One Man's Peace Corps

The year was 1964 when Edward ("Ned") Coll, an idealistic 24, left his promising job as a junior executive with a Hartford, Conn., insurance firm to found a social-action agency. Professionals and family were not amused. "It will take $80,000 to get started, and don't count on volunteers," gruffed the local antipoverty chief. When he started going around to newspapers to sell his cause, his father, a retired postal clerk, would call ahead and warn the editor that Ned was not to be taken seriously.

Armed with $1,100 in savings and a vision of ending racial enmity by bringing white and black together, Coll pressed on. He rented a storefront office with a telephone. He gave his outfit a name with a resonantly contemporary ring: "The Revitalization Corps, America's Citizen Peace Corps." He dreamed up zingy program monikers like "Operation Amigo," and zealously advertised for volunteers. His guiding conviction was simple: "Most of the people in this country, black and white, want an integrated society."

Today, seven years later, the Revitalization Corps remains alive and well, headquartered in Hartford's grimy northside ghetto, and has spread to eight other cities. On last year's slender $50,000 annual budget, almost all raised through contributions, its programs are building people-to-people "bridges" on the premise that racial problems can be solved only if individuals get to know one another in relaxed ways.

Ghetto and Guard. In the past two weeks, for example, Coll talked Hartford car dealers into sponsoring an outing for several hundred ghetto kids in Rocky Neck State Park, and threw an interracial picnic that drew 2,000 suburban and ghetto residents. He arranged for a National Guard medical team on its two-week active-duty tour to visit his office and give physical examinations to 50 ghetto children bound for 4-H camp. Says Coll: "It was about time the ghetto saw the Guard in a nonriot situation."

Another important aspect, he believes, is for black and white to explore each other's turf. Since its inception, the corps' most ambitious programs have been aimed at this goal. This summer, 200 to 300 Hartford ghetto children will spend two weeks in suburban homes, while many whites will repay the visits during corps-organized housepainting projects and ghetto-neighborhood get-togethers. Coll also has completed arrangements to take over the National Guard camp at Windsor Locks, Conn., for several weeks to create a "Corps City" for 100 black and white children. Says he: "We'll challenge the hell out of them."

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