24 Hours in America: Part 5

HOMEWOOD, ALABAMA

By Joe Drape

Steve Sills hustled the referees out through the tunnel into the pouring rain and rumbling skies to the football field where his seventh-grade team was waiting. Their pads were bigger than their shoulders, and their helmets, too large, made them look like life-size bobblehead dolls.

Do not tell Sills that middle-school football does not matter: It does desperately to this group of Homewood Patriots. They have never won a game, and, on a recent Monday, for the first time in two seasons, the scoreboard was on their side, 14-6.

Every flash of lightning meant at least a 30-minute delay to seek shelter. Every flash also threatened to suspend the game and to keep Homewood’s winless streak intact.

In a pregame speech, Sills dug deep into his motivational toolbox to moderate and harness the restless energy of adolescent boys.

He was omniscient.

“Jack, lose the earbuds. Sam, eyes on me.”

He was philosophical.

“Don’t matter if you are big or small, if you are fast or slow. If you give us the very best of you, together we can do great things.”

He was infectious.

“You guys know I have only one speed, and that’s full speed — I want you to have it, too,” the coach told his team, his lighthouse smile searching the amped-up room.

Sills, 38, is an educator. No, he is an evangelist for the gospel of encouragement, one he’s been preaching for 13 years at this economically and demographically diverse middle school in suburban Birmingham.

“Encouragement is like oxygen — you need oxygen to breathe,” Sills said. “These kids are under so much pressure to drink, to smoke, to make the one or two bad decisions that can ruin their lives. They need encouragement to survive.”

He used to play wide receiver, first at Tennessee Tech and later in the Arena Football League.

He is married now, with three children.

Despite Sills’ devotion to football, it is in the classroom where his impact is most widely felt. He likes to think of himself as an instructor of lost arts.

He teaches his sixth-graders how to type because he learned to do so, and it allowed him to make extra money in college. Not long ago, he brought in 40 ties for his seventh-grade boys and taught them how to tie Windsor knots.

In college, Sills wore bow ties or suspenders on test days, a habit that became the foundation for his “look good, feel good, do good” mantra.

So nine years ago, he founded the Homewood Trendsetters, a club that combines sharp dressing with dozens of service projects. It now numbers more than 300, including more than 100 girls, and has logged thousands of volunteer hours and raised thousands of dollars for the community.

Asked to reduce his teaching philosophy to its core, Sills paraphrases poet Maya Angelou: “These kids will forget what I said and did, but I hope they never forget how I made them feel.”

On the rainy football field, water rushed off Sills’ bush hat, and his nylon sweatpants squeaked. His Patriots added another touchdown and a two-point conversion and the scoreboard read: Homewood, 22, Irondale, 6.

A flash of lightning fractured the skies, and a deep rumble of thunder announced more drenching rain. The head referee sent both teams back to their locker rooms.

“That’s it, Steve,” the referee said.

Sills said: “We’re going to count it as a win.”

Then he stopped at his own locker room door to wipe his face before bursting through the doors.

“Congratulations,” he said, but the rest of his words were drowned out by whoops and stomps. The Homewood Patriots had their first win, lightning aside, and they were going to make as much noise as they wanted to.

PITTS, GEORGIA

By Kim Severson

Just about the time a lot of people may be looking at the office clock and wondering what to do about dinner, Clark Roundtree was climbing into the cab of a tractor.

There were peanuts to dig.

The early fall heat here in South Georgia was over 90 degrees. Sometimes, when it’s this hot, he likes to dig peanuts when the sun goes down. But peanuts are ready when they’re ready.

The day had brought some rain, which helped. On a dry day, he might get through only 10 acres or so before the blades on the peanut inverter get dull and have to be changed. When the earth is soft, he can bang out 60 or 70 acres.

Farming is solitary work, which is a big part of why Roundtree, 35, likes it.

He started working farm jobs when he was a teenager. By his junior year in high school he thought maybe he was cut out for something else, and he quit school and joined the Army.

By 2005, Roundtree was a reconnaissance specialist in Iraq. He was the guy who went out ahead of everyone else, scouting for trouble.

“I lost 14 good friends over there,” he said.

He came back and used his Army benefits to enroll in a criminal justice program at a local technical college, but the idea of law enforcement quickly lost its luster.

“I just got to thinking that I did enough peacekeeper-type stuff already,” Roundtree said. “I fought that fight overseas. Farming made more sense. It’s a better way to help people.”

One of the people he figured he could help was his friend Clinton Oliver, an old hunting buddy whose father had died. Oliver needed some help with the 1,400-acre cotton and peanut farm his father had left to his wife, Jurice Oliver, and his two sons.

“When Clark came on board we sighed a big sigh of relief,” said Jurice Oliver, a retired teacher who once taught Roundtree science. “We don’t say Clark works for us. We say he works with us.”

For Roundtree, the day begins a little after 8 a.m. and often ends after 8 p.m. Much of the work is tedious. Parts need to be replaced on the equipment. Pigweed, the bane of many farmers, needs to be pulled or sprayed or cursed at.

Roundtree is the technical one on the farm, so in addition to his planting and harvesting, he is called upon to make sure the electronics that run much of the machinery are working.

His wife, Hollee, 28, works for the Olivers, too. She helps Oliver’s brother, Clay, with a small company that cold-presses peanuts, pecans and sunflower seeds into oil for restaurants and home cooks.

During a break on a recent Friday, his wife sent him a text. She was making pork chops and green beans with some macaroni and cheese on the side. And their daughter, who is 6, says hello.

“My whole family lives off this farm,” Roundtree said. “We get by.”

DOUGLAS, ARIZONA

By Fernanda Santos

For Ida Ann Pedregó, the owner of Illusions Boutique here, closing time means the usual tidying up of the aisles. She’ll calm the ruffled organza of the quinceañera dresses she sells, sorting them according to color, size and price. She’ll retrieve the gowns she had hung on the awning in the morning, like talismans.

One mid-September day, those red and black dresses had lured three generations of women inside. The day before had been rough — “not a single sale,” Pedregó said, clutching her manicured hands against her chest.

The store occupies the first floor of a century-old two-story brick building on G Avenue, at the heart of a commercial district on life support, wedged between what this city was and what it’s trying to be. To the right is a jewelry store that seems to have been abandoned in haste; plush white fabric, crinkled and dusty, lines the empty window displays. To the left is a new store that sells ripped jeans and crop tops sequined with phrases like “Peace” and “Love.”

Pedregó, a retired school counselor, welcomed the women: a bride, her sister, their mother and grandmother.

“Get the coloring books,” she whispered to her assistant. This was for the fifth member of the group, and the only male: the 4-year-old brother of the bride and her sister.

The family lives south of the hulking steel fence down the street, in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the small city on the other side of the international border in this corner of southeastern Arizona, 246 miles and worlds apart from Phoenix, the sprawling state capital and one of the most populous cities in the United States.

They came in to find a dress for Andrea Hernández, 64, the family’s matriarch, but Pedregó knows well that Mexican weddings are usually big, fancy affairs. And in her line of business, where there’s big and fancy, there’s money to be made.

“What color will the groomsmen wear?” she asked the bride, Frida Guerrero, 22, ushering the women toward a pair of tuxedo catalogs.

Pedregó has practiced the art of sales since she was a child in Douglas, traveling door to door to sell tamales made by her mother, Maria Isabel Vega. A dozen cost $1.20; “I earned 20 cents for every dozen I sold,” she said.

Vega was also a house cleaner, who raised five children after a divorce.

She wanted to open a boutique, and in 1994 she and her new husband did just that. There was money in Agua Prieta then, where most of her clients came from. “They would make $5,000, $6,000 a day, in cash,” Pedregó said, although she suspects not all of the money was honest money.

Eight years later, after her mother and stepfather had died, Pedregó took over the business, selling ball and the quinceañera gowns worn by girls at their 15th birthday parties to celebrate their entrance into womanhood. By then, the store was running at a deficit.

“My mother cleaned toilets, and then she owned a boutique,” Pedregó said. “I couldn’t see all the hard work she put into this place die with her.”

So, Pedregó works, selling the gowns she buys in Texas and California, alongside shoes, handbags and bracelets, and tiaras made of acrylic and faux diamonds. The bangles on her wrists chime as she ferries gowns from hanger to fitting room and from a storage closet to women who paid for them in interest-free installments that may have dragged on for months and who are finally taking them home.

Hernández, the grandmother, found a dress she liked. It was navy blue, with short sleeves, a flowy skirt and a fitted waist defined by a ribbon held together by a brooch.

“This dress doesn’t work for you,” Pedregó said, smiling. The brooch, she said, “le va acentuar su panza.” (“It will accentuate your gut”).

She brought two more options, one burgundy, the other champagne. Hernández liked the burgundy. It had an embroidered bodice that dropped below her bellybutton and sleeves that didn’t squeeze her arms.

“Me gusta,” Hernández said as she emerged from the fitting room, smoothing the bodice with her hands.

But she wasn’t ready to buy it just yet.

Pedregó set aside the dress and reminded the women that if they rented six tuxedos, “the seventh is free.” She followed them out the door, where she found another pair, a mother and daughter, eyeing a gown in her store’s window.

“Come in,” she said. “There’s more inside.”

MASHANTUCKET, CONNECTICUT

By Steven Kurutz

Friday before the nighttime crowds is one of the quieter times inside a casino. The blink and boink of the slot machines is at a tolerable decibel level. There’s little wait at the bar to get a cocktail and not many drinkers.

It’s the countdown to the weekend, the unexciting hours that must pass before people make a night of it here.

Dwane Mitchner, a blackjack dealer at Foxwoods Resort Casino, in southeastern Connecticut, stood on a stage in an area called Play Arena. Scattered across three long rows of computer gaming consoles, facing the stage, were maybe a dozen men and women.

“Pop it like it’s hot! Snap!” he said through a headset microphone.

“You need ace or face, ace or face,” he called out to two gamblers.

After they touched their screens to draw, he told them, his voice full of exaggerated caution, as if this game were not a $5 minimum bet but high stakes: “17. I’m staying. I’d stay.”

In the Play Arena, a recent addition to the casino, the hushed intimacy of a gaming table has been blown up. Dealers stand on a stage instead, calling the action for players who use the consoles to place bets. The job calls for the dealer to be a performer, a hype man keeping spirits up in the face of long odds and lost dollars. “I like to be the focal point, the star of the show,” Mitchner said.

Three dealers shared the stage. Elizabeth, to the left, spun a roulette wheel. Rafael, to the right, dealt baccarat. But Mitchner was the one with the microphone. The casino put on view a life-size cardboard cutout of him. Fans leave notes in it. One wrote: “Larger than Life!!!”

Mitchner, 43, grew up in South Carolina and started working at Foxwoods in 1999, after a six-year stint in the Navy. He has won an employee service award and bounces around like a teenager. “I tell my daughter, ‘I’m going to play cards for eight hours, and I’ll be back.’ It’s fun, man.”

He is single and lives in Groton, Connecticut. He was once stationed at the Naval Submarine Base New London, about 12 miles from the casino.

“After I got out of the Navy, I had a choice to stay here in Connecticut or move back to South Carolina,” Mitchner said. “I decided to stay here. From the Navy to Foxwoods.”

Mitchner used to work from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. at the casino. That was less fun. As the night wears on, he found, ordinary people out for a good time can transform. “They’re hitting the bar and they’re losing money,” he said. “They get loud, mad.” Mitchner prefers to laugh, to stay upbeat. He wants to entertain the customers and give them their money’s worth.

“It feels good,” he said, “when people tell me, ‘It feels good to lose my money to you.'”

The big screen runs animated graphics, and Mitchner knows them so well, he throws up his arms as cartoon chips rain down. Like an exhausted, winning athlete, he swigs from a water bottle and asks Rafael to towel his perspiring face, the two of them hamming it up.

Each Play dealer works for an hour, followed by a 20-minute break, when he comes offstage and walks by Fuddruckers, the hamburger chain. Then it’s through the Grand Pequot Tower, down an escalator, past the upscale David Burke Prime steakhouse and down a fluorescent-lit hallway to the employee break room.

Chairs and couches, a coffee maker, a pay snack machine, a TV tuned to sports highlights. Mitchner said hello to the other employees and sat down. No coffee? “I’ve already got energy through the roof,” he said.

Since he has been at the Play Arena, Mitchner has become fond of performing for an audience. He wants to try stand-up comedy, he said.

And just like an entertainer, when he steps offstage, he leaves work behind.

“You walk out, the air hits you, it’s done,” Mitchner said. “What happens in the casino is done.”

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH

By Paisley Rekdal

“Good,” Willy Chun said, about the mooncake he was eating. It was perhaps just the 15th word he had uttered during a Bing Kong Tong meeting he was overseeing in September. Chun is, to put it mildly, a reticent leader. A man his wife, Tami, 71, says can walk around the nearby Fashion Place Mall for a whole hour without saying a word.

She knows this because that’s what they do for exercise. But he is kind, she said, and he never loses his temper.

At 92, Chun is the senior of the two Bing Kong Tong elders, and if he is not the most active voice of his local tong, or organization, he is its presiding spirit. While the rest of the men gossiped over mahjong or laughed as Kithing Ng, 66, the tong’s second elder, gave an animated description of a trip to Taiwan, Chun just smiled and watched.

Chun was 25 when he left Guangzhou, China, in 1951 to join his grandfather in Oakland, California, for better prospects. Unable to find work there, he migrated to Salt Lake City, knowing that the Bing Kong Tong, a Chinese family association, would help.

The Salt Lake City elder at the time hired him as a busboy at his restaurant and kept a protective eye on him for a decade. Slowly, Chun said, he worked his way up to lead cook and eventually became the owner of over 10 restaurants, at one point owning all the Chinese restaurants in the valley whose names ended in “Sea.” (“Seven Seas, South Sea, New North Sea,” he said. “All mine.”) Not because he had any particular passion for food but because, as he put it, “There was no choice.”

Now Chun has his wife, whom he met on a visit to Hong Kong, and three grown children. He sold his restaurants years ago and retired; he has been the tong’s elder since 1971.

The mission of the Bing Kong Tong was to help Chinese men who came to the United States to gain a foothold in a nation that can be hostile to outsiders. The Mormons were welcoming, Chun said, nicer than people in Oakland, but there’s a limit to niceness.

The tong, whose national headquarters are still in San Francisco, tracked the transcontinental railroad through the late 19th century, setting up chapters across the West to serve and profit from the Chinese bachelors who settled to become merchants, laundry owners or restaurant workers. The Bing Kong Tong was one of the biggest of these secretive organizations, with transnational roots and interests, and it became a necessity for Chinese men arriving in California during the gold rush, offering members loans, translation services, physical protection and more.

Still, there’s a shadow history to tongs, many of which vied violently to supply the needs of a burgeoning Chinese workforce. They were built to protect male labor and interests; they not only controlled the opium trade and gambling parlors but also trafficked Chinese women into brothels, a trade that became so lucrative state officials looked the other way.

Bing Kong Tong has been a silent part of Salt Lake City since the late 1870s, and it also participated in that violence — earlyDeseret News articles complain about the criminal element of Plum Alley, Salt Lake City’s original Chinatown — but that is in the past now.

Today, the chapter’s hall is draped with Taiwanese and U.S. paper flags, beside a velvet banner decorated with the square and compass of the Freemasons, with whom the Bing Kong Tong is affiliated. In the hall, which sits next to a store called the Beer Nut, antique rosewood chairs line the yellow walls, and the tong’s archives (donation records and burial documents) are stuffed inside a single battered suitcase. The members are men mostly in their 60s and 70s, many of whom, like Chun, are retired restaurant owners.

Few speak English, although they have lived in Utah for decades. (At the meeting, they teased each other in Cantonese, their mother tongue.) At one point, Salt Lake City’s chapter had 270 members; now it’s around 50. A dwindling Cantonese population means an aging tong membership in cities like Salt Lake City, where the groups mainly promote charitable work, observe ritual ceremonies and tend to local Chinese buildings and gardens. The group has become closer to a trade union or social club — a networking space for business owners.

Chun represents a generation of Chinese men who struggled to make a living in America at the cost of actually livinghere. The new country was for their children. Chinese immigrants to Salt Lake City these days tend to be younger mainland Chinese and Taiwanese people who speak Mandarin, have jobs and do not see themselves as culturally aligned with the older Cantonese community. Even the tong members’ own children aren’t interested. They are more apt, as one member noted, to play mahjong on a screen than in a tong hall.

Yet Chun is sanguine about the future: “The younger generation comes with family, connections, livelihoods. They have choices. Maybe there’s no need for the tong.”