Flattering the Man on the Street

The San Francisco Chronicle of the 1970s was probably best known as a punch line in the movie All The President’s Men. Playing Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee in that film, Jason Robards, Jr., was pitched an idea for a new-age feature of some type and he replied by saying, “Tell ‘em to take it to the San Francisco Chronicle.”

            The joke was not without basis (otherwise it wouldn’t have worked, right?), but the reality was that the much-pilloried Chronicle of that time was a good and lively paper in its own way. The way just didn’t happen to be that of the Post or the New York Times.

            It was a paper with world-class columnists: Herb Caen (who later won a special Pulitzer), Charles McCabe, and Art Hoppe. If it didn’t have a lot of in-depth investigative reporting, it nevertheless covered the news in a lively and entertaining fashion. The headlines and writing were sharp, and it got the details right in a lot of ways.

            I was reminded of that recently when I had coffee with a friend and business colleague, and he made a remark about how inane one of the local paper’s person-on-the street columns was. An ordinary reader probably thinks there’s nothing to doing such a column: Just go some place with a lot of foot traffic, ask the same question of five or six people, then come back to the office and write it up. Piece of cake. The ordinary reader would be badly mistaken.

            In the time period I speak of, the Chronicle had a superb practitioner of this type of piece. The column was called Question Man, and its author listed only as O’Hara. Much later, I learned that O’Hara, the question man, was actually a woman. That makes sense because two of the qualities needed to do the job right are an ability to put people at ease and an ability to listen well and hear what people are really saying. Women often do those things well.

            To get a compelling person-on-the-street column, you have to come up with a well phrased question and put it to more people than the number who will appear in the column. Some people are vapid, inarticulate, or both. There are those who would say such subjects should be included in the column, as they are representative of the population at large. I disagree. The newspaper’s space and its readers’ time are too valuable to be wasted on inanity.

            Nor is it enough, in all cases, to simply ask a question and let the subject talk. A good interviewer working on this kind of piece will ask good follow-up questions to elicit additional response and to help the interviewee, who typically is not used to talking with the media, articulate the point he or she is trying to make. That holds true whether the question is about Watergate or something as simple as what are you having for lunch today.

            After interviewing enough people, the columnist has to pull take a 500-word answer and editing it down to 75 words or so that capture the gist and sting of what the person was saying, and convey a sense of the person’s voice. Even the order in which the answers are arranged is important; if the reader sees variety and interest in the utterances, he or she will keep reading. I’ve never seen this type of column done as well as O’Hara did it, just as I’ve never seen an item column as good as Herb Caen’s. There’s no substitute for instinct and talent, and in flattering her subjects, O’Hara satisfied her readers.

If the Vatican Were Run Like A.A.

            Bill Wilson was the principal founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that, among other things, calls for turning your will and your life over to God as you understand Him. Curiously, after finding God and sobriety, he never found a church he could belong to.

            As a believer without a church, he was in good company: Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and John Wayne come to mind. (The Duke once said, “I believe in God, but not religion. If God wanted us to have religion, he’d have just made one.”) Bill was apparently taken with the Roman Catholic Church and flirted with it, but the deal-breaker at the end was the concept of the infallibility of the pope.

            Having grown up in a small town in Vermont, where matters were settled democratically at town meetings at which everyone could be heard and could vote, he simply couldn’t go along with the idea of following the dictate of one man who claimed to be channeling God. That’s why a critical element of A.A. is that decisions are made by “group conscience;” everyone who comes to the meeting gets a say and a vote, and God is presumed to speak through the group as a whole.

            Applied to life and institutions in general, I think Bill’s philosophy is the right one, and not just for spiritual reasons. The more people who are involved in a decision, the better it’s likely to be. If nothing else happens, a larger and more diverse participation increases the odds of the key questions being asked. Most bad decisions are the result of not thinking of something that becomes a glaringly obvious problem down the road.

            It’s a messy process, to be sure, and sometimes a wrong-headed person or sub-group can hijack the process and lead it down the wrong path. Even when it works, it takes time and compromise, which frustrates those who are absolutely convinced of their righteousness. But over time the right thing happens a lot more often than not.

            Bill’s issue came to mind recently during the uproar over the new health care law requiring Catholic secular institutions such as universities and hospitals to provide birth control coverage in their health insurance plans. Birth control being against church policy (though widely practiced by actual church members, if you believe the polls), the issue turned into a religious-freedom donnybrook that I won’t go into here.

            Buried deep in an article about that controversy was an illuminating point. In the 1960s, Pope John XXIII created a Vatican Council considering reforms within the church. One of the matters on the agenda was ending or relaxing the Church’s outright rejection of birth control. For a variety of reasons, the idea had broad support and was recommended to the pope.

            By the time the matter reached the Pontiff’s desk, John had died and Pope Paul VI had taken over. On July 25, 1968 he issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which rejected the majority report and upheld the Church’s traditional ban on artificial contraception. In Paul’s remaining ten years as pope, he never wrote another encyclical.

            It’s possible that if John had lived long enough to make the decision, it would have been different, and of course every religion gets to decide how it hears God. But if the Vatican were run like Alcoholics Anonymous, and decisions were made by group conscience, the Catholic position on birth control would in all likelihood be far different than it is today. Considering how that would have gone down makes for one of history’s greatest what-ifs.

Elvis, Rhonda and Conway Twitty

                  I’ll never be able to listen to Conway Twitty’s “Tight Fitting Jeans” without thinking of the McCloud River Inn, where I heard it for the first time.

                  When I woke up that morning in October of 1984, I had no idea I would be at the McCloud River Inn that night. My friend Paul De Lay and I were going on a long fishing weekend, and the plan was to camp at Ah Di Na Meadows along the McCloud River, twelve miles up a dirt road from the last trace of civilization. But as we drove north on Interstate 5 that morning, menacing clouds were moving in from the north.

                  Heading into the mountains outside Redding it began to rain, and as we gained elevation, it began to snow. By the time we reached the turnoff to McCloud, it was clear that camping, or even getting to Ah Di Na Meadows on that treacherous road was out of the question.

                  Mid-afternoon, driving gingerly to stay in the tire grooves through a couple of inches of snow on the road (it was so early in the season I hadn’t thought to bring chains) we made it to the town of McCloud and rented a cabin at a deserted motor court. After a couple of restless hours, we decided to walk through town and see where we could have dinner.

                  Which is how we ended up being half the population of the bar at the McCloud River Inn that night. As we had our pre-dinner drinks, the place was still as a tomb, and the music came through loud and clear. When “Tight Fitting Jeans” came on, Paul and I looked at each other, and we knew. This was the song that would define the trip.

                  Another country song forever associated with a time and place is Barbara Mandrell’s “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed.” In September 1978 I was doing a photography trip in the western prairie section. For three days, as I drove from the Texas panhandle into Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, the one station I could get clearly and consistently was the megawatt KFDI Big Country, Wichita. They played Sleeping Single all the time, and more than 30 years later, I can still sing most of it by heart.

                  About the time I was hired at the newspaper where I worked for two decades, the Eagles came out with “Witchy Woman,” a huge hit. The Salinas rock/pop station I listened to at the time seemed to play it almost every morning between 7:40 and 8, as I was driving to work. Every time I hear it now, I feel, for a few seconds, as if I am 22 or 23 again, with my life in front of me. If only that could be bottled.

                  Last week I got a new car (how it happened is another story), with Sirius Radio, which I’d never had. Saturday night I went out to run a couple of errands and tried Sirius for the first time, checking out Cousin Brucie’s Sixties music show.

                  On the way to the gas station, Rhonda from Saskatchewan called in and requested Elvis’s “Rubberneckin,’” which Brucie played. Before he did, he asked, since Rhonda was calling while on a road trip (I hope she was the passenger), that everyone driving a car or truck honk twice. Traffic was light, so I did, and that imprinted this song as well, as the one that will be forever linked with Sirius and the new car.

                  Thank you, Rhonda. I’ll never forget you.

           

           

Too Much to Say, Nobody to Say It

            Perhaps you have had the experience of going to a web site for a business or organization and seeing an invitation on the home page to subscribe to its e-mail newsletter. Perhaps you went a bit farther and checked out the newsletter archive on the site and discovered that the last newsletter was put out two or three years ago.

            I see this sort of thing all the time in my line of work, which includes helping clients with newsletters, annual reports and other forms of public outreach. It’s part of the overall societal issue of information overload.

            Everybody is being told these days that you have to have a web site, you have to be on Facebook, you have to be on Twitter. Not everybody has to, of course. The corner bodega that lives off neighborhood walk-in business can easily behave as if the Internet never happened and do just fine, thank you.

            Still, for most businesses, it’s a good idea to get your story out there as much as possible, though I admittedly have a professional bias on that issue. The critical question is who’s going to do it.

            Most businesses and organizations aren’t exactly adding people to handle their communications needs. What happens, typically, is that they assign the communication to an existing employee. Chances are that employee is already trying to do 45-50 hours of work in a 40-hour workweek, with no overtime authorized. If that’s the case, something has to give. If the employee is an administrative assistant, rather than a communications specialist, the communication work tends to get put on the back burner until it falls behind the stove and is lost from sight.

            In some cases a business will hire a freelancer, such as myself, to take on some of the communications work on a spot basis. Again, I have a bias here, but that makes a lot of sense. Instead of having an employee who is putting off the work until everything else gets done, the organization gets an outside contractor who doesn’t get paid until the job is done. Hence, the job gets done as quickly as possible.

            There’s a certain cycle I see, particularly with nonprofit organizations. Such an outfit will typically start out lean and mean and focus its energy exclusively on developing a donor base and establishing its programs. After several years of steady growth and success, people in the organization start to say the same thing to each other:

            “We’re doing such great things, and nobody knows we exist.”

            I’ve made a lot of money over the years from that complaint, because that’s typically when the organization decides to hire an outsider to take on the information duties. What happens next is that with someone with a financial interest in doing the communicating, the communicating gets done, and the organization sees the benefit in terms of public recognition and resultant growth.

            This, then, enables the executive director to move on to a bigger operation at a bigger salary in a few years. In comes a new executive director, who decides the communications work is getting so big it should be handled in house, which often makes sense, and so I’m gone. A staff position at least partially for communications is created, and the outfit moves forward until a sour economy and the loss of a few major donors force the position to be cut or restructured.

            Then, a few years later, people in the organization start saying.”We’re doing such great things and nobody knows we exist,” and they start looking for an outsider to take on the information duties. Is this the land of opportunity, or what?

           

           

The Names We Give Our Children

            There was a story in the local newspaper recently about a high school basketball game, and the first two paragraphs are worth quoting in their entirety:

            “With the defensive attention shaded towards Soquel High stars Ragine Graves and Madison Rocha, Saturday afternoon’s Central Coast Section Division IV quarterfinal playoff game gave Keahna Clark a bushel of open looks.

            “She made the most of her opportunity.”

            I don’t know if any other readers felt the same way, but I was grateful for the “She” at the beginning of the second paragraph. Forced to make a gender guess based solely on the first paragraph, I probably would have gone with the women but been far from certain about it. If you haven’t found yourself puzzled by the first names of the currently young, you just haven’t lived long enough. It will happen, guaranteed.

            In my far-from-wild youth in suburban Southern California, it seemed as if half the boys were named John, Jim, Bob or Bill. Two of my best friends in high school were John Sutton and Jim Ludlum; John had a brother named Jim and Jim Ludlum had a brother named Bill. On the street where we lived, we often played ball with the Knauf brothers, Bob and Bill.

            As your life changes, so do your friends, but the chances are the names don’t change that much because each generation has its own set of highly popular names. Starting with high school, I’d say I’ve had five best friends over the years, and three of them were named John. The other two were Paul and Jeff.

            In my school days there were few other Mikes; I recall only one other in my high school graduating class of nearly 400. My last name, Wallace, was almost as common a first name as my first name, Michael. So I was quite surprised when, in my early 30s, the wire editor at the newspaper where I worked informed me that Michael was the most popular name for newborn boys that year. Not long after that she and her husband named their new son Michael, though not after me.

            When Linda and I were expecting our son, we were looking for a name that was solid and traditional but not too common. We settled on Nicholas, and apparently a lot of other parents at the same time had the same idea. Our Nick has known many other Nicks as he has gone through school, and in fact, one of his current best friends is also a Nick.

            In girls’ names there seems always to have been more diversity and change over the years. In my parents’ generation there were a lot of Gertrudes, Mabels, Lucilles, and jewel names: Opal, Ruby, Sapphire, even Jewel. In my generation, nearly none.

            That was true on the male side as well. My father’s name was Clarence, and among his best friends were Harold, Mel, Walt, and Harry; I can recall one Walt in my high school class and none of the other names at all.

            Some day the Dylans, Taylors, Madisons, Ragines and Keahnas will seem as quaint to the contemporary ear as the Mels and Rubys of bygone days. The old standards keep making comebacks, to be sure, but not always at the same times. If you go to the wedding section of the paper, at least in California, you’re more likely to come across a marriage between a John and a John than between a John and Mary.

           

The First Federal Bailout

            In the summer of 1971 I was home in Glendale between my junior and senior years of college, working at my father’s plastics business in Burbank. Just down the road (literally less than a mile) from that business, history was being made in the form of America’s first corporate bailout.

            Lockheed, the venerable aircraft firm, was in trouble, largely owing to its connection with the airplane engine division of Rolls Royce, which had just gone into receivership. Lenders were unwilling to lend further without a guarantee, and without capital, Lockheed would be unable to finish building its Tri-Star airplane, on which it had more or less bet the company.

            President Richard M. Nixon, with the help of Treasury Secretary John Connally, drew up a loan guarantee proposal that would provide Lockheed with $250 million (about a billion and a quarter in today’s money) in loan guarantees. It was a controversial and hotly contested proposal.

            There were strong arguments on both sides. Opponents screamed bailout. Sen. William Proxmire, Wisconsin Democrat, who gave monthly “Golden Fleece” awards for wasteful government spending, was a leading naysayer. Alan Greenspan, then a young economic adviser to the president, cautioned that if the government bailed out one company, where would it end.

            On the other hand, there was a concern that if Lockheed failed, owing to problems with its British partner, America would lose a critical defense contractor, a key aviation firm, and about 60,000 jobs once the ripple effect was factored in. Right up to the time Congress voted, no one knew how it was going to go. Being so close to Lockheed’s main plant, we were all acutely aware of the fear and anxiety in the air, and it sometimes seemed as if Lockheed was all anyone was talking about that summer.

            Being in college, I of course knew everything, and had a strong position on the matter. Like Proxmire, I was against it, figuring that the government shouldn’t be bailing out large companies that had messed up. As a matter of abstract philosophy, it was an absolutely tenable position.

            My father, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who believed in Free Enterprise and distrusted the federal government, was for the Lockheed loan guarantee. On the eve of World War II, he had worked as a night watchman at Lockheed and had a soft spot for the company, but his main concern was jobs. He didn’t see how you could throw 60,000 people out of work if there was a way to avoid it.

            In the end, Lockheed got the money by the narrowest of margins. The vote in the Senate was 49-48, and in the House of Representatives 192-189. There were divisions in both parties. Republican Congressman H. Allen Smith, whose district encompassed the Lockheed plant, voted no, based on solid conservative principles. After doing so he decided not to seek re-election in his solidly conservative district in 1972, “retiring” from Congress at the age of 63.

            Forty years later, it’s a bit easier to see the picture. Greenspan was right about other bailouts following, but Lockheed and its jobs survived for another quarter century before the company merged with Martin Marietta. I’m now at about the age my father was at the time, and I’ve come around to his point of view. In the abstract, the government shouldn’t be bailing out large companies, and there are limits to when it can and should. But the people who get hurt aren’t abstractions, and it’s far from a sure thing that the free market will step up and replace the failed firms with minimal pain and disruption. Some times the philosophically weaker position becomes the lesser of evils.

           

Religious Liberty in Old Pennsylvania

             During his Philadelphia years Benjamin Franklin was actively involved in a number of town and colony governing offices. At the time, Quakers made up a majority of most governing boards, which made for some interesting politics when questions of public defense arose.

            Several pages of the Autobiography are devoted to discussing this. Franklin recalls when the Fire Company conducted a lottery to raise funds that might be used to create a defensive battery at the harbor. Twenty two of the governing board of 30 were Quakers, but Franklin soon learned that most, particularly the younger ones, were willing to tacitly support defensive measures if it could be done without openly going against their church leadership.

            When the time came to vote on the distribution of the lottery funds, the eight non-Quakers showed up, as did one Quaker leader, who adamantly insisted his people would not support the battery. At the time the meeting was scheduled to begin, those nine were the only ones in attendance; then Franklin was called to a nearby tavern by a waiter who worked there. Eight of the Quaker board members were waiting and said they would come to the meeting and vote for the battery, but only if their votes were absolutely needed.

            Knowing he had the 16 votes needed, Franklin returned to the meeting and told the lone Quaker representative that the others would wait an hour to allow the 21 missing Quakers to show up. To the surprise of the lone Quaker present, none of them did, and the motion to approve the battery was carried 8-1.

            In the Pennsylvania Assembly, where Franklin also served, similar difficulties arose when defense appropriations were necessary. “They were unwilling to offend government on the one hand by a direct refusal, and their Friends, the Body of Quakers, on the other, by a compliance contrary to their principles,” Franklin writes. “Hence a variety of evasions to avoid complying and modes of disguising the compliance when it became unavoidable.”

            A common technique for appropriating defense expenditures was to pass a resolution allowing money “for the King’s use.” That was fine as long as the funds requested were for the Crown, but it didn’t always work. At one point, for instance, the Assembly was asked to approve an appropriation requested by another colony’s governor for gunpowder to defend a garrison.

            After much wrangling, Pennsylvania voted an appropriation of three thousand pounds to be used for “the purchasing of bread, flour, wheat or other grain.” Urged to reject the appropriation on the grounds that it wasn’t what he had asked for, the Governor replied, “I shall take the money, for I understand very well their meaning; other grain is gunpowder.”

            Ever the practical politician, Franklin realized that this approach could have been used in the fire company situation. As he later told a friend, he could have got a resolution approved that the money be used to buy a fire engine and had himself and his friend appointed as the committee to make the purchase. They then could have bought a cannon for the battery because what, after all, is a cannon if not a fire-engine of sorts?

            The moral here is that controversies between government and religion can be worked out by reasonable people of good will as long each side is sensitive to the other’s concern and not too starchy about asserting its own. If they could figure that out 250 years ago, you’d think they could do it now; but progress is not always a straight line.