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the witht E of San Francisco is many things to many people to the wealthy, sophisticated urbanite. It's Victorian elegance, good theater, fine restaurants to the middle class suburbanite. The city is a place to work to shop, a convenient and stimulating source of culture and recreation, but

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a place from which to escape each night. Yet there are thousands to whom the city is neither exciting nor rewarding. They are the slum dwellers trapped by poverty, ignorance and bigotry in crowded, crumbling ghettos. To them, the city is a cruel and dangerous maze with few

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exits. Fell Street in the Western edition is the home of Louis digs in itinerant, mostly unemployed handyman on the remaining two of his five Children. During the next 25 minutes Assignment four will look at life in San Francisco's Western edition as it's lived by a family

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on Fell Street. This'll is assignment for the award winning report to the West, produced in the community interest by the documentary Department of Heroin TV Tonight Ah, family on Fell Street, an inside view of life in the slums. Louis digs was born 52 years ago in

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an obscure Texas Hamlet near Houston. He and his family, including a wife and five small Children, immigrated to San Francisco 10 years ago in search of a better life. I got to San Francisco on a Wednesday morning. My family had already been here for a while

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and I was to come on later, and when I got to San Francisco, I was really disappointed because I thought I would see something Dick and I don't know what I expect to see myself and I was disappointed in. I wanted to go back right then.

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My wife, she wanted Thio come and her relatives was here and she, doctor Children would have more opportunity in school. That's mostly what we were interested in. Children toe fire. And so that's why we really came. The Children are mostly grown up now. One daughter is

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married, a son is in the army. Another son lives away from home. Last October, Lewis digs wife Maureen, passed away after a succession of heart attacks on Lee, a 14 year old daughter. Cherry and a 16 year old son, Joe, remain in the flat on Fell

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Street. I don't think we it has been a problem bringing up two kids It's just haven't been very pleasant of the struggle we had. We haven't had the chance to go say out on a lot of picnics and outings to go hunting and to go fish,

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And that's what not true. And I always wanted to dio. We haven't had the money to do that. And I think this have made things a little more, uh, now toe where the family is a dull family, I would say life has been dull. For that

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reason. Louis digs eldest son Larry is 20 years old and hardly the typical product of the slums. He's had some college into Europe, writes music and earns a meager living as a youth counselor for a local anti poverty agency. Although Larry does not live at home,

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he is nearby and help support the family. Okay, his justus, much now obedient because he was when he was 12 years old. I confessed Larry, do this or do that, Whatever I tell him, E mean he does it. Joe, Hey, had started this kind of a

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wanting to be in the streets. It always a child would like to go, and as he get older, he thinks that he's becoming a man, and he doesn't have toe asked things as much as they used to have to ask her, Of course, lower since his

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mother has been going to cause he's been lonesome for her and he is really trying to find something that he probably can't find. Sharia is a hard child I'm thinking about. I'm gonna have to send her to psychiatrist. She's hard to understand because she won't talk

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in anything that you ask her. She don't know. Larry frequently drops by the Fell Street apartment to check on his father's health, which has not been good, and to see that his brother and sister get off to school. Although they're very different in their attitudes, Larry

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has a deep understanding of an affection for his father. I could talk to my father or he was there, and he presented an image for me. He's never Some families have had the misfortune of having their fathers go to jail. I've even known people to go

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to jail for, ah, stealing like four or five loaves of bread because you know, you gotta have some food, but at the same time, like my father could understand cars. He didn't understand human beings that well. He wasn't able to cope with him. Cherry Digs is

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an eighth grader at Zion Lutheran Parochial School in the Richmond district. It's a long way from home, and the tuition is, Ah, hardship. But Kerry is a poor student. Her parents hoped she would do better here than in public school. Zion Lutheran is predominantly white and

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middle class. Having grown up in a ghetto, Sharif feels handicapped and defensive at the school. I want to now where everybody is the same. You know, I don't think there's any registered, want anybody. So for a few kids, they act that way. Sometimes in the class

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of that man, there's four Negro girls. Most local kids, they don't actually like Caucasian kids. They say they're different and they try to be more popular. And they because they don't do to think some of the things that they do well, like if they don't listen

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to same radio station, you listen to them. They say they're different, they're square and everything, and they will not take Told to go. Racial discrimination is an insidious evil. It need not be overt to be destructive the U. S. Supreme Court recognized this when it ruled

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that separate but equal schools could never be truly equal, so long as they remain separate. But even in a presumably integrated system, discrimination can be brutally effective. Larry Digs learned this early in life at the integrated Andrew Jackson Elementary School. Let's say, for instance, I went

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down to talk with ah, white girl for some reason. Usually you just didn't do it because after a while you got the picture. Then the teacher would find some reason that you should be playing. Of course it was okay if you were talking to a Negro

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girl, I didn't care whether you play or not. Yeah, yeah, okay. In class, Um, there was always the differentiation between line drawn between the Negroes and White. Because, of course, everybody knows that all white kids is smart, right? And, uh, then all the white kids would

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set up right in front of the teacher, just wasa sort of bombarded into my subconscious that in order to get a way to get ahead, one had to be white for every time that I would have a dream or think of myself, you know, something good

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happening that I would always be white, you know, like I would dream of myself when I was a white boy. In other words, the image of success was white. Perfect Champlain. Well, Larry's younger brother, Joe, is 1/10 grader at George Washington High School, Larry's old alma

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mater. But Joe is not doing well. His attitude toward education Vassil eights between hostility and indifference, increasing his sense of isolation and failure. He talked with Caroline TV. I'm just not putting myself to it. I mean, I'm not studying. Not too much, not enough. But I

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didn't realize this. So I mean, you know, I don't know why I don't study in the way. The hardest part is is going home. Home is where Louis Dig spends most of his time for him to. It's a melancholy place, a shabby refuge from a life

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of hard times and unfulfilled dreams. Just turn the radio on, listen to the radio. That's all I have there now. I think it's been quite a change in the time since, However, Sir Teenager, a young man coming up, I wanted to be a traveler and see

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what the world was like I wanted to make a lot of money, and that's what I dreamed about. I've always liked to make money. I'm come similar. Mon baby about Children was very much devoted to my wife. And of course she was the big grandma Rod.

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She was the boss of the house, and everybody, including me, had to do what she said. She always was striving for, to do something better. We didn't have a piano. We took some of the grocery money, went out and bought a piano. The churn didn't pay

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it any attention. However, eso uh, these things pile up. First thing you know, you're a couple of $1000 that you can't pay and still you have toe go on and eat and buy clothes. So this is the things that have made to struggle a little harder

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than normally would have been because we tried to have everything that everybody else had and was poor. I've been used to that all of my life. It's poor people. I mean, it doesn't no, I owe bills knowing it didn't make me feel bad. I just feel

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like the people sympathize with me and go on all I have to do is just tell them troubled. We'll make some kind of arrangements that z e another one. Mhm. A recent study by the U. S. Department of Labor points out what

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every ghetto dweller knows instinctively, that while unprecedented numbers of Negroes are entering the middle class, life is getting harder for those still trapped in the slums. The median income of San Francisco's 20 slum families is $4200 a year, more than $2 below the national average. Half

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of these families, Air Negro and 20% exists below the $3000 per year poverty line set by the federal government. The Labor Department reported recently that unemployment in the slums of San Francisco is so much worse than it is in the country as a whole that the

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national measurements of unemployment are utterly irrelevant. An estimated one quarter of the people are unable to earn a decent living. Lewis Digs is one of the 25%. For several years now, he's not held a steady job. Part of the reason is poor health, but he's one

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of unarmed of unskilled workers in San Francisco who were either chronically unemployed or who exist from day to day doing odd jobs for menial wages. Lewis Dig says long since given up hope of anything better. That was here a few weeks and they found me a

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little janitor, a job. It really wasn't enough pay, and I knew quite a lot of things. Thio do myself on my own. And so I finally bought me a little car and I stopped working on my own. I do a lot of, um, save maintenance, mechanical

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work, and I had a lot of difficulties because a lot of things that I could do it you're supposed to have license to do. And people. Of course, there's no financially didn't have a license and they didn't wanna pay you because it was in the union.

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Oh, it was hard to get in unions to do the things that I like to do. Uh, could do best. Eso I still didn't do too much better. Frustration and failure are endemic in the slums and transmitted like a grim heritage to the young. Larry digs

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as a youth for service worker learned how widespread was the despair among the youth of the Western edition. Negros don't feel that they couldn't do the things that that they of course they're able to do. Let's say, for instance, the the youth that I work with,

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I'll bring them in and they will fill out an application and for a job and and I say, What do you want to be? And the kid will say something to me. Well, I like to be a janitor or nurse's aid or something like this. So

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what do you have is a continuation of of janitors, and you never hear ah person saying, Why don't you be a A new electrician's? Have you thought about being ah technician? Have you thought about being a politician? My mother. She taught us that Negroes were equal.

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But I remember times when she says, not realizing that she was contradicting herself. In other words, she would say, You know, like you're going to high reaching for two high goals. Larry is younger. Brother Joe has additional cause for discouragement. Doctors recently discovered that he suffers

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from a serious congenital heart defect. Once an avid and promising athlete, Joe Digs has been permanently bench. Nor will he be able to pursue a military career like his brother Michael after school, I just like to walk around by myself, walk through the park. You know,

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I try make myself and convinced myself that I'm gonna settle down and stay and getting good grades and be something or somebody mhm. And this stone is what I could do it by just being by myself. The average Negro teenage boy been from a poor family.

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He would maybe you think that he couldn't possibly socialized with middle class or the fairly well, mhm Negroes are whites because you would fear they will look down on. So therefore, the lead him to think that every once against, he feels classes and soon he gets

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fed up and drops out of school. He doesn't get a job. I mean, he has it turned to some of the source of income. May be robbing, stealing or mhm things of the sort Bread e think I've finally convinced myself after look after, you know, thinking

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about this, you know that I gotta do better. It was surprising how many kids actually wanted to be when they grew up. Pimps and prostitutes because what do you see when you go out on the street? Your clothes always ragged. You don't have any food, but

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it always looks like the pimp who's always driving around the long Cadillac or something. Man, he's really got it made. This represents social prominence. There was a time when I wanted to make break away from everything. Can I say Wait a minute. You know, uh, um

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I running away. Am I saying that I don't wanna be a black person? Then I found that maybe I was trying to run away from the black stereotype. Larry did break away. For nearly a year. He lived with a group of young musicians, all of them

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white. The experience taught him a lot about himself and the world outside the ghetto. I got to know a lot about middle class people enough to know that I don't really want to live in the Richmond and Sunset District. I can't say that there their basic

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hang ups as human beings there really that much different from Negro hang ups. It's just that they're on top there. The haves and the Negroes by and large, the have nots. Time when there was hardly any money in the house times when someone was in the

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house was very, very sick. You know, uh, and we all experienced the same grief or sadness together at this type of living together bills one, You know, you just feel that Hey, wow. I'm just, you know, we all feel the same thing now. I realized more

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that people can live together if they try, and if they decide that, sure, we're gonna live together. And we got, but I feel that was a big problems. Is that, uh, people don't wanna work at that. Larry Digs has resolved some of his early conflicts about

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being a Negro. He no longer seeks toe. I feel like I could just drop out of the whole scene completely, you know, and say, Well, it's not my problem. Like many other problems close, you know, But I don't feel that I could be comfortable as a

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human being knowing that the guys that I grew up with, you know, uh, are out there scuffling and somebody's shooting them in the back. And they're very confused, and they don't know which direction they're going to. The Negro community always feel suppressed. You're always really uptight.

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Always ready, ready to do you know punch somebody, but it's like people are always very despondent. They're always down, and it has the effect of of being very lethargic, making me not want to get up in the morning because you can't see your way clear. It's

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like being so far down that down looks like up after school. Cherry digs cares for the young son of a working relative and shops for the evening meal. Like all youngsters her age, Suri is searching for a adult identity and is frequently discouraged by the hard

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facts of life she observes around her. She explains why for Caroline TV, most local when we didn't have it hard, when we first came my hair, my mother didn't. She didn't spend a lot of time with us because we were smaller and she had to work

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mostly type all night and all day, and we was there at the house by herself, with my older sister. And the kids really have it hard because, you know, they feel as if their parents don't care, so they do what they want. The digs family tries

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to gather for dinner as often as possible, but the center of gravity that once kept the family together. Mrs. Digs is gone, and so they find themselves drifting apart. Dinner time these days is mostly a time for memories. I remember sitting at the table, the whole

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family, and there would be nothing on the table where we'd set the table on just sit there. And it wasn't like in protest or not having any food. It was just that well, first place my mother thought it was. You know, dinner was a time when

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everybody should be together if if you didn't have any food. So we did it, you know. So there's ceremony, I guess you might say, And of course, my father would come in and not having any money must have really, you know, blew his mind stuff like

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that, distinctly the look on his face when knowing that or feeling that he was somewhat less than a man simply because he could not provide and simply because he worked really hard. But he couldn't. He could never get ahead than many nights when I come in,

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let's say to talkto about something and I have seen him, like on his knees, crying many, many times. I want to stay in the ghetto and help help those that I can and contribute something. Not that I feel that I have all that much to offer.

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But whatever I have to offer, that's what you know. I want to give that much. Shortly after these films were made, Lewis Digs gave up the flat on Fell Street. He could no longer afford the $110 a month rent. Joe moved in with his brother Larry,

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who subsequently lost his job with youth for service. Because of the cutback in funds from Washington, Shari was sent to live with friends. She was withdrawn from Zion Lutheran School because there was no money for tuition. There is no happy ending for the family on Fell

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Street, but then happy endings are rare in the slums of San Francisco. Better assignment for is brought to you in the community. Interest by the documentary department of Carolyn TV. Be with us again for our next report to the West on assignment floor