Learning about life ...

Some of my life’s best learnings came through adversity, or what seemed to me at the time adversity. Bear with me while I elucidate. Elucidation is a minor talent I possess that, itself, grew from adversity.

Early in my career as an urban planner, I ran afoul of one of the most mean-spirited people ever to emigrate to our state. His name is Paul Greenberg and, at the time, he was the editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial, my hometown newspaper. Because of an innocuous issue, he developed a hatred for our firm, which was doing some work for the city. To adapt a phrase that J. Edgar Hoover used for Bobby Kennedy, nobody hates like Paul Greenberg. Just ask Bill Clinton.

As a result of a year-long series of sometimes personal attacks in his editorials, attacks that tickled my aunts to death and mortified Sainted Mother, I developed a talent when writing. “What talent?” one might ask. It’s not a talent as much as a cautionary instinct, which is to think before I write. I imagine that Paul Greenberg, all full of venom, is watching every word I write. Let’s just say that it helps me proceed with care aforethought.

Adversities related to sports took awhile longer to teach me. But after a series of humiliating experiences, experiences that still contribute to my 3:00 a.m. insomnia attacks, I decided that I would never excel at anything requiring manual dexterity, speed, strength, visual acuity, good reflexes, or basic coordination. It took time, but I even found a girl to date who didn’t regard those traits highly. She was seeing a basketball coach at the time, and I think that the experience of watching a few games while sitting on a hard bench, may have convinced hear that a boring sloth whose main dream was to learn to play the banjo wasn’t the worst deal around.

That brings us to my military service, an issue that I never expected I would have to face. I had suffered asthma as a child and it was well known around Pine Bluff High and Maxine’s Tap Room in Fayetteville, that asthma was the best “no-service” guarantee around. There was this clinic in West Memphis that still held my records, and when LBJ and General William “The Unsuspecting” Westmoreland came for my body, all I had to do was present those records. I was in a nice place, surrounded by friends, and set for the future. “Get your fodder somewhere else, boys.”

Imagine my surprise when I learned that the clinic had since suffered a fire that destroyed many of the records and was run by the son of the original doctor. Imagine my further discomfiture on learning that said son believed that military service was next to spiritual salvation and that any male with a body large enough to receive a bullet who desired to avoid such service deserved to be imprisoned.

No sweat, I’ll join the Navy, avoid combat, see the world, and spend ample amounts of time in the company of beautiful South Pacific ladies wearing Bougainville ear-blossoms and mouthing my name like a Trump moans “money.”

“So long you draftee suckers.”

Well we all know how that turned out. But you know what? I learned a lot in the Navy, some of it even legal. The greatest thing I ever learned was that it is very important that one be happy wherever one is. There is no guarantee that things won’t change, as Baptist preachers like to say, “in the twinkling of an eye.”

It sure did for me, and, when they saw me in uniform, you should have seen all my “friends” scatter like cockroaches in the light. Know what? I’ve been better off without them. It’s just a matter of learning from adversity.

Are you coming or not?
Yeah, I went.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 31

As my marriage date of August 17, 1972 approached, I concentrated on work as best I could. I was learning a lot more about urban planning than I was about women, but what the heck? Our firm had gotten an engineering contract for a street project in Pine Bluff. What seemed simple was to get complicated.

The engineer and his staff, in close communication with the city engineer in Pine Bluff, began laying out plans to construct the street according to the standards outlined in the existing master street plan of the city. It had been adopted years earlier and, of course, our firm had nothing to do with the standards it proposed. To ignore or violate those standards would have invited censure.

The editor of the local newspaper, Paul Greenberg saw a chance to make print, using an out-of-town firm as an invading army, hovering over the city and drooling with monstrous intent. Instead of a needed project, he constructed it, journalistically, as the intrusion of a white power structure into a minority community that was simply minding its own business. He phrased it as a classic case of pleasing the rich at the expense of the poor.

Day after day, he pounded upon the unjustness of improving a street serving this peaceful neighborhood. He found an audience with a local business owner who would have profited from the improvements but who had political hopes that outweighed advantages to his business. The contrived controversy eventually placed him on the city council.

The city agreed to reduce the scope of improvements. Then the project became one designed to destroy the existing neighborhood by encouraging suburban sprawl. It got real ugly.

The odd thing was that the city had received money for street improvements that could have been used for any number of projects in any number of neighborhoods. The mayor and council had chosen this street specifically because it would have benefited a minority community, at least the elected officials saw it that way.

It didn’t concern me much, this affair. The engineering staff suffered by not being paid for all the redesign and receiving much personal vilification. I used it as a learning experience, to wit:

No good deed ever goes unpunished.

Keep an eye on journalists. I found, over the years, that most were decent folks. They weren’t your friend, simply fellow professionals out to do their job. You didn’t lie to them and you didn’t try to use them for your own purposes. They live on information, whether it benefits you or not. Learn to live with it. Failure to do so will make you look silly and guilty. Finally, most journalists are ethical. Greenberg was an exception.

Projects must be vetted through the neighborhood in which the project is to exist. Many neighborhoods in our country have suffered and died, and will continue to do so, because of projects designed not for the people who live there but for people who are just passing through.

Plans aren’t always perfect and life is not always fair.

And, as the Vietnamese say, a bad strategy and good tactics means defeat. It just may take longer than will a combination of bad strategy and bad tactics.

I tried telling my bride-to-be about these things and more. She feigned interest, but I could tell her mind was in August.

"That which does not kill us makes
 us stronger." - Friedrich Nietzsche 

My Redacted Life: Chapter Eight: (Cont._4)

Life wasn’t turning out like I had expected. How could I have known that I would be the chief target of the editorial page of the Pine Bluff Commercial for weeks shortly after the birthing of my career? I was a mere lad in 1971 and Paul Greenberg was making literary mincemeat of me.

It went like this. A young reporter named James something or other would report on something. He wasn’t a bad fellow, but desirous, I suppose, of keeping his boss happy. The next day, Greenberg would take a line or two from the news piece, twist it, or completely fabricate something about it, and light in on me.

That’s something to look forward to every day. And it was all because I didn’t think the city of Pine Bluff should render a person’s entire property useless in order to satisfy a public desire to preserve a greenbelt adjacent to the city.

Greenberg’s MIT source said it didn’t matter. What he thought was proper came first. The editor was also in a liberal state of mind back then. The individual could just give way to the public. He would change positions like a call-girl on a “role-play” assignment later, when he signed on with a conservative newspaper. But that was in the future. Now was now, back then, and it was dreadful.

I’ll wind the tale up here. We stood our ground, and the company would serve as a favorite Greenberg target for years. Herbert Hoover once said that “nobody hates like Bobby Kennedy,” but all I can say is that Herbert Hoover may have never met Paul Greenberg.

We finished the plan. The city adopted it. Much later the city repealed the greenbelt ordinance. I don’t think they ever replaced it and I’ve always thought they would have when we worked on the plan, had such controversy not erupted. Be the time of repeal, Greenberg was off on another kick, pissing and moaning because the government didn’t declare a “VV-Day,” complete with parades, when we finally pulled our troops out of Vietnam.

I tried to turn the experience into an educational “lemonade.” I learned to make friends with journalists and to always tell them the truth, maybe not all at once, but as time passed, and at the critical points. I learned not to charge up a hill with a big sword in my hand unless my client was ahead of me leading the assault.

For everything I’ve written or produced since that time, I have put myself in the mindset that Paul Greenberg and the ghost of his MIT man would read it, analyze it for weaknesses, and use their collective brilliance to editorialize against it. That has helped a great deal in my career.

Finally, I learned that it isn’t enough just to be brilliant in this world, or even a genius. One must temper that intelligence with a consideration of what impact its efforts will have on the public at large.

In short, I lived through the ordeal, albeit with some degree of resentment that I’ve been unable to shed, as the reader may have noticed.

Oh, and here’s a tidbit. The Supreme Court of the United States, by 1992, had fully established that ordinances such as the hallowed greenbelt ordinance of Pine Bluff violated Amendment Five of the United States Constitution. You just can’t regulate away the complete use of a person’s property without just compensation.

To paraphrase a law school article, regulations that eliminate all economically beneficial uses of a property are considered a “regulatory taking.” In Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003, the Supreme Court held that when property is rendered worthless by a regulation, such a taking has occurred, regardless of the fact that a legitimate governmental objective led to the regulation.

Odd … I was right and Mr. Pulitzer Prize and Mr. MIT grad were wrong, all along, and I a pitiful product of Arkansas public schools. Go figure. Actually, I’m pretty smart myself.           

To this day, Paul Greenberg has never apologized to me.

Still waiting.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Eight (Cont._3)

1971 wore on and I continued my work at the consulting firm, preparing a park plan for my hometown. Trouble was brewing. Boy, was it.

We had followed the city’s direction and had studied the issues surrounding an existing “greenbelt ordinance” that denied certain property owners any use of property that touched Bayou Bartholomew, a sluggish stream that bordered the city on the south of its urban area. Somehow, it seemed to me, it was excessive to frame the restrictions along property lines. That prevented productive use of portions of a person's property that was to hell and gone from any public need or purpose.

In a public setting, we suggested that the boundaries of the restrictive ordinance be reshaped along an elevation line, assuring both a uniform boundary and a regulatory restriction that only affected unusable parts of a person’s property.

It seemed like a reasonable revision to me. The city got its greenbelt and the property owners got the use of portions of their property that weren’t needed for that greenbelt.

Reasonable it may have been, but all hell was about to break loose nontheless.

As I have mentioned, the editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial, a vicious and talented scribe named Paul Greenberg lay in wait for an opportunity to harass, humiliate, and torment the existing mayor, Offie Lites.

I was to be the vessel for pouring on the fiery rhetoric, a naïve, optimistic young man, totally inexperienced in the intricacies of local politics. I doubt, as well, if my name helped.

The first indication that I was headed for trouble was when a local genius from the city sought me out. Arthur Stern was a brilliant man who had graduated a couple of years after me from the all-white high school in our city. He was an architectural graduate of MIT and attended, I was led to understand, the same synagogue as Mr. Greenberg.

Arthur stormed into our Little Rock office one morning, snarling and frightening the receptionist, and demanding to see, under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, all our notes related to the city’s park plan. The law was fairly new and, rather than argue as to whether a private firm had to follow its mandates on a moment’s notice, we offered up the material. Arthur and the toady he had brought with him began to pour over the material like dogs searching in the grass for a piece of dropped beefsteak. The toady was a former classmate named Tom, whom I had always considered a friend .... until that moment. Life is strange.

As I say, Arthur was a true genius and he was to die young. Following the dictum of De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, I shall refrain from describing the arrogant, insulting, demeaning, and humiliating way that he treated me and my colleagues that morning. In simple terms, the city’s greenbelt ordinance was a modern manifestation of the noblest works of humankind and we were all idiots educated in low-class public colleges if we suggested any alteration. Compromises were for sissies.

To his credit, he never cursed me. In fact, I don’t remember his ever actually calling me by my name. He just took notes, grimaced, and pointed from time to time for something that elicited particular disdain. After what seemed like an hour of agony, he rose and pushed the pile of papers toward me.

“Just wait,” he said, “until the paper gets hold of this.”

And so it began.

It wasn’t my particular dream to have the first appearance of my name in the newspaper as one describing me as a low-class idiot threatening to destroy a city with no more concern than a cow flicking away a horsefly. It left my Sainted Mother in tears, and her sisters in giggles, their having found proof at last of my long-suspected worthlessness.

After all, there it was in the newspaper, and newspapers wouldn’t lie. It got worse when the editor discovered a typo in an early draft of the plan. I had misspelled the work “athlete,” and that offered the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor a chance to spend half of an editorial exalting in a description of me as an untalented Yogi Berra without the good looks.

I, believing in truth, justice, and the American way, stood my ground. It didn’t matter, I was doomed by simple association, but I saw no reason at the time to back down. I looked around for help. Local politicians and the affected property owners were steadfast in support of my recommendations, but nowhere to be seen when the rhetoric ripened.

I saw myself as Will Kane. Greenberg presented me as Norman Bates.

It was about this time that I began having trouble falling to sleep. It would only get worse.

Maybe I should have
stayed in the Navy.

Redacted Life: Chapter Eight (Cont._2)

Here I was, a young planner in 1971, on my first solo assignment and about to incur the wrath of a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer. Further, it was an assignment in my own hometown. I think the conflict to come drew its strength from enmity between Paul Greenberg, the journalist, and the Mayor, a man named Offie Lites.

As the African proverb goes, “When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

The assignment, as I have mentioned, was to prepare a stand-alone park plan for the city. The city council had previously adopted, as part of its planning, a so-called “Greenbelt Ordinance” designed to perpetuate a band of natural area between the existing urban area and any expansion of the city in coming years.

This concept fell in line with the so-called “garden city movement” a method initiated in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard in the United Kingdom. Garden cities were intended to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by "greenbelts", containing proportionate areas of residences, industry and agriculture.

It was a sound theory, and the undevelopable nature of the Bayou Bartholomew floodplain lent itself well to the idea. The ordinance that the city council had passed was well-intentioned and supported by precedent.

There was one major flaw in its design, one that would cause me many sleepless nights, and a lifetime of resentment. The limits of the greenbelt weren’t based on elevations, distances from the bayou, or floodplain contours. This would have reserved basically undevelopable land for the greenbelt, placing only minimal restrictions on the use of private property.

That wasn’t the way the ordinance was drawn, though. Instead of reserving land below a certain elevation, the ordinance drew up the greenbelt boundary according to property lines. If a person’s property touched the bayou, the entire property fell within the greenbelt and its use restrictions.

Why was this a problem? Two reasons bear pointing out. First, the use restrictions on land within the greenbelt were severe. The land could only be used for … a greenbelt. That is to say the land couldn’t be used at all, only maintained in its natural state, to be enjoyed by the general public at no expense to themselves.

The second problem created more contention. Why would anyone want to develop a densely vegetated, snake and varmint invested, floodway in the first place? As it turned out, some of the property that bordered the bayou continued past the floodway, then beyond the floodplain boundary, rose up a hill created by eons of erosion, crossed an area of flat, developable land, and terminated at the boundary of the Pine Bluff Country Club golf course.

What might have been the choicest property in the city, property that was in some places far beyond any reasonable outline of a greenbelt, could now only be left in a natural state.

Needless so say, some property owners were pissed. It is needless also to add that some of those property owners were people of means.

After some deliberation, we expressed the opinion that the ordinance intended a sound planning principle, was flawed in design, and would present few problems in a redesign that would maintain the integrity of the greenbelt concept and provide relief to the property owner.

Mayor Lites agreed that the repair job was in order and nodded for us to proceed as we worked on the park plan. The parks director agreed as well.

Paul Greenberg decided that this presented an opportunity to create a crisis from nothing in order to harass the mayor, and perhaps to irritate those associated with the Pine Bluff Country Club, an institution historically closed to members of his faith. He therefore re-invented the Pine Bluff Greenbelt Ordinance, in its original form, as the greatest example of urban planning since Pierre Charles L'Enfant had presented the layout for Washington, D.C.

He immediately established it as a document only slightly less sacred than the nation’s Declaration of Independence.

That set the stage for a confrontation, a confrontation that would, on occasion, make me long for the relative peace of a war zone.

Greenbelts: Nice if you have
the money to pay for them.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Eight

It started with good news. It would end months later with my having learned a great deal about human nature, newspapers, and urban planning. I would learn that there are vicious people in the world who would hate me just for expressing an opinion contrary to theirs. I would learn not to charge up any hill protected by institutions that publish whatever they choose daily, buy ink by the barrel, and paper by the ton.

I would, years later, learn that I had been legally prescient in the course I followed. I would learn that it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference by then. In short, I would survive the ordeal, but I still carry the scars.

As I say, it started out with good news, double good news. First, my company had learned that my hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas had hired it to prepare a parks plan for the city. Second, my bosses had decided that it was time for me to take the lead on a planning project. A parks plan was ideal for such an intro, for they were pretty straightforward. Or at least they should be. This one proved otherwise.

To prepare such a plan, one first analyzes a city’s population and gauges public sentiment. Next, one analyzes the existing parks system. One then compares the existing system with national standards for acreage allocated to parks, recommended facilities per population, and spatial allocations. One then prepares a draft for consideration by the public and the city government

One needed to be aware of taboos and social restrictions, some racial, some not, some a little of both. For example, some baseball fields, though city-owned, were reserved for the exclusive use of white boys between the ages of 9 and 12. No exceptions. There would be no footfall profaning this sacred soil with the exception of coaches, umpires, and maintenance personnel. Empty fields, unused school grounds, and vacant lots served the other kids.

Armed with this background, I set about my business. Then I learned of an additional angle. I learned what Vaughn Black, the parks director, had meant when he said that he had a problem that involved city government, rich people, and a newspaper editor. He claimed that he faced a real problem.

Did he ever.

His problem also involved the muddy, smelly, wandering floodway known as Bayou Bartholomew. It had been a favorite area of exploration in my youth. Kids could build hideouts there, sneak around within its dense vegetation to smoke pilfered cigarettes, and hunt for snakes until their mischievous hearts were content. Fishing was allowed, but most folks considered consumption of those fish chancy, for the stream was contaminated both by municipal sewage and agricultural pesticides. The poorest of families partook from necessity. Others didn’t.

What was the problem? Its tentacles spread in a number of directions. First, there was an existing municipal ordinance that sought to establish the bayou and its environs as a “greenbelt” marking the end of urban development to the south of the city, at least in the current phase of its development.

Next, there were rich landowners who objected to parts of said ordinance. Then there was mayor, who like any successful mayor who has ever lived, tended to listen when rich folks spoke. Then there was a citizenry that didn’t much care one way or the other.

Finally, there was a newspaper editor named Paul Greenberg. It turned out that he hated Mayor Offie Lites with a long-simmering passion that pre-dated the present storm that was approaching.

In the account that I will relate, the central fact wasn’t that Greenberg detested the mayor. Nor did it center on the apparent belief that controversies, whether real or concocted, could increase, by the fanning and reporting of those controversies, newspaper readership.

It really wasn’t confined to the fact that Greenberg was a mean-spirited soul, governed by situational principles, who never hesitated for a second to use his position as editor to demean, damage, diminish, or destroy a person’s reputation in order to promote his own ends through his editorials.

No.

The real problem was that he was so damned good at it.