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.