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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Lessons in disruption

Posted on November 3, 2017 by Jim

I’m a big fan of disruption. It’s an acquired taste. But because virtually everything is being disrupted these days, from groceries to government, it’s something we should learn to appreciate.

We often cheer disruption from a safe distance because overturning established institutions is in the American DNA. Most of us like to think of ourselves as rebels (unless we’re taking about the Confederate kind). But when we’re invested in the institution being overturned, our first impulse is to dig in our heels.

I was immersed in disruption for much of my career. I worked for the telephone company from 1968 to 1990 and had a front-row seat for the breakup of AT&T, at that time the largest corporate reorganization in history. It was a great experience, though I did not always think so at the time.

The Bell System was a well-managed monopoly with a century-long tradition of excellent telephone service, a close-knit corporate culture and nearly a million loyal employees. It was disrupted by advancing technology, changing markets and shifting consumer sentiment — culminating in an antitrust suit in 1974 that broke up the company a decade later. The phone company had done nothing wrong, but the things we did well were no longer as important to our customers as the promise of wider choice and cheaper long-distance calls.

Our initial response was to circle the wagons because everyone’s identity was rooted in the Bell System’s stability and security. It was hard for us to believe that customers liked their telephone service but still favored breaking up the company. We were convinced that telephone service was going to fall apart.

Once change was inevitable we learned to cope with uncertainty and massive reorganization. It was messy at times, with management missteps and downsizing, but telephone service did not fall apart and neither did we. If the antitrust judge had changed his decision a decade later and told us to go back to being a monopoly, he would not have had many takers.

This sort of upheaval has been going on throughout American history. If competition is the engine of our economy, disruption is its turbocharger. Companies are routinely disrupted by innovation and competitive pressure, and successful companies disrupt themselves. We’ve seen Apple disrupt music and telecommunications. Video streaming services are displacing television and cable networks. Amazon disrupted publishing and is quickly taking over retail markets. Retail jobs are disappearing but distribution centers are hiring.

Disruptive renewal is harder for institutions that are insulated from the economy. Universities have been sheltered from market forces because they are either state-owned or government-subsidized. But declining enrollment, online competition, soaring costs and political unrest make higher education ripe for disruption. Can we get Amazon to buy a university?

The latest target of disruption is government itself. Donald Trump’s election was a hostile takeover of a government that had lost the trust of at least half the country. Unlike past changes of administration that left a permanent governing class untouched, this election repudiated a bipartisan set of assumptions and values to an extent we have not seen in more than a century.

It’s natural for bureaucrats, politicians and interest groups who were invested in the status quo to feel the same sense of existential threat I saw among telephone company managers in 1984. Historians recorded similar outrage after the presidential election of 1860.

Unlike a corporate takeover, government disruption can be reversed in the next election. This gives opponents incentive and opportunity to continue the fight and that’s what we’re seeing. Because Americans still identify with rebellion, it’s a smart tactic for the Democrats to brand their campaign to restore the old order as a Les Miz resistance movement.

Business disruptions take place when consumers embrace new ways to meet their needs and shop at Amazon instead of Sears. Whether this holds true for government remains to be seen. All we know right now is that the disruption and drama is not going to end any time soon and we’d better get used to it. The good news is that we get to vote on the outcome.

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Columbus and my neighbors

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Jim

This is an updated version of a post from 2017.

Columbus Day used to be a really boring holiday (unless you’re Italian). Now it’s nearly as controversial as, say, a football game, as a growing number of cities dump Christopher Columbus in favor of Indigenous People. 2021 update: Looks like it’s a national holiday now.

I’m all for giving indigenous folks their own holiday, perhaps in March or April, and don’t begrudge government workers yet another day off. But it’s hard to escape the impression that re-naming the holiday is more about dissing Chris than celebrating the indigenous.

Whether or not Columbus was a bad hombre personally, his principal accomplishment was to open the Western Hemisphere to Spanish colonization. So are the anti-Columbus folks saying that the continent would be a better place if the Spanish had never interfered with idyllic folk like the Mayans? If so, doesn’t that disparage Hispanic Americans?

For a closer look at Columbus’ legacy, consider my adopted home state of New Mexico: Hispanics make up 45% of the population and Native Americans another 10%. The result is a rich, blended culture that makes Columbus impossible to erase and Native Americans impossible to dismiss.

Many New Mexicans trace their families all the way back to Spain (because the priests that accompanied the Spanish invaders recorded all the baptisms and marriages). They are unlikely to agree that their ancestors should have stayed there instead of following Columbus – especially when the family tree includes the occasional Native American. Some New Mexicans have embraced the “indigenous” label themselves because their families were on the land before it was part of the United States.

Update: I’ve been studying New Mexico history and find that the state has its own ethnic melting pot. The “Spanish” who colonized the place were a racially mixed bunch when they got here. New Mexico was practicing diversity and inclusion a couple of centuries before it became fashionable. 

If Columbus had never arrived, my house would be a Cape Cod.

The Spanish arrived in 1541 and their influence is everywhere: in architecture, religion, art, food, etc. Spanish is the state’s official second language and practically every place has a Spanish name (including the street where I live).

Native American influence is nearly as strong. While indigenous populations were evicted from most other states, Navajos and Apaches returned to their ancestral lands after the displacements of the Nineteenth Century and the 19 pueblos never left. So while Native Americans may be a political abstraction in New York and Washington, they’re neighbors and co-workers in New Mexico.

Over the centuries the two cultures have co-existed and blended. Santa Fe’s two biggest art events are Spanish Market and Indian Market. You can see Indian dances and flamenco in the same day in Albuquerque. Catholic churches on the pueblos have a distinctive Native American atmosphere. New Mexico’s unique cuisine combines both traditions on the same plate.

Reconciling Columbus’ legacy is an ongoing process here. Everyone acknowledges that the Conquistador ancestors of my neighbors enslaved the Indians and converted them to Catholicism at swordpoint. For the past 300 years Santa Fe’s biggest festival has celebrated the Entrada, the 1692 “bloodless reconquest” of New Mexico by the Spanish after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 kicked them out. The bloodless part was a whitewash, it turns out, and the city is re-thinking the festival.

A monument in Santa Fe erected in 1868 commemorates the soldiers who fought against the “savage Indians.” The word “savage” has been chiseled out. Update: The Santa Fe monument was torn down by rioters in the first “celebration” of Indigenous Peoples Day last year. (No great loss: It was a pretty ugly monument.) There’s an opportunity to create an exciting new monument that symbolizes unity. A committee has been formed.

A few years ago the Taos town council removed Kit Carson’s name from a local park because of the famous explorer’s role in a brutal forced migration of Navajo people. They changed the name back again because Kit’s buried there, but discussion is likely to continue.

There’s a high school team called the Redskins. It’s on the Navajo reservation and everybody’s cool with it. An elderly state senator closes every session of the legislature by singing a Navajo song. It’s a tradition.

When the “Occupy” protests popped up a few years ago, the local version called itself “(Un)occupy Albuquerque” to protest the 400-year occupation of Native American land.

In a more sensible way to cast off colonialism, a couple of New Mexico’s pueblos voted to revive their Native American names. The Spanish had named the pueblos for the churches they forced the inhabitants to build. So San Juan Pueblo is now Ohkay Owingeh and Santo Domingo is Kewa Pueblo.

Albuquerque and Santa Fe are joining the national movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, but Hispanic city employees still get the day off. Meanwhile, New Mexico’s celebration of its blended culture will continue to evolve with updated monuments and festivals. And folks who want to atone for Columbus’ sins against indigenous people can pay reparations at the nearest Native American casino.

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Mississippi summers

Posted on September 7, 2017 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 okay.

When you’re growing up in a big city, it’s a treat to spend the summer in a small town with indulgent grandparents. My brother and I spent most of every summer in my father’s hometown of Corinth, Mississippi.

The adventure started with a train ride. My grandmother would take the train to Chicago (free because my grandfather was a railroad retiree) to collect me or my brother for the overnight trip. We’d board the train in Chicago’s bustling Illinois Central terminal, arrive at the sleepy Corinth station and ride in my grandfather’s Ford through tree-lined streets to their house.

A house! Compared to our three-room apartment, my grandparents’ modest house was a palace. A bedroom all to myself! A front porch and, best of all, a yard! That was a big deal for a city kid, because if we ventured onto the tiny front lawn of our apartment building the janitor yelled at us. In Corinth I luxuriated in the single-family territoriality of a big lawn and garden. My grandfather even built a playhouse for us.

Everything about Corinth was different. The population was about 10,000 in those days, and I could walk downtown along quiet streets with practically no traffic. Downtown consisted of a few blocks of shops, including a Kroger supermarket and a dry-goods store with an old-fashioned trolley that carried money to a cashier upstairs and came back with change. The courthouse square had a Confederate monument (wonder if it’s still there?) and a series of park benches where elderly men in overalls spent the day whittling.

What was more interesting was a drainage ditch down the street where we could catch tadpoles. The neighbor kids and I went barefoot, which was unheard of in Chicago. My grandfather took me fishing at a nearby lake, taught me to shoot a .22 rifle and permitted me to putter around in a workshop shed that smelled like cedar shavings.

The Jim Crow South of the 1950s was strange to a Northern kid. I had never seen separate drinking fountains before, and was disappointed to find that the water in the “colored” fountain was clear instead of, say, blue or green. Despite the segregation of that era I saw more daily contact between white and black folks in Corinth than I did in Chicago, and never saw my grandparents treat any African-American individual with disrespect.

My grandmother’s cooking was plain but delicious. I helped shell peas: blackeyed, not the green peas we ate in Chicago. My grandmother made memorable cornbread and purchased fresh produce from a mule-drawn farm wagon that came down the street. She spoiled me with Dr. Pepper soda pop, a regional delicacy that was not sold nationwide until 1963. I still drink the stuff. There was no restaurant in Corinth, but a neighbor ran a hamburger stand on the highway.

Everybody knew my grandparents: They taught Sunday school at the Baptist church and my grandfather was a big wheel in the Masons. The local radio station even mentioned that the McClures’ grandson was visiting all the way from Chicago.

The pace of life was slow and the hot, humid summers made sitting still the best way to stay cool. Air conditioning was rare in those days, and the grownups sat on their front porches every evening and fanned themselves. My grandparents’ church supplied cardboard fans (sponsored by a local funeral home) in the hymnal racks at each pew. So the minister could tell at a glance whether the congregation was staying awake through the sermon.

Years later, when I was in college, I made a brief visit and saw Brad, one of my childhood playmates, sitting on his porch across the street. We chatted a while and I asked what guys our age did for fun in Corinth.

“We go fishing, play a little softball, but mostly just set around,” he said.

Just then a teenage girl, visibly pregnant, walked by and waved. I asked: “Isn’t that little Maynette who lives around the corner?”

“Yes, she got married about a year ago,” Brad said.

“Are all the girls around here married?”

“Yep, that’s why we just set around,”

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Observations from Harvey

Posted on August 31, 2017 by Jim

I can’t stop watching TV coverage of Hurricane Harvey (and couldn’t avoid it if I wanted to). It’s simultaneously terrible, tragic and heartwarming.

The good news us that we’re seeing a learning curve in responding to disasters after the missteps of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Public agency screw-ups made Katrina an even bigger disaster, but government seems to have its act together this time around. People are getting rescued, shelters are up and running, and state and federal resources are coordinated. We’re getting better at this, and will continue learning from the inevitable mistakes in the Harvey response.

We’re also learning that government can’t do everything. Every newscast shows ordinary folks rescuing people in boats, and volunteers distributing clothing and food at shelters. The Cajun Navy drove in from Louisiana. A brewery shifted production from beer to bottled water.

I wish they’d stop giving big storms innocuous human names. That’s unfair to the actual people whose parents named them Harvey, Sandy and Katrina. How about aggressive names like Godzilla, Kraken, Sasquatch or Chupacabra?

Environmentalists blame global warming, but eliminating fossil fuels and bankrolling the Paris Climate Accord won’t prevent the next storm and the one after that. Long-term efforts to reduce emissions need to continue, but mitigating severe weather is a more immediate priority.

One factor in the impact of natural disasters is poverty. Destructive storms in the U.S. destroy property but kill fewer people than in poor countries: 230,000 were killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and 160,000 Haitians died in the 2010 earthquake. Closer to home, the poverty rate of 23% in New Orleans (and associated breakdown in local institutions) may have contributed to the death toll of 1,833 in Hurricane Katrina. Houston, with a poverty rate of 14.6%, looks like it will fare better.

Living in a place that has decent infrastructure, a functioning economy and a competent government makes people less vulnerable to severe weather. A storm probably will kill you in Bangladesh, but in Houston someone will rescue you.  And your cat, too.

Prosperity is important because we need to spend big bucks on infrastructure: coastal seawalls like the ones in the Netherlands, reservoirs and diversion channels in flood-prone areas like Houston. If the U.S. economy grows at an annual rate of 3% or better we can afford this. If we settle for the lower growth of the past eight years, we can’t.

We also need to re-think local development and growth policies. Paving over floodplain farms with subdivisions and shopping centers makes floods more severe. Federal flood insurance needs to be overhauled: not only to adequately compensate homeowners and small businesses, but also to eliminate perverse incentives to build and rebuild in vulnerable areas.

If a neighborhood gets flattened or flooded every few years, perhaps federal insurance should help residents relocate instead of rebuilding the place yet again. That’s how folks coped with climate change in the days before federal insurance. In Shawneetown, IL, for instance, residents moved the entire town a few miles inland after the Ohio River flood of 1937.

The most important lesson of Hurricane Harvey has nothing to do with government policy. What makes the TV coverage compelling is the spontaneous outpouring of support, compassion and courage: first responders in helicopters, neighbors in small boats and the shelter volunteer who just had to come and help. Contributions are pouring in and the entire nation is cheering them on.

So while pundits bemoan the nation’s divisive politics, the news cameras are revealing that Americans really can come together. For a while, anyway.

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Visit to a bird farm

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Jim

USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78)

I enjoyed watching the commissioning ceremony for the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) on TV over the weekend. The news media consensus is… it’s big. Really BIG. President Trump’s commissioning speech showed uncharacteristic restraint by not calling the ship yuge.

One memorable episode in my Navy career was a visit to the USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) in the 1980s. Carriers were a novelty to me because my sea duty was aboard one of the Navy’s smallest ships, a coastal minesweeper with a crew of 35. When I told people aboard the Vinson that my first ship displaced 400 tons, I was told: “That’s about how much we eat.”

Carriers, nicknamed “bird farms,” are as crowded as they are gigantic. Take a two-acre aircraft hangar, put a 4.5-acre airstrip on top and build a ship around it. Add all the equipment and supplies needed to operate the ship and its aircraft, and squeeze 5,000 people into whatever space is left.

Every deck, or level, is a maze of compartments and passageways. The Navy gives each compartment a numerical “address” that indicates its deck, fore-and-aft frame number and port-or-starboard location. Because it’s easy to get lost, floor-plan maps of each deck are posted prominently. When I visited Vinson some prankster had removed the “you are here” stickers.

President Trump described Ford as 100,000 tons of U.S. territory but carriers don’t operate alone. A carrier battle group includes cruisers, destroyers and submarines: not to protect the carrier, as they did in World War II, but to form an integrated system that can detect and defeat anything within a radius of several hundred miles, from the ocean floor to the stratosphere. Think of it as the world’s largest safe space.

The wonder of an aircraft carrier is its ability to launch and recover airplanes. I arrived aboard Vinson on the COD (carrier onboard delivery), a C-2 Greyhound turboprop transport with about 20 passengers. Before takeoff in San Diego we donned helmets and life jackets, and strapped into rear-facing seats in the windowless passenger cabin.

Landing on a carrier requires catching a cable stretched across the ship’s deck with a hook on the aircraft’s tail to drag the aircraft to a stop within a few hundred feet. It took us three tries. We were waved off the first time because the wingtip of a parked airplane was intruding into the landing area.  The second attempt was a “bolter.” The tailhook missed the cable – we could hear it bumping along the deck – and the pilot hit the throttles and took off again. The hook caught the third time and we were pressed into our seats as the aircraft went from 145 mph to a dead stop in a few seconds.

Landing on the deck of a ship is an unnatural act for both aircraft and aviator. Every pilot has to re-qualify at the beginning of every cruise, and every landing is recorded on video, critiqued and graded. Every landing is assisted by a landing signal officer (LSO), an experienced aviator who guides the pilot down or waves him off. LSOs stand on an open platform at the edge of the flight deck uncomfortably close to landing aircraft.

When I visited there my guide pointed out a padded ramp several feet below the platform, where the LSO’s can jump if an errant aircraft heads for them. “If you see the other guys jumping, you jump too,” I was told. “But if you’re the first one to jump the other guys will land on top of you.”

The orchestrated chaos of the flight deck, and the care and feeding of 75 aircraft, are only part of what goes on aboard a carrier. It’s a floating city with a hospital, a police force of Marines, food service, laundry, gym, brig (jail) and even a TV station. Not to mention advanced electronics and a nuclear power plant.

It’s a city of youngsters with an average age of 24. The men and women fueling and maintaining the aircraft are in their teens. The aviators are in their twenties, and the squadron commanders and senior enlisted people are in their thirties.

My tour of the Vinson included clambering down into the bowels of the ship to see a pump room of some sort. Ships have lots of places like this: neat, utilitarian arrays of well-oiled machinery. But in this one the sailors decided to polish the equipment to a parade-ground sheen and transform an ordinary pump room into an immaculate showplace. Because it was theirs.

Departing a carrier is just as dramatic as arriving. The aircraft is hitched to a catapult driven by a hydraulic ram, and is held in place as the pilot revs up the engines. When maximum power is reached the catapult yanks the aircraft forward and flings it into the air. As my transport flight was launched we levitated against our seat harnesses for a moment and two young crew attendants let out a joyful whoop. It’s a rush and yeah, it’s fun!

Posted in Sea Stories | Comments Off on Visit to a bird farm

My stuttering family reunion

Posted on July 15, 2017 by Jim

Last week I spent four days reconnecting with an extended family of 700 people at the annual conference of the National Stuttering Association.

This is the world’s largest organization for people who stutter with about 150 local support groups, educational programs and a national conference. Stuttering was a problem for me when I was younger but is practically a non-issue in my life today, thanks in part to conferences like these.

We who stutter make up about one percent of the population. Stuttering is mostly neurological in origin and often genetic. (Short answer: Our brains process speech less efficiently.) It’s not psychological but comes with a lot of emotional baggage – particularly because stuttering is widely misunderstood and may be the only disability it’s still acceptable to ridicule.

Speech therapy helps, but overcoming the effects of stuttering requires attitude change and a lot of emotional healing: letting go of lifelong fear and shame, bringing your stuttering out in the open and accepting that it’s okay to stutter.

Many people who stutter have never talked with another stutterer about stuttering, and some have never met anyone else who stuttered. So walking into a gathering of hundreds of people who stutter – a place where stuttering is normal – is a new experience. Newcomers are accepted the moment they walk in the door and there’s an instant bond of kinship.

The kids are fun to watch. A child who is the only kid in the class who stutters suddenly meets dozens of new friends. I’ve seen a generation of these youngsters grow into confident young adults.

The conference has educational workshops, keynote speakers and a gala banquet. But the main attraction is a family reunion on a massive scale, where people reconnect with old friends and make new ones. People come back year after year, and some arrive a couple of days early just to socialize.

People who usually have difficulty talking are immersed in nonstop conversation. Groups form spontaneously for lunch or dinner, and first-time attendees (identified by a ribbon on their nametags) get special attention. Nobody is alone for long. For people who are still struggling with stuttering, the conference is a boost in self-confidence that carries over into their daily lives.

This year one of our long-time members was ill and could not make it to the conference. So another friend posted a video on Facebook with hundreds of people cheering for him. Another guy walked up to the stage during the conference and proposed to his girlfriend: one of several couples I know who met at these conferences.

This was my 22nd National Stuttering Association conference and I’ve made many friends over the years. It’s a varied group: Engineers, retail workers, college professors, accountants, a retired postal worker, a veterinarian. I’ve learned a lot from all of them.

I keep in touch with many of these people on Facebook and we frequently argue about politics, as practically everybody does these days. At the conference, the subject rarely came up because we had so many other things to talk about.

Posted in Idle Ruminations | Comments Off on My stuttering family reunion