A simple wooden cross hangs around the neck of Jim Anderson, a tall and lanky Pete Seeger lookalike who is now 88. “I hope the Mexicans will win the Mexican American war on poverty,” he announces as we begin. It takes me a few minutes to catch on: his sense of humor is another aspect of his modesty. As we get into our conversation, I see that not only does Jim hope, but he has a lifetime of actively helping people improve their chances of getting a job.
He had a privileged childhood but, like many sensitive children, he felt the sting of inequality and segregation.
When his family moved to the Philippines in 1934 for his father’s work in international trade, 7-year-old Jim was sent to an exclusive school. For recreation, he went to an all-white American polo club where local people were excluded from membership, but hired to be servants.
“At Catholic Mass, I listened carefully to Gospel stories, the only part of the adult services then in English,” he says. “I didn’t think Jesus would approve of the ways brown people were treated.”
In the spring of 1941, the family moved back to the States, and by the end of that year, the U.S. was at war. Eager to help “stop Hitler,” Jim enlisted in the Army at 17.
While still in basic training, Jim joined the Young Christian Workers, a Roman Catholic movement. But before he could be sent abroad, Japan surrendered, and Jim was assigned to be an instructor at Fort Lewis to train service members in military regulations.
After discharge, he went to Stanford University on the GI Bill, earning a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering in 1950. A job with Crown Zellerbach brought him to Portland. Ten years later and living in Tigard, Jim was hired on with Tektronix.
In Washington County, he was appointed to the Community Action Board for the War on Poverty, working with unemployed farmworkers.
“The Democratic Party chose me because they knew it was an interest of mine,” Jim tells me, then quotes Paulo Freire: “Whatever the poor want, figure out a way to do it.” One of his tasks was to audit Title I in the school system, and he made a disappointing discovery.
“Instead of helping the kids who were behind, the money went into the general fund and helped the kids who were already ahead.”
The Community Action Board also served as an umbrella for the Valley Migrant League.
“Here’s where the Mexican American War comes in,” Jim says, now serious.
“There was a woman named, Ruby Ely, head of the Hillsboro office, who organized a feisty Latino club, called Viva, with help from American Friends, the Communist Party and me. Viva members wanted to increase the representation of farmworkers on the board from one-third to two-thirds. With a lot of politicking, we got the board to fire all the 40 professional employees and hire migrant farmworkers in their place. They went on to build cultural centers throughout the area, centers that still exist today in Jefferson, Dayton, Woodburn, Hillsboro and Independence. We helped get the Virginia Garcia health clinics started. We hired a master carpenter to help 14 families build their own homes. Thirty-nine churches sponsored families who settled here. And we stopped the expulsion of students who were speaking Spanish in school.”
Forty years ago, he moved to the Albina district, where he has been active with social justice programs through St. Andrew Catholic parish . He bought an old house that had been abandoned after a fire and fixed it up.
“This is where I live and offer apostolic hospitality,” he explains. The original idea was that up to five men could be in residence when they needed a stable address in order to get a job.
A primary concern of Jim’s has been to help people find work. He participated in a Jefferson High School jobs program in which Jefferson provided the names and phone numbers of all the graduates who didn’t plan to go to college. Committee members contacted the students and told them how other students had found jobs, gave them job leads and helped with resumes.
“The first year 100 percent of the kids who were looking for jobs got hired within three months of graduation.”
When a new privacy policy went into effect, Jefferson stopped giving out students’ telephone numbers and the project closed.
Around 1980, Jim began tutoring kids in math after school. In 1992 when the SMART (Start Making a Reader Today) program began, Jim volunteered to tutor second- and third-graders in reading. Disappointed that some kids were still failing, he now helps tutor kids from King Elementary School on Saturdays at St. Andrew’s classroom. This program has been more successful, bringing about 80 percent of failing kids up to their grade level.
At King School, he continues to volunteer in social studies classes, where he teaches about the wisdom of Imhotep, the Egyptian father of mathematics and medicine and builder of the first pyramid. He gives the students a biography he wrote about Imhotep, introducing Africa as an important source of civilization.
His concern for his neighbors has also led him to advocate for people in danger of losing their homes. About 20 years ago, as Alberta was gentrifying, he became aware that developers were driving through the neighborhood, scouting out locations on which they might build, then reporting the existing home to the city as a property that should be checked for potential code violations. These were often old homes owned by elderly people who didn’t have the means to make repairs. Jim did what he could, mediating, advocating, lobbying and protesting to try to keep people in their homes.
Then one day, to his surprise, it happened to him: A city inspector came to the door, and by the time he left, Jim had a long list of expensive repairs that would have to be made if he wanted to keep his house. He did what he could, patching this, replacing that, until he ran out of money and time.
Rather than wait for the other shoe to drop, he called the city and told them to come out and have a look.
A young African-American inspector arrived on his front porch — not the same inspector who had come before — and Jim showed him the list. The inspector took his own tour of the house, then reported to Jim: “It passes.” Jim was both surprised and relieved.
As the inspector started to leave, he turned to Jim and held out his hand.
“You don’t remember me, do you, Mr. Anderson?” he said.
“Well, your face is familiar,” Jim said, hesitantly.
“You tutored me about five years ago in the algebra class I needed to get this job.”
As he turned to leave, he mused to Jim: “A lot of the inspectors just don’t understand this neighborhood.”
Jim insists that his spiritual life has given him the time and energy to help the students, the homeowners and the unemployed.
“I feel a calling,” he says. “At Stanford, I saw that unemployment was the main engine used to suppress the nonwhite members of the community and that the secondary engine was designing education best suited for the middle class. That’s why I’ve worked in those two areas.”
For Jim Anderson, there’s not much difference between activism and ministry.
“Pope Francis says that youth unemployment is the greatest evil in the world,” he says. “His words have pushed me back to my first vocation.”
The NOTHING MORE HOPEFUL series originates from a workshop taught by Martha Gies. “Last fall, as I tired of hearing the ISIL Hour, interrupted only occasionally by a warning about Ebola’s imminent arrival in Europe or the U.S., it occurred to me that the media was deaf to good news,” Gies says. “I remembered my friend Sr. Rosarii Metzgar once telling me she believed all the terrible news with which we are daily battered must surely be offset by small and unseen acts of good.” Gies resolved to enlist some writers who would hunt down and write those stories.
