Buffalo Wiggins and Charlie Gessert

Or

How to Screw Up a New Mayor’s First Day

It had been a dirty, long political campaign but I prevailed with 72% of the vote and began the task of assembling an administration.  According to State Statutes, the municipal elections are held on the first Tuesday of April and the new Mayor is sworn in at noon on the third Tuesday of April.  There is supposed to be a cordial transition with the gavel being handed over in a gentlemanly ritual.  In this case I considered it almost barbaric because of the rancor of the campaign.

I had two weeks to select my appointees and conjure up enough votes on the council for confirmation, lay out a consolidated and rational description of what my administration would accomplish and convince the vanquished “other side” that I was NOT the devil incarnate.

The rest of the world didn’t care much about my little problems.  Life went on as usual in the rest of the City   Only a few nerds cared much about who was getting sworn in or what that would actually mean for them personally.  Likewise, and unfortunately, the normal activities also included elements of alcoholism, racism and stupidity.  All three came together with horrible results.

The Sunday before my oath was to be taken, in a rancid bar on the east side of town, a Native American by the name of Buffalo Wiggins and a white man by the name of Charlie Gessert confronted each other in a drunken belligerence.  As the story goes, the insults flew hot and heavy and when an altercation became imminent, the bar tender told them to “take it outside”.  They did.  They went to the vacant lot next to the bar to settle their differences physically.

The story differs here depending on whether you were a friend of Gessert or Wiggins.  The only thing that is consistent is that at some point during the fight, Gessert slugged Wiggins and knocked Wiggins unconscious.  Wiggins died.  Apparently, he had strangled to death on his own vomit.  The police and ambulance were called and Gessert was eventually arrested.

I saw the story in the newspaper on Monday but didn’t pay much attention to it until I got a phone call from the Chief of Police.  He informed me that the death had essentially torn the scab off of unhealed racial relations and thought that there would be issues to deal with shortly.  I thanked him for the “head’s up” and went about my business.

My wife stood beside me at noon the next day while I took the oath of office to an almost deserted city hall.  I took her home, grabbed my briefcase and set about preparing for my first Council Meeting as Mayor which would take place at 7 o’clock. 

The Chief of Police interrupted my preparations and told me we had serious problems and he would need my help.  It seems that since early that morning there had been three “guns drawn” incidents between members of the tribe and the police department.  There were reports from the Sheriff’s Department of tribal members heading towards the City with guns

.

But that wasn’t all.  The Police Department had intercepted cars with white men inside, with guns, driving around town looking for members of the tribe.

This was all new to me.  Quite frankly I was worried.  I had no idea what powers either the Chief or I had to diffuse the situation but I knew eventually one or both of us would have to do something.  At the moment, I only asked the Chief to keep me informed and let me know what needed to be done from the Administrative/Political side.

Sometime around 3 PM, the Chief came back to the office and closed the door.  There was another incident.  Police received a call that there was a person with a gun in another bar on the far east side, and a car was dispatched.  Another officer thought the call was rather unusual so he proceeded  to the site.  When he got there the first officer was already inside the bar but there was a man with a rifle leaning on the car aiming at the door of the bar.  The second office confronted the man with his weapon drawn and radioed  for help from the officer inside the bar.  They arrested the man with the rifle.

The Chief said he had discussed the situation with “authorities”  (meaning the County Sheriff, I think) and recommended that we take emergency action.  The action was based on the theory that we could only control those elements we had jurisdiction over, meaning the City, through a declaration of an emergency within the City but any help we could get from the Tribe would be strictly voluntary and of good will.

On our end we could control alcohol but had no legal authority to control guns or ammunition.  We could declare an emergency and shut  down the bars because we had licensing authority over them but we could only ask for voluntary compliance from gun and ammunition dealers because they were State or Federally licensed.  I would have to draft a declaration of emergency and get it distributed to the taverns/bars and likewise a copy of the letter would be given to the firearm dealers.

The Chief provided me with a template (which I assume he got from the City Attorney) and I had the Deputy Clerk type it and make copies of the signed document.  It shut the bars down at 6 PM and asked for voluntary shutting  down  of the firearm dealers at the same time.

One of the Sergeants on the Police Department was Native American and had a good relation with the tribal leadership.  He told us that the tribe was really angry because Gessert  had not been charged with murder and it was hard to keep the anger spreading throughout the tribe.  He felt I would need to talk with the Tribal Chairman.  I arranged for a phone call and with two police officers standing at the foot of my desk, I had to act like a real Mayor for the first time in my life.

I started off by telling the Chairman that I regretted that we had to have our first discussion this way but I wanted him to know that I would do everything in my power to keep the incident from spreading any further.  He assured me that he was doing the same.  On his end, he said that he had talked to the Wiggins family and they had agreed to ask the Tribal Members to respect Buffalo and refrain from taking any actions that would disgrace his name.  They asked for a week of mourning.  I told the Chairman I appreciated that and I would rely on justice to take its course.  We ended the call.

 The crisis was over for a while, at least until the trial.

I went to my meeting a 7 and didn’t mention a word about the day’s events.  My Council President knew everything just from hanging around at bars but he declined to say anything either.  The public never knew about all the details or the role of City Hall in keeping things under control.

Backlash and Retribution: Death of the Dream Team.

Stump was finally politically astute enough to see the handwriting on the wall.  He doubted that he could get re-elected.   He announced that he would not seek a second term. But in all honesty, I suspected he wanted to cash in on his reputation as a bright, successful, administrator and seek more important, and therefore, lucrative positions. 

He picked his City Clerk, to run in his place.

The Clerk was hand-picked not because of his skills either as an administrator or politician but largely, I think because he married a really nice girl who came from “Old Money” in the community.  Her family name was well-respected in the community and the calculus was that would be enough for the electorate as it was for Stump.

He was an awful politician and ran a campaign based mostly on Stump's record, which, he never seemed to realize, was precisely the reason Stump was not seeking re-election.

Unbelievably, the newcomer spread rumors through the bar network that Stump and Kuhlmey were somehow personally profiting from the “massive debt”  Stump was running up.   I never knew why or how he decided that Kuhlmey was his “personal public enemy number one” but it might have had something to do with Ed’s irreverent and often sarcastic public comments and his combative stance against any alderpersons who might oppose him or worse yet, considered as morons.

Steve won in a landslide and unleashed two years of pure hell that saw him fire Kuhlmey and eventually turn his ire on me.  All progress in the City came to a screeching halt. Kuhlmey, before he was fired, Denny Dutchman and I kept the downtown project and our project that we considered Ashland’s salvation, a marina on Lake Superior, moving quietly along to be ready for any grant or development opportunities.. 

One night after a particularly rough Council meeting after Kuhlmey was fired, Thedens, Wickmann Denny and I went to  Mr Ed’s Bar to have a few beers and vent our collective spleens about Steve's  behavior and his absolute hatred of professional staff.  Without warning, Steve walked in to the bar.  He wanted to buy us all a round of drinks but we told him we were just leaving.  He went up to Thedens and said that he wanted to be friends with us and he was sure that we could find some common ground as long as we didn’t make him look bad in the newspapers. (It was too late, his antics and intemperate remarks combined with his wild conspiracy theories had already made him an easy target for the press.)

Thedens listened, took a mouthful of his beer and promptly spit it on Steve's shoe.  He put the beer on the bar and walked out of the bar.  As good as I am sure it felt for Earl to do that, he made us all targets of Steve's plotting and manipulation for another year.

Zohimsky eventually made my life so difficult I ended up in a hospital with a perforated ulcer which required surgery.  When I announce that I would be returning to work, I faced a charge from a project inspector I had to hire to replace Joe, that I had “fired him because of his “medical issue”.  The medical issue was he was too drunk to come to work and we offered him a chance to go through the Employee Assistance Program and come back to work or be terminated.  We didn’t hear from him for three weeks so we terminated him.

When I walked into the hearing in Council Chambers, I found that one of our Aldermen who was also a local radio broadcaster had set up a LIVE BROADCAST of the Personnel Committee Hearing.  He brought some friend from the local AODA committee to tell the Committee that alcoholism was a “Federally Recognized Disability” and that I had violated Federal law by terminating him. They put the inspector up to say that he was too “sick” (aka drunk) to call in and I should have sent an ambulance for him.  In the end the committee under the threat of a Federal discrimination law suit, granted his request to be reinstated with back pay and have a warning and reprimand placed in my file.

I resigned that afternoon but Steve wasn’t done.  He hired a replacement to look for any sign of wrongdoing in the Community Development Block Grant program I was handling.  The person and his female assistant looked at the housing rehab records and saw that we had “over committed” the program by some $300,000 dollars.  What he didn’t understand was that was the total commitment for THREE YEARS and we were well within the limit for those years.  It didn’t matter to Steve.  He called in the State Department of Criminal Investigation (just as he did as an excuse to fire Kuhlmey) and they proceeded to look up every one of our bank records, medical records and interview everybody who had ever worked for me.  I came out clean but that didn’t matter  either.  He kept the conspiracy theories going that I had to deal with for the next five years. He rehired Karl (remember him?) to replace the inspector I fired.

Nine months after I resigned.  I filed papers to run for Mayor.

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[1] Based largely on his reputation, he was appointed by a new, Democratic Party Governor to become the Secretary of the Department of Local Affairs and Development (DLAD), a cabinet-level position.  When DLAD was dissolved by the next Republican Governor, Bruce became Executive Director of the Upper Great Lakes Regional Commission, which was dissolved by Ronald Reagan immediately upon taking office.

[2] We had no fireplace and used a gas-fired boiler.

Poop Runs Downhill….

That spring my staff and I implemented the housing rehabilitation function.  Over the next three years we rehabilitated or brought to compliance with code over 140 homes of low or moderate income persons.  Under my program we paved 21 blocks of streets, built 3 neighborhood parks  and laid about 1000 feet of new sewer line including a new, state-of-the-art lift station.  It wasn’t without excitement though and that was because of Shorty.

I had never dealt with anybody like Shorty.  He lived up to his name as well physically as he did to his reputation. He was five-foot-two-inches of shear meanness.  As I learned, he lived up to his reputation as a hard to get-along-with, foul-mouthed, crude and obstinate plumbing contractor who, if you weren’t careful would use contract loopholes to rob you blind if you weren’t careful.

My project inspector and project engineer let out a huge moan when we opened the bids for two “mini” lift stations and almost one-thousand feet of force main in order to provide city sewerage service to sixteen homes that had failing septic systems.  Shorty’s company was low bidder and they knew it was going to be “a rough ride” for the duration of the contract.  There was no valid reason to by-pass Shorty’s bid and accept the second lowest bidder even if we wanted.  Being a newcomer to the City, I didn’t understand their hesitancy over accepting Shorty’s bid but they quickly filled me in on his history.

Evidently Shorty had been a problem from a very young age.  There was some disagreement whether Shorty had been taught his plumbing trade in “reform school” or actually in an adult prison but it was agreed that he never learned it in a formal school.  It was speculated that he couldn’t talk without a big cigar hanging out of his mouth and he used “the “f-word” like it was a required element of speech. Somehow he passed union apprenticeships and set out on his own and prospered, not because people necessarily liked him but more likely because there was a scarcity of licensed plumbers in the area. At any rate, I knew I would have to be careful with this guy and, perhaps, through charm and flattery, maybe get him to trust me enough to reason with him if the need arose.

The first meeting was at contract signing and pre-construction contract coordination with the engineers.  It went pretty well and so I talked with Shorty for the first time.   I told him I was glad there was a local contractor (him) on the job and had heard good things about his work.  Actually, the only person who had commented on his work was my project inspector who said that Shorty’s company was “competent”.  I took that as an endorsement…of sorts. 

At one point the engineer suggested that the contractor had an option as to what technique he wanted to use on a certain operation of the installation and asked me if I had a preference.  I thought this was a good time to flatter Shorty so I told the engineer that I would defer to Shorty’s expertise’. Shorty chuckled and said it didn’t matter to him because all he knew about plumbing was that “..s##t rolls downhill and payday is every Friday”.   After the stunned silence, the engineer suggested a common technique should be utilized.

Everything went well for a week or two but one day I got a call from my project inspector who called from a bar located near the worksite telling me that I needed to come to the site right away to resolve a dispute with Shorty.  Although it was probably over eighty degrees that day, I purposefully donned my suit coat thinking that Shorty would understand that I was “the boss” and I had final say on management of the contract, not him.

It appeared that Shorty wanted to change on the force main which would cost us additional money and probably create a budget overrun to a Federal Grant.  That’s not something you want to do.  I had to back up the work of our consulting engineers and stick with the plans as drawn.  At first, I tried the softer approach of thanking Shorty for his input but insisting that the plans be followed.  That just made Shorty angrier.  So I tried reasoning that I didn’t have enough in the budget to make his proposed change.  That didn’t work either.  Shorty was raising his voice and tossing f-bombs around and I responded more angrily and forcefully but he forced me to use the trump card, “We’re going to use the golden rule, Shorty.  I’ve got the gold, I make the rules.”

Shorty became silent.  He pulled out his wallet and started thumbing through a large, impressive stash of bills; some hundreds, some fifties, and a lot of twenties.  I immediately thought he was going to try to bribe me and I responded indignantly: “You can’t bribe me Shorty.  Don’t even try!”

Shorty said, “ I’m not going to bribe you, I’m just checking to see if I’ve got enough to pay the judge, ‘cause if I do, I’m going to knock you on your smart little ass!”  That stunned me and it took a few seconds to recover.

I don’t know why but I decided at that moment to say,” Just do it as planned!  That’s it. No more discussion”, and walked away to a fusillade of f-bombs and suggestions that I had sexual relations with my mother.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of that project.

I had a clock radio by the side of my bed and it was set for six A.M. tuned in to the local AM station.  On one morning, I awoke to the news reader warning Ashland residents that there had been a water main break and there was no water service to the entire east end of the city.  The east side was where we were installing a new sewer line to serve some twenty houses that had failing septic systems draining into a creek which, in turn, drained into Lake Superior. I was suspicious that we had something to do with it so I threw on jeans and a sweater and drove to the site to see what was going on.

It was my worst nightmare.

Joe Kasper was already there talking to one of the water utility engineers. Our consulting engineer and Shorty were also there but at the moment they were huddled together away from Joe and the utility representative.  When Joe saw me he came up, put his arm around my shoulder and walked me off to the side.  The first thing he said was he had good news for me, to which I gave a big “huh?”  He said, “Our sewer line really works, it sucked all the water from the east side right out.” He then became very conspiratorial, and suggested that I ask questions when I had to, but mostly just listen and FOR GOD’S SAKE don’t say anything that will assume any liability on our part.  I told him I understood but wanted to know what happened.  It was sort of complicated but it started with something called “as-builts”.

The design and location of our new sewer/force main was determined by the engineers looking at a set of plans for the City’s water lines called “as-builts”.  When a design is implemented, it often isn’t where the architects/engineers planned them usually because of soil conditions or other factors which prevented strict execution of the plans.  When the project is completed, the engineers provide a set of plans to show exactly where everything ended up being located. 

As it turned out, the as-builts we were operating off of were off by twelve feet.  The 48” diameter water main was 12 feet closer to our new line than indicated on the plans.[1]  As a result, our ditch opened up and exposed the 48” line.  When that happened, the utility had been notified and after consulting with Joe and our engineer decided that we should proceed to bury our line four feet under the water main. Work proceeded normally and so Joe went home expecting all “best practices” which included leaving the smallest possible length of trench open over night would be followed.  This is because the soil under the water main could dry out and become weaker, so weak in fact that it might not hold the weight of the heavily loaded main.  That’s exactly what happened.

 The contractor didn’t follow “best practices”, Joe wasn’t there to make sure he did and neither was the engineer.  The result was that the soil holding the main collapsed, the ductile iron pipe (DIP ) sagged and pulled it out of a 75-year-old leaded joint, gushing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water into the trench, and into my new sewer pipes.  Liability ended up being split three ways because everybody screwed up.  Fortunately the damages weren’t catastrophic for anybody. I never had to deal directly with Shorty again.

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[1] This was before today’s utility locating techniques that use magnetometers and other sophisticated instruments to locate the EXACT location of utility lines.

First Round Pick on the Dream Team

To this day, I believe that fate was playing out a hand that I had absolutely no control over because the sequence of events that took place cannot be explained in any other way.

 

In the span of just over a year, I had left Florida, travelled to Chicago, reunited with Sylvia, worked for an employment agency,  got married, sold TVs and Stereos for Montgomery Ward, had my car stolen TWICE, and somehow, stumbled into the State Job Service Office in Ashland, Wisconsin and got hired as the City’s Director of Community Development.

I could not have planned any of that but here I was, moving to Ashland, Wisconsin and starting a new life with a new bride.

I was scheduled to begin work just before Thanksgiving of 1975.  Sylvia and I had miraculously found an apartment when no others seemed to be available in the entire city.  As it turned out, the landlord had evicted the occupants the night before the morning we inquired about vacancies.  We quickly made arrangements to with a moving company to bring belongings to the new apartment (Sylvia’s Mother and Father had stored and stashed furnishing for Sylvia for years) and set out to move into our first real home as a married couple.

Wisconsin weather foiled our perfect arrival.  When we got within 100 miles of Ashland we started running into roads that were literally iced over.  We thought at first that the roads were filled with potholes but soon discovered they were actually thin spots in the ice!  It became apparent to us that we were coming into town on the tail end of a blizzard for which we were woefully unprepared.

When we got to Ashland the roads were plowed in name only.  The top layer of snow was scraped off but it served only to expose a layer of about 4 inches of ice.  The roads were really slick as we quickly surmised while watching a car trying to stop at an intersection perform a 360 degree pirouette, and slide into a plowed snow bank.  We tiptoed to our apartment.

When we got there we found that the doors were drifted in with snow banks about 3 feet tall and, of course, because we didn’t pay attention to the weather, we had no snow shovel.  Everything in Ashland was closed at this hour and also due to the blizzard. We also learned later, that we had come into town on the opening day of “deer gun season”, the nine days of deer hunting across Wisconsin which is also referred to as “Holy Week”.  Everything closes down during that week.  The Blizzard was just a minor annoyance.

We ended up spending our first night at the Best Western Motel on the far west side of town.

We used the rest of the weekend to “Shovel out” and settle in to the apartment so I could go to work on Monday morning.

 

I reported to the Mayor’s office for work on Monday morning dressed in a 3-piece suit and carrying a briefcase.  The Mayor welcomed me and told me that my office was not in the Courthouse (which was combined with and rented from the County Government) but above the local movie theatre, The Bay Theatre.  He didn’t offer to take me over there, he just told me to use the door on Vaughn Avenue.

I left our car parked at the Courthouse and walked the two blocks west along Second Street, the City’s Central Business District getting curious looks from others on the street that were absolutely unaccustomed to seeing somebody in a 3-piece suit and dress shoes walking on the semi-cleared sidewalks.  I had not thought purchase thermal underwear or boots so within the short span of two city blocks I learned their value profoundly. When I found the entranceway, I looked up at a stairwell of more than 20 steps and dutifully climbed the steps.

When I walked into the offices I saw a four people in one room and an office with Dr. Paul Fiske sitting at a desk.  There was a young girl sitting at a desk facing the door who I assumed to be some sort of receptionist so I said, “Hi. I’m Ed Wagner.  The Mayor told me my office will be up here.”  She appeared stunned and turned and called to Dr. Fiske, “Paul…the new guy’s here”.  There was a note of disbelief in her voice.  Dr. Fiske didn’t get up from his desk, he just said motioned for me to come into his office.   When I entered he did stand up and offered me his hand, saying “We didn’t expect you’d make it with the blizzard and all.”  I told him I was taken by surprise by the weather so he went into a description of the impact of the blizzard.  They had 12 hours of freezing rain (hence the 4” of ice on the roads) followed by 18 inches of snow.

Dr. Fiske found it necessary to go over his background and qualifications with me.  He was granted his PhD from Cornell University just four years earlier.  He was a principle planner in New Hampshire for a number of years before being hired by the Northwest Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission to be the shared-staff planner for Ashland and was the head of the Planning and Development Departments. Because of my reverence for three of my favorite professors, Tom Tipton, Bill Young and Bob Bledsoe, I was immediately respectful of Dr. Fiske, who told me to please call him Paul.

He asked me if I had met or had been introduced to the “office staff”.  Of course I had not. He introduced me to Jack, a Native American who was hired as a drafting/map making assistant, and Linda, the young girl who had somewhat greeted me at the door. Paul told me that they were really “my staff” and were hired under funds from the Community Development Block Grant which I would administer. I was a little miffed that I hadn’t had the possibility to hire my own staff but I would play out the hand I was dealt There was an older man there, Karl, who was introduced as the City’s Building Inspector who had been assigned to work under Paul as part of the shared staffing arrangement.  Karl didn’t seem too pleased to meet me.  Paul said that the Principal Planner, Ed Kuhlmey, also an NWWRPC shared staffer was hunting and wouldn’t be back until after Thanksgiving.  Also absent was Joe Kasper who the City had hired as my project inspector.  He was hunting also and as far as I understood, was “qualified” only because he held himself out as a carpenter.

Paul showed me my office, an 8x10 room with a “view” of Vaughn Avenue. It had an old wooden desk and wooden swivel chair along with a long wooden table that Paul proudly announced he had commandeered from the old library.  On the desk was a two-foot high stack of file folders and bound reports which he said he was happily turning over to me for administration of the program.  Sometime, during those first two weeks, Jack sold me a pair of snowmobile boots for Five dollars.  They were clunky and uncomfortable but they were, at least generically, boots[1].  I didn’t slip around on the sidewalks like I was on ice skates.

During the next week, I met Ed Kuhlmey and was immediately impressed.  He held a Master’s Degree in Landscape Architecture and had a minor in urban planning.  He was one of the most irreverent and quick witted, foul-mouthed persons I had ever met but his brilliance was undeniable.  Ed and I would work together for more than 4 years.

Joe Kasper and I started working together, he couldn’t write a coherent sentence but he knew housing construction in a way that you cannot learn in books.  He would have to “do”.

The first week was spent plowing through tons of paperwork and going to meetings with the Mayor and Paul about an implementation schedule for the grant generated programs.  I was also told that the first week in December I would attend a two-day conference on Community Development in Madison with n him and Paul.  Secretly I had misgivings about leaving Sylvia alone in a strange City so quickly but she was much more comfortable with the prospect than I.

In January two events would take place that would set the tone for the next four years. Late in December the Mayor called the “Senior Staff” into his office and announced that he would not be seeking another term in office.[2] The field was wide-open and Arnie was afraid one of the perennial “crazies” who ran for Mayor perpetually would be unopposed and destroy the city from within with their bar-room political views. This caused a lot of anxiety among the staff. Arnie swore us to secrecy until he would make the announcement in the first week of January.

The second event was that in mid-December, the Mayor insisted that we show “immediate progress” with the Block Grant program and ordered me to come up with something to demonstrate that.  The easiest thing was the “Demolition Component” which promised to remove buildings which were “blighted” properties.  The biggest one on the hit list was the building known as the 9^th Avenue School, a three-story, red-brick building built around the turn of the century which had been abandoned for over 20 years.  It was derelict in every sense of the word and just screamed for demolition.  It would be an impressive kick-off and justify the Mayor’s insistence on the grant program.

Both events drew headlines from The Ashland Daily Press complete with the requisite histories and picture of each of the subject. I got my first taste of public outrage when a group of history buffs protested the demolition of the building but it had to be done and I took the heat.

Out of seemingly nowhere, a candidate for Mayor who was a native “ boy done good” type of candidate emerged.  He also held a Master’s Degree in Urban planning and had been awarded a Fellowship to study at Cambridge in London, England on the basis of his academic achievement.  To top it off, he was married to the granddaughter of Dr. Prentice, one of the founders of the Ashland Medical Community who had parks and medical clinics named for him.When we met him we immediately learned two things, first he was "all in" on Paul's urban redevelopment plans and second he was extremely short in stature.  If you can believe it, he was actually shorter than me.  Kuhlmey, being the irreverent cuss he was immediately nicknamed him "the stump"  We used that nickname among ourselves but never in his presence.

Although "the stump"portrayed himself in a "regal" manner, he was popular and he won against the “gutter-heads” by a landslide.

The new Mayor immediately fired Karl, who he exposed as running a scam program with one of the local slum lords in which Karl condemned the homes of elderly persons and then the slum lord would offer to “buy them out” to give them money and a place to live (for a profit to him of course).  He also fired the Parks and Recreation Director for no other reason than the Mayor wanted a “professional” in the position.  There was a fight on the Council floor but the new Mayor prevailed. 

The replacements joined the Mayor’s “dream team”.  Craig Wickman, Masters in Conservation was made Code Enforcement Officer and Earl Thedens, Masters in Landscape Architecture, was named Director of Parks and Recreation.  We all reported to Paul.  As far as Paul was concerned, this was the dream team of planning and he intended to make the most of it.

Things really began popping.

The second event was that in mid-December, the Mayor insisted that we show “immediate progress” with the Block Grant program and ordered me to come up with something to demonstrate that.  The easiest thing was the “Demolition Component” which promised to remove buildings which were “blighted” properties.  The biggest one on the hit list was the building known as the 9^th Avenue School, a three-story, red-brick building built around the turn of the century which had been abandoned for over 20 years.  It was derelict in every sense of the word and just screamed for demolition.  It would be an impressive kick-off and justify the Mayor’s insistence on the grant program.

"The Stump" took on every project he could find and drove Paul, Ed, Craig, Earl and me like a slave driver.  Something unexpected happened: Paul and his wife disagreed about living in Ashland.  Paul loved it but when our work days to meet  Stump's demands extended from 8 to 12 hours and sometimes planning sessions  extended well into the night.  Eventually Paul resigned and went back to New Hampshire and as we understood a divorce soon followed. 

Ed Kuhlmey was the obvious choice to take Paul’s place and Ed was replaced by a new planner, Dennis VanHoof, who became known to us as “Denny Dutchman”.

To finance Stump’s schemes, he raised property taxes: Significantly!  This brought about a loud outcry from the public and lead by the usual factions of “gutter-heads”[3]. Particularly irritating to the citizens was his plan to renovate the “Old Federal Building” (e.g. Post Office) into a new City Hall.  What poured gasoline on the fire was the fact that the Mayor wanted a rigid adherence to the historical/architectural details of the building which drove the costs through the roof.  A $1.1 Million dollar project quickly became $1.5Million and costs were projected to go beyond that.  The public was furious but Stump believed he still had supporters behind him.

We, the staff, were worried about what we were hearing from the public outside of Bruce’s close circle of friends.

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d[1] I still have those boots.  In those days wearing those boots with my perfectly tailored suits was much like the character “Billy Pilgrim” in Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five a POW who was forced to wear a pair silver painted boots along with his uniform.  Read the book to understand how it fits.

[2] He went to law school, graduated and practiced law in his home town of Ladysmith, Wisconsin.  He also served as the City Attorney for the City of Ladysmith.

[3] “Gutterheads” was the term that Bruce introduced us to referring to a particular class of city residents who passed around negative rumors and lies through the network of bars and taverns in the City.  Occasionally they would surface, usually in strength, at Council meetings to protest taxes or any kind of progress whatsoever.

PREAMBLE

Preamble

At the very beginning, consider this:

“No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.”

― Jim Butcher, Turn Coat

I’ve had three heart attacks and one intervention to prevent another.  I’ve been told I have hereditary cardio-vascular disease and can expect more of the same as I “age”. By any reasonable standard, I can’t expect an extensive amount of time ahead of me. Naturally, I find myself doing a personal accounting of where I’ve been and what I’ve done over the last 72 or so years and wondered if there is any theme or, for that matter, any purpose, to those 72 years.

Taking stock of my life, I am reminded about a “Father’s Day” a couple of dozen years ago where my wife told me she was worried that I wouldn’t like the gift that she and our only child, my son, had picked out for me because they didn’t “ really know much about me.”  I was actually surprised about that but had no idea how I would get them to “know” me better.  I never thought I had made any particular effort to hide anything about myself to either of them, although I’ll admit to a certain amount of “role-playing” in the enterprise of fatherhood and fully in the interest of perceived good parenting.  Apparently though, I never did anything to correct that impression because recently I was confronted with that again.

As I have been forced into this exile of retirement and decided to write about my life experiences, I have, in the process, verbally related to my wife (of some forty-four-plus years) of the vignettes I have written about my early life before I met her and, some, even afterwards.  To my surprise, she told me that she had never heard these stories and expressed surprise, and in some cases dismay, at the content of the stories.  Facing the proposition that if the woman with whom I have spent almost every day of my life for over forty-four years didn’t know these things about me, I suspected my son knows far, far less

I want both of them to know these stories.  I want both of them to know me beyond the context of “Dad” or “Husband”.  However, I think there will be neither time nor opportunity to sit with them and tell the stories.  There will have to be a more permanent medium.

Logically, the best solution is to reduce these stories into a less volatile form so they can be weighed, measured and refined at a later date.  In that manner, I will leave a paper trail at least for my wife and son to use for reference in the future, or for my own use, and risking the possibility that someday, someone else will find this and have access to my experiences, innermost thoughts, hopes and fears.  My only solace will be that with any luck it will be long after I have gone.

Obviously the preceding treatise points in the direction of “an old man, trying to find meaning to his life”.  I admit that I am intrigued by the questions of what is the meaning of life in general and why is the span of any human life so ridiculously short in relation to, say, the age of the universe, the size of the galaxy, and, of course, there is the question of what happens after death. I don’t pretend to have any special insight into those questions and I certainly don’t have any “inside track” to what lies beyond life.  I am therefore content to fall back on what I read a long, long time ago.

Prologue to Dante’s Inferno:

If I thought my answer was

To someone who might return to the world,

This flame would move no more;

But since from this depth it never happened

That anyone alive returned (if I hear right),

Without fear of infamy I’ll answer you

In other words, since nobody really knows what “lies beyond”, any discussion of it is useless.  The only thing that counts then is what we did while we were alive and what we left behind for others.  That is the purpose which I will pursue.

I’ve entitled this rather pathetic effort   “That Didn’t Go As I Planned” because, as you will see, for a large part of my life I thought my fate was pre-ordained and tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not so successfully to alter the course.  In some strange ways it was, given the times and circumstances there were choices that were not mine to make and I endured those even if I resented them.   The value, morality or intelligence of what choices I made that were mine to make, I will leave to whatever the reader may interpret them to be.