My Redacted Life: Chapter 17 (Cont._2)

School was out. Teachers were off for the summer. The Redhead would be around the apartment a lot I supposed, although she had evidenced no interest that I might be. All I knew about her feelings was a haughty “in your dreams, sucker,” look that she delivered so well.

I worked on the final stages of the Hope grant application, the place where nothing seemed to fit and things were always missing. As I struggled with this, amidst much swearing, a talent honed during my four years as “Barnacle Bill the Sailor,” the company prepared to go into the land development business. A bank had helped procure an option on a nice tract of land between two growing cities and Jack Castin had worked his magic in designing a wonderful modern subdivision.

Watching Jack work was as treat in itself. He was left-handed, in fact he once held the left-hand golf championship title for the State of Oklahoma. He would take pen in hand and, with great flowing arcs, streets and lots would appear, along with landscaped areas. Soon, a wonderful image peered back from what had been a blank sheet.

The women in the office thought he was wonderful as well. Drawing too many stares, and with such talent, he sailed unsuspecting into a sea of jealousy that was bound to erupt later. Stay tuned.

As for me, I had to go out of town to gather some data. That didn’t make my socks roll up and down, as they say. I imagined all sorts of things: parties to which I wouldn’t have been invited; my Redhead leaving on a date with a big tall basketball coach, her arm in his and her head resting lovingly on his shoulder, those wonderful eyes peering up adoringly from a circle of red hair; or an engagement notice in the paper.

I thought maybe I’d better forget about it and concentrate on what I was doing. The company wasn’t paying me to moon over a girl that had already promised herself to some fool. They were paying me to photograph wonderful old buildings, slated to be demolished in the name of progress. I was righteous, after all.

One evening after I finished the day’s work, I did drive to Texarkana, Texas and look up my old friends Gary and Dianna Toler. I found them living in a converted chicken house behind Dianna’s childhood home with a young daughter.

We visited and they sang for me, not the old songs, though. After several drug-filled adventures that had led them hitchhiking to New York City—where Gary had almost sold a song—and back, they had gotten into religion, the one where you go around knocking on doors on Saturday. They claimed it had saved their lives, recommending it highly. It had led to a child and a stable home, albeit a chicken house. It changed their music, and not necessarily for the worse. We got along fine, a good diversion from my miseries.

Talking to Toler always helped
to ease my troubled mind.

Seeing how content they were, I decided “to hell with the Redhead.” She may have gotten married while I was gone. Good enough for her. She could just go on learning the difference between a foul shot and a layup. I didn’t care if she chose bleacher-splinters over fun and excitement, her loss, not mine.

I pulled into the apartment building’s parking lot after dark when I arrived home. I grabbed my old sea bag full of dirty clothes from the car and started to my apartment. My neighbor stood behind her screen door watching me.

For a moment, I didn’t think she was wearing anything at all. I averted my gaze and headed for my door.

“Hey sailor.” Her voice caught me. Oh well, one little look wouldn’t hurt. Besides, both my affections and my attention were free to roam now.

I looked.

She wasn’t fully exposed. She wore her faithful peignoir. The backlighting had produced the initial effect. I tried to look her directly in the eyes. Gravity fought me like a demon.

“You just missed her.”

My heart succumbed to gravity as well.

“She asked about you.”

Gravity dissipated.

“Oh? Who?”

That laugh and that wink. “She said she hadn’t had anyone stare at her hind-end all week.”

“Oh,” I said, “you mean your sister’s friend.”

“No, I meant the Queen of England,” she said, then added, “You’ve really got a case of it, don’t you?”

“How old is she?”

How old is she? Couldn’t I have thought of anything more stupid to say?

“Old enough,” she said, laughing. “Take it from your friend here. Old enough.” She turned to close the door. The combination of light and sheerness of material gave me a quick glimpse of what I thought Heaven must be like. “Good night,” she said. “Sleep tight.”

I turned to my own door, thinking, “I’m not in Vietnam anymore.”

My Redacted Life: Chapter 17

 Back to work on Monday, now just past the middle of May in 1972. I was working on the final budget figures for the Hope project. It was a monumental affair, the application was. When we eventually finished, it would comprise nearly two inches of legal-size paper set in a flip-over binder. I was now working on the budget.

Theoretically, I assume, I was supposed to research costs, verify them, and add them all into subtotals by category and a final total for the entire project.

I thought of a better way.

We knew, see, what the maximum amount of the final budget would be. Why on earth go to the trouble of assembling cost figures that would add up to more than the budget would allow?

Hell, I just worked backwards. Thank goodness for algebra. It, and deceit, would get me through “many dangers, toils, and snares” over a colorful career and a miscreant life.

That evening, I skipped the “happy-hour” movie and went home directly after work. I entertained no thoughts of seeing my mysterious redhead. She taught school some 20 miles away and only stayed with her old college friend on weekends. I would have to wait three more days at least. That morning, I had seen my next-door neighbor leaving for work and we had exchanged pleasantries. I had been pleased to see that she was fully dressed. I gathered that the prospect of going to her job tended to focus her mind.

As we expressed mutual disdain for Mondays, I had resisted the temptation to ask directly about her sister. She was a bright, intelligent woman and would have recognized that as a disguised ploy to seek additional information on her sister’s friend.

Did I mention that I was learning to be deceitful in the assembling of information? When Rita asked if I had a pleasant evening, I lied.

“Oh, spent most of it talking to a woman I’ve been dating,” I said. “We were talking about making a trip up to Fayetteville some weekend.”

She ignored me. As I say, she was bright and intelligent and would remain a dear friend for life. She sure wasn’t about to buy into any fiction that I was Little Rock’s answer to Paul Newman. She gave me that wink she employed so well. The one that said, simultaneously, “Give it your best shot,” and “bullshit artist,” and “lots of luck.” Then she was off to Downtown and her job.

I trudged off to mine, and now I had returned. I changed clothes, had a beer, and listened to Isaac Hayes do his 19-minute version of By the Time I Get To Phoenix. Then it was off to the stores. On Mondays there were few, if any public meetings, so I reserved it for stocking up on food and liquor.

That was as close to an ordered life as I was ever to achieve.

Back from the mission, I had retrieved a sack of wine from the back seat and turned toward the apartment when they were right on me, less that ten yards away. Yep, it was the redhead and her friend. They wore simple T-shirts with no written messages, but that screamed out “Lookee here.” They each wore short skirts, more aptly described as six-inch strips of material with pockets.

I gasped, panicked, and nodded, nearly slamming the car door on my hand. They giggled, arched their eyebrows, and sashayed on by as if I had been nothing more than a cop standing on a street corner in Palookaville. I turned and watched them heading for a red-tinted late-model Chevrolet Impala. It was the same color as the long hair that swayed to and fro over hips that would have made a preacher want to dance the Tango. The long hair rocked and mocked me with a whispery voice that seemed to say, “What the hell are you looking at?”

It got worse. My neighbor was standing in her doorway watching as I arrived at the apartment building. She had, evidently, started undressing when movement in the parking lot caught her eye. She still wore her business dress. She wore nothing else but but hosiery and a cream-colored bra of fine weave and dotted with bright pink rosettes. A dainty band of lace ringed the cups. A small bow tie below, and between the cups, covered a clasp that seemed barely able to achieve its assigned task.

But I didn’t notice. Instead, I nodded toward the parking lot. “I thought she taught school and only came here on weekends,” I said.

That wink again. “School’s out sport,” she said. “Ain’t you the lucky one?”

Were you talking to me?

My Redacted Life: Sunday Break

Sunday came and still no sight of the Redhead, the farmer's daughter. That morning, I carried a jug of wine over behind the church, sat on the "Big Rock" outcrop, watched the river flow, and listened to the Sunday morning music. Yeah, it took me back and all. When the service was over I went back to my apartment and spent most of the rest of the day on the patio reading Steinbeck and sipping wine.

I left the front window shades open in the living room and would drift in periodically and look across the parking lot. There was not much stirring. It was as if we were all observing a siesta. It would be back to work tomorrow and no time to think about women. For the first time since January 4, 1972, I didn't look forward to going to work of a  Monday morning.

My next-door neighbor, and information source, went out once to the trash bin. She was wearing white shorts and either a bikini top or a blue bra. Normally I would have ventured out to verify, but I couldn't think of anything to say to her. I felt empty, unjustified and unfulfilled.

I took out my old Gibson guitar and tried to emulated the fine picking I had heard from the church, but I couldn't concentrate. My mind kept drifting, trying to recall her face: the Redhead's face. It wouldn't stay in focus. I was almost on the verge of feeling awful. Wine didn't even help. What a pitiful excuse for a man.

What had gotten into me?

Was I under a spell, or what?

My Redacted Life: Chapter 16 (Cont._3)

Saturday came and I became more convinced that 1972 might prove to be a pivotal year in my life. Don’t ask me why. I didn’t see the redhead. I looked, believe me I looked. I went to the office for half a day and hurried back to scour the scene. No redhead. Neither did I see her pal Vernell. I hung out in the parking lot using every excuse imaginable. I saw almost every other tenant save Vernell.

Crap.

When I could stand it no longer, I thought up an excuse to knock on the door of my next-door neighbor and pal, Rita, Vernell’s sister. She answered wearing her favorite garment, a flowing peignoir decorated with gorgeous floral designs, sheer, and extending almost to her knees. It fit her perfectly, but no one, it seems, had ever told her that you could see right through it when the light hit a certain way.

I didn’t feel it was my place to tell her.

She answered my question while I stared. The question concerned something about the management of the condo to which I already knew the answer. For a couple of reasons, I stayed and attempted to carry on a more extended conversation.

“Big plans for the weekend?” That was an imaginative conversation-starter, right?

“Doing it,” she said waving her arms to illustrate a relaxed and casual plan of action. She made the peignoir flow like a silk sheet in the wind and I forgot what I was going to say next. I thought of it finally and mumbled, “You and Vernell aren’t going to visit the parents?”

“Vernell and her friend Brenda went to see Brenda’s folks. Won’t be back until tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

Rita gave me that that cute, mysterious smile that she used so well. “She wanted to know who you were, too.”

Be still my beating heart. “Who wanted to know?”

“You know who. I told her you were on a work-release program.”

“You what?”

“Just kidding. I told her you were a rising star in the urban planning business.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“Did that impress her?”

“Not really. She wanted to know what the ‘urban planning business’ amounted to.”

“Oh.”

“You really need to rescue her,” she said, “from all this,” she waved her arms with a grand gesture and I saw what was either the gardens of paradise or the pathways of hell flourish before me. Take your pick.

“From, … from what?”

“Well,” she said, “from that basketball coach for one thing.”

“She doesn’t like him?”

“Oh, she’s very fond of him and he’s a terribly nice man, a good one, too.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that she hates basketball.”

“Oh.”

“She says that in order to sit through a game on, as she puts it, ‘those hard-assed wooden bleachers,’ she has to pretend the pirates are torturing her and Sean Connery is coming to the rescue.”

“Oh.”

“She’s even calculated the number of games she would have to sit through if she married him and he had a successful career.” She waved an arm again. “Hundreds,” she said, and the peignoir beckoned me once more into the chasms of sin.

“I see.” Oh did I see. Plenty.

“She plays the piano, you know.”

“I don’t know anything about her.”

“Time to learn,” she said, flashing a semi-lewd grin.

I could only nod.

“Go for it, Sport,” she said, closing the door. My final view of her standing there in her casual weekend attire inspired me to spend the rest of the day picking guitar, drinking beer, and imagining all sorts of things.

Rescue this precious thing?
Well, if someone had to ...

My Redacted Life: Chapter 16 (Cont._2)

 It finally happened of course. As Robert Burns said once, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men  Gang aft a-gley.” Mine did, for damn sure.

It happened this way.

For several months, I had been doing some car trading. I wound up with some money in the bank and a 1960 vintage Ford sedan in perfect condition. An elderly lady’s son sold it to me after she had gotten too old to drive it to the bank a couple of times a month. I had a buyer all ready for it in Pine Bluff, an elderly lady who just needed to drive to town a couple of times a month for groceries and to the doctor. Did I mention the car was in perfect condition?

It was, save for the need of a new universal joint and replacement of a headlight. My brother and a neighbor replaced the universal joint, and I was engaged in replacing the “headlight of destiny” when it happened, right there on the parking lot of our apartment building.

I had the hood up on the car and had just finished the job when movement to my right caught my eye. Two figures had left the building and were walking toward a car. One was Vernell, the sister of my next-door neighbor, Rita. I didn’t know the other one. They were dressed like young women of that time dressed who, as they would say, were “lookin’ for adventure, and whatever comes our way.”

As for me, it was a warm early spring Friday evening and I wore a “Join the Navy and Ride the Waves” T-shirt and a pair of dirty jeans. My hair had grown a couple of inches since I had parted ways with the military, and my hands were greasy. I stared.

When they saw me looking, they ceased walking and began to “sashay.” If you don’t know what that means, find a true Southern girl and let her show you. For now, just understand that it has a stupefying effect on men, especially Southern men with weak minds.

I nodded. Vernell nodded. The apparition with her looked at me for a second, then shook the long red hair that fell down her back. She didn’t speak, but the look she gave me spoke with such thunder that it drowned out the sounds of the traffic on Cantrell.

It said, “Just what the hell are you looking at?” She sashayed on by me.

I stood there like a man who had just had 15 flashbulbs go off in his face at one time.

She wasn’t tall, but she seemed to have the power and tension of spring steel wound inside her as she walked away. The long hair had framed an oval face, the kind that cameras love. The face was soft and ruddy, more Celtic than Mediterranean. She would have been the perfect choice for a “Visit Ireland” magazine ad. Shapely legs flapped the hems of a dark blue dress that was set off with a bow. It swayed with a music that only she was hearing. I was sure that her walk was a copyrighted achievement.

I dropped a heavy screwdriver on a toe sticking from a “flip-flop.” I didn’t feel it. Somehow, I managed to close the hood, gather my tools and walk back to the apartment.

Rita stood in the doorway of her apartment, fully dressed for a change, well, except for buttoning her blouse. We exchanged nods. “Not going out of a Friday night?” she said. "Even I have a date."

“Maybe later.” I started to my door, but stopped. “Could I ask you something?”

“Her name is Brenda Cole and she is from Lonoke, teaches school there.”

She had been watching all the time.

“Her daddy is a farmer, and she’s an only child, a real “Daddy’s Girl.” They say she can drive a tractor like a man, even has one of her own—a tractor that is.”

I nodded.

“On some days, she’s engaged to a basketball coach,” she said.

My face must have given me away. I never was a good poker player.

Then Rita smiled at me and winked. “But on other days, she’s not.” She gave what seemed like a little mocking laugh and closed her door.

With teachers like this, could I
have possibly done better?

My Redacted Life: Chapter 16

Life would sort of hit me from out of nowhere sometime in the early spring of 1972. I sure wasn’t looking for it. I was concentrating on work, wanting to go further and higher. I knew what I wanted and I knew how to get it.

While going about my business, I had been observing friends with whom I had attended college. Since I had wondered in the wilderness for, not 40 but at least four, years, they all had a head start on me.

I was catching up fast, though, and I had come upon a secret. The ones who were in the fast lane weren’t always the best and brightest. In fact, some of the best and brightest seemed stuck back in the pack. No, many of the ones who were getting ahead had been at the top of the class, but probably in the second tier of gifted students, solid but not flashy.

What I noticed was that they were the personable ones, the ones who got along well with others. They were the ones you couldn’t help liking. In other words, they would be able to go out and bring in work as well as having the ability to get it done. That’s where the path to success lay.

It was a lesson that I never forgot.

Another thing that I noticed was that I had returned to a state with two noticeable characteristics. First, it was a state that was on the move for the first time after suffering for years under the governance of a shady and bigoted opportunist who had now been exiled to a much-deserved oblivion. The state was enjoying its second progressive governor in a row, a trend that would continue for years with some slight bumps along the way.

Second, it soon appeared to me that I had also returned to a state with great opportunity for a young man hungering for fame and fortune. The level of educational achievement was still very low. In addition, there had been a massive outflow of talent during the dark years. Some of it was trickling back, but it was still a state in which “cream rose to the top” very quickly. This was a phenomenon with which I was familiar as it was true of the state of military service as well. It was like coming home in a way.

I was determined to be on the right side of history this time. That’s why I had turned my back on Riverside Drive and moved a little farther up the hill. Thankful I was. I had a good job in an honorable profession. I worked with high-caliber people like Tom Hodges, Jim Vines, and Ron McConnell, as well as a new administrative assistant named Christie Porter, another gifted and highly intelligent associate. She was a recently assigned single-mother whom life tried on every occasion, unsuccessfully I’m happy to say, to beat down and dispirit. Hers was another professional friendship I would enjoy for years.

One can see where my mind was. As with Orwell’s horse, I just needed to work harder and keep my head down. There would be time for fun later, maybe even romance someday. I needed to concentrate on polishing my skills. Top on the list was overcoming my fear of public speaking. Next stood education. I read, and also took a graduate correspondence course from Berkeley, doing well on it. I just needed to make professional progress each day and stay away from both trouble and distractions. Easy, or so I imagined.

That’s why, one can see, I was so unprepared for the ambush that awaited. A well-armed intruder had been preparing for me for years.

Chapter 15: (Cont._4)

With an engineer and tech on board, our company proceeded into 1972 with additional vigor. We picked up some engineering work on the basis our planning work. In professional circles, that was what we termed as using a “loss leader.”

We did the planning work on the cheap, often “on the come,” in order to develop the more profitable and stable engineering work. Americans don’t intrinsically believe in planning in most situations. Usually, except in the case of rural land developers, engineering is considered a requirement.

The firm was sailing along. Then we discovered a glitch, a “fly in the ointment,” a burr resting dangerously under the saddle blanket, or, as they say in the South, a “wast-nest” in the outhouse.

Our engineer couldn’t get along with the clients. He got on well with most folks, but not the ones who signed the checks. Most of us who had worked to develop the work now found ourselves spending an inordinate amount of time refereeing disputes.

The trick, we learned, was to keep him, the engineer, as far away from direct client involvement as possible. Others with better human relation skills filled in as direct contacts. Ron McConnell proved exceptionally good at this. Thus, we were able to keep the ship on course with just a minor trimming of our corporate rigging.

The firm took on another partner, the best land-planner that our state has probably ever known. His name was Jack Castin, a native of Oklahoma, a graduate of Notre Dame where he attended on a football scholarship, and he was a fine and pleasant fellow. He had attended the University of Oklahoma graduate school of urban and regional planning with Tom and Jim. There, he became a legend as a magician with pen and sketch paper. He brought those skills to our firm.

There followed some heady times. I didn’t know it, but my personal life was about to some uncharted seas. I suppose when two people live in the same building, even if for one it is part-time, they are bound to meet, like two ocean vessels on a misty morning.

Someone should have sounded the foghorns.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 15 (Cont._3)

Monday came on a nice early May morning in 1972 and I had a problem. It may have been an opportunity more than a problem. Either way, I faced an obstacle. We needed an engineering tech at the office, and I had fallen heir to the assignment. I looked for several days and then quit.

I had found one. He was just what we needed. There was just this small matter. He was the Boss’s distant cousin. As such, he had been offered a job when the firm opened and had turned it down, fearing the risk of the unknown over a secure job with the state highway department.

Now the company had been around for a couple of years and the risk had diminished. The Boss’s ego hadn’t. It had grown, in fact. That evidenced itself when I told him that morning about my find, and about their relationship.

He didn’t express a great deal of enthusiasm, quite the contrary.

I relied on a tried and true management skill that I had been taught in the Navy’s advanced human relations training.

It’s called Class A Ass-kissing.

“Don’t you see, though,” I said, “how being under your guidance would train him to take risks and address challenges? I know it has me. The family would be thankful. I know I would, too.”

“He gave me one of those ‘don’t try to pull that crap with me’ looks and shrugged. “I don’t care,” he said. “He’ll be working for the engineer and not for me. Do what you want.” We went on to a different matter.

I called Ron McConnell and suggested that he might want to give notice. Building a good team isn’t hard. You just have to find individuals that fit, and who, at least in this case, knew a circle template from a T-square. That phone call was the basis of a friendship that has lasted through “many dangers, toils, and snares.” Funny how things work that way.

That evening, I came home from work to my new apartment, now furnished with cast-off items and a few new things. I even had a TV now. It was a primitive color set, loaned to me by my sister, bought years before after she had gotten a promotion, one of countless ones over the years that would land her at the top of both her profession and a high-rise office building. Have I mentioned that my sister is some sort of genius? "She got it all," Sainted Mother used to say.

My next-door neighbor was standing in her doorway as I approached. She was behind a screen door, but I could tell she was wearing naught but an unbottoned blouse and a pair of lacy panties. She asked if I had gotten moved in okay. Her name was Rita and she was an attractive and wonderful, though slightly eccentric person.

As I was trying to clear my head and decipher her question despite the obvious distraction, her sister Vernell, also a “looker” and nice person, walked up. She lived upstairs, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend from college who taught school in a nearby town and who lived part-time with Vernell.

She took one look at her sister through the screen and said, “Didn’t quite finish dressing, did we?”

Rita looked down. “Oops,” she said, slamming the apartment door.”

Vernell turned to me. “Enjoying your new apartment and the neighbors, are we?”

I blushed. She laughed, winked, opened the door, and went inside Rita’s apartment. She left me there to wonder, not for the first time in my life and not the last, why people in my life invariably marched to the beat of drummers that only they heard. That was true.

It would only get truer.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 15 (Cont._2)

It was sometime during early 1972 that we began amassing one of the most amazing group of young professionals ever known in our city. With an engineer’s name on the wall now, we needed an engineering tech. The boss told me to look. He only interviewed secretarial staff himself by then.

It was an easy job I had. Need a skilled civil engineering drafter and tech? Just let the word go out to the Arkansas Highway Department. (Yes, in one of the cruelest acts of linguistic mendacity our state has ever known, they later added “Transportation” to the title, but that's for another day.) Anyway, they tended to pay staff less than did the private sector. Cherry-picking experienced and skilled people was easy. The department changed salary policies later to stem the outflow, but this was now, not later.

It wasn’t long before I received a call for an interview from an employee of that very department The caller sounded like a sincere young man, so I said, “Come on in.”

Next morning, while all the bosses were away, the receptionist buzzed that a man was there to see me.

That’s when I met Ron McConnell.

He wasn’t much over 20 years of age, a pleasant looking man with spectacles and a friendly face. I took him into our conference room for an interview.

Was he what we were looking for? Hell yes. He had worked for the highway department for some time doing exactly what we needed. He was modest, erudite, and pleasant. I had no way of knowing at the time, but his abilities and talent were beyond exemplary. He was a native of North Little Rock. He had brothers and had grown up middle-class and eager to learn. His dad worked at Horace Terry Pontiac, the dealership across the street from my first apartment.

I felt as if I knew him already.

As I mentally congratulated myself on my good and great fortune, he lowered his voice and studied his hands. “There’s one problem,” he said.

“No, no, not a problem,” I thought. “We don’t need problems. We need an engineering tech.” What could it be? A felony record? Unmanageable fits of violence? Was he about to be drafted? No, that couldn’t be it. They had stopped that cruelty by then.

I sighed and asked what the problem might be.

“Tom Hodges is a relative,” he said. I think maybe he said a third cousin or something like that.

“Hell,” I said. “No problem. Everyone knows you don’t bring your kids into a business, but cousins? It ain’t no big deal.”

He frowned. “It’s this way,” he said.

“What way?”

“Tom asked me to come to work for him when he started this company,” he said. “I turned him down.”

I took a deep breath. “It might be a big deal. I said. I said it ain't no big deal, but I meant to say it might be a big deal.”

At least he wasn't a
felon or draft-dodger,
and being the Boss's
cousin doesn't make
a boy all bad.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 15

Things didn’t always go smoothly as I continued my adventures as an urban planning consultant. Take my second trip to Malvern, for example. It still smarts.

There was pretty much a routine case on the agenda. A developer wanted to build a cheap apartment building smack dab in the middle of a middle-class African-American neighborhood. There wasn’t any way to “pretty this one up.” I received numerous calls from the concerned neighbors, and three or four letters expressing dismay at the prospect. They all promised to be at the planning commission meeting.

I included the letters in my report and mentioned the calls. I included some statements on neighborhood stability. My thoughts were pretty clear.

Unfortunately.

I arrived on time and took my place with the commissioners at the head of the table. There was only this one item on the addenda. I was surprised, to say the least, to see that none of the neighbors involved in the case showed for the hearing.

There were four men in the audience. Three I didn’t know. The forth owned the largest reality company in town and one of the banks. I knew he had a mean streak. He had once killed a major development for the city through his influence with the utility commission. Seems that the land sale was going to a rival firm.

He was the stereotype small town businessman who would receive a Rotary award at lunch, evict a family buying a house on contract from him at noon for missing their first payment in years, and take a neighboring widow a sack of tomatoes from his garden that evening.

It was a not-too-well-kept secret around town that he was a mean one. And I posed a target for his wrath.

After the Chairman opened the hearing for discussion, he ambled to the podium, took a deep breath, and turned to me.

“It seems,” he said, “that the only person in the room who is against this project is this young man from Little Rock. I don’t know how they do things in Little Rock. I don’t live there. Never wanted to. I like Malvern. This young man doesn’t.”

He continued in this vein, listing my inadequacies until he began to approach his regard of my Sainted Mother and her child-raising abilities. As I started to rise, the Chairman shut things down and called for a vote. I’m sure I don’t have mention how it turned out.

On the way home that night, I resolved to abandon this sill dream the next day. I wasn’t going to stand abuse like that. No one could treat me that way. I could go back into the Navy, or go on to California. To hell with this racket. It wasn't the last time I would form this resolve.

Dawn rose. I rose. I went to work with the conviction that I would leave the business if and when I damned-well chose. No two-bit hustler would chase me away. I don’t have to tell you how that turned out. I would prevail and, as the story goes, there are always obituaries that don’t make me cry. In short, I prevailed.

I would become a little more diligent about learning whose bank was going to finance projects in the future and which banks held mortgages. And I would respect the stance of others. Later, I ran into the man who had been the most vocal neighbor before the hearing.

When I asked what happened to him and the others, he looked at the ground. “Nothing,” he said. “We just all have mortgages along with jobs that were hard to come by and can be hard to keep.”

They don’t teach case studies like this in graduate school. I always figured it was worth a couple of hours of credit. I learned to survive and to keep on keeping on.

Oh, and the asshole in question got his second “Man of the Year,” award a few years later, I seem to remember.

The treacherous will be with us always.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 14 (Cont._4)

The last of the winter snow came in 1972 and things were as normal as they would ever get again. Technology had reached its peak. There wasn’t much more that could be done. They had introduced something called a “handheld calculator,” the HP-35. We couldn’t think of much use for it. Imagine people walking around distracted adding numbers from something in their hands. It would be both dangerous and a waste of time. Besides, it cost $395. It was nuts.

Yep. Technology had peaked, no doubt about that.

I encountered my first case of being what I call “neighborhood filicide.” It wouldn’t be my last. It happened, by chance, in one of our major cities. The powers had finally decided that neighborhood preservation was a superior concept to neighborhood demolition. I can’t imagine why it took them so long.

At any rate, we had gotten a grant approved for funds to reconstruct a street in a large minority neighborhood spreading out around a major neighborhood school. The street scheduled for reconstruction connected the school and the local city park, still partially segregated but much used by the neighborhood.

It was a good project, a simple one, much needed, particularly the sidewalks planned to replace the open, trash-filled ditches that the kids had to navigate daily. A group of neighborhood activists had helped gather data for, and complete, the grant application.

As I say, it was a good project, eagerly awaited. That’s why there was such a surprise when all hell broke loose.

It seemed, all of a sudden, that this wasn’t the street the neighborhood wanted upgraded. Folks wanted one a block over fixed instead.

This was odd, because the street a block over didn’t connect anything. It made no sense to change the plan. Grant approval had relied on the benefits to the entire neighborhood. A tempest was beginning to rage, though.  The situation called for a public hearing.

That turned out to be, as many public hearings are, a fiasco. A local “leader” dominated the hearing with loud denunciations of a city that, for reasons only known to the white power structure and its neighborhood pawns, sought to destroy a long-standing and vibrant community. This was racial genocide at its worst, he implied.

Other leaders of the neighborhood, who had helped with the grant, and who had come to the hearing to support the original plan, sat in thunderous silence with heads downcast.

Oddly, it turned into my first professional encounter in which opinions grew from feelings and not from facts, a situation that works better in religion than in government.

What caused the debacle? The reason turned out to be simple one, one that would be repeated in my career multiple times in varied situations. The issue wasn’t neighborhood revitalization. It wasn’t racial. It was economic. Guess who owned three or four shabby rent houses on the “preferred” street? Guess who gained the most trust and prevailed?

Today, there is a crumbling street, with weed-choked sidewalks, serving nothing but a couple derelict houses in a minority neighborhood in our state. A block over, kids still walk along, through, and over, ditches filled with broken bottles, needles, and less appetizing trash, to get to the city park.

Sometimes, those who knowingly do harm to our neighborhoods and other institutions, are the ones who should love them the most.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 14 (Cont._3)

It was a few months into 1972 and the Riverside Drive crowd was beginning to wear a little thin with me. I think the bug of ambition initiated it. My friend Jackie, despite the benefits she brought, was starting to suffocate. I needed make a choice between the old ways and new ones.

I liked to read of an evening when work didn’t send me off on a trip somewhere. I had gotten interested in the so-called “Holy Grail” literature and that led me to Eliot and Frazer. Jackie cared nothing for that and could prove aggravating at times.

Cooper Burley had lost his job drafting and was increasingly seeking loans that would never be paid back. As for others on Riverside Drive, one night, I was to learn days later, someone had introduced what they then called “Horse” to a party down the street. A few tried it and said it was nice.

That all did it for me. I was ready for a change. Baseball legend Yogi Berra receives credit for “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

I did. Casting off the old social ways became easier when I learned that Cooper had been making runs to Louisiana for some reason or other in his old Chevy Stingray. Coming back one night, he crashed into a car parked on a highway and died before his 30^th birthday. It dawned on me that I had been lucky. Life can get you one way or another.

Don’t think it was easy saying goodbye to the 1960s. They had proved to be strange and sometimes interesting times. It would later be said that if you remembered them you really weren’t there.

I remembered most of them. Some I chose to forget. Some were still jogged by the daily news. Then President Nixon had just authorized a massive bombing campaign targeting all NVA troops invading South Vietnam along with B-52 air strikes against North Vietnam, declaring to a confidant, "The bastards have never been bombed like they're going to be bombed this time."

It was becoming clear that, though I might change, some things never would.

Opportunity knocked. I would initiate my change by upgrading my living quarters. Through an acquaintance I learned that an unfurnished apartment would be available in the more upscale building next door. Smitty, the manager, was delighted that I would take it. I was white, after all. It would certainly improve my status as a rising star in the Arkansas professional class.

It would have the additional benefit in that the crowd on Riverside Drive wouldn’t know, at least for a spell, where I had gone. Goodbye drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

I toured the ground floor apartment, a nice one-bedroom affair with central heat and air, carpets, and small patio and back yard offering a breathtaking view of the Arkansas River.

It was a major step up for me, or at least it would be as soon as I could lay hands on some furniture.

Little could I imagine who might be the weekend roommate of the woman living in one of the apartments above me.

So long. It's been
good to know you.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Fourteen (Cont._2)

Things were simpler for an urban planner back in 1972. In some ways, that is. For example, there were still youngsters who didn’t get a new car upon turning 16. Thus, there weren’t too many families with five or six vehicles and no place to park them. There were even interurban bus systems still operating between most cities.

Transportation, as a concept, was changing, though. Cities were captives of a transportation planning mania that eschewed the traditional grid system of streets, blocks and lots. While it was true that this method of street layout often failed to respect topographical conditions, it was a marvel of handling traffic efficiently in many cases.

It also provided multiple routes for both motorists and emergency service providers. Oh, and it came in handy during evacuation needs created by natural disaster. In all, it worked pretty well, if fitted to the lay of the land.

But we had developed an obsession with crooked streets, the crookeder the better. The Urban Planning Bible said it best, “Blessed is the crooked way, but evil abounds in the straight.” If a person knew her or his way around their subdivision, the planners had failed. In later years, there would be longtime residents of large developments that still carried street maps of their community while driving.

Then we developed that most insidious traffic monster, the so-called “one-way” couplet. This involved three parallel streets. The middle would remain open to two-way traffic. The outer two would allow one-way traffic moving in opposite directions.

The thought processes that created them has been lost in the dustbins of urban history.

It had something to do with the personal vehicle. That was becoming the ultimate ruler of urban planning. No neighborhood, historic district, commercial district, or park system was safe as long as the efficiency of automobile movement was suffering the slightest impairment. And, of course, the ultimate goal of the transportation planners was to allow interurban commuting by personal vehicle.

The provision of new commuter lanes would become the raison d'être not only of our highway department, but those of many other states as well. So, we built them, commuter lanes that is.

And lo, the effect this would have on the cities of our country. Remember the mention of a case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, that had wound its way through the Supreme Court in 1971? In 1972, few were thinking of it. What effect could an order effecting the busing of school kids in North Carolina have on the urban development patterns of America?

Stay tuned.

Why would you not want
to live where you work?

My Redacted Life: Chapter Fourteen

Mondays would come and I would be back at work. I walked a little taller now. I had my own client. Malvern was a nice town, not far away. They made bricks there and mainly minded their own business.

The city manager was a man named Ken Parker. We would form a friendship that would last decades. At the time, however, he was wary that I might do something to embarrass him or the city. That's never a good move in the consulting business.

Here’s how I chose to handle the mission.

After the deadline came for planning commission business submissions, I would pick up the material and analyze the cases. More often than not, there would be a request to change the zoning on a piece of property. I would look at several factors

- Would approval constitute so-called “spot-zoning?” This would involve a small parcel, the re-zoning of which would not be consistent with the land use plan and would grant benefits to one property owner that wouldn’t be granted to a neighbor.

- Would it conform to adopted plans?

- Would the re-zoning act as a destabilizing factor on the neighborhood, i.e. would the size, height, bulk, and traffic generated by the new use be inconsistent with the productive use of neighboring land?

- And, of course, who was making the request?

I would prepare a report, make copies, and we would mail them to the commissioners in time for the meeting. Wouldn’t you know it? The first time I did the report, the chairman of the planning commission made a request for a re-zoning. It was a bad one, but the chairman had married into power.

Being a fast learner, I honed a skill that would last me for an entire career. It involves a combination of doubletalk, misdirection, discombobulation, perplexity, and downright deviousness. I call it “implicit non-specific clarity.” Check it out. It’s in all the textbooks, I think.

Anyway, it worked. The commissioners didn’t bother to read my analysis. They simply approved the request as they would have had I charged up that hill with my guns blazing. I would live to fight another battle, somewhere else, on my terms, where I might have a chance of winning. Time changes the battlefield, patience promotes advantage, and circumstances even the odds.

I had learned that lesson from my former enemies in Southeast Asia. Good tactics and skill are not enough. One must have a winning strategy as well.

Yep.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Thirteen (Cont._4)

Weekends were nice as 1972 sped along, though I often put in half-days at the office on Saturdays. Sainted Mother wanted me home, always, on the weekends. She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which a young man wouldn’t want to spend the entire weekend with his mother.

They are like that, mothers are, particularly southern ones. Of course mine never met my friend Jackie, or some of the others who tempted me away from the comforts of home. Secrets enrich, after all.

Some Sundays, I would go fishing with my father on his only day off. We had fun, but he took it a bit more seriously than I did. I’ll always remember talking to him long-distance during our years apart and hearing of a fruitless fishing trip. “Didn’t catch much, and we fished hard,” with emphasis on the word “hard.”

I always took the position that if a fisherman fished “hard,” he was missing the point.

They were good folks, though, my mother and father. He had made enough money working at a CCC camp during the Depression to come back to Arkansas and marry Mother. They had sharecropped until my sister came. Then a stroke of luck put them in possession of a hog, which Daddy butchered. He peddled the meat in Pine Bluff to old customers of his daddy. One thing led to another and they saved enough to purchase an old grocery store just south of the city.

He ran that store six days a week for 40 years, so I didn’t see a lot of hardship in working some Saturdays. I think I developed a reputation for being a hard worker, though at times a short-tempered one. Nobody’s perfect, I suppose, though I often regret not being as even-tempered as some I knew.

Oh well. Things were changing. We had a new secretary/receptionist/typist named Christie Porter. She would prove to be one of the most capable people I’ve ever known, a Master of Production. In fact, with her arrival, the firm was about to begin a record of hiring unusually talented and gifted people, a record unmatched in professional circles. Some are still making marks on the city and state.

I’d like to think I had some part in hiring them, but I didn’t. It was pure luck. If anything, a slight ability to spot a better class of people may have contributed a modicum of assistance.

Anyway, our firm would be blessed with high-level personnel, over and over again through the years. Our state and our cities would reap the blessings as well.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Thirteen (Cont._3)

As the fateful year of 1972 progressed, a sense of stability settled in and I knew I had entered the proper field of work and study. It paid well. It accorded with my long-nurtured progressive leanings. It attracted the best of people into its ranks. If done properly, it could lengthen the life-sustaining period during which our planet suffered humans to exist. Simply stated, it satisfied.

It also abounded with political minefields.

I discovered that one day upon being ushered into the head-man’s office. Beckoning me to sit, he drew on a pipe he used to express gravity. I sat back.

“Are you ready?” He threw the question at me as if there were only one acceptable answer. I could decide to be cute and reply “Ready for what?” He wasn’t a man who tolerated “cute” very well. I chose my patented maneuver, honed by four years of military service. I call it “aggressive suck-up,” and it has only failed me a few times over the years, those mainly in marital situations wherein superior intelligence quickly demolishes subterfuge.

I leaned forward and said in my most sincere voice, “I’m sure that with your help and guidance, I am.”

This resulted in a long draw on the pipe and a slow exhalation of smoke. I waited. Who could possibly predict the outcome? Who even could guess where the hell we were headed?

After checking the ashes in his pipe, he looked up at me. “You’d best be.”

Again, my military training guided me. “Yes sir,” I said. Then I shut up. I knew from experience that the one who didn’t speak next would emerge the winner.

He studied me as if I were a figure in a museum diorama. He drew on the pipe with no result. He laid it aside and again looked me over. At last he spoke. “We could hire an experienced planner to fill in,” said, “but that would cost more money than we can afford.”

I nodded as if the two of us had just settled upon a jointly-developed cure for cancer.

“Vines pissed off the new city manager in Malvern, and he prefers that we start sending someone else to work with their planning commission.” He stared into me, into someplace I had never known existed. I stared back. “I can’t go,” he said.

I must have looked surprised.

“It wasn’t Jim’s fault. He just told them the truth a little too plainly. He does that sometimes. Doesn't always work in our profession. Anyway, it’s opening up a spot.”

I nodded again, filling the nod, I hoped, with an air of wisdom long held from mortal view and reserved for only the highest of the gods. He picked up his pipe, tapped residue into an ash tray, and reached for his tobacco pouch, a nice leather one, very expensive I imagined. He held the pipe in one hand, the pouch in the other, and looked at me as if offering me the choice between two of life’s most important treasures.

“Want it?”

I considered standing and shouting “Sir, yes sir!” I had learned to do that someplace or other. Instead, I chose understatement. “I do,” I said.

It’s funny how those two words, strung together at the right time, can produce such a cosmic change in one’s life.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Thirteen: (Cont._2)

As 1972 got underway, it was nothing but tall cotton for me. My salary was nearing, and would soon pass, that of my former classmates who had a four-year head start on me. There were rumors that Little Rock would see another high-rise office building in another year or so. Plans were proceeding to turn Main Street and a block of Fifth into a mall. We all still thought it was a good idea.

Well, nobody's perfect.

I was still attending planning commission meetings with both owners of the firm. We would prepare reports on the upcoming planning commission meeting and make recommendations. I was beginning to see the logic behind the process. Our primary goals, in increasing order of importance were

1. Present the facts
2. Analyze the facts
3. Consider alternative courses of action
4. Decide the best course for the health, safety, and welfare of the community
5. Make sure the best course wouldn't piss off anyone in the power structure
6. Make a recommendation

It was a process that would see me safely through the decades to come.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Thirteen

The year 1972 sort of eased in. I didn’t make a commotion, fearing I might wake up from a dream standing behind a bunker, rifle in hand, and staring into the jungle.

We were working on a number of planning projects. I spent most of my time working on a major project for the city of Hope in southwest Arkansas. Part of the project would be righteous endeavor, providing rehabilitation assistance to homeowners in a low-income section of the city.

Alas, the other aspect of the project would involve a misguided attempt to follow the advice of internationally known architect Victor Gruen, born Viktor David Grünbaum. He was an Austrian-born architect best known as a pioneer in the design of shopping malls in the United States. Yes, shopping malls. Once he had facilitated the downfall of downtowns as dominant retail centers, he had a plan for their salvation.

He proposed simply turning Downtown into another shopping mall. He should have stuck to designing buildings.

At any rate, I was becoming intimately acquainted with this charming town not far from the Texas and Louisiana borders. I doubted if anything or anyone of significance would emerge from within its borders, but it was a nice place inhabited by nice people. It was also the first city in which I worked that placed a female on its planning commission, alongside an African-American male who had preceded her by nearly a year.

It was a pattern that repeated itself countless times over the years: first a person of color, next a person of the female gender. Change comes slowly sometimes. Planning proved no exception.

I was enjoying my current apartment, though it was old and hardly sparkled. The landlord was a man called “Smitty,” who managed my building and the newer one next door. He was friendly, attentive, and was always pleasant, even if you interrupted him during a meal with some minor complaint.

Work was both fun and fulfilling. The new partner—the engineer—and I didn’t, as they say down South, “gee and haw” too well together, but that really didn’t affect my career. I avoided him and he quickly expressed the feeling that I wasn’t of significant consequence to warrant his attention. He didn’t mind expressing his opinion of planners, and I didn’t mind expressing my opinion of people who, as he had, joined the National Guard. At that time in our country’s history (it would change drastically and tragically much later), it was a move back then designed to avoid actual military service.

That’s all I’ll say about that topic.

Let’s see … oh, lest I forget. As I went home each day, there was a young lady with luxurious long hair and eye-popping beauty, in a city some 20 miles away who had just finished teaching an unruly band of third-graders in her hometown. She had friends in the apartment building next door and visited there often. I knew nothing about it. That apartment was as step up, socially, from mine, so I stuck with my friends in the opposite direction on Riverside Drive. Class is class, but benefits are benefits, after all.

As with many young teachers working for minimal wages, this young lady was still wearing her college wardrobe while teaching.

Given the then-prevalent style of mini-skirts for well-formed young college ladies, and remembering my lingering infatuation with a third-grade teacher named Miss Roundtree, I can only imagine the fantasies created. Ah, but that had nothing to do with me.

Or did it?

Waiting in ambush?

My Redacted Life: Chapter Twelve: (Cont._3)

So 1971 drew to a close and I had survived. I had gained a year of experience both in urban planning and in dealing with civilian life. I can't truthfully say which was the most valuable. I had been running into some of my old acquaintances from college. Some of them didn't seem too happy. I met a few veterans such as myself. They were, to a person, well adjusted and pleased to be in the "free world."

That's why it has always amazed me that the press was able to build such myths about them. Oh well.

Christmas Day passed and worked resumed on Monday. The staff realized that all the bosses, including the new engineering partner, had planned the week off between Christmas and New Year's. We were on our own.

There began a tradition that exists, I imagine, to this day, best described by the old adage, "When the cat's away, the mice will play." We were enjoying the business equivalent of having "the crops laid by." There weren't any dire deadlines hanging over us like giant spider webs. We relaxed. It had been a trying year and we deserved it.

We discovered the benefit of the "designated answerer" in case one of the bosses called in. We made a list of errands that required staff to be absent and developed quite a skill at taking messages. Friday came and for the half-day that we were scheduled to work, some ingredients miraculously appeared that produced a gallon of Bloody Marys. This time we left the phone off the hook.

So ended that marvelous year in which I learned urban planning, responsibility, the benefits of study, deceit, trickery, and loyalty in equal measures, all that a "Young Turk" needed to get ahead.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Twelve (Cont._2)

Goodness gracious but 1971 was an exciting year. I had survived the challenges of entering a profession totally unprepared. I learned many of the basics that year and filed away some lessons not taught as formal curriculum in any university. To say that I had learned much that year was like saying a bear cub learns a lot his first year on earth.

And I hadn’t had to carry a weapon, other than a devious and calculating mind, one always “locked and loaded” on full-automatic. Even so, I had learned that, just as in my former line of work, it always proved advantageous to keep your head below the sandbags. I had sharpened the useful skill of not telling someone everything I knew on first meeting them. I retained a lesson learned in Boot Camp that, as someone said, “All thoughts do not need to be spoken.”

I had learned that a little paranoia can be a good friend if one listens and that, as the Apostle said, “The quality of mercy is not strained.” Conversely, one should always pay attention to the person with “scrambled-eggs” on the hat. I was beginning to be less certain each day that my four years in the military had been a total waste. Learning to live by one’s wits is a marvelous skill, no matter what profession one follows. Nothing teaches that better than the military and nothing rewards it more than life among the sharks and shoals of business.

I hadn’t found love in 1971, but I had found comfort on more than one occasion. I hadn’t found success, but I had avoided failure. I had found that age and an acquired sense of treachery were the allies of the ambitious. In short, I was no longer afraid.

As the holiday system settled in on our collective consciousness, I looked forward to being able to participate. In downtown Little Rock, there were still enough shops and mainline stores existing to create a pleasant and comforting atmosphere. Stores began staying open later and as I left work in the dark each day, the sharp and happy staccato greetings of shoppers filled the air beneath the bright holiday lights. Everyone seemed so pleasant to one another. Were such times here to stay? Time would tell.

Christmas Day came on a Saturday that year. I had a major deadline due for some project or other, so I put in half-a-day Friday morning. Then I left, walked into the MM Cohn store at Fifth and Main to buy a last-minute present, and drove to the old hometown for the weekend. It was the second straight Christmas I had spent with my family after missing four in a row. It was the first ever, at nearly 30 years of age, that I had money to buy presents for each of my family.

Life was good. That first year had gone well and 1972 was going to be even better. Wasn’t it?

Oh, hell yes.

The end of "Ripple Days?"

My Redacted Life: Chapter Twelve

As the summer of 1971 passed into fall, I was traveling a lot. The company was serving as planners on contract with a number of cities. These were vibrant communities having yet to encounter the trials that were to face them in the near future. I was soaking in experience like a dry sponge.

I began to notice some minor change in the makeup of planning commissions. When I had first began attending commission meetings, the commissioners, were, without exception, middle-aged men of Caucasian background, overly represented by real estate and insurance professionals. These overlapped, as many real estate brokers in communities sold insurance as well. Sometimes they also owned banks. Power stayed close to the center in most communities.

As time passed, though, I noticed a slight change in the makeup of many planning commissions. An African-American face would appear from nowhere. It would belong to a local professional in the Black community. A local dentist proved a common choice. Whatever the background, the choice would be a safe one for the power structure. There would be no independent thinking.

In fact, there wasn’t much independent thinking evident among most planning commissions. Each boasted a “bell cow,” usually the local developer or his representative. When a vote was called, no head would turn toward the appointed leader, but the votes would signal a pre-arranged agreement.

Conflict would occur on occasion because of a local power struggle. If the community was large enough, there could be competing factions, usually from competing banks, sometimes competing real estate companies. Often, a faction represented both. It could provide entertainment unless it turned tragic, as one did when the patriarch of the losing faction went to his office one evening and took his own life.

Not all of the lessons I was learning came from textbooks.

It wasn’t that the power brokers were evil. They were just protective of their privileges. Once they had taken care of those, they would, in the fashion of the 1970s South, take care of the communities. They established water and sewer systems that served all citizens. They cleaned up environmental dangers. They built fire stations. They built parks, segregated parks, but parks. They built, or sought funding for the building of, new traffic arteries. They sought sources of new jobs.

It seemed that, deep in their hearts, they believed that a harbor served humanity best when its tides lifted all ships. The fact that the tides lifted some ships higher than others simply represented the proper and given order of things. As long as most citizens benefitted a bit, it was okay for a few to benefit a lot. The banquet table was spread for all, but the rich and powerful dined first. For the common masses, as the heroine of a popular novel would later comment, “Enough is as good as feast.”

Then there were the locally owned newspapers, usually independent in their thinking. They did a good job of protecting the powerful from any of their baser instincts.

I watched our cities grow and I watched myself grow as 1971 moved toward a close. The year, overall, had been good to me. Even adversity had, by not destroying me, made me stronger. As it drew to a close, one might have observed me and said, “He was almost always happy, I think.”

Yep.