments and hopefully find the fault that was preventing our 4KW Onan Emerald Plus to start and run. I had spent the morning studying the service manual and then digging a wish list of part numbers for stuff that was needed and stuff that was just-in-case from the parts manual so I had a page full of notes and part numbers and my mind, or what’s left of it was securely wrapped around the theory of operation of the Onan’s control circuitry.
At 2:30 PM my day came crashing down around my head and shoulders. Karen Hoey, accompanied by Jennifer Samela and Brad Clark representing the US Army Corp of Engineers stopped at the booth in an park ranger truck and asked if they could have a meeting with me and Lynn in 10 minutes or so. Yes it was o-kay to put the sign up in the booth and lock the door, so I did and walked back to our home and told Lynn what was up. We were concerned but we’d been doing the job the same way we had last year and the year before that so we didn’t feel any real worry. What came next was completely unexpected.
We were told that our volunteer service was hereby terminated and we had 24 hours to be off the property. Not even a hi how are you today? Why? We really don’t know. What we do know is what we were told.
Jennifer and Brad sat as silent witnesses to our termination. Karen Spoke. Karen told us that on Friday, Saturday and Sunday our days off an alarming number of complaints had been collected. We asked to see the complaints and Karen told us that wasn’t possible. We asked who had collected the complaints. We asked who had complained since we pretty much deal with the same people over and over again. We were told that we had made inappropriate comments about staff members. But couldn’t be told what the comments were. We were told that we had made an alarming number of inappropriate comments to visitors. Again we asked what was the nature of the comments and Karen told us that she couldn’t tell us but that because we had harmed the image of the Corps of Engineers our volunteer status was terminated immediately and we must be off the property within 24 hours.
Now this was our third summer at Elm Brook and we weren’t doing anything different from previous years. Marjorie and Dave Drake were new hosts this summer. Last summer it was Cynthia and Tom Innskeep and when we first started it was the Darby’s. We never had problems with the other park hosts until this summer.
So one thing that’s different is Marjorie and Dave Drake.
It’s now 8AUG2014 and we’re still too rattled to think straight. We thought that in this post-Don’t Ask, don’t Tell era we had a safe place to work, free from mindless bigotry. We were wrong.
Karen Hoey told us that our behavior had hurt the image of the Corps. I think Karen fired the wrong people.
