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

Chapter Eleven: (Cont._3)

Knowing where you are on the planet has always been important in urban planning. It hasn’t been easy. By 1971, we knew about where we were due to the efforts of two land surveyors, Prospect Robbins and Joseph Brown, who set out in October, 1815, to survey the land acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase.

What motivated this? The federal government chose to award land grants to veterans of the War of 1812 and needed appropriate descriptions for the allocations. In fact, I write this from a farm that was part of a grant awarded by President James Monroe to one Grady Thomas, formerly a private in Jones’s Company of the 24^th Regiment of Infantry.

Most veterans sold their grants to settlers moving west. There is no record that Grady Thomas ever emigrated to what is now the State of Arkansas.

But I digress. Let us just say that the surveying was an arduous undertaking, one commemorated to this day by a state park. When I started work, the survey information, along with more modern data, chief of which were topographic elevations, were available on individual sheets that we simply called “topo maps.”

These sheets only covered 60 square miles or so. To use them, the process involved getting into a car, driving to Roosevelt Road in Little Rock, purchasing the map(s) from the United States Geologic Survey) bringing them back, and usually trimming and taping several together. If you were close friends with a photographer, as I was, you could draw a very thin line on the original and have the map enlarged so that the line was a specific length that would produce a traceable result at a workable scale, sort of.

Later, this would all involve a dozen or so keyboard strikes.

Information is key to making good decisions for future generations. Pity the society that ever eschews information. It would be like choosing not to breath oxygen. Accordingly, we struggled with topo maps and census tables, often leaving the office at the end of the day with strained eyes and a throbbing head. In the process, we would slowly develop what we hoped would be a logical course of action for our clients.

Sometimes we were more successful than at others, the chief obstacles to success being politics, lack of resources, and the dreaded “Law of Unintended Consequences.”

What’s that? Oh, it is like when the government spends a fortune on a major traffic artery with which to move goods and services and then allows it to be clogged with adjoining commercial enterprises to the point where traffic no longer can move along the artery and another must be built farther out, often with the same results. One major American city had gotten up to eight rings, I think it was, before the whole system toppled over like a Delta thunderhead on a summer afternoon.

Evenings after struggling all day with facts, figures, and maps, it was nice to return to my simple apartment and enjoy the benefits of having a friend like Jackie, from over on Riverside Drive where they didn’t worry a lot about the future.

Where the survey started

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 Eleven

As luck would have it, the 4^th of July came on a Sunday in 1971, before the days of elongated holidays. They let us off Monday anyway. I went fishing with the family and returned for work promptly on Tuesday amidst many complaints of too much sun, too much food, and other overindulgences. An extra day can mean the difference between delight and misery. Numbers count.

I tried to keep up with the news, but much of life in America went unreported. For example, over in our neighboring state of Tennessee, a 17-year-old girl from Nashville named Oprah Winfrey won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant. If the news made our statewide paper, I missed it. The victory gave the young lady a scholarship to an all-black college in her state where she would major in communication. I doubt if any of us would have thought much about that.

News about race was settling down, anyway. Many Americans thought “that civil-rights stuff” had all been settled in the 1960s. Weren’t the Blacks happy? They could now eat wherever they chose to.

Most of the news centered on our lightening-swift plan to bring victory in Vietnam. Second Lieutenant William L. Calley became the sole conviction resulting from the My Lai Massacre, the cold-blooded murder of several hundred Vietnamese civilians by units of the United States Americal Division. Commanding officers who ordered the massacre skated through, as commanding officers tend to do, and the affair became distant history. We all had better things to worry about.

July would be a sad month for music fans. American singer, songwriter, poet, writer and filmmaker, Jim Morrison died on July 3 from “too much love of living,” as Swinburn put it.  Less noted by the young was the passing of legend Louis Armstrong on July 6. “Pops” would dazzle us never again.

We took in the news and suffered through the Arkansas summer. I’m not saying it is miserable, but some theologians admit that the average outside temperature in our state ranges a degree or two above that of Heaven’s opposite home.

I was thankful for having an apartment with an air conditioner, albeit one without a pool. At work, I was beginning to become intimately acquainted with census material. Contained in several books, the tables provided detailed socio-economic data down to the block level. As with any data, they could be used for good or for the not so good.

The data were extremely useful for documenting need for specific areas of a city, or neighborhood, so that limited resources could be directed efficiently. They helped, as well, for justifying requests for funding.

They were also good for drawing voting district boundaries designed to maintain a white supremacy.

I was beginning to realize the power that numbers carry, or seem to carry. After all, speaking of the Vietnam travesty, our sole military strategy for most of the war had been to document more enemy deaths in battle that those of Americans. South Vietnamese or civilian deaths didn’t matter one way or the other. Numbers, selective numbers, ruled. I thought about this as I worked in a nice, cool, safe place while others still stood in harm’s way. Would it ever end?

As for my current work in planning, one thing always puzzled me until I began to understand the world a bit better. Grant applications seemed never to ask for data from tables directly available in the census data. Their use always required interpolation, bundling, estimation, guesswork, or outright prevarication.

It would all become clear to me as time went by. As with the military, selective counts rule over actual counts. A little statistical legerdemain can prove useful, until the day when actual counts refuse to belie the truth further and things erupt.

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.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Ten (Cont._3)

Things were taking a hard turn for consulting firms by the time I went to work in 1971. As part of the grant era, a devastating event occurred. The state, through much grant funding, had established planning agencies, economic agencies, and metro-planning agencies throughout the state. These were to provide planning services for free or for reduced fees for cities and counties. They would receive preferential treatment for planning grants under what was known then simply as the “701 Program.”

The result? The day I went to work there were six planning consulting firms in the Little Rock/North Little Rock metro area. By the end of 1971, there would be two. Those two would have to strive mightily for planning work in the future.

As a result of this, the owners of our firm made two fateful decisions. The first was to bring a professional engineer into the firm as a full partner. The second was to pursue the original dream of pursuing land development.

It all sounded good on paper.

I wasn’t concerned. At worst, I was learning a trade. As the year progressed, I spent most of my time working on two of the last urban renewal projects scheduled for the state. One would be funded, the other only partially and only after a massive reduction in scope.

These were gigantic undertakings requiring a grant application nearly two inches of legal-sized paper thick. They handed me an old application that had been funded and told me to modify and replicate one like it for a firm in southwest Arkansas, a place called Hope.

I spent my days number crunching, studying census reports, and directing the mapping required. Nights, I went to planning commission meetings when one happened to be scheduled. Other nights I would read, or sometimes wander down to some house on Riverside Drive where there might be music.

Weekends might find me going home to Pine Bluff or driving up to Fayetteville to party with friends. I didn’t have a care in the world.

This all beat the hell out of the Navy, though I sometimes missed its structured life where the future was fairly easy to predict and thoroughly controlled by higher powers.

The new engineering partner took a little getting used to, and that’s all I want to say on that subject.

We still had plenty of work, despite the cut in potential created by the planning and development districts. Further, it was about this time that I started being involved in one of the most heartbreaking phenomena known in the design services industry.

This involved writing and presenting proposals for jobs, not grants, but jobs. Oh my.

In the old days, cities and other public agencies simply hired who they wanted to do such work as planning, engineering, or architecture. This, of course, suited the old-time firms well. By the time I came along, some of the younger firms had raised enough hell that the selection process became more formalized. It seemed like a good idea and it sought to even the playing field. Additionally, though, it seemed to bring out the worst in some people.

More about that tomorrow.

A lesson
to be learned.

My Redacted LIfe: Chapter Ten (Cont._2)

As I went about my business in 1971, the country and the world began to change. Some changes affected me. Some didn’t. Some would later.

I approached, but hadn’t quite reached, the average income in the United States of $10,600 per year. By the year 2018, that would equal about $65,700 per year. The “sailor home from the sea” was making progress.

Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed that a young upstart named Fred Smith, with ties to Little Rock, had developed a wild dream of starting a business offering overnight delivery of packages first by air, then by ground. “Crazy,” the leaders of Little Rock said. “Hmm,” the leaders of Memphis said. “That would sure be something,” those of us said who had been using the Greyhound Bus system for that purpose.

Up in Northwest Arkansas, things were quiet. The architect Edward Durrell Stone, a native, had once described, Fayetteville, the key city, as a “hotbed of tranquility.” Aside from occasional rowdy football games, it still was. But not far from Fayetteville, an obscure retailer had gone public with his company in 1970. Its initial stock price was $16.50 per share. Had one purchased 100 shares at that price then, by 2018 stock splits would have created 204,800 shares worth more than $17 million, with annual dividends reaching around $400,000.

The Ozarks would never be the same.

Ah well. Back at the apartment, I was going to work every day in an exciting, vibrant city in a respected, by most, profession and was moving up the ladder of success with amazing speed. I was making new friends in the neo-hippie community called Riverside Drive. An old college classmate named Cooper Burley introduced me around, and I was considered a close-enough neighbor to be deemed socially acceptable, particularly if I provided an occasional jug of wine and abided by the stricture that the street was a closed community and society at large had no reason whatsoever to even know of its existence.

Cooper had eased out from under his legal problems through a combination of luck, confusion, and family connections, mostly those of the young girl he had once quartered and whose parents saved the couple with understanding that she would not cross the Arkansas River Bridge into Little Rock without parental supervision.

The Vietnam war dragged on, even though 60 percent of Americans had turned against it. Returning vets were, as I did, joining a group calling itself “Vietnam Veterans Against the War.” The stage was set for disruption. None of it bothered me, though. I had laid down “my sword and shield,” for a gentler life, a life that would be nothing but a fast ride to success.

Beneath this peaceful surface though, swam a political creature, spawned in 1971 and destined to grow to city-destroying proportions with an insatiable appetite for destruction. In that fateful year, the U.S. Supreme Court of the United States upheld, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education 402 U.S the concept of using school busing to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States.

Rarely, in American history, had an event so created the epitome of the earlier mentioned “Miles Law,” or, where you stand depends on where you sit. No attempt will be made herein to broach the social implications or equitable justification of the case. Those discussions still divide Americans.

Suffice it to say that the ruling, and its aftermath, would have one of the greatest impacts on urban development patterns this county has ever seen.