NOTTINGHAM SQUARE
Category: American Affairs
MANAGEMENT STYLES
Within an organization, you may see a manager who chooses to surround himself or herself with talented individuals and then allows them the freedom to perform at their best. This is the leader who’s not afraid of being placed in their shadow but rather supports their efforts and builds a team of responsible players. This leader hands out kudos, rather than blame, and corrects errors as a matter of avoiding them in the future. Credit is shared rather than hoarded.
There’s another kind of manager who wants to stand taller than his or her subordinates. Talent is viewed with suspicion, and workers are held on a short leash and often micromanaged. Scant praise is handed out – and when it is, there’s little reason to trust it. Fear and blame, especially, are the root of motivation, and maintaining a low profile and even doing as little as possible (to reduce one’s exposure) are inevitable consequences. These managers don’t want to hear your ideas, though they expect you to follow their orders.
One type leads to excellence; the other, to mediocrity.
I’ve worked for both – sometimes briefly in the same enterprise. But I know which one gets the most for the money. Not that money’s the top item when you’re working for them.
JUST LIKE THE CORE OF THE UNIVERSE
Downtown, scrawled on the side of a public trashcan or light pole, in quite flashy strokes:
MR. E?
I read it again, and realized: it was a mystery.
Now I wonder how it was intended.
ONLY THE BEST
Often, the lessons appear when least expected.
One my thoughts returns frequently to a conversation I overheard on a Saturday afternoon in Baltimore’s Little Italy. A couple, recently back from New York City, was trying to impress the restaurant owner that everyone they had talked to was raving about the establishment, saying it was clearly the best in Little Italy. Finally, the owner was able to thank them, with this rejoinder: “Anyone who doesn’t think he’s the best in this neighborhood shouldn’t be down here.”
I admire that sense of upholding your own pursuit of excellence. No excuses. And I admire that esteem for the standards of others doing the same. Rivals. And yet colleagues.
I don’t want to hear a salesman slam the competition, or a priest short selling another denomination or congregation, except in this light.
My work is the best. And so is yours! And, yes, we can both do better!
Humbly yours, forever.
A REFLECTION OF OUR TIMES
Cutting through our neighborhood park and playground on a Saturday afternoon, I noticed it was filled with dads and their kids. Not even a mom in sight.
Usually (meaning other days of the week), it’s the other way around.
GRAPHING OURSELVES IN THE ECONOMICS CROSSHAIRS
As I said at the time: Golly, I hadn’t thought in terms of “lower middle class” in ages, though that’s where I’ve been most of my adult life – even as management. According to government statistics, at least, and thanks to my union card, we made it up to median income, although in reality, considering the cost of housing in New England, we were never quite there. Before the housing market decline (our property had more than doubled in price in a half-dozen years), my wife saw the assessment and cried out, “I never thought I’d live in a quarter-million dollar house – and it’s still a dump!” Yup.
What is amazing is what can be accomplished when we focus our resources and set priorities. The secret is that you can’t have it all. My wife would love to travel, but then we managed for her to not have to be employed, which in turn allowed her to return to college and to chair the local charter high school (a full-time, unpaid job) while taking care of both her mother and the girls. Maybe we’ll get around to travel, but for now, there are too many other demands – on our time, especially. I was able to carve out blocks to draft/revise large sections of work, although in doing so, I wasn’t submitting much anywhere – that would come later, probably in retirement. So I hoped.
One of our favorite writers, Wendell Barry, points out that a divorced family is, on paper, far more economically viable because it has to pay for two households, hold down two jobs, maintain two cars, and so on, each point adding to the cash flow, which can be measured. Of course, that fails to calculate a lot of other, more meaningful values. Keeping my mother-in-law in her own little apartment in the barn, for instance, allows her some independence while still getting some family care – none of it showing up in the gross national product, or whatever we call that calculation these days.
BOTTLE FARM
Among those dim memories from childhood are Sunday afternoon drives, including one on a dull rainy day as we approached Farmersville. As Dad slowed the car, I heard an eerie panorama of tinkling glass and looked out over a seeming junkyard with large, black figures shaped from roofing tin, I suppose – witches, Indians on horseback, perhaps cowboys and the like – and many poles “like cornstalks,” as some have described, but with bottles instead of leaves. Plus, as I’ve read, a number of old church bells mounted somewhere, in addition to the bells of grazing sheep.
Yes, it was the chorus of sound that lingered strongest in my mind.
By the time we got a chance to go back, it had all been razed, declared a public health hazard, I remember hearing, because of the broken glass caused by vandals. Other stories suggested the orgies of motorcycle gangs instead.
One history I’d heard, that this was a relative of the late comedian Jonathan Winters, proved erroneous. The owner’s name was not Zero Winters, but Winter Zellar (Zero) Swartsel (1876-1953), an eccentric who turned his 22 acres into artwork fashioned from discards such as old bedframes and twisted wire. What I retain from that one day is far more cluttered than the clean photographs taken by Edward Weston.
It’s all lost, of course. How much it could have been an installation in some gallery will forever remain conjectural, but Winter was way ahead of his time on his multi-sensual approach to creation.
ALL THOSE TRAINS
With the exception of a small spur to our south, all of the railroad traffic to and from Maine goes within a few blocks of our house.
The first year or so we were here, our youngest complained of the noise through the night – turns out it was gravel and sand headed to Boston for the Big Dig construction. At least that’s died down.
During the day, though, we have the Amtrak Downeaster’s five runs south, to Boston, and back, to Brunswick, Maine, plus the usual freight traffic.
But is it healthy to have so much dependent on such a tiny point of transit? At least as a point of homeland security, I’d argue not.
TALLY HO, PIMLICO
As I said at the time, I’ve been thinking about names. Especially place names. Take “Baltimore,” a name most of us use repeatedly and never consider. There’s Balty More, kind of salty. Or Balta moor, rather Mediterranean. The name itself sounds Irish. I know, they were English. But it sure sounds like Ballyhagen or . . .
Of course, not everybody pronounces quite the same. I was in Florida a couple of years back and we went out to a restaurant owned by a woman and her husband, who had retired from Tennessee and, well, got so bored with the retirement life they went back into business just to take their minds off the boredom. So, following the dinner, she asked us where we were all from and the first of my colleagues replied, “I’m from Los Angeles,” and she said, “Oh, that’s very nice,” and the second colleague replied, “I’m from Chicago,” and she said, “Oh, that’s a nice city,” and the third said, “I’m from right here in Florida,” and of course she had to ask what neighborhood, and then my fourth colleague drawled, “I’m from right outside Atlanta,” and naturally they had that Southern thing going right away, in ways we Northerners can never know about. Finally, she turned to me and I said, as some folks around here do, “Bal’mer.” All of my colleagues looked at me queerly. Bal’mer? Not Bal-ty more? But not that lady, no sir. Without missing a beat, she came back, “Oh! Merlin!” Yessirree. I’m from the state of Merlin.
But back to Bal’mer, which sounds like something you put on a wound. Especially a burn.
At one time, the name made sense. Unique, except for the home plantation, wherever that was back in the British Isles. Named for the good Lord Baltimore, and all that.
But it’s time for a change.
For one thing, there are so many other Baltimores around the country, we’re only the biggest of them these days. I mean, there are all of those West Baltimores, New Baltimores, and North Baltimores, and so on running around, who needs them?
Even the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad decided it was time to change its name to CSX or whatever. Even here, in the metropolis, we have problems confusing, as we do, between Baltimore City and Baltimore County.
No, friends, it’s time for a change. New and improved, as they say in the advertising business.
We could turn to the original names, but Fells Point just doesn’t ring quite right. And Jonestown just won’t work, not after the Reverend Jim and his little band of suicidals. Nor would Otterbein, with its sectarian overtones as a denomination that no longer exists, for that matter. Harbor City doesn’t quite say it. Our nicknames Charm City, Mobtown, Crabtown, and so on, fail us as well.
What I am proposing is Pimlico.
Yes, this is Horse Country. And Pimlico has a nice ring to it. Consider the crowd that does Paris and Rome each year. Would they ever say, “I did Paris, Rome, and Baltimore”? Hell, no. But now try “Paris, Rome, and Pimlico” and you see what I mean. Pimlico has the kind of sound to it to reflect our definite up scaling of the city. It sounds just a tad racy, too.
Say Pimlico it shall be.
Remember, when you see the shining college students outside your favorite supermarket and they ask you to sign the petition, do not hesitate. And remember to vote yes on Proposition Fourteen, to rename Baltimore City and Baltimore County. Either or both.
Then we call all unite in saying, with renewed vigor: “Tally Ho, Pimlico!”
If only …
MARIAH WATKINS
One of my wife’s childhood heroes, George Washington Carver, is proof that some of the best mothers never have children of their own. After his own mother’s death as a consequence of being stolen from one slave-owning family and carried off to a plantation, before being bought back – how vile, the entire institution – young George was cared for, first, by the sickly wife of the slaveowner, and third, by an art teacher who directed him on to her own father, a college professor of botany. But most important was Mariah Watkins and her husband, Andrew.
We know very little about this black couple, except for her influence on the boy who emerged from spending a night in their barn. In another circumstance, George might have been shot. Instead, she called out for him to wash up and come inside for breakfast. What’s your name, she asked. Carver’s boy George, came the reply. No, she corrected, from now on you’re George Carver. (The Washington came later.) He lived with them while attending the Lincoln School for Negro Children. She gently instilled a deep religious awareness in him, presenting him with her beautiful, large family Bible, which he used daily for the remainder of his life, and also nurtured a sense of responsibility for the advancement of his own people. Essentially what we know about her comes in the correspondence they continued over the years. (Among the few other bits we know is that she was a midwife who cared for about 500 babies, including the painter Thomas Hart Benton.)
You can also trace the two connections between George and another great agricultural reformer, Norman Borlaug, whose Green Revolution is credited with saving the lives of a billion people.
Indirectly, then, by feeding a single child that first morning, Mariah put into motion events that would feed a billion humans – a miracle overshadowing the multitude Jesus’ disciples fed with those few loaves and fishes on the banks of Galilee.
Jnana's Red Barn 