Brian Slattery Photo
Juan Castillo: From the streets to the airwaves.
A roomful of New Haveners embarked on a journey Monday night from Newhallville to Wyoming, from Panama City to Brooklyn, and back again. By the time it ended, they traveled through time, heard about fateful encounters with ancient bison bones and a tough-love judge, and gained new insight into their own community — as well as the spiritual quests that can connect people from seemingly different worlds.
The occasion was a session of a series called Storytellers New Haven. Scientist and philanthropist Bill Graustein and WYBC radio personality and community organizer Juan Castillo were at the wheel, taking an audience of dozens gathered at ConnCAT in Science Park on their personal journeys.
Storytellers New Haven is based on the simple premise that community can be built and strengthened through people sharing their stories — the experiences they’ve had, the mistakes they’ve made, the successes that came their way, and the clarity that comes from people looking back and expressing to an audience how their pasts shaped who they are now. Its first event was held on Nov. 13 with Babz Rawls-Ivy, the managing editor of Inner-City News (and a WNHH FM radio host) and Erik Clemons, executive director of ConnCAT, a job-training and youth-arts agency. Monday’s event with Graustein, now most directly associated with the William Casper Graustein Memorial Fund, and Castillo, program director of WYBC, would test that premise further.
After all, the idea of storytelling — of shaping one’s own life into a narrative, something that is supposed to be more than an array of memories, that is supposed to have some sort of structure, perhaps even a meaning — cracks open philosophical questions. What does it mean when we try to make meaning of our own lives? What does it mean when we try to share that with others? And can those meanings be put to work in bringing people closer together?
A Square Yard In Wyoming
William Graustein.
Graustein told a story about the way certain threads in his life — weaving together the personal and political, science, history, and civil rights — have come together through a mix of curiosity, ambition, and happenstance.
One such thread began in his childhood when he took walks with his father on the weekend. They lived 40 miles outside New York City. His father, a successful businessman, was someone who “could figure out how to make what he wanted happen.” His told his son, a “boy geek,” how their driveway had been sinking when they first moved into the house. His father took willow branches and laid them into the driveway. The branches took root. The driveway stopped sinking.
Adrift in college, Graustein ended up working on an archeological dig out west. The drive took three days. After helping set up camp, “I was given one square yard of Wyoming and a mason’s trowel, and I was told to scrape away and find out what was below the surface,” Graustein said.
He found a bison rib with scratches across it. Nearby he found a flint. The edge on the flint matched the scratches in the rib. “I realized I was the first person in 10,000 years to hold that scraper,” he said. “My head started to spin around … I could imagine I was there, 10,000 years ago.”
That archeological expedition unearthed an entire campsite, evidence of early habitation that included structures made from wood and probably hide. For Graustein, the project kindled an interest in geology. He got into the Ph.D. program at Yale and earned his degree in 1981. “Getting a Ph.D. is learning more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing,” he said.
He became a research scientist in Yale’s geology department, involved in a project that took him across the country taking soil samples. It brought him back to Wyoming. He noticed willow trees there and thought of the prehistoric campsite he had helped excavate years earlier.
“Of course those post holes were made by willows,” he thought. That made him think of his father and how he had used willows to keep his driveway from sinking. “My mind started to shift from what landscape the ancient people saw, to how ancient people saw the landscape,” he said. “What do people talk about when they’re together?”
As it turned out, he also met his wife Jean on that same Wyoming expedition, though Jean “decided she was more interested in living Indians than dead Indians.” She worked on a reservation through VISTA and connected with a family, forming a lasting friendship with one family member named Juanita. On one visit, Juanita said that she’d had a vision, “of driving down the highway and being in two places at once. Bison were coming toward her.” The Grausteins showed her a picture of the camp in Wyoming where they had met.
“That was the place in my vision,” Juanita said. She took it as a “sign to both of us to pay attention — this isn’t about you.”
Fast forward to this summer’s solar eclipse, which passed over that spot in Wyoming. Jean wasn’t feeling well enough to go, so Bill went by himself. Others were gathered there, including someone who knew that it had been a site of prehistoric habitation. “I see why kept coming back to this place,” Graustein remembered the person saying. “It would be the perfect place to hunt bison.”
“And my sense of what they talked about” 10,000 years ago “shifted,” Graustein said. They would have talked about the hunt, and what each of them could contribute. “It was a place where people came and thought, ‘We’re all in this together.’”
Last week Juanita came to visit Jean and Bill and they talked about the vision she’d had. “I still don’t know what it means,” Graustein recalled her saying. “but I can tell the story, and wait for the tribe to call on me when it needs what I have.”
Funeral For A Basketball
Paul Bass Photo
Juan Castillo at WYBC.
“This is a story about America, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But mostly the good,” Juan Castillo began. He spent his early childhood in Panama, first just outside Panama City which was “the jungle.” He knocked mangoes out of trees and ate them with vinegar. He moved into Panama City proper at the age of five when his mother remarried.
“My parents just let me roam,” Castillo said. “I got used to city life, and I loved it.”
The balcony of his apartment overlooked Bolivar Park, and “every once in a while,” he said, “students would be protesting, and then the tanks would come, and there would be riots.” Then curfews, soldiers patrolling the streets. His mother sent him to the store during the curfews to buy cigarettes, and he’d dodge the tanks.
Then his mother said they were moving to the U.S., because there they would have more freedom.
“Aren’t we free here?” he remembered asking.
“Well, look at the tanks,” his mother said.
They moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I remember the first time I tasted pizza, I threw up,” Castillo said. (“I eat too much of it now,” he added.) He learned English. He also got exposed, for the first time, to basketball, when a few kids on a court asked him if he wanted to joint them.
“I don’t know how to play,” he said.
“You’re tall. You’re fine,” they said. “Just jump up and get the ball, and then give us the ball.”
Before long, he was doing way more than that. He joined the junior high basketball team, and then played in high school. His team at Boys High School was good enough to do travel games, including against Hillhouse in New Haven.
At the same time he was playing basketball, he joined the Latin Kings. By his senior year, he was the head of the Latin Kings in Brooklyn and “doing very well” — selling drugs. “I was going to school with rival gang members,” he said. He told his parents the money he had was from playing basketball.
He was good enough to earn a scholarship to Notre Dame. He played ball there too, and still sold narcotics. It didn’t last. The school caught wind that the Drug Enforcement Agency was closing in on him and forced him out. He went back to Brooklyn and was arrested. His charges carried a sentence of 15 years to life imprisonment. But the judge took an interest in him.
“Juan Castillo, you’re supposed to be playing for the Knicks right now,” Castillo recalled him saying. “What are you doing in front of me?” Castillo replied that he didn’t want to be poor. The judge pointed out that he could be making millions if he played for the Knicks. Castillo replied that he was already making millions selling drugs.
The judge made Castillo a deal. If Castillo went to prison but got a college degree in his first five years of being there, the judge would get him out. He was sentenced to Attica. He was still a Latin King. Involvement in the gang had woken him up to his heritage as an African-American Spanish person. But “at that time,” he said, “I was a racist, and very much a black nationalist.”
Castillo’s cellmate, who was serving a life sentence, talked to him about Nelson Mandela. It was a moment marking when Castillo turned himself around. He left the Latin Kings, worked toward his degree, and got it. The judge made good on his promise.
Castillo had a fresh shot. But the path to becoming a basketball star — once a real possibility — was closed. “When I was thrown out of Notre Dame, I never watched a basketball game for years. I was in mourning,” he said. With the help of therapy (“all of us should go to therapy, no matter what,” Castillo said), he would realize in time that he needed a funeral. He got a basketball and he buried it. Then he went out and played ball. But that was years off.
A section of the audience.
After getting out of prison, he moved to New Haven to get a new start. He started off as a security guard, then began working for Liberation House, which helps people struggling with substance abuse problems, as Castillo himself had done. He became Liberation House’s executive director. Then, he said, he worked for the Department of Corrections. For a time he worked with the state Narcotics Task Force (a twist of fate that the audience at ConnCAT appreciated).
Working on the task force, however, wore Castillo down. “Watching kids get put into DCF was harder than locking people up,” he said. Looking for a new direction, he heard that New Haven station WYBC would train people who started working there. With him as a radio personality and program director, the station underwent a rejuvenation. “It has offered me the opportunity to help people of all races, colors, and creeds,” Castillo said. “This town adopted me, made me one of their own, and that has been wonderful.”
But he wanted to connect with people on an individual level, too. So he has become a big brother, a mentor, a community organizer. “I help returning citizens get their lives together once they’ve gone through a re-entry process,” he said. “That’s what gives me joy today,” even as he thinks “America still sees us” — the formerly incarcerated — “as the ugly.”
And Castillo sees his story — all of it — as an example of America fulfilling its promise to those who come here. “I know a lot of people who got my story,” he said.
Whereupon someone in the audience said, “I know a lot of people know, but what radio station are you with?”
Castillo smiled and turned on his best DJ voice. “94.3 WYBC,” he purred. Everyone clapped.
Did the storytellers build community? It felt like it afterward, as most of the audience lingered to chat with the two storytellers and with each other. Did we understand each other more? Did we understand New Haven better? Storytellers New Haven’s motto, repeated a few times over the course of the evening, was that with 130,000 people in the city, that meant 130,000 stories, and we should hear every one. It suggests that the answers to the questions its mission raises can’t be answered just yet. We just have to keep coming back to find out.
Storytellers New Haven meets monthly at ConnCAT in Science Park and is free and open to the public. Visit its Facebook page for more details.
BJ- I find your 2017 twists on race interest. Yes, let's pile on Dr. M. but forget to call the GNCC to tasks for it's stunning lack of racial diversity in its leadership over the years. I see where you feel impressed to expend your energies these days.
Question for those in the know. How are the directors of the chamber selected? What is the reason for the stunning lack of racial diversity on the board? When it comes to paid positions, the excuse is typically that the pool of qualified minority candidates who are the right fit just does not exist or is quite small. What's the excuse for these self perpetuating boards around the state?