““My father would say things to me like, ‘It’s easy for you to help your friends,’” Porco said. “’But you also have to help your enemies.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, tell me something new.’ But there came a time when an enemy of his came in and asked him for help. Let me give some background. That enemy and my father, whenever that guy would come in on a Saturday and start drinking, would end up fighting. I don’t mean just verbally. I mean with a knife. He stabbed my dad. My dad stabbed him once. My dad shot him once. He shot at my dad once. It was bad. And every time that guy came in on a Saturday, I would begin to get worried. I’d say, ‘By the end of the day, we’re going to have a problem.’”

Porco’s father and this enemy went and sat at his father’s throne, a special booth in the tavern where his father conducted his business. Well the enemy and Porco’s father conversed in hush tones for a while and his father asked him to get his hat and coat.

“I thought, ‘Are you crazy,’” Porco said. “I couldn’t disobey him, so I went and got the hat and coat. I tried to say, ‘Where are you going?’ And he replied, ‘None of your business.’ So they left. They walked out of the tavern together and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, this guy is going to ambush him.’ It seemed like hours went by, days almost in my mind. I worried and wondered what was happening. I would get out of the bar and look down the street and didn’t see them. Finally, in comes my dad. And I was surprised. I said, ‘Okay, he’s alive. Did he kill the other guy?’ He always carried a gun. My dad said, ‘Take my hat and coat and out them away.’ I said, ‘Dad, can I talk with you after that?’ He said, ‘Sure.’ I put them away and sat down with him in the booth. I felt like I had arrived. I said, ‘Dad, this guy is always fighting and beating on you and you on he. And yet, you left and went with him. Why did you help him.’ He smirked a little bit. And he said, ‘You Americans are all alike. You don’t understand.’ ‘Dad, you heard the guy say that he needed help.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I listened and then I said okay. I had to help him because I had the ability to help him. But I wanted him to know that I didn’t like him the way that he was. He had a family and kids and he didn’t take care of them. My dad said, ‘You and me fight all the time. But you ask me to help you and I help you.’ I asked, ‘What did you do?’ He said, ‘He needed cash bail. He was afraid to go to the police alone because they beat people up and that. So I went down with him. I called our attorney. I asked him to represent this guy. And I also put up $5,000 cash for him.’ $5,000 in 1956 was a lot of money. I said, ‘Dad that’s crazy. He could leave town, couldn’t he and you’re out.’ He said, ‘Babe, money is good in a way. But if you hoard it, you missed the opportunity to wash your hands of it and cleanse your soul. But first, if you call yourself going into the ministry — he was criticizing me — you have to learn sometimes the person you need to help is your enemy. And sometimes, in order to change people, you need to make them an enemy. You need to get them to hate you enough that they are going to be honest with you. Then you can help them.’ Well I learned a lesson. Yeah, it’s great to have friends. But one of the most valuable lessons I learned in dealing with government regulators who don’t care about the human dimension of what you are trying to do is you have to get them to really put their guard down. And sometimes the way to do that is you have to dismantle their projected image of authority and control and knowledge and get them down to just the basics of what it is to be human. And you have to risk being the enemy because then you have a responsibility to work to make them a friend. That sounds crazy, but it works.”

Years later when Porco and Housing Ministries took over the Northport and Packers apartments, there were many problems that had been simmering for years. The residents formed a tenants organization and the clamoring and discord could be heard all the way in city hall. Paul Soglin was mayor and he was angry with what was happening. It always seems that when someone has mismanaged an organization, it iis the person coming after them who pays the price for the mismanagement. And Soglin proceeded to take it out on Porco even though they held some of the same values.

“That’s what motivated me,” Porco said about the encounters. “In the process, because I learned that lesson, what I had to do was say, wait a minute. Paul and I are on opposite sides. But what is the value center of that. When I examined it closely, when we come to understand it, we really are the same. First of all, I was inspired by Paul. As I studies him, I said, ‘This is a young man who fought the war issue. And then he had the courage to take on the political world and he shifted the focus from Vietnam Protest to housing. I thought that was great. He would be a great advocate. Yes, I angered him by some of my antics. And he certainly on a pseudo level saw me as the enemy not in the bad sense, but as in the that’s who we have to change. I saw that I had to change him, but we were on the same plain.”

Some of that also came out when Porco “lobbied” U.S. Senator Bill Proxmire to hold a senate hearing to get Section 8 funds, that had been approved, released. Proxmire agreed to meet with him.

“When Prox said, ‘Okay, I will meet with you’ and he said, ‘You know I voted against Section 8, why are you asking me now to open a hearing,’” Porco recalled. “And I don’t know what I said at the time. And he said, ‘Okay Arla, write a letter to Secretary Hills. We want to open a hearing on it and give Mr. Porco a copy of it.’ We rode the trolly back to the office building and I said to her, ‘Can you tell me what I said?’ She said, ‘I cannot believe that the way you spoke to him that you got anywhere or anything. You said, ‘Senator, as you said, you have the right initially to represent what you though was in the best interests of the public policy and you voted against Section 8. It’s now a matter of law and Senator, you have the moral obligation to get the same weight of the benefits of that law to the people. And that’s where we are at.’ I said to Arla, ‘Holy mackerel, I can’t believe I said that to him. Would you write that for me?’ Arla was a stenographer. She did. I have a copy of the letter somewhere. That was one of the most amazing things. We were predetermined to be on opposite sides. But he had a heart for people. And that is what I was going after.”

Next issue: Learning the lesson of compassion