GRATITUDE ON PARADE

#gratitudeonparade

Today’s late-night entry has no photo because I have none from so long ago, certainly not digitized, anyway–or easily found. That makes Lynn Saunders’s contribution to my career no less seminal or memorable. An English teacher at Brecksville High School, she was the willing and required faculty member who became the adviser to our budding Writers Club, a new entity in 1967 that was the brainchild of a handful of aspiring student writers, including me as I entered my senior year. With her encouragement, we produced our own literary journal, “The Tenth Muse Recently Discovered in Brecksville.” We young literati were probably not the most popular types in our Ohio school, but we may have been among the most visionary. I have spent the last half-century refining those writing skills, and for this foundation I express today’s moment of gratitude.

Posted on Facebook 1/6/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE

#gratitudeonparade

Shhh. I’m waiting until she goes upstairs so she doesn’t see this now and can be surprised in the morning.

It is hard to find a more devoted mother and grandmother than my wife, so here’s to Jean Schwab. Whatever parenting mistakes we made, individually or combination, like every human being out there, Jean nonetheless remains committed wholeheartedly to the welfare of her family. Over time, she has learned how to make the tough decisions and say the tough things to say when we needed to, all while making clear she is doing it out of love.

Most people who know us know that we adopted children out of foster care. This was mostly because Jean expressed early in our marriage the feeling that we had too much to share not to reach out to children who needed a home. I am not sure either of us envisioned that future when we married, but it became a big part of what we will leave behind. And we have learned so much along the way. We have embraced the challenge. Here’s to the future, and a salute to my life partner.

Posted on Facebook 1/7/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE

#gratitudeonparade

Tonight I was in downtown Chicago at the Harold Washington Public Library for a Society of Midland Authors presentation of women authors writing about the Vietnam war. Their interesting perspectives caused me to think about my own experiences during that time. I attended Cleveland State University from 1968-1973, the heart of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history.

I started college with a student deferment just before President Richard Nixon introduced the draft lottery. My number was 135, but the year I gave up my student deferment they went to 125, and so I was out of the draft forever. Fighting a war I did not respect was not part of my future. But it does not mean the events did not affect me.

Tonight’s tribute is to someone I have not seen in 45 years. I have no idea if he is alive or dead, or where he is living, but I would not mind hearing from Peter Damok. By 1970, I think, I had founded the first student environmental group at CSU, right after the first Earth Day. Peter, a Vietnam veteran attending college on the GI Bill, joined us at some later point. This was during a time when Vietnam veterans often returned to an uncertain welcome. Peter, I think, was drawn in part to my lack of judgment, open mind, and willingness to listen and learn. He had much to share.

One thing I distinctly remember made a permanent impression on me. There were often anti-war marches down Euclid Avenue, past the CSU campus, in downtown Cleveland. I joined more than a few (though I seldom shared that information with my more conservative parents). Peter, who hoped to become a journalist, had some friends in the news media and joined some in watching one of the demonstrations from the upper stories of one of the buildings along the march route. Later he told me that one of his reporter friends scoffed at the protesters and asked, “How many of them have ever been to Vietnam?”

Peter stopped him cold in his tracks. “How many more do you want to send over there before you listen to them?” he asked.

I learned to separate service in the military from the automatic assumption that a veteran supported the war. Many came home embittered by what they saw and determined to end the madness. And I learned it straight from the mouth of one veteran–Pete Damok.

Posted on Facebook 1/8/19

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
There are those who quietly do the less glamorous tasks that make things run. Being the secretary/treasurer of a member division of the American Planning Association is among those tasks. As the chair-elect of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, thrust into an acting chair position because of Chair Allison Hardin’s unfortunate accident, I have come to appreciate the value of Jennifer Ellison, a Polk County, Iowa, planner who is also our secretary/treasurer. We have responsibilities to hundreds of members who work at making our communities safer and helping them recover from disasters, but Jennie makes sure the bills are paid, the dollars add up, and the proper reports are filed, all without asking for any special attention or credit. But I couldn’t do it without her, and so she is tonight’s focus of gratitude.

Posted on Facebook 1/9/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade

When I first met Richard Roths, he was a planner working for FEMA. As I recall, he was detailed to southern Ohio for flood recovery sometime in the late 1990s, and I was completing work with my team on Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, a path-breaking FEMA-supported guide published by the American Planning Association in 1998 as a PAS Report. I learned that Rich was among dozens of FEMA personnel asked to review it, many of whom were similarly on duty away from home and living out of a suitcase in a hotel room. Rich was doing his reviews, he told me, while washing his clothes in the laundromat each week. Other people might have idled the time with a good book, watching television, but not Rich.

It did not take long with further encounters back in Chicago for us to team up teaching a graduate course on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery in the spring semesters of 1997 and 1999 at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s urban planning program, part of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. Over subsequent years, Rich attended a number of my infamous backyard barbecue parties, usually bringing some beer to help out. It is amazing to think we have known each other now for well over 20 years. During that time, Rich moved on to URS Corp. as a consultant and then retired. He is now active as a volunteer with the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am Chair-Elect. In that role, I recruited and organized the division’s Professional Development Committee.

Sure enough, Rich has become a leading player in the committee’s endeavors. When Kehla West was unable to take on the role of interviewer for a series of podcasts on recovery in major recent disasters, Rich stepped up and did a fabulous job. He has completed three since last fall and is not done yet. These are all now on the APA website as part of APA’s Resilience Roundtable series. Rich is also heading up an effort to develop a program of outreach from the division to university planning schools. In his semi-retirement, he has carved out a meaningful role that has made the rest of us proud. He is a model of productive volunteerism in retirement.

Posted on Facebook 1/11/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
I have lost the name of my sixth-grade teacher in the mists of time and do not wish to ask anyone to search the archives of the elementary school to find it. Her name is beside the point. What matters is what I and others learned.

The school year was 1961-1962. Unlike other teachers at that level at that time, she believed that young people our age could understand and digest more than her contemporaries thought. During reading time each day, she introduced us to the works of Dr. Tom Dooley about Vietnam and Indochina. I am well aware of the mixed and ambiguous history of Dooley before his untimely death of cancer. He may well have exaggerated descriptions of Viet Minh atrocities and fed intelligence to the CIA. But when one student questioned whether some of Dooley’s stories were propaganda, our teacher concede the possibility.

Still, we gained a vivid mental image of a part of the world that soon would dominate the news of the 1960s, yet of which most Americans had only minimal awareness. The moral ambiguity of the mess that became the Vietnam War was illuminated in my teenage and then college-age mind by the memory of what she had read to us. It took some courage and imagination to think we could digest all this and that somehow, within a few years, it might deepen our perspectives on the world. Her own views may have been equally ambiguous, for all I know, and I will probably never know. But I can be grateful that her audacity at the time left an indelible impression of the importance of learning about faraway places and the moral and developmental challenges they face–and which we face along with them.

Posted on Facebook 1/12/2019