My Redacted Life: Chapter Eleven (Cont._4)

As I continued in the urban planning profession in 1971, I and my colleagues were standing on the shoulders of some giants in the field. They consisted of a small group of dedicated professionals based out of the University of Arkansas. I never knew them all, but they included Bob Middleton, Phil Simon, and Jim Vizzier among others.

These men covered the entire state from Fayetteville, in pre-interstate Arkansas. They organized planning commissions and prepared plans, along with supporting regulations for cities, mostly the smaller ones. They traveled pretty much at their own expense. Bob Middleton’s son Rob, who became an urban planner himself, would later tell of how his dad would leave Fayetteville at four in the morning, drive to Smackover, Arkansas to work and perhaps attend a planning commission that evening and drive back. Meals consisted of perhaps a jar of peanuts consumed along the way.

Phil Simon claimed later, of driving from Fayetteville to Osceola across the state and back, a trip that included a ferry crossing at Norfork, to attend a planning commission meeting. They were tough men who must have truly loved what they were doing.

A man originally from the rural side of planning, Bill Bonner headed up the group. Later, the professional planners of the state would establish a “Bill Bonner Award,” given to those in the state who exhibited extraordinary devotion to the profession.

I didn’t know much about this group when I began my career. Some of the projects on which I worked involved updates of their modest efforts. Superciliousness posed a serious temptation in those days. We had the capacity of producing maps in color and a state of the art IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter that could store data and allow the changing of font types. Would there ever be more advanced word-processing devices than that?

Our capabilities certainly made the old-fashioned looking products from Fayetteville look amateurish.

As time went by though, I found myself appreciating the professionalism that the group from my Alma Mater imparted under such trying circumstances with limited budgets. I also came to appreciate the impetus behind their efforts. It flowed from a country and state that believed in confronting and addressing urban problems. Our Leaders were brash enough even to believe that we possessed the wherewithal to solve those problems.

The world was changing, and the country would not permit the decay and death of communities bypassed by modern history, as well as the Interstate Highway System. At least we thought so then.

That was in an America that can seem as having existed a long time ago in a place far, far away.

The ultimate and then some