My Redacted Life: Chapter Eleven (Cont._2)

One of the many nice things about working for cities over the years is that one meets such wonderful people. I’ll share one of many.

His name was Mike Kelly and he owned a women’s clothing store in Hope, Arkansas, back when cities had things like woman’s clothing stores right Downtown. We’ve lost so much in America. Small stores like Mike’s represent one of our greatest losses.

Down the street from Mike’s store was a men’s store, where, back when any Southern man had a suit to wear to church and funerals, the purchase of a necktie included the tying of it into a perfect, so all the owner had to do of a Sunday morning was loosen it, slip it on and pull it tight. We’ve lost so much in America.

But back to Mike. He looked exactly as you would expect an Irishman past middle-age to look. Short, wiry, with a melodious voice that made his eyes dance when he talked, he made up for lack of size with an infectious enthusiasm that never wavered. In addition to owning the women’s store, the running of which he left to two competent matrons, Mike ran the local housing authority. That’s when I came to know him.

This was back in the day when actual signed contracts failed in importance to the content of one’s character. In Hope, Arkansas, if Mike Kelly trusted a person and spoke highly of him, that person was trusted by all, end of story.

His wife, also diminutive, was named Margarite. They never had children, a fact which probably made them more attentive and loyal to one another than normal. Oddly enough, she was of the Methodist faith and he was a devoted Catholic. When asked about this, his face would brighten, his eyes would dance, and he would say, as if surprised by the question, “On Sunday mornings, she dresses and goes to the church on the hill that we can see from our living room window. I dress to go to Mass, and we have never talked any further about it.”

Oh, another oddity: When I met Mike in 1971, he and Margarite had not missed an Arkansas Razorback football game since 1947. Notice I said “game,” not home game. This would continue until Margarite died peacefully in her sleep in the mid-1970s.

If the team rated a bowl game at the end of the season, I would always receive a special invitation to sign on to the bus tour he would organize. Sometimes I would go.

Things were breaking up in downtowns across America by the time I knew Mike. We were about to make, in the planning profession, the tragic mistake of thinking that if “malls” were destroying downtowns, we only had to practice what Sir James George Frazer called “imitative magic,” and transform downtown into the best mall-replica we could and all would end well.

Mike trusted us, the planners. It was the only mistake I ever saw him make.

In reality, downtowns faced inevitable doom as dominate retail centers. America lost so much as the centrifugal force of suburban seduction flung retail businesses farther and farther from the city center. No solution would have saved it.

Mike died not long after Margarite. In an early instance of civil justice, he had arranged for his assistant, a capable African-American man to assume directorship of the housing authority. He willed the women’s store to the two women who had run it for years. He left everything else to a niece and nephew who came in one day for the funeral and were never seen again, refusing an offer from a group of friends to set up a small fund for the care of the gravesites.

I was in town the day of Margarite’s funeral and Mike fixed supper for us that evening. When we were finishing, he said, “Don’t worry about the dishes, she’ll take care of those.” Then, “No, I don’t guess she will, will she?”

He had asked me to pick up Margarite’s brother at the Little Rock airport a day or so earlier and drive him to Hope. Someone else had taken him back after the funeral. On the way down, I had remarked to her brother about how much Mike and Margarite had loved the Razorback football team.

Her brother never moved his head from staring out the window. “Know what?” he said. “Margarite never cared a thing about football. She went along because it made Mike happy.”

America has lost so much that we may never get back.

Working with and meeting good people
is the best fringe benefit a job can offer.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Ten (Cont._4)

As I mentioned, a part of my profession would involve submitting competitive proposals for work. It was a nasty business. It worked this way.

A public body would have some project. For some reason or other, it would decide that it had to perform a “selection process” to choose a firm to do the project. This might be a planning project, design, oversight or any other work that required a professional services firm.

They would publicize their need and request either or a “Request for Qualification,” (RFQ) or a “Request for Proposals” (RFP)). The first was much simpler. The second was much more fun for those doing the selection. It usually required both a written submittal and a live presentation, i.e. more hoops for the firms to jump through and more agony to observe.

It was quite an ordeal for the firms, for there were several governing doctrines.

1. At times, the final selection bore no relationship to which firm was the most qualified for the work. There were old grudges extant and the lure of working with a big firm from New York City often proved irresistible, particularly for young staff members on the selection committee who might receive the hint of a promise to visit “the home office” for purposes of coordination.

2. In a large majority of cases, the public body needing the work knew beforehand which firm they would select. The others simply went through the motions. These bore the title of being “wired.” In almost all cases, this was because the agency had worked with a firm before, had a good relationship with that firm, the firm had a good reputation, and the firm had done preliminary work on the project in question for free. This might include, for example, writing the grant application that funded the project.

3. The process would often pass over a potential genius in the field because the firm was new or small.

4. There was a dictum (some have called it a "third-world mentality") in our state positing that Arkansas firms lacked the talent or capacity to undertake large or significant projects. This required local firms to enter some competitions as a “Joint-Venture.” That involved dealing with individuals from out of state. Almost without exception, these were the most arrogant, supercilious, egotistical jerks on planet. In those cases where a joint venture worked, the Arkansas firm, most often, receive little if any, of either remuneration or credit.

One may notice that I never mentioned actual bribery or skulduggery. Over nearly half a century, I witnessed only one case in which we felt money had changed hands. The head of the organization at the time was a county judge, not a city official. He later held state office and was sent to prison from there for malfeasance in office. Our suspicions may have been well-founded. Who knows? We lived over it.

At any rate, no personally observed instances of bribery by cities in half a century is a record that surely allows them to claim a record of honesty that would hold any other organization or profession to shame.

One may ask, with all those obstacles, how did one compete?

My solution was simple. Form a reputation and build relationships that would allow one to appear most often on the “wired” side of the equation. It worked for me.

In less than a year, I would go through another type of selection process. It would involve even more skill and planning. And it would involve lasting repercussions.