R E S U M E

1960 ~ 1967 U. S. Navy 1968 ~ 1969 American Appraisal Company 1970 ~ 1972 Universities 1973 ~ 1976 Miscellaneous     recipes 1976 ~ 1977 Marriage & Graduate School 1978 ~ 1986 Columbia Business Consultants and very intensive computer programming 1987 ~ 1994 Volunteerism and giving back to the neighborhood that kept me from a life of dysfunctionality. 1995 ~ (ongoing) computer programming, web site development, family genealogy and whatever else turns me on.

Pictured on this page are a few of the one thousand two hundred (1,200) kids who lived on my former block (2400 block of North 40th Street) from 1987 through 2005.  Normally, there were a little over 100 kids living in the 59 flats on the block at any given time each year - with 60 of those children replaced each year as families moved in and out of 15 of those flats -- some families staying only one to three months before moving on --- some flats turning over four times in a year. For a short period beginning in 1997, the turnover decreased to less than 20 new kids each year living in fewer than a half-dozen flats.  We seemed to have bottomed out of the dysfunctionality of constant mobility, change and strife around 1997 until it restarted to a lesser extent a few years later. Upon return to Milwaukee in 1987, after 14 years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I decided to retire from the business world and devote my energies to volunteer community organizing. Given that children of all ages were the only ones active at all hours in the neighborhood, my first priority was to get them to trust me enough to pass along information about conditions in the neighborhood detrimental to our collective well being.  It was also necessary in order to minimize and control some of those constantly changing kids' more dysfuntional behavior. Needless to say, our block eventually became known as "Ben's Block."  After only a couple years of picking up litter each morning and introducing new kids to each other, those NORMAL processes took on a life of their own.  (A book could be written about it all!)

Kids began to greet each other - now as potential friends rather than competitors for scarce resources -- scarce resources like caring, goodwill and attention.  Cursing and profane language in public became abnormal (except, of course, for those adults who, much less frequently than in the past, walked through from other blocks, seemingly without any self-discipline regarding their constant stream of profanity in the course of a normal conversation); knives, sticks, rocks and other weapons were seldom seen; screaming matches between adults were rare; and, in general, it became a pretty safe place for kids to play, grow and be kids.  Hopefully, the role modeling behavior of the kids who've lived on our block long enough to have been influenced by our positive values will be passed along to others in a never ending, self-perpetuating cycle.

Website link/location/URL: http://Ben.Ciriacks.com/resumev.htm