However, the Bureau did take steps recently to reopen the Langley Teen Center under community direction. This seems to be a step in the right direction, and without Saravelas's efforts, the negotiations may never have gotten off the ground. But this proposal originated with a staff member, and some are wondering if Saravelas backed it because of some larger aspirations for increasing his own prestige by taking over parts of other city departments.

Kerry Saravelas calls Joe Tyree "my most charismatic streetworker." A short but powerfully built black man in his middle thirties, Tyree is balding on top with a fuzzy growth around the sides and a twinkle in his eyes that give his face the look of a wise Bozo-The-Clown. He grew up in Cambridge and has been working with the kids here for years. Most of the kids seem to like him, although they think he sometimes works too much within the system.

Tyree is the man who runs the CYRB's Junior Advocate program, of which Saravelas is so mightily proud. Saravelas is also proud of Tyree and suggested I speak to him.

"Kerry could do a fuck of a lot of things he doesn't do," Tyree began. "Any director should be seen in the community he's working in, but Kerry isn't. You just can't run an agency like this from an office; it has to be from the streetcorners where the real people are. The kids are honest, they tell us what they need. We should be telling City Hall what the kids need. you should make some allowances about how the city is fucked up, but we shouldn't be impeded this much. If I go up with a good program, the money should be there. But it isn't.

"We're a paper operation. I mentioned the idea of a summer camp when I first started working--that was December of '70. We finally got it off the ground a year ago. It seems like the way things are set up, the salaries outweigh the program expenditures five to one."

As a black man, Tyree is particularly critical of the Bureau's approach to racial problems. "The social patterns of the black community and the white community are different," he said. "Programs that work in the white community don't necessarily work in the black community. But we don't have any programs dealing with racism, for example. Any agency using federal money should have programs dealing with racism." Which brought up the Bureau's cosmetics program.

"That program's based on that whole premise that people are what they look like, not what they really are," Tyree said. (Sharon Shelton, in charge of this program, had her picture appear recently in the Cambridge Chronicle. To the amazement of Saundra Graham and others, she was listed as a "black community leader.") "If you explain to someone enough good reasons to wash, then they'll wash. I'm not going to say that I know what's good for girls all the time--I guess I'm a male chauvinist pig from way back. But I think that money is in the wrong place. That kid from Riverside who died last summer could just as easily been a girl: dope doesn't care. If it's a hotshot, you're going. Black people used to cut their skins and put bones in their noses. That was part of their culture even if it wasn't what white people approved of. In my mind, that cosmetology program is assimilation to white culture."

As we were talking, another staff member came into the Bureau and joined our conversation. "You can be what we are--a typical city agency--or you can outmaneuver the politicians," she said. "If we had the right director and the director could get the ear of the City Manager, we could do more. I'm sure it's because of Kerry that we're getting fucked around. The perfect example is Largey. We all wanted to take a stand, but Kerry wouldn't do it. We were in a good bargaining position, but the Bureau backed down. The people trust us, then we come back with an empty bag. I'd say the people have been overly patient."

THEN OUR CONVERSATION turned to matters more internal to the Bureau. Like a large number of their co-workers, these two complained that Saravelas used to kill their proposals by saying that the Bureau's board of directors had vetoed them. Later, the staff learned that the board only had advisory powers. When Saravelas hired Ron Silva for the newly created post of program administrator, thereby reversing the decision of the hiring committee, dissension was widespread. Saravelas dissolved all total staff meetings, and six staff members, including Tyree, signed a letter calling for Saravelas's resignation.

There is also evidence which indicates that Saravelas may have withheld the GCLE evaluation from some of the staff. The evaluation was mailed in separate envelopes to each and every member of the Bureau's core staff. But when I checked with members of the agency to see if they had received their copy, which was mailed to them in care of the Bureau, a few said that they had not. Little did Cambridge know that when it hired a director for its youth Resources Bureau it may also have hired a postmaster.

So his Bureau slips and slides, leaving tension and ill-will in its wake. And Kerry Saravelas does nothing. Or does he? And if he does, just what kinds of things has Saravelas been doing for his $18,600 salary?

"Not a fucking thing," said Joe Tyree finally. "Not for what $18,600 is supposed to do. I don't like back-stabbing, but fuck it. If he can't take a little now and then, fuck it. I may lose my job for saying all this. But what the fuck. I was doing the same things before the Bureau started, and I'll be doing the same things after it's over. It'll be easy for Kerry because he's got a college degree."

IT APPEARS THAT Saravelas is already trading on that. Not only does he teach a class at North Shore Community College, but he is apparently doing consulting work on the side as well. Present and former staff members say they saw an unsigned contract on his desk. Moreover, a colleague of mine, posing as a representative of a fictitious community group from Martha's Vineyard, told Saravelas that he had an $8 to $10,000 allocation for staff training consultation to a program similar to the YRB and asked who Saravelas would recommend for the job. Saravelas said that he could not recommend any established "soft-ware" consulting corporation but that he could arrange for the job to be handled by "a group of individuals who haven't formed into a corporation yet." Saravelas said that he and his colleagues all had experience with "how you set up such programs and what it means to be a worker in an outreach agency."

When told that among the stipulations of the prospective client's grant was the mandate that consulting work be done by consulting firms and not by individuals, Saravelas said that the Planning Council of the United Community Services of Greater Boston could be induced to serve as the formal contractor. His group could then sub-contract from them. Saravelas concluded the conversation by asking that a copy of the Martha's Vineyard program proposal be mailed special delivery to his home in Beverly. Given all that had come before, it seemed like a good thing for Martha's Vineyard that the contracting proposition was fictitious.

As for Cambridge, it is long past time for the city to meet the needs of its juvenile population fully and tangibly, not merely with cosmetic solutions. But informed sources say that because of the neglect, ineptitude, and mismanagement of the Cambridge YRB (revealed to them in part by the evaluation cited above), the Governor's Committee has decided to delay funding for the Bureau until March, and has cut the new budget by nearly $90,000. Kids in Cambridge could use that money, and it is a shame if they have to forfeit it, apparently because of the doings of a man who drives in from the suburbs to watch them parade past the picture window of his $1200-a-month Mass Ave offices. It is a shame that kids have so few substantive programs in their neighborhoods, and it is a shame that their parents seem to have so little impact on the central decision-making processes.