My Redacted LIfe: Chapter 29 (Cont._4)

The next week passed. We were a betrothed couple so the world looked a little rounder and 1972 seemed like an even more memorable year. The girls, Brenda, Vernell, and her sister, began plans for the wedding. The few times I was around them, I heard lots of giggles and snickers.

They left me out completely.

I didn’t mind. I had work to do. Tom was getting antsy that we finish the Hope plan so the engineering could begin. Business was falling off Downtown there as in most cities. Later, pundits delighted in blaming downtown malls for the death of retail in the central business, and those misadventures certainly didn’t help. But the end had settled on downtown retail much earlier with the proliferation of family automobiles, the death of public transit, and the construction of alluring shopping centers that offered excitement along with spending. Centrifugal force spun retail away from the city core and into the low-density suburbs, to be chased by swarms of shoppers in individual vehicles.

Since ancient humankind first danced in order to make the rains come, we have believed we could cause the unlikely or impossible to happen by human interference. So modern sapiens envisioned the downtown mall as a way to counterattack reality. Reality is an impervious foe, however. Urban planners no more knew this at the time than did the American military or the government that directed it.

I knew nothing about all this in 1972. I danced along merrily with the rest. It would take years of heartbreaking reality before the truth revealed itself. I was still a believer in urban planning’s prowess in imitative magic. Besides, I had me a girl, or she had me. I didn’t know which. That made me untouchable.

On Wednesday, she met me downtown for lunch at Land’s Cafeteria on Markham. Then we walked all the way over to Cave’s Jewelry on Main. There we picked out and bought an engagement ring for her and put some wedding rings on the layaway for the two of us. This thing was getting serious.

It was Daylight Savings Time by now. I took off work a little early so we could drive out and tell her folks. They didn’t throw a fit. In fact, they took it in good humor. I didn’t have my hair greased back and didn’t carry a pack of Lucky Strikes wound into an arm of my T-shirt. Nor did I ask her father if he might hire me as a farm hand after the wedding. She assured her mother that I was, indeed, some years older than she, so her daughter wasn’t “robbing the cradle.” They were pleased, I felt.

Hazel did inquire where and when the wedding might be. “We’ll have it in the Methodist church in town so all the relatives can make it,” Brenda said. “I’m sure Grandma will want to come, and she can’t travel far.”

“That’s good,” Hazel said. “I can’t imagine a girl wanting to get married someplace her grandmother couldn’t get to.”

With that, we were set. Hazel would help get the news out. That wouldn’t be hard for her. The office of Dr. B.E. Holmes, where she worked, was the official news center for most of Lonoke County. Walter Cronkite would have marveled at the speed with which information vital to everyday life in the polis and surrounding area spread.

My name, the last one at least, quickly became a household one, though challenging in pronunciation. Who was this mysterious man who had stolen the heart of the Belle of Lonoke County? Some decided I must secretly be a physician, a member of the only profession good enough for her.

The next Saturday, we drove to Pine Bluff and broke the news to my folks. Their response proved predictable. Any man that Brenda would marry couldn’t be all bad. That even included me.

Thus, we set the stage for a great adventure. Our ship was rigged, the crew was ready, the lines were taught, the anchor ready to be hauled, and the shoals well marked.

Most of them were anyway.

When is my life going
to get simple again?

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 Six

Back at work, I spent spare time during lunch break watching Capitol Avenue. Something was going on. Something bad. Really bad.

Each day at noon, there was a show going on at the intersection of Capitol and Main streets. I finally asked someone what was happening.

“Preparing to save Downtown,” someone said.

“Getting ready to make Main and Broadway into a downtown mall,” another said.

Had I been a prophet, had power, and had courage to act, perhaps I could have stopped them, but I doubt it. Americans are a hard-headed bunch at times. They believed in “downtown malls,” And American cities all over, including Little Rock, were about to make one of the biggest mistakes in the history of urban planning.

Downtowns across the country experienced many problems back then. We blamed their decline on all sorts of issues, mainly centered around the idiotic presumption that malls were the main problem, and by using what Sir James Frazer called, “Imitative Magic,” the solution would prove simple.

Yeah, I know. It was like the bull entering the bull ring, going into “analysis mode,” concluding that his main problem is the red cape, and making what he thinks is the right decision. As we all know from the first, the red cape wasn’t his problem after all.

In the happy, happy Land of Hindsight and Retrospection, the main enemy in the fall of the central business as the primary retail center of commerce may have been something as simple as the Law of Gravity, and its antithesis.

That’s what formed downtowns in the first place: gravity. With townsfolk relying on travel by foot, public transportation, and slow-moving wagons, there was a great motivation to concentrate commercial activity in as small a place as possible, often around the train station or the intersection of other major traffic arteries.

The actual shops for the conduct of retail crammed themselves into an even smaller area, as near as possible to the “100 percent corner.” That would be at Capitol and Main in Little Rock. Cities located the warehousing of goods for the shops a short distance away in an area set aside for the purpose. In fact, one of the first zoning attempts involved the desire to prevent New York City’s garment district from getting too close to the ritzy shops and high-class clientele concentrated in the city center.

All worked fine until the automobile became a staple of the American family, and General Motors began buying public transit systems throughout the country and either closing them down or allowing them to deteriorate into such a state of filth and unsightliness that an unremovable stigma clings, in America, until this day, upon their use.

Then, “anti-gravity,” what we sometimes call “centrifugal force,” took over. Why should retail costumers fight their way all the way to Downtown when they could jump in the family car, drive a short distance, and buy things? The things they bought would become increasingly cheaper as national firms cornered what had been a free-market retail phenomenon in so many ways. As residential suburbs proliferated, centrifugal force slung retail businesses out toward them, away from Downtown.

At any rate, the future of Downtown as the dominant retail center faced inevitable doom. Turning it into a mall with few customers, and little of the necessary parking required, wasn’t going to change that. If a city didn’t have a suburban mall, a neighboring city did. We wept and wailed, and threw money at the issue. It didn’t work. Shopping centers and strip-centers ruled commerce, and the subterranean monsters we now call “big-boxes” hadn’t even yet been released from their noxious lairs.

The big-boxes would later take care of neighborhood businesses and now face their own “economic matadors,” but those are stories for another day.

Downtowns would have to evolve in order to survive. Given the vast number of Americans who refuse to accept the realities of natural evolution, it’s not surprising how many would refuse to accept a concept involving urban evolution. As I say, Americans are a stubborn folk, clinging to images in crumbling stones .

The evolution of the central business district was a solution that would grow into an inspiration only in recent times. During the interim, many downtowns would crumble and fall, despite the benign, but devasting, efforts of a long line of urban planners and urban designers who yearned for immortality,

Back in the day, I stared through the window at Capitol Avenue and was quite willing to play my part in the carnage.

Somehow,  central cities survive
our best efforts to destroy them.