A graceful exit

Posted on December 14, 2018 by Jim

The recent announcement of General Motors plant closings brought back memories of my career with Illinois Bell. During my 22 years at the company, sweeping changes in technology and the court-ordered breakup of AT&T resulted in serial downsizing.

During my rotational assignment at Western Electric in the 1970s, factory layoffs cut the Hawthorne Works from 16,000 employees to 12,000. The cuts finally ended the long-outmoded plant beauty contest after most of the young women were laid off.

At Illinois Bell, the company of 40,000 employees I joined in 1968 had dwindled to 24,000 by the late 1980s. A series of voluntary incentives trimmed the management force as long-service managers jumped at the chance to retire early. Downsizing was becoming part of the corporate culture. Buyout rumors cropped up every year, and the career aspiration of some employees was to be bribed to leave.

Executives tried to call these force reductions “rightsizing,” but nobody could say “rightsizing” with a straight face. They also claimed the cuts would make the company more innovative and entrepreneurial. This rhetoric inspired some of the most innovative managers to take the buyout offer and leave the company to become entrepreneurs.

Because I was the public relations liaison to the human resources department, my department head walked into my office at one point and asked what I’d heard about downsizing plans. “Would you be interested?” I asked. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Since we live in the same suburb, I would ask you to drop the papers off at my house.”

So it came to pass that I was called into a confidential human resources meeting in 1989. It sounded ominous, but I walked into a conference room brimming with happiness as the HR managers discussed a new downsizing incentive. It was quickly apparent that these folks, all nearing retirement, were exchanging high-fives because they were eligible for the offer. At age 46, I did not share their jubilation.

I walked back to my office, closed the door and began working on the communications package that would announce the downsizing offer to employees. As I wrote up the details of the downsizing plan over the next couple of days, I began to get interested.

My job was secure but my career path was narrowing.  I was nowhere near retirement, but the downsizing offer would enable me to walk away with a year’s salary. Everyone was surprised when I took the buyout.

For several months I had been working with a task force to recommend ways to reorganize the company. Taking the buyout required me to leave the company at the end of January, and my department made preparations to fill my job. But the task force asked me to stay until its project finished in April.

So I remained at Illinois Bell as a kind of free agent, a man without a department. Human resources transferred me to the president’s staff to keep me on the payroll, and friends in another department gave me an office to use. When the task force concluded its work, my last act before turning in my employee badge and leaving the building was to drop off the final draft of the president’s speech.

That graceful exit turned out to be a long goodbye. The terms of my voluntary buyout permitted me to work for the company as a consultant. I soon began a series of consulting assignments at Ameritech (Illinois Bell’s parent company) that helped me transition to a new freelance career.

One of the HR guys who had designed the downsizing plan took the buyout but was called back periodically to consult on future force reductions. Whenever he was spotted in the building downsizing rumors circulated. He grew a beard but was still recognized.

A couple of years later the company downsized again and this time the offer was not voluntary. Most of my former peers and all of my former bosses were pushed out and were not allowed to come back as consultants. Meanwhile, Ameritech and its affiliated companies remained on my client list until 2002. Some of my clients were former Bell System colleagues and people who had worked for me at Illinois Bell. My last major client, Unilever, was the result of a referral from a former Illinois Bell colleague.

My experience at Illinois Bell made me useful as a consultant to companies going through major reorganization and change. Where they were going, I had already been.

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Putting words in the boss’ mouth

Posted on November 28, 2018 by Jim

Writing has been central to my career, and writing executive speeches is part of my portfolio.

I got my start as a speechwriter when the Bureau of Naval Personnel, in an uncharacteristic display of logic, matched my degree in journalism with an assignment as an admiral’s speechwriter at the Great Lakes Naval Base in Illinois. I had never written a speech, but it was a change from a minesweeper in the Western Pacific.

The speechwriter’s job is to write the speech the executive would write if he or she had the time and writing talent. The speech should sound like the speaker’s own words, perhaps jotted on the back of an envelope as Lincoln reputedly did with the Gettysburg Address. The best speeches are the product of an alter-ego partnership between the executive and speechwriter, such as John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson or Ronald Reagan and Peggy Noonan.

I rarely got to see my admiral, much less become his alter ego. Fortunately, I was not writing nuanced policy speeches. The admiral mostly spoke to community groups in his capacity as Naval District commandant, using talking points that came down from the Pentagon.

Delivering speeches did not come naturally to a former destroyer skipper. Listening to the admiral read every word I wrote was painful, but he was inspiring when he occasionally departed from the script and spoke off the cuff. We tape-recorded him once when he did that and wrote his words into his next speech, only to hear him read his own words as woodenly as he read mine.

Writing a speech is industrial-strength wordsmithing. Beyond the art of capturing the audience’s attention and making key points memorable, grinding out 3,000 words for a 20-minute speech was hard work in the manual-typewriter era. The admiral’s busy speaking schedule gave me a heavy workload on tight deadlines. At one point an impatient admiral’s aide dispatched a Marine orderly to wait in my office as I pounded out the manuscript.

I had a more satisfying experience as a speechwriter at Illinois Bell, where the head speechwriter was an excellent mentor and the company president was an accomplished speaker. The president always asked for the final manuscript with a generous right-hand margin so he could add his notes to make the speech his own. The result often was better than we could have written. Okay, he’s smarter than we are… that’s why he’s the president.

When I heard him deliver the first speech I wrote for him, I recognized little of what I had written because the president had wrapped his words around my ideas. He took me aside afterward and said he hoped he had done justice to my material.

When I wrote speeches for other executives, I would research the audience and subject matter and then sit down with the executive to talk about the speech. Chatting with the speaker (and recording the conversation) was an opportunity to learn how the guy talked when he was speaking informally. Was he good at telling stories? Would he be comfortable quoting Shakespeare, or would a Yogi Berra one-liner be a better fit? Could he tell a joke?

Some executives would say: “I don’t need a manuscript. Just give me bullet points.” I get it. He’s an engineer.  So I would break the manuscript into snippets and format it as bullet points.

My annual reserve duty in the Navy often involved speechwriting. I would report for duty in Washington or San Diego and be told: Welcome aboard! We need you to write two speeches for the admiral by Friday.  In the early days of word processing every office in the Navy used a different system, so being an itinerant speechwriter made me a word processing whiz.

I especially enjoyed hanging out with other speechwriters for interesting and witty conversation. I was a public relations generalist who occasionally wrote speeches, but full-time speechwriters (there are not many of them) are an eclectic bunch. Some have academic backgrounds and my mentor at Illinois Bell was an ex-priest. When I started writing speeches I contacted the Chicago Speechwriters’ Forum and asked how I could qualify for membership. You just show up, I was told. Speechwriters are not organization types, apparently.

The most rewarding aspect of speechwriting is the opportunity to communicate ideas. Important people have big ideas, but those ideas have no impact until they are expressed in clear language and delivered persuasively. A great speech can make history. Powerpoint slides can’t do that.

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Of suits and sandals

Posted on September 23, 2018 by Jim

I need a new suit. Usually a blazer or sports coat is as formal as I get for dress-up social occasions or the opera, but I have one good suit for weddings and funerals. I had not worn the suit in a couple of years, and when I put it on for a friend’s funeral recently I found some moth damage. (Moths in the New Mexico desert? Who knew?)

It’s probably the first suit I haven’t worn out. For decades I put on a suit (or at least a jacket and tie) every working day, like nearly every man who worked in an office. It was the uniform, like the Navy with a choice of colors. Styles didn’t change much, and I generally could keep wearing a suit or sports coat until it began to look disreputable.

I don’t know many men who truly enjoyed wearing a suit and necktie to work. I sure didn’t. We wore them because we had to, and because looking businesslike could help us climb the ladder to the executive suite (where we would wear more expensive suits). In many companies it was a status thing: On the factory floor at Western Electric’s  Hawthorne Works the supervisors wore neckties as a badge of rank.

But comfort was more important than status for most folks, and everyone was happy when offices began to change to business casual attire in the 1990s. It was a revolutionary move. At Ameritech, the chairman started things by arriving at the office in slacks and a knit shirt. He spent the day explaining that, no, he wasn’t going golfing, this is the new dress code.

Business casual took different forms at different companies. Some managers I saw at Amoco Oil wore the same suits but hung up the jackets and lost the neckties. At Ameritech, a few leisure suits from the 70s were briefly resurrected and quickly discarded.

It was more complicated for the women. Human resources employees were pressed into service as fashion consultants when people would call and ask: “This is what I want to wear tomorrow… is that okay?”

Even a casual dress code demands rules. Shortly after launching business casual, many companies felt compelled to issue “we didn’t mean that casual” memos banning torn jeans and crop tops. Sears had an ingenious solution: Since they were in the apparel business, they put department-store mannequins in their headquarters lobby with examples of what to wear and what not to.

A logical extension of business casual was Casual Friday, when jeans and more casual attire were permitted. One office at Unilever monetized the universal desire for denim:  During office charity drives, employees could purchase a pass to wear jeans on Thursday as well as Friday by donating a few extra bucks to charity.

I paid attention to dress codes because as a consultant, I needed to blend in with multiple clients. At one point I was working with a coat-and-tie hospital association and a business-casual food company. I would attend a meeting at the hospital association, then toss my jacket in the car and take off the tie as I drove to the food company. When I had to reverse the process, one of the guys at the food company noticed me putting on my tie in the men’s room. I explained what I was doing and he said: “Oh, like Superman.”

These days my retiree attire is influenced by New Mexico’s balmy weather and casual culture. Jeans are appropriate practically everywhere. I wear shorts and sandals all summer, and some folks wear them year round. But I still need a suit (and a mothproof bag to store it in). I don’t expect to attend any weddings, but there will be more funerals.

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The Navy’s Chicago mafia

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Jim

The idea of the Navy reserve is to prepare sailors for mobilization by immersing them in the Navy experience one weekend a month. For reservists who live nowhere near a ship or air station, this means reporting in uniform to a training center for two days of highly regimented training in exchange for a monthly paycheck.

Then there were the public affairs companies. Because I was a public affairs officer when my active duty ended in 1968, I joined Naval Reserve Public Affairs Company 9-2 in Chicago. In those days most public affairs reservists were not paid for monthly drills, and this gave the program an unmilitary degree of flexibility.

Instead of drilling in uniform at a training center, we met once a week after work, in civilian attire, in downtown Chicago. It was nothing like the Navy I knew: more like a group of freewheeling Michigan Avenue professionals who were on a first-name basis and wore identical suits once or twice a year.

The unit’s reservists (nearly all officers) included newspaper reporters and editors, advertising executives, public relations and marketing people, a magazine publisher, a bank president, a publicist for Playboy Magazine and, briefly, a TV anchor. We met at the Wrigley Building because the unit had a former member named Wrigley (who, the story goes, raised eyebrows at the Great Lakes Naval Base as an ensign when he arrived for duty in a chauffeured limousine bigger than the admiral’s).

These folks worked closely with the Chicago chapter of the Navy League, a civilian group of Navy boosters that included top business executives. One Navy Chief of Information called the reservist-Navy League alliance the Navy’s Chicago mafia.

Unlike other reserve units, public affairs companies didn’t just train: They did real-time communications projects for the Navy. Weekly unit meetings were brief because project work took place during business hours. I was impressed by how much time these guys took away from their high-powered jobs to work for the Navy. Their civilian jobs and connections enabled them to get things done that would have been difficult or impossible for active-duty public affairs officers.

My reserve drill site

  • Whenever a top admiral visited Chicago, our unit arranged a media tour that included newspaper editorial boards. Every admiral who took command of the Great Lakes Naval Base was immediately introduced to Chicago’s movers and shakers.
  • In those days the Navy had no paid TV commercials for recruiting and had to rely on public-service TV spots that aired in off-hours. One of our members was an ad agency media buyer whose job gave him lots of clout with TV stations. Once a year he persuaded the Chicago stations to air a bunch of recruiting spots in a prime-time ad blitz.
  • When American Prisoners of War were repatriated from Vietnam in 1973, our unit mobilized on a day’s notice to handle media coverage of returning POWs who arrived at the Glenview Naval Air Station for medical evaluation at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital. One of our members tapped his business contacts to arrange for each POW to get a reclining chair in his hospital room and the use of a new car from an auto dealer during his stay.
  • In its early days, the unit played a major role in bringing the captured German submarine U-505 to Chicago in 1954 to be placed on permanent display at the Museum of Science & Industry. At one point the unit signed for temporary custody of the submarine.

The original members of reserve public affairs companies were World War II veterans. Some of those guys were still around in 1968, along with veterans of more recent Navy service. Many of our members, however, had come through a direct-commission program that recruited professionally qualified people with no prior active duty.

So some of our most talented people knew very little about the Navy beyond what they’d learned in a two-week orientation. Occasionally we had to remind them to wear their insignia correctly and take off their hats when they walked into the officers’ club. I was an old salt by comparison, a lieutenant who actually had been to sea. A few of these “instant ensigns” stayed in the reserves to eventually become commanders and captains.

The oddball public affairs companies proved their value to the Navy, and in the late 1970s reserve public affairs was upgraded to a paid program and reorganized into units with mobilization missions. Getting a monthly paycheck was welcome, but meant that we had to rejoin the more traditional Navy with uniforms and weekend drills at the training center.

Integrating public affairs reservists into the operating Navy paid off years later, when public affairs reservists were activated for the Gulf War in 1990. But nothing could replace the Navy’s Chicago mafia.

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The rise and fall of objective journalism

Posted on June 27, 2018 by Jim

We keep hearing from the punditocracy that President Trump’s conflict with the news media is an existential threat to freedom of the press. I’m not buying it.

Conflict between government and the press is rooted in American history. No one got the vapors when Thomas Jefferson said: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” No one called for General William T. Sherman’s resignation when he threatened to shoot a reporter. That’s because for most of our history newspapers were intensely political and drew much of their financial support from political parties.

General Sherman’s threat to execute a reporter during the Civil War was not without justification. Newspapers often published troop movements and battle preparations gleaned from “leakers” on military staffs. (Sound familiar?) A court-martial banished the reporter from the army but, to Sherman’s disappointment, declined to impose the death penalty.

The objectivity we have taken for granted in journalism did not arise until the early 20thCentury. Newspapers broke with political parties to become corporate enterprises that relied on mass circulation and advertising. The Progressive reform movement fought political corruption and placed journalism above the political fray. Schools of journalism were organized to make journalism a profession.

The novel idea of professional ethics took longer to gain traction. The “yellow journalism” that flourished in the late 19thCentury continued to sell newspapers with sensational headlines and spurious stories: that era’s click-bait. The 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page, fueled the reputation of hard-drinking journalists willing to cut corners for a scoop.

The profession I joined in 1960 as a journalism student was striving to live down its dodgy heritage by embracing objectivity as a kind of religion. Lectures at the Medill School of Journalism portrayed our occupation as a higher calling bound by professional ethics. Instructors who had day jobs at Chicago newspapers conducted a boot camp of reporting and newswriting that force-fed impartiality and rigorous fact checking. Another famous training ground in those days was the City News Bureau of Chicago, whose motto was: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Yet journalists still debated whether journalism was a profession or a trade. Some editors remained skeptical about hiring journalism school graduates. Editor & Publisher, the industry publication, had help-wanted ads like: Copy editor wanted. Must be sober.

In the late 1970s I briefly joined the Chicago Press Veterans Association, many of whose members were survivors of the bad old days: irreverent geriatrics with really strong livers. At the association’s annual banquet, servers took your drink order when you walked in and brought TWO drinks. The stories they told sounded more like The Front Page than what I had learned in journalism school.

Objectivity finally prevailed. In the last half of the 20thCentury big-city newspapers, lots of them, established a reputation for solid reporting and TV networks followed suit. Investigative reporters carried on the tradition of the progressive muckrakers. Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. Presidents and the public treated the news media with respect because journalists had earned it.

The many reporters I encountered during my public relations career in Chicago asked tough questions but were straight shooters with no agenda. Matching wits with them was a challenge. On the rare occasions when they had time for lunch, they bought their own as a matter of ethics.

But objectivity is fragile. Reporting is a cascade of subjective decisions: what the story is about, whom to interview, which facts to include and which to omit, which quotes to use. Editors must decide what to cover and what to ignore. Even when a reporter tries to cover both sides of an issue fairly – I used to count lines in my stories to make sure I had the balance right – human nature is bound to get in the way.

The Washington Post’s investigative coverage of the Watergate scandal in 1972 was the high point of objective journalism and may have precipitated its eventual decline. It inspired a generation of young people to enter journalism who were motivated by the opportunity to bring down the powerful but ignored the painstaking research and rigorous fact-checking that made it possible. And it intensified the liberal bias that had begun during the Vietnam War.

At first we didn’t notice the decline in objectivity. CNN established cable TV news as a potent force with its worldwide network of reporters in the early 1990s. But the economics of the news business were changing. The decline of print advertising gutted newspapers. Increasing competition and tight budgets prompted TV newsrooms to replace field reporters with studio pundit panels. We began to see less reporting and more “analysis.”

National news organizations that no longer had bureaus in Berlin and Boise increasingly focused on Washington and New York with growing co-dependence between media and government. A surprising number of journalists have relatives and spouses who are government officials or political operatives: like the president of CBS News, whose brother is Obama staffer Ben Rhodes. People move between jobs in the media and government in the same revolving-door fashion as Congressmen and lobbyists.

Media bias gradually became more noticeable. By 2009, 60% of Americans believed the news media were politically biased and 63% thought news stories often were inaccurate. National media organizations openly favored President Obama, both in favorable coverage of the administration and lack of curiosity about its failings. Much of the investigative reporting the news media used to do has shifted to nonprofit organizations such as ProPublica, The Intercept and Judicial Watch.

There’s still a lot of solid journalism going on. Most local news coverage is relatively unbiased, and the proliferation of online news outlets gives discriminating readers plenty of opportunities to get all the news. But it’s easier to get accurate news about your local community than about the nation as a whole.

Donald Trump’s election completed the politicization of national news organizations. The widespread announcements that news organizations did not intend to “normalize” Trump were a declaration that those newsrooms will no longer apply the principles of objective journalism and will function as an opposition party instead.

And they are doing so. Coverage of Trump by the traditional news organizations has been overwhelmingly negative (though a plurality of Democrats say media coverage is not critical enough). Media story selection is striking, with Stormy Daniels getting dramatically more TV coverage than the economy or healthcare.

I don’t think my journalism professors would recognize CNN’s Jim Acosta or April Ryan as reporters: Their speeches at White House news conferences make it abundantly clear that they are advocates with an agenda. In a throwback to the yellow journalism era, we are seeing more news stories based on anonymous leaks, speculation and rumors (Where’s Melania?) that prove to be inaccurate. We also are seeing deliberate deception such as the Time Magazine cover featuring an immigrant child who was NOT separated from her mother. Reporters are irate that the White House is not treating them like Walter Cronkite, but they can’t have it both ways.

So when President Trump responds to media abuse in kind, that’s not an assault on press freedom. It’s an appropriate way to treat mud-slinging political opposition, just as it was through most of American history. The republic will survive: General Sherman was not allowed to shoot a reporter and Trump won’t either.

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Surnames for Pyongyang

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Jim

There’s a lot of skepticism about President Trump’s negotiations with North Korea, and how difficult it will be to persuade the hermit kingdom to give up its nuclear weapons. But it may be possible if – IF – we offer North Korea what they need most. I’m talking about surnames.

Yes, surnames. North Korea isn’t just a poor country: It’s so poor they don’t have enough names to go around. Half the population is named Kim, Lee or Park. Imagine how hard it must be to run the country if they can’t even publish a useful phonebook. Okay, they don’t have phones either, but you get the idea. No wonder they want to lash out at everyone.

South Korea has the same problem but overcame it by giving everyone a Samsung cell phone. They probably have an app to tell all the namesakes apart.

So our negotiators can expedite denuclearization of North Korea by stationing a ship full of surnames off the coast, ready for immediate distribution once destruction of the nukes has been verified.

The United States is rich in surnames, many of which are overstocked: Smith, Johnson, Williams, etc. An exchange program could encourage some of the Joneses and Garcias to change their names to Kim or Park. Democrats would get behind this because they are all about diversity. Van Jones would get even more airtime on CNN as Kim Van.

Support from celebrities would clinch the deal. I’ll bet Beyonce, Cher and Snooki would donate their unused surnames to the cause of world peace. Other celebrities could license their names as a perk to win over North Korea’s ruling elite. Kardashian Jong Un has a nice ring to it.

Surnames for North Korea. It just might work.

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Election entertainment

Posted on May 22, 2018 by Jim

The silly season is here again. New Mexico’s primary election is June 5 and it’s quite a show.

Two of the state’s three Congressional representatives, a Democrat and a Republican, are running to replace a term-limited governor. This makes the campaign for the two open Congressional seats a free-for-all.

New Mexico has a one-and-a-half-party system. Democrats dominate except for a conservative stronghold in the southern part of the state. That makes the primary election important because in most of the state, the winner of the Democratic primary for most offices wins the general election with little or no opposition. So I register as a Democrat to avoid being disenfranchised.

I’m not sure if the Republicans even have a primary election in my county. Perhaps they play musical chairs and put the loser on the ballot.

Because Albuquerque is the only television market in the state, I’m seeing a schizophrenic mix of campaign commercials aimed at widely different constituencies. An ad for an Albuquerque Democrat promising to fight President Trump is followed by one for a southern New Mexico Republican calling for tougher immigration enforcement. And apparently there’s a hotly contested sheriff’s race up in San Juan County.

Every single Democrat is running against Donald Trump. My district’s six Congressional candidates are out-bidding one another for the most combative declaration of jihad against the Trump administration. Since New Mexico depends heavily on military bases, national laboratories and federal welfare, this smacks of biting the hand that feeds.

It’s not just the folks running for Congress. A candidate for state auditor is pledging to block Donald Trump’s border wall. He has not explained how the auditor’s office will accomplish this.

One Congressional candidate made national news by dropping the f-bomb in a commercial opposing the National Rifle Association. This is a novel campaign pitch for New Mexico, which has the seventh-highest gun ownership rate (49%) in the country and still celebrates Billy the Kid.

Then there are the surveys. I get several phone calls a week from pollsters. They read a list of candidates and ask if I have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of each. Then they test campaign arguments by asking my reaction to statements about the candidates. Candidate X failed to pay his taxes in 2011. Does this make your opinion less favorable? My usual response is: No, I already know he’s a crook. I amuse myself by trying to guess which candidate sponsored the survey.

Early voting has started but I always wait until Election Day in case one of the candidates gets indicted at the last minute. Or arrested for drunk driving, as one of our state legislators was last weekend. I’ve been saving the “I voted” stickers from past years and may walk into the polling place wearing three of them.

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Frank, Ernest and me

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Jim

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois. Frank Lloyd Wright lived there. And so did I.

Oak Park is a vintage suburb of Chicago that retains a small-town atmosphere despite a population of 50,000. Century-old buildings and tree-lined streets give it a sense of history. Hemingway once described Oak Park as a town of broad lawns and narrow minds. In recent years it’s become trendy but still is best known for two of its most famous residents.

Another Oak Park native, comedian Judy Tenuta, quipped that Oak Park was about sitting on uncomfortable chairs to shoot moose.

When I was in high school in the late 1950s these legends were still making news. Hemingway had published The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 and was basking in the celebrity of his Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. Wright, at age 89, unveiled a plan for a mile-high building in downtown Chicago in 1956.

Wright settled in Oak Park when he was starting out as an architect and built 25 structures there between 1889 and 1913. Some did not have his distinctive rectilinear style because when Wright was young and hungry he sometimes built what the client wanted. Picture FLW gritting his teeth as he says, “So you want gingerbread trim on the eaves? Okey-dokey.”

By the 1950s the Frank Lloyd Wright houses were local curiosities that attracted architecture students with cameras. I found Wright’s buildings and his rebellious persona interesting and read his weighty autobiography.

When the Navy sent me to Japan I visited Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Over the years I’ve toured the Taliesin complex in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. For a while I sort of wanted to live in a Wright house. Minus the uncomfortable chairs.

Oak Park rediscovered Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1970s to help rebuild its sagging economy. His crumbling home and studio was restored to become a national landmark. I served on a local economic development board that helped make Wright’s architecture the nucleus of a thriving tourism industry.

I felt a closer kinship with Ernest Hemingway because I aspired to a career in adventurous journalism and was going to his high school. I read The Old Man and the Sea when it first published in Life Magazine and consumed the rest of his books in short order.

I felt Hemingway’s presence in the high school. When they renovated the oldest wing of the school it occurred to me that he had walked those halls. When I became editor of the Trapeze, the school paper, I wondered if Hemingway had sat at that desk (probably not, 40 years earlier).

Hemingway got the hell out of Oak Park as soon as he could but, like Wright, is celebrated today as a favorite son and tourist attraction. His birthplace is now a museum. The high school has a Hemingway award for young writers (which my daughter won twice). Local folks often quote Hemingway’s characterization of Oak Park as a town of broad lawns but omit the narrow minds part.

I never met either Wright or Hemingway and that’s just as well. Wright was a self-centered heel who left his family and ran off with a neighbor’s wife. He designed low doorways and cramped kitchens because he was a short guy who didn’t much like women.

I would not have been pals with Hemingway, either. I have no interest in fishing or bullfighting, and everything I’ve read suggests that the legendary Ernest was kind of a blowhard.

But I still admire Wright houses. And I re-read Hemingway whenever I start thinking I know how to write a sentence.

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Moving on up to Oak Park

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Jim

Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff, and that’s fine with me.

We were ready to move. My parents had rented the one-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood just before I was born. By 1955 I was in seventh grade, my brother was in fourth and the apartment was too small for the four of us. The folks had been saving for a house for years and an inheritance from my grandfather finally made a down payment possible.

It wasn’t just about a bigger place: We were ready to move up. Maypole Avenue was an okay neighborhood but my parents were aspirational. Although my father had a blue-collar job, most of their friends were professionals. We went to symphony concerts and plays, and my mother would save for months to buy something nice from Marshall Field’s rather than settle for something cheaper.

My folks also noticed early signs of the neighborhood going downhill: houses broken up into small apartments, lax zoning enforcement and declining city services. Twenty years later much of Austin would be a high-crime ghetto.

And then there were the schools. My parents had not gone to college but were determined that my brother and I would – and would earn scholarships to do so. My brother and I were doing well in school, but our neighborhood school had 40 kids to a classroom. So my parents chose the nearby suburb of Oak Park, which had a highly regarded school system.

Our new neighborhood was only three miles from the old one but was a step up: mostly single-family homes rather than apartments on quiet, tree-lined streets. Our modest, three-bedroom house at 921 S. Humphrey Ave. was a palace compared to the old apartment. My brother and I had our own rooms and our very own backyard.

We were on our best behavior to make a good impression on our new neighbors. Until Uncle Frank dropped by unannounced a few days after we moved in. My mom’s uncle was a good-hearted old guy with a loud voice and colorful vocabulary. He stepped out of his jalopy, looked up at the house and shouted: “Well, Goddam!” My parents were not amused but the neighbors probably were.

We had to work a little harder in school. There were only 16 kids in my eighth-grade classroom. To my mother’s delight (though not ours), the school offered free music lessons: violin for my brother and cello for me.

We quickly realized that pleased as we were with our new house and neighborhood, it was modest compared with some parts of Oak Park: a gracious community that included Victorian homes, impressive mansions and Frank Lloyd Wright landmarks. I thought of our house and neighborhood as the first rung on the ladder. When I walked home from high school I used to admire the nice homes I passed and would visualize owning one of them – which I did, years later.

Living on the wrong side of the tracks was rarely an issue in high school, at least not for me. Wealth and social status may have been important in some circles, but the school was too large for any one clique to dominate. I hung out with the brainy nerds and edited the school newspaper. It didn’t occur to me that some of my friends were wealthy until I visited their homes, and it didn’t much matter.

Oak Park was a good fit for us, as it turned out. After my hitch in the Navy I gravitated back to Oak Park and raised my own family there.

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Working by the Western

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Jim

The place was legendary. Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works was the world’s largest telephone equipment factory: Five million square feet of floor space on 200 acres in the Chicago suburb of Cicero and 40,000 employees in its heyday.

Western Electric was the manufacturing unit of AT&T and Hawthorne was its largest plant. When it opened in 1905, factories were works of architecture as well as utility. The main building was an industrial monument: six stories of red brick, three blocks on a side, topped with a tower that elevated the general manager’s office.

When I first walked through Hawthorne’s iron gate in 1973 I was impressed with the history and scale of the place, and never lost that sense of wonder during my three-year rotational assignment from Illinois Bell. This was more than a factory: It was a city, a community and a kind of extended family.

Hawthorne had its own electrical power plant, water system, fire station, police force and even its own railroad. There was a credit union, employee clubs and activities and a grassy park in the center of the complex. They even had a beauty contest in which the contestants rode into the coronation ceremony on a locomotive. (Women’s liberation was slow to reach Cicero.)

But first and foremost, Hawthorne was about manufacturing. Old photos of the Hawthorne works showed hundreds of people assembling telephones by hand at long tables. By the time I arrived machines occupied more space than people, ranging from a noisy foundry to a state-of-the-art “clean room” that produced computer chips.

Hawthorne no longer manufactured telephones at that point but made switching equipment and other components. A cable plant transformed raw copper into miles of telephone wire. There were rooms full of punch presses and even a carpenter shop. I expended a lot of shoe leather walking around the complex, occasionally with a reporter or TV crew in tow.

Like most factories, Hawthorne had a population of cats that kept the place rodent-free. One cat wandered into a boxcar loaded with reels of cable and was inadvertently shipped to a facility in Atlanta. A week later the boxcar returned to Hawthorne with empty cable reels… and the cat, supplied with food for the trip by the Atlanta crew.

Most of Hawthorne’s original employees were Eastern European immigrants who made Cicero a community of brick bungalows and Bohemian bakeries. Pay and benefits were good for those days and working “by the Western,” in Chicago parlance, was a status symbol. (My wife’s Lithuanian grandfather was impressed when I began working there.) Later generations brought Mexican-Americans and African-Americans but Hawthorne retained an old-neighborhood flavor. I met a surprising number of second- and third-generation Hawthorne employees, many of whom had relatives working there. And I got really good at spelling Czech and Polish surnames.

Hawthorne figured in one of the biggest disasters of the century when the SS Eastland capsized in the Chicago River in 1915 and killed hundreds of employees departing for an excursion on Lake Michigan. Another historical footnote: Al Capone’s headquarters, the Alton Hotel, was half a block away.

Part of Hawthorne’s history was the Hawthorne Studies, a pioneering series of experiments in the 1920s that helped launch the field of industrial psychology. The “Hawthorne effect” was discovered when experiments with lighting levels showed that employees responded to management attention more than environment. I found myself glancing up from my desk occasionally to see if they were changing the lights on me.

The plant beauty contest was a big deal back in the day.

The company continued to value employee relations 50 years later. When it was time to re-paint the machines in the cable plant, managers let employees pick the colors instead of going with the usual industrial green. Peter Max colors were popular with young workers in the 1970s, and machines the size of garbage trucks blossomed in psychedelic shades of puce, chartreuse and fuchsia. The plant looked bizarre but productivity probably improved.

A Western Electric national strike in 1974, Hawthorne’s first in 70 years, was the friendliest strike I had ever seen. In contrast to the bitter telephone company strikes I had experienced, managers were never hassled and I rode my bicycle through the picket lines without incident. The general manager visited the picket line to chat with employees and nobody thought of taking a poke at him.

What made this employee engagement extraordinary was that Hawthorne was in steep decline. Changing technology had cut the workforce from 24,000 to 16,000 before I arrived, and only 11,000 remained when I left. The department where I worked was cut by half. Managers were reluctant to end the beauty contest because it had been a tradition for decades and was popular with employees (especially women in their 50s, oddly enough) but finally discontinued it after most of the young women were laid off. Layoffs are not unusual in manufacturing, and managers were candid with employees about the plant’s prospects.

So I was happy to rotate back to Illinois Bell in 1976. The Hawthorne Works finally closed in 1983. The water tower is still standing but the rest of the property is now a shopping center.

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