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 Much later the city repealed the greenbelt ordinance.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.

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.

Morning Thoughts: December 15, 2017

She was a tiny lady of indeterminate age, her back bent and her fingers gnarled from arthritis. Don’t know how she held a pencil, but she did. Each week, she and others like her sent their work in to local papers like the Lonoke County Democrat. After the marriages and obits, theirs were the most highly valued and loyally read pieces in the weekly news.

Her name was Hazel Pall and she died a few years ago. Before she died, though, the paper was sold and her input terminated. What was this marvelous source of news that she and her colleagues provided, that we lost, and that we still miss?

Why, the church news, of course: attendance, visitors, Sunday School lessons, sermon contents, things that contribute to a civilized society. They did it for years, this dedicated bunch of amateur “stringers.” (That’s journalism talk). There wasn’t a person at the Washington Post or New York Times more reliable in meeting deadlines. Their gift to us was a link from the Heart of America to the printed word—a genuine testiment to veracity and honesty long since trampled into the ground by modern “news” sources like Fox, Brietbart, and Drudge.

BigNews bought out the little papers and discontinued the input of Hazel Pall and the others. The new models feature sports news, city council minutes, obituaries, and weddings. The latter doesn’t feature the carefully posed professional engagement and wedding photos of my generation. No. Too often they are cell-phone-photos of an unshaven man in an over-sized cowboy hat and an under-aged girl with tattoos flowing out of her collar and up her neck.

Times have changed. I had one of my eagerly-looked-for lunches with my journalist friend Sonny Rhodes yesterday. We discussed the demise or transformation of the weekly papers. His take was most interesting, as his insights always are. “The readers of church news in local weeklies,” he said, “are often people who live far away and want to keep up with their hometowns, not the folks who are prospects for local advertising.

Thus, money rules. As the president would say, “If it don't make a buck, then you’re out of luck.”

We had an enlightening lunch, Sonny and I. He told me some tales about having to decipher the submittals of the Hazel Palls of the world. He recounted some of the struggles he and his contemporaries had in moving from IBM Selectrics to the computer age. With a little prodding, I’m sure he would have re-told the escapade in which he learned the consequences of accepting a ride in a private plane to see the site of a story he was working on, said flight occurring only an hour after a big lunch at a Chinese restaurant.

We also planned our next "road trip," maybe to northwest Louisiana to see the “Bonnie and Clyde Death Site.” Please don’t ask why. There’s no good answer. Sometimes it is just good to spend time with a friend and see things that have no intrinsic value, but satisfy an “itch to learn.”

You know, it’s fun to have face-to-face talks with a learned friend. It’s also fun to visit places that provide no lasting profit. Yeah, it was also fun reading about who from Colorado visited Donny Ray Albright at Sunday School the past week.

Note: Arkansas' own John Grisham wrote eloquently about small-county newspapers, and the death of their downtowns as well, in one of his better books.