There are some things that you have a right to believe will never happen to you, particularly if you are a Pop Warner mother.
Pop Warner mothers are selfless creatures who chauffeur their kids around to endless football and cheerleading practices. Who sit in the stands of too many games that drag. Who preside over bake sales that don't really interest them.
At a recent Pop Warner party, a few of these mothers found that their involvement with Pop Warner football had become far less predictable than this, however.
At the party, they heard that the president of their board of directors had repeatedly denounced the musical entertainment as "nigger-loving music." Alarmed that a man who occupied a position of wide influence with young children would be openly racist, they confronted him about his behavior.
He told one of them to "go suck [a black man's] dick."
When the mothers filed a complaint with the board of their Pop Warner league, a closed meeting was held at the home of one of the president's personal friends. Not surprisingly, the president was not asked to step down from the board.
When the mothers contacted the press about the incident, either the press was stonewalled by the officers of Pop Warner or else the officers quickly rushed to the president's defense.
When a reporter and photographer attended an open Pop Warner board meeting, hoping to take the board president aside for the interview he had been avoiding, Pop Warner officers called the police.
This is how difficult it can be to pursue the matter of prejudice in Arizona. ON THE NIGHT of September 22, Pat Miller, Cathy Quintero, and Mary Hinski were partying at the Mesa Holiday Inn on behalf of the kids of the Mesa American chapter of Pop Warner Football. Miller, a pre-kindergarten teacher whose children have been going out for Pop Warner for four years, is a volunteer team mother who attends the games and provides treats for the kids and supervises bake sales.
Quintero, an executive secretary for a general manager, has three children in Pop Warner. Hinski is a divorced dance instructor who had gone to the Pop Warner party with a friend; her own children do not play in Pop Warner.
All of these women did not get to know each other that night. Hinski did not meet the other two, in fact, until she discovered that they had all written to the board of directors of the Mesa Pop Warner to protest the behavior they witnessed that night. Before things turned ugly, they all had a marvelous time at the party, which was held to give the parents of Pop Warner players a chance to celebrate. They danced all night, primarily to the sounds of Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, and other Top 40 performers whose tunes were provided by Chris Galvin, a deejay who'd been hired by the Pop Warner group. Sometime after midnight, Miller found herself still out on the dance floor partnered with Quintero, with whom she had struck up a friendship that evening and whose husband, like Miller's own, had reached the point of exhaustion and begun to prefer the sidelines. "We said, `Forget them!'" Miller says of the women's attitude toward their faltering husbands. "The music was so good and we were having so much fun that we could not sit still."
They didn't want to stop dancing, but as things turned out, they had to stop. In the middle of a dance number, the room that had been filled with music went abruptly silent. It was a little odd but, reasoning that it must be time for the party to end, Miller and Quintero approached deejay Galvin for his card, in case they wanted to get in touch with him when planning a party of their own.
They say that Galvin explained to them that the program had ended suddenly on orders from Jack Polchow, the president of the board of directors of Mesa American Pop Warner. Galvin said Polchow had approached him several times during the evening and demanded that he quit playing that "nigger-loving music" and switch to country-western. Galvin had played some honky-tonk, then, but apparently not enough to satisfy Polchow. By the time things came to a head, Polchow was threatening not to pay Galvin his full fee, according to Miller and Quintero.
This is the same story that Galvin later told Hinski, when she approached him separately and asked why the music had stopped. The next day, he told a similar but apparently more graphic story to his supervisor at Windy City DJ's in Tempe, a woman who would identify herself to New Times only as Juanita.
"The president was really tipsy and he made racist comments and he threatened to punch the deejay," is the way that Juanita describes Galvin's account of the argument that evening. "He was not going to pay us or anything." (Galvin himself did not return repeated calls from New Times.)
Both Miller and Quintero are Hispanic. Their kids and a lot of other Hispanic kids, as well as black kids, play for Pop Warner. (Nobody keeps track of the exact number of ethnics, according to Dan Rich, the commissioner of the Arizona Federation of Pop Warner, which oversees all 300 teams in the state. Rich says there are a lot of them, though, and that there are also ethnic coaches and board members. Three members of the Mesa American board are black, in fact.)
Miller says she was very disturbed at the thought that "this man was allowed to be out there [at the football games] with minority children if he feels this way about minorities." Quintero agreed. They approached Polchow to confront him about his decision to cut the dance short.
Miller and Quintero say Polchow appeared to have been drinking, although he was not affected to the point that he was hopelessly slurring his words. They say he told them that he had called the music to a halt because he was "sick of listening to that nigger shit." They say he suggested that if they were upset that the dance had ended early, they were free to continue dancing on the silent dance floor. The women were angry, but Miller says that, in the face of Polchow's hostility, they eventually backed off.
(Jack Polchow himself never returned my calls, but I did reach Janie Popple, whose husband, Doug Popple, is a fellow board member and personal friend of Polchow's. Janie says she witnessed the confrontation with Miller and Quintero and that, although the two women started out calmly, they became overwrought enough that one of them called Polchow a "son of a bitch." She says it as though the term constitutes an offense equal to reducing the musical talents of an entire race to "nigger shit," although she also says she never heard Polchow actually say "nigger shit." There is a lot of this equating of apples with oranges. The Pop Warner officers don't even seem to understand exactly why anyone is upset with Polchow.)
Miller and Quintero were not the only women at the dance who got stirred up by Galvin's account of Polchow's remarks; the story also raised Mary Hinski's hackles. She says she passed by Polchow as she was leaving the dance and called out to him, "You know, some of the best football players are black!"
"Well then, why don't you go suck their dicks?" he replied, according to Hinski.
Hinski's friend who had taken her to the dance, Robin Nitchoff, was standing with Hinski at the time, and she confirms that she heard Polchow's comment.
(Janie Popple's memory of Polchow's rejoinder is hilariously sanitized. She recalls Polchow saying: "Well, if you like those people so much, you'll have to go deal with them." She also claims that she remembers that Hinski incited Polchow to this level of indignant retort by telling him, "I can't believe you're such a bigot." Both Hinski and Nitchoff deny that the "bigot" comment was made.)
Neither Miller nor Hinski nor Quintero felt they could let slide this startling chain of events. They wrote separate letters to the board of Mesa American and requested that Polchow's position as president be reconsidered. They were surprised to learn very shortly that a meeting had been organized by the board members to review the letters, but that the women had not been informed or invited. As a result of that meeting, they each received a copy of a mimeographed letter from Polchow that was addressed to all of them. It was very carefully worded. Miller believes that it implies that the women were drinking and helped bring the insults upon themselves. The women themselves say that they'd had only a couple of drinks apiece.
"It's a shame sometimes when drinking is involved that things get out of hand," wrote Polchow in his letter. "This is what happened Sept. 22nd at our adult dance. So I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for my part in it and for offending anyone.
"I am hoping we can put this behind us and move forward with the real reason we are here. And that is for the girls and boys. It takes us all to do the job, and we appreciate the work each of you do.
"And as for the disc jockey, he was paid in full for a job well done on Sept. 25th."
This is where matters stood when I first heard about them. It was Hinski who called me originally, and her voice sounded as sharp and sputtery as the discharge from a BB gun as it painted a picture of a few moments when the hot racial hatred that is very often covert bubbled into full view. "We are going to take this all the way to the Federation," Hinski said, referring to the level of volunteer government in the Pop Warner organization that oversees the Mesa American league, but sounding as earnest and enraged as though she had dropped into the conversation a reference to the United States Supreme Court.
And she was as good as her word: Within a few days, the three women had written a joint letter to commissioner Dan Rich.
That was about the time that I began calling around and trying to confirm things. I discovered that the most disturbing aspect of the words that the women said were exchanged at the Mesa Holiday Inn did not even have to do with the raunchy words themselves. It had to do with the seemingly automatic way that Pop Warner officers rushed to excuse the words, to find ways to avoid staring the incident strongly in the face and even determining whether Hinski, Miller and Quintero were telling the truth. It had to do with the fact that no one wanted to take this charge of racism a whit seriously.
When I spoke with commissioner Rich, he was primarily interested in impressing upon me that his hands might well be tied where Polchow was concerned.
"We do not have the power to go in and remove somebody," he said. "We have to charge him and schedule a hearing, just like in a court of law.
"First of all, we look for a Pop Warner rule that has been violated, and I am not sure there is one [in this case]. The rule book is 144 pages long, but there is probably nothing in that rule book that applies to this so that you could say it was a direct violation.
"Obviously, we promote the highest kind of morals we can. But I would be naive to think that nobody has made a comment like this before. I have seen the kids themselves get into that kind of racial stuff.
"Those kinds of things go on and people do things under the influence of alcohol that they regret.
"Remember, you have got to have grounds. You can't just say, `I don't like you.' That's called a kangaroo court. That's called the Ku Klux Klan."
For a minute, I thought I was listening to Ev Mecham, who tries to wriggle away from the charge of bigotry by saying his accusers are the bigots.
I also spoke with one of the black board members of Mesa American, Jerry Barnes. He was present at the meeting the board held about the incident, but he told me that he had never even asked Polchow whether the women's charges were true. "I do not desire to know if he made the comments or didn't make them," he said. He had advised Polchow that he should apologize to the women in a letter if he was guilty as accused, he said.
But don't racist comments offend you? I wanted to know.
"Racist comments bother me if they are made directly to me, but I was not at this particular function," Barnes said. "I have not seen any racist conduct."
Do you believe that racist conduct occurred?
"I would have to accept three letters from three different individuals and say that apparently there was an incident," he admitted. "But past experience has led me to believe that individuals that drink will do a lot of things they will not normally do if they are not drinking. I think we can forgive certain things.
"I have worked with Polchow for the past year on this board, and he has not given me the impression that he is a racist.
"And Mesa American is for the children. It means a lot to the parents and children that live out here in the East Valley."
Finally, I drove out to Mesa last week to attend a Mesa American Pop Warner board meeting--one being held by the pool in the same Holiday Inn where this whole story got started. I understood that the meeting was open to everyone, that its purpose was to nominate officers, and that Polchow would be there, expecting to run for office again. I hoped to interview him and I took along our photographer Jon Gipe. Although I hadn't told anyone in Pop Warner that we were coming, I knew the Pop Warner crew wouldn't be startled to meet us, since some of them had been dodging my calls and letters for weeks.
Before the meeting got rolling, Gipe walked to the front of the room to snap a shot or two of Polchow, who was presiding over the front table. It isn't that easy for Gipe to be discreet when he is wrapped with wide straps and weighted down with cameras, so I wasn't surprised when his progress was blocked by an angry woman who'd been standing near Polchow. What was surprising was that she threatened to have Gipe thrown out of a meeting being held poolside in a hotel, in the name of a sports organization for children. First, she threatened to have him thrown out by the police, and then she threatened to press charges and confiscate his film. Later Gipe saw her writing down the license plate number of the New Times truck he'd arrived in. While all this was going on, Polchow silently disappeared.
Apparently, this woman or someone else actually did telephone the police. I wandered out to the hotel's entrance in a few minutes, and I found two officers of the law standing just north of their squad car, conversing with some officers of Pop Warner.
An hour after the board meeting was to have begun, the Pop Warner people called it off altogether, saying that some commissioner whose presence was mandatory was a no-show. I tried to interview other Pop Warner officers about Polchow, but they all refused comment.
Finally, board member Barnes did agree to talk with me out in the parking lot. We were deeply into an interview when I was approached by a police officer who was accompanied by Ida Wright, a deputy commissioner of Pop Warner from whom I had tried to gain comment earlier. It seemed as though she had pointed me out to the cops. As the policeman began to question me, the whole scene became twisted and bizarre.
I was trying to pursue a news story about a man who occupies an influential position with Valley children and who, according to multiple witnesses, had violated standards of social and moral behavior in a way that went far beyond tastelessness. At first, I had been brushed off by people who behaved as though I was trying to make something out of nothing, and now I was actually being treated like a lawbreaker. Not a single person whom I had reached or tried to reach had behaved as though Jack Polchow had anything to answer for.
I was feeling so irritated about the whole thing that when the officer asked me what I was doing, I said, "I'm conducting an interview. And you're interrupting me."
Rather quickly, the police officer decided to leave me alone. There probably isn't much punishment assigned to the activity of interviewing a willing subject in a parking lot.
Unfortunately, I think that there is not much punishment assigned, either, to displays of racism in Arizona. I think that the attitudes I encountered throughout Pop Warner--a statewide organization of more than 3,000 adult volunteers who preside over the leisure time of 10,500 boys and girls--cannot be unusual ones. When confronted with a colleague's overt racism, these men and women either accepted it, trivialized it, or felt helpless in the face of it. They clucked and made noises about wanting to gloss things over for the children; they said that children are the real point of Pop Warner.
And they are. That's precisely the reason for concern: All those little ballplayers are learning to react to prejudice in exactly the manner that their parents do.
The threat is real enough that Cathy Quintero is wondering how to handle her kids' desire to continue to be involved with Pop Warner. "If they want to play next year, I might let them," she says. "But I would make sure that that guy is not around my kids."
She says it as though Jack Polchow is the problem.
In Arizona, we have felt this same way about Evan Mecham. Because of his overt displays of bigotry while he was governor, Arizona became perceived nationwide as being a state full of bigots. I have heard many Arizonans lamenting this image, and blaming Mecham, and believing it is not largely true.
I think they are kidding themselves, and that the kidding is dangerous.
If we assume we are being falsely judged, we--like the officers of Pop Warner--will not look closely at the acts of prejudice that surround us. We might even begin to believe the hype of local business leaders who've suddenly rallied to the cause of Martin Luther King Jr.: that the reason we should honor the slain civil rights leader is out of a desire to attract a sports extravaganza and recover lost convention trade.
We might think there is nothing more at stake next week in the vote on Proposition 302 than pure public relations.
No one wanted to take this charge of racism a whit seriously.
The Pop Warner officers don't even seem to understand exactly why anyone is upset.
When confronted with a colleague's overt racism, these men and women either accepted it, trivialized it, or felt helpless in the face of it.
