tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-132000552024-03-13T14:37:17.116-04:00Bull City MutteringsThe personal blog of Reyn Bowman, a Durham NC resident, 40-year veteran of community-destination marketing, an inductee in the Destinations International Hall of Fame and still an explorer in community sense-of-place. Opinions expressed here are those of the author.Basioneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13513338518929461384noreply@blogger.comBlogger1892125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-51412932237274608532016-05-12T12:20:00.001-04:002016-05-12T12:20:01.123-04:00The Fallacy of Trading Sense of Place for Density<h5>In May of 1989 I accepted an offer to relocate to Durham, North Carolina and jumpstart the community’s destination marketing organization.</h5> <p>It was clear during my interview visit that Durham had good bones as well as deeply held traits and values that would be appealing visitors. <p>By good bones, I mean that many of its indigenous, core commercial districts retained the smaller, people scale, historical blocks of buildings that a majority of travelers are drawn to because they reflect a distinctive sense of place. <p>This is the “there” there of a particular place that so very many places long ago surrendered. <p>It is a term that was coined in the 1930s by Gertrude Stein that over time has come to describe anywhere that “sense of character or coherence has eroded,” as so eloquently noted by Scott Russell Sanders in his essay <em><a href="http://www.civictourism.org/documents/SandersTalk_001.pdf">The Geography of Somewhere</a></em>. <p>Of course there is a lot more to having a “there” there than just architectural setting. <p>It was also clear back then that Durham had given in every now and then to the temptation during the 80s to throw up a skyscraper or two, as it is currently doing. <p>But different than those prior to WWII, apparently both developers and local officials (as illustrated by their own buildings) have forgotten a crucial tenet noted by <em><a href="http://www.witoldrybczynski.com/about/">Witold Rybczyski</a></em> in <em><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374211745">How Architecture Works</a></em>. <p>New buildings, according to Rybcyski (<em>Rib-chin-ski</em>,) a noted architect, professor, critic and author, should foremost seek coherence with place and setting.<a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AmfsawEC7nE/VzStLm-ydiI/AAAAAAAADT4/41DaA7xxFRk/s1600-h/TrustBuilding_pcard%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img title="TrustBuilding_pcard" style="border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; float: right; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px" border="0" alt="TrustBuilding_pcard" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-hnmobgCAvU0/VzStMK0o1sI/AAAAAAAADT8/6ozvXy9BksI/TrustBuilding_pcard_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="246" align="right" height="321"></a> <p>When I mentioned a need for “coherence” to an official during deliberations for this newest and tallest building underway in Durham, I received only a look of bewilderment and something mumbled about the need for density. <p>More on density that later but studies show that, too, is a fallacy when used as a justification for towering structures that violate sense of place. <p>At year-end I will be seven years retired from that career, but last week the staff there invited me a personal tour of the new headquarters for the organization I led for 21 years in Durham. <p>Including the ground floor Durham Visitor Info Center, it occupies the first two floors of the six story <a href="http://www.opendurham.org/buildings/trust-building">1905 Trust Building</a>, Durham’s first skyscraper and one perfectly coherent with place. <p>It was the tallest building in the state when it was erected. It also had the first elevator in Durham and was a little more than twice the height of surrounding buildings. <p>There is no record of controversy at the time but there is evidence three years later when the <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/30/the-life-and-death-of-the-world-s-tallest-building.html?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning">47-story Singer Building</a> opened in New York as the tallest building in the world that these structures were taking a toll on sense of place. <p>For several decades people had complained of the canyons these buildings created, along with the wind tunnel effect and the deep shadows they cast shortening the amount of daylight for blocks in at a time. <p>Now, 100 years after <a href="http://www.janes100th.org/#intro">Jane Jacobs</a> published launched a conversation in <em>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</em>, a new study across a wide range of metrics finds that <a href="http://www.preservationnation.org/information-center/sustainable-communities/green-lab/oldersmallerbetter/report/NTHP_PGL_OlderSmallerBetter_ReportOnly.pdf">blocks of older, smaller builders perform better than districts with larger, newer structures</a>. <p>By comparison, these blocks generate more jobs per square foot, a greater diversity of businesses, more non-chain local businesses, more small business vitality and greater density, more character, walkability and a broader socio-economic residential mix. <p>The answer isn’t either/or. It is about mix, fit and especially coherence. <p>Communities that have surrendered to forces who told them they had to sell out their sense of place in order to be major league still have pockets or fragments they can salvage. <p>Communities such as Durham that turned the corner with sense of place in tact but may be unprepared for how quickly out of town <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/the-downside-of-durhams-rebirth/476277/">“buyer/flippers”</a> as well as franchise architecture developer/lenders can hollow out sense of place. <p>They may need to shift gears even more quickly. <p><a href="http://www.preservationnation.org/information-center/sustainable-communities/green-lab/olde">Reading this study</a> is a good start. Begin by dissuading planners and officials of any notion that coherence of place must be sacrificed for density. Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-50952108754637500142016-05-08T16:23:00.001-04:002016-05-08T16:23:48.214-04:00Lessons From An Era’s Promise Unfulfilled<p>The rumble of our more than <a href="http://www.worldboattoday.com/image/jl/1985-century-boats-mustang-jjxxlx.jpg">thirty year old inboard</a> when it fires to life in our runabout most weekends is a reminder of my own passing into “vintage” years. <p>Not only because starting up at all, regardless of how well maintained, should never be taken for granted after all these years, but because the powerful 4-cylinder's<a href="http://www.ehow.com/info_12213282_mercruiser-470-engine.html"> technology</a> actually dates to the early 1970s. <p>Coincidentally, that was when I was first cutting my teeth on what became a lifelong career in community destination marketing. <p>The early 1970s was an era, such as now, filled with transformational promise in that field. <p>So during frequent guest lectures for today’s college students in destination marketing I encourage them to look back at what they can learn. <p>In fact, the lessons I hope they will glean might help them understand why so many destination marketing organizations (DMOs) today still function much as they did in the late 1960s/early 1970s albeit under a thin veneer of “digital window dressing.” <p>Let me touch very briefly on two huge paradigm shifts that gave so much promise and opportunity to DMO execs as the 1970s opened up. <p>One involved the emergence of a new technology for marketing intelligence and the other dealt with the near simultaneous rise of a range of nationwide sense of place policies. <p>In the late 1960s while unwrapping for airlines why some people were resistant to flying, Dr. Stanley Plog developed a data model for understanding, segmenting and then appealing to travelers based on the type of leisure destinations that fit their travel interests.<a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-LCeoOesOCBI/Vy-gUT-6_1I/AAAAAAAADTU/Sr0yAcKw-EM/s1600-h/1985-century-boats-mustang-jjxxlx2.jpg"><img title="1985-century-boats-mustang-jjxxlx" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; float: right; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px" border="0" alt="1985-century-boats-mustang-jjxxlx" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-QLeW73p9Vwo/Vy-gUxjkRHI/AAAAAAAADTY/DYJ5GhM97Iw/1985-century-boats-mustang-jjxxlx_th.jpg?imgmax=800" width="244" align="right" height="182"></a> <p>This had the effect of making accessible the vastly greater tourism potential beyond the 10% or so related to conventions and meetings that had been the limited focus of nearly every destination for the previous seven decades. <p>At virtually the same time, a range of national sense-of-place policies were rapidly beginning to transform communities. <p>In the wake of 1960s battles that brought disrepute to urban renewal/destruction to make way for mega-facilities such as convention centers, a slate of new policies greeted the 1970s. <p>Instead, they were intended to make communities more appealing by fostering historic preservation, waterway restoration, natural area protection, cultural endowment and highway beautification by eliminating sign and billboard blight. <p>Strategic thinkers christened the 1970s as an era when destination marketing, too, would broaden its approach. Across the land many DMOs even added “and visitor” to their organizational names in anticipation, as did the professional association in 1974. <p>So what happened? Why did most stop with just a change in nomenclature? <p>Why did so few 1970s era DMO execs grasp or embrace these lucrative shifts even as strategic foresights came to fruition? <p>Or for that matter, why did so few of those who they mentored in subsequent decades ever seem to move beyond the same 1960s style destination marketing? <p>Don’t get me wrong. There have been some significant strides in destination marketing since that time and there have always been best practitioners and strategic thought leaders. <p>Even the vast majority who have remained 1960s retro at their core typically try some new elements when they come along. <p>What is noteworthy, however, is that many often mistake a strategic change as something tactical, e.g. the Internet, and a tactical change as a strategy, e.g. social media and these elements always remain peripheral to a 1960s era core. <p>We know now that as strategists projected in the early 1970s, by the early 1990s leisure travel overall eclipsed business travel (including conventions,) which both tipped into gradual, though turbulent, decline in the late 1980s. <p>Last month it was announced that even among the 9 or 10% of person-trips taken by Americans via commercial airlines, <a href="http://m.atwonline.com/associations/a4a-vacations-eclipse-business-trips-primary-us-air-travel-purpose">leisure trips have now eclipsed business/convention trips as the pre-eminent reason for US air travel</a>. <p>And still, generation after generation among DMO execs remain stuck in the late 1960s throwing up look alike mega-facilities, then paying subsidies to get enough groups to fill them. <p>All of this while then proclaiming, seeming without any sense of irony as one did recently, that this dwindling segment is somehow “the heart of any major city.” <p>This sense of denial, too, dates to the 1960s. When the first feasibility studies were conducted as prerequisites for public mega-facilities in the latter 1950s, they came back negative. <p>Proponents (not all of whom were DMOs) quickly learned the tactic of shopping for studies until they got what they wanted and then stoked hyperbole as justification. <p>Thus one I suspect was born the “the heart of any major city.” <p>But this introspection is not about shaming my generation of DMO execs or as you will read sparing myself. <p>There are several lessons for today’s DMO aspirants to take away from an examination of the failed hopes of the early 1970s if they are to ever hope to help destinations emerge from this quicksand in the future and go on to fulfill the promises of their own era: <p>First, it may be helpful to understand that in the field of destination marketing, we’re all shaped to a some extent, by the destinations we each have the honor to serve. <p>This includes the time period when we serve them and especially the foresight of each boards that governs the DMO during those particular spans. <p>A few people are quick to credit me with fulfilling the promise of that 1970s era but as I will explain, it is far more complicated than that. <p>Much of any credit goes not only to the nature of the three destinations I led but the unique time frames and especially the unusually farsighted and fearless boards who governed those DMOs during those spans. <p>I led the first during the 1970s. I was a voracious reader and had the benefit of some strategic mentors, but it was all just starting to sink in when I moved on. Within a few years that DMO was and remains, in essence, a 1960s model. <p>Together with the board, I definitely took the second destination to a fulfillment of the 1970s era promise over stiff opposition from 1960s stalwarts. Once I moved on though, and the board rotated, it all but reverted to a 1960s model. <p>It is probably from my third and final destination that any reputation for fulfilling that 1970s era promise is more deserved, but there were always a handful trying to pull us back to the 1960s. <p>Long after I’ve retired, the destination perseveres but regression is always a threat I’m sure. <p>So as far as my own record goes, batting .300 is pretty good if I were hitting fastballs or 3-pointers, I guess, but just so so measured against the promise of we felt inspired to accomplish when I started my DMO career in the 1970s. <p>Frankly, had I not been the beneficiary of being in these three places when I was, given my nature, it is doubtful I would have been drawn to make destination marketing a career. <p>Another take-away from examining why more DMO execs didn’t rise to the promise of that 1970s era is that there is an incredible inertia that traps tourism in general in its 1960s past. <p>In part, this inertia is fostered by at least four conditions: <ol> <li>A “circle the wagons” mentality when it comes to change, reflection on the past or even introspection such as this. <li>A powerful industrial complex of entrenched interest groups, feasibility consultants, developers and old-school elected officials. <li>An impatience with discussing concepts, ideas and anything controversial which stymies strategic thinking. <li>A stubbornness or failure to grasp the importance of improvements to nomenclature, e.g. referring to tourism as an industry instead of a sector (which is a combination of many industries such as lodging, transportation, foodservice, entertainment etc.)</li></ol> <p>There are many other strategic lessons to be learned by looking back at that earlier 1970s era not the least of which is the importance of seeking out those DMO execs today whose DNA traces back to 1970s era execs that somehow, someway, were able to realize some of its promise. <p>Destination marketing, at its very essence, is about differentiation and that includes, among others, strategic differentiation, marketing differentiation and destination differentiation. <p>But it all begins with a broader understanding of the arc of where destination marketing has been, where it could have and should have been as well as where it should go in the future to remain relevant. <p>Few of us in that 1970s era could piece together a picture of the sweeping changes that were underway like we can by looking back in hindsight. <p>Even strategic thinkers at the time were not connecting the dots for us and maybe that is one of the lessons for students to take away that will help them pull so many DMOs out of the 1960s quicksand and leapfrog to this era’s transformational promise. Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-78077076813965227012016-04-18T09:06:00.002-04:002022-10-19T14:34:21.503-04:00The Unlikely Origin of Tourism’s Sense of AuthenticityReaching back to a tent restaurant erected there in 1919, Lexington brands itself, at least in part, the “barbecue capital” of North Carolina, a state with considerable heritage in that regard. <p>But it was a <a href="https://www.ourstate.com/buffalo-bill-wild-west-show/">tragic train accident</a> eight years earlier that occurred between that would-be tent site and what is now High Rock Lake that is more symbolic for tourism historically across the nation. </p><p>My Tar Heel Roots go back to 1650 but because I am the last of a line of five generations of Idaho ranchers going back to the 1860s and didn’t make my way to North Carolina until 1989, I’m considered “adopted” by those who could be considered far more relative “newbies.” </p><p>But it seems that wherever I’ve lived, including my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, I’ve crossed paths with William F. Cody. It was least expected here in North Carolina as I began what would be the last half of a four decade career in community destination marketing. </p><p>When a freight train tragically smashed into one of three trains near Lexington, Cody’s “Buffalo Bill Wild West Show”s (sometimes known by other names) was in the midst of 40 performances throughout North Carolina between 1878 and 1916, including two in Durham where we live. </p><p>Over 100 horses were killed in the accident, and the vitality of the show that had also performed hundreds of times throughout the country and throughout Europe would never really recover.<img align="right" src="https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/_0aG7XEoSp2qDsp9Uq5o3mQ4R1Oku0ZnMAF3gYLxft3l-E1AjsBb3VuDBY_AXlFf144NDrl_qgHEUMQmyBR265S8=s16000" /> </p><p>But it is easily arguable that no other person did more to instill a curiosity for transcontinental travel across the United States in both Americans and those overseas. </p><p>His attention to detail and authenticity informed expectations. </p><p>Equally significant, Cody redefined and instilled a deep appreciation for history, culture and artifacts among those living in relatively newly settled lands east of the Hundredth Meridian. </p><p>He seemed to innately grasp what place branding expert Bill Baker tries to impart wherever he is invited to teach. </p><p>The brand of a particular place is, in essence, its innate personality. It exists at the intersection of what internal audiences and external audiences perceive it to be. </p><p>Today, more than ever, it is not something you conjure up or create, it’s simple who and what you genuinely are, something Cody understood was far more appealing than fantasy. </p><p>In a moment I will share a story or two about how Cody’s influence has helped shape the negotiation of authenticity over the decades about what it is and isn’t western, a negotiation still underway. </p><p>But first, for anyone unfamiliar or in need of a very quick refresher: </p><p>Cody was born in Iowa in 1846; the year after my ancestors began fleeing across the southern half of that soon-to-be state toward sanctuary in the Rockies. </p><p>Then his family moved to eastern Kansas where he lost his father. </p><p>At age 11 he worked as a rider carrying messages between drivers and workers on wagon trains before becoming a bullwhacker, then a trapper, miner and briefly a Pony Express Rider. </p><p>He enlisted in the Union Cavalry and after the war worked as a buffalo hunter for the railroad. Cody then became a Chief of Scouts for the 5th U.S. Cavalry, leading the rescue of Wild Bill Hickok. </p><p>Eventually, he earned the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars. </p><p>Cody became a public figure and the subject of dime novels as well as outspoken about the rights of Native Americans. In addition, he became a performer and show producer. </p><p>As a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, Cody was also instrumental in the nation’s first national forest and the national reclamation act. </p><p>The best way to get a sense of William F. Cody is to visit his namesake along the Absaroka Mountains in northern Wyoming as they give way to the Bighorn. </p><p>Cody, Wyoming is the eastern and to many the most scenic and least touristy gateway to Yellowstone Park. It is also home to the Buffalo Bill <a href="https://centerofthewest.org/">Center of the West</a>, which is comprised of four museums including one devoted to Bill Cody’s story as well as a research library. </p><p>The little town is also home to the still operating Irma Hotel which Cody co-founded a year after that train wreck back in North Carolina. </p><p>He began by acquiring and then expanding the <a href="http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/NationalRegister/site.aspx?id=333">T E Ranch</a> up the more secluded South Fork from Cody in 1895 and then built a hunting lodge up on the North Fork where the road now leads to Yellowstone since the dam was built. </p><p>But Cody first saw the potential of this area in 1870 while leading a scientific expedition up the Bighorn. It happened to be the same year an expedition was being led to examine the potential of Yellowstone. </p><p>Until then, exploration of river valleys along the Rockies such as the Henry’s Fork where my ancestors would settle were dismissive of any settlement potential. But fresh eyes such as Cody’s changed all of that. </p><p>William F. Cody had a sense of authenticity that has inspired 150 years of nomenclature about the old West and is preserved today in details and artifacts such as clothing and dress and speech. </p><p>His shows inspired audiences to travel and to know what to expect. They also helped <a href="http://www.bullcitymutterings.com/2014/08/fostering-framing-fabricating.html">negotiate what experts call the ongoing interplay</a> and socially-agreed upon construct that we designate as authentic. </p><p>Tourism faces much courser fault lines than just authenticity today. Take for instance, the one that exists between commercial hucksterism and genuine sense of place. </p><p>The West does too, and not just recently with standoffs by a few militants in Nevada and Oregon. </p><p>In 1939, a movement anchored in the Sheridan Rotary Club began with a threat to secede and break off northern Wyoming including Cody and Yellowstone into the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absaroka_(proposed_state)">State of Absoroka</a>. </p><p>The frustration back then, as it had been during the “range wars” 50 years earlier was more about intrastate politics with the federal policies as a surrogate. </p><p>But as it does today, another fault line separated the views of preservationist northwestern and fossil-fuel driven northeastern Wyoming. </p><p>I thought of this on a cross country trip through my homeland a few years ago while listening to a story on the radio far more reflective of the West in which I grew up. </p><p>A rancher down on the South Fork, near Cody’s T E ranch, was out irrigating his hay fields in June of 2013 when he accidentally came between a Grizzly and her cubs. </p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlrDpJBMpkA">Watch this very short video</a> of this remarkable account and listen carefully to Nic Patrick’s remarks at the end. </p><p>If you are a regular reader, you may recall that my great-great-great grandfather, Thomas B. Graham, was killed in 1864 by a Grizzly in Cache Valley, Utah under similar circumstances, after having put his rifle down to help my great-great grandfather load some wood. </p><p>Like many ranchers, Patrick is a conservationist. Also like many ranchers, he has another occupation. For nearly forty years, he and his family have built authentic log homes, often for people who are drawn to live a version of the life Bill Cody depicted. </p><p>He understands something that William F. Cody came to understand during his lifetime. </p><p>Tourism can help preserve nature and the things it loves. But unmanaged tourism can also often introduce changes that can kill the very the things it loves. </p><p>A lot is written today about gentrification of historic neighborhoods. If well-managed so that socio-economic diversity is preserved, it isn’t a problem. If not, the very soul of those neighborhoods and the reasons they became so popular is rapidly hollowed out. </p><p>However, gentrification can also occur in areas of the West around public lands. Studies show that for both kinds of gentrification, tourism popularity can provide warning signals to policy makers that they need to instill protections. </p><p>Unfortunately, tourism circles today have far too few Buffalo Bill Cody’s. Instead of being willing to debate the broader issues society faces, they are prone instead to circle the wagons.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-66213804653331000982016-03-29T15:43:00.001-04:002016-03-29T15:43:45.031-04:00A Legendary Journey<p>From a vista in the center of San Francisco known as Twin Peaks, you can look down <a href="http://itouchmap.com/?d=2100096&s=CA&f=military">on a spot</a> in the Mission District with the Bay glimmering to the east.<u></u><u></u> <p>For a few years in the early 1860s this was known as Camp Alert, a race track-turned-Union Cavalry training facility.<u></u><u></u> <p>I’ve always wondered how Thomas K. Messersmith, one of my maternal great-great grandfathers, who was a fourth-generation Southerner and native Missourian came to enlist to fight for the Union and train there, so far from home. <p>Tracing genealogy is a journey, often beginning by tracking down documentation for family legends. But even when found, each revelation usually still leaves a loose end or two, that once tied open yet another revelation.<u></u><u></u> <p>By the 1860 census, my great-great grandfather, a few weeks shy of 26 years old, was bunking with two other miners who were well into their 30s, T.H. Wilson from Virginia and N.F. Scott from Maryland. <p>They were living in a boarding house in Virginia City, Nevada which was then a part of Utah Territory and the site of the Comstock silver discovery only a few months earlier.<u></u><u></u> <p>I doubt he came out to the California Gold Rush a decade earlier because the census then shows him still at home in Missouri.<u></u><u></u> <p>But Virginia City had not only been named by Southerners, it was a hotbed at the time for secessionists who were gloating at having defeated a proposal for statehood because it included a prohibition of slavery.<u></u><u></u> <p>My great-great grandfather had somehow formed a friendship with Samuel Clemens, who was a year younger and yet to adopt his famous pen name “Mark Twain,” <p>Because they were born and raised in very different parts of Missouri, I suspect they had formed a bond once Twain arrived in Virginia City with his brother, probably as much over as shared prowess for playing cards as briefly sharing a mining claim. <p>These fragments can be pieced together from references in collections of Twain’s letters from that time, which also confirm that my great-great grandfather would often be referred to be “Smith,” a truncation of his last name, Messersmith, just as my great-grandfather Ralph would later do. <p>This discredits another family legend that the truncation was the result of discrimination during World War I. <p>My great-great grandfather gave up on mining around the time he crossed paths with Twain or shortly thereafter and headed up and over the Sierra Nevada’s and down to Stockton to enlist for the Union on October 3, 1861.<u></u><img src="https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/b2LicL8P5Uz2XAF5meDEQwTINXkyU0cwYsKpq0GuegtpnpTjKgSHfxIM1aZhYGfzawJuB5ng8VQvLfFHsfEjLH7iDKMirPaqBGQitBI0gAsGPphc4-OCtEjH4RpiKg3dIptzQOgfJA=s0-d-e1-ft#https://seekraz.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/purple-fields-and-white-mountains.jpg" width="325" align="right" height="169"><u></u><u></u><u></u> <p>Interestingly, Twain had already served a two week stint with a Confederate militia back in Missouri and still had Southern sympathies at the time. <p>This and the dissention back in their home state must have led to some interesting conversations between the two Missourians. <p>The California into which my great-great grandfather rode had been in deep turmoil since a deep spit the year before in the Democratic Party, which had resulted in the election of President Abraham Lincoln with just a third of the vote.<u></u><u></u> <p>Rampant secessionist conspiracies had compromised local militias and more than a few law enforcement official, especially in Southern California, leading to public demonstrations by both sides. <p>At the same time, regular Union Army units were being withdrawn to the east and several new Union regiments of California Volunteers were being enlisted to protect communications and critical ore shipments needed to fund the war effort from sabotage and attack. <p>My great-great grandfather made a conscious decision which to my prior understanding was contrary to his both native state and his friends. <p>But digging further I have learned that it was me that was very much misinformed.<u></u><u></u> <p>It took me a while to track down that he initially enlisted in Company A of the Third Regiment which was an Infantry unit, but that didn’t jive with family legend that he was Cavalry. <p>Nor did the date of that unit’s arrival in Salt Lake and its various assignments align with the date and place he eventually mustered out of the army at the end of his tour.<u></u><u></u> <p>Finally, I found a small reference in one military citation that read, “see Company L Second Regiment Cavalry.”<u></u><u></u> <p>After being outfitted at the <a href="http://beniciahistoricalmuseum.org/">Benicia Arsenal</a>, he may or may not have participated with Company A in the Bald Hills uprising that ended at Fort Baker before being transferring to Cavalry. <p>It is more probable that he was moved to Cavalry training in San Francisco almost immediately. <p>A hint is provided in one of Twain’s letters, <a href="http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/UCCL00049.xml;query=tom%20messersmith;searchAll=;sectionType1=;sectionType2=;sectionType3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5=;style=letter;brand=mtp#1">dated May 17, 1862</a>, where he asks another friend to send a pair of <a href="http://thumbs.worthpoint.com/6UYEXIQtkLkuaMJfDF-Wd92nqJM=/400x0/images/images1/1/0308/13/1_a19c205375b2bed1a230458f14703f28.jpg">Spanish spurs</a> hanging back in his office out to my great-great grandfather. <p>Between late that summer and early fall, with Cavalry training at Camp Alert behind him, at least a part of my great-great grandfather’s company in detachment with another had joined Col. Patrick Conner in Stockton. <p>From there, along with 1,000 other Cavalry and Infantry, they moved in phases over the Sierra Nevada’s and out into the Great Basin along the Overland Trail. <p>They rode first to Fort Churchill about 30 miles east of Virginia City and then proceeded on to secure Fort Ruby, near, coincidentally, where two other of my great-grandparents would drive stagecoach a few decades later. <p>Eventually, they based at Camp Douglas (later re-named Fort Douglas,) a newly created installation on a bench of the Wasatch Mountains above Salt Lake City, where, again coincidentally, my father would be inducted into the army during WWII. <p>From there, my great-great grandfather’s Cavalry company would deploy to protect wagon routes in mountain valleys to the west where they were under constant attack. <p>This was all during the period when the <a href="http://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Central+Overland+California+and+Pikes+Peak+Express+Company&item_type=topic&overlay=">Pony Express was phasing out</a> and the first <a href="http://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=First+Transcontinental+Telegraph&item_type=topic&overlay=">Transcontinental Telegraph</a> was being completed along a major freighting corridor to the east carrying bullion and supplies for the war effort. <p>It is hard to relate just how broadly and intensely these facilities were under attack during the Civil War from <a href="http://content.lib.utah.edu/utils/getfile/collection/USHSArchPub/id/6340/filename/6375.pdf">warring bands of Paiutes and Shoshone-Bannock</a> peoples, stretching in a “T” up the Upper Snake River Valley to what would become my birthplace eight decades later. <p>So I will insert <a href="http://content.lib.utah.edu/utils/getfile/collection/USHSArchPub/id/6340/filename/6375.pdf">this link as background</a>. <p>Because so much of the family legend surrounding my great-great grandfather’s Union Cavalry experience has now been documented, I have no doubt that one day I will find verification of another part. <p>As the story has been passed down, the scar through his trademark mustache was the result of deflecting a Shoshone arrow that would have struck Colonel Connor.<u></u><u></u> <p>My initial skepticism, at least of this particular hand-me-down family legend, has repeatedly proven groundless so far.<u></u><u></u> <p>When digging into family history it helps to remember that legends are traditional stories regarded as historical but unauthenticated, usually because those details have been lost as the stories were passed down.<u></u><u></u> <p>My great-great grandfather was notoriously quiet and solitary, spending weeks at a time herding sheep up into several of valleys along the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oquirrh_Mountains">Oquirrh Mountains</a> where he had once patrolled near the end of his stint as a Cavalry trooper, including Rush Valley where attacks were especially frequent. <p>(Another, Cedar Valley, where he settled, is shown above.)<u></u><u></u> <p>He became a Mormon and spent the remainder of his days alongside the very Overland Trail he had help protect as a means to hold the Union together never revealing what I now know of how he came to choose that side. <p>But in researching this blog, I think that has become clear. <p>Missouri, it turns out, may have had a very vocal population who had migrated from slaveholding states but by the time of the Civil War, while a neutral border state, it was <a href="http://www.yandtblog.com/?p=262">firmly Unionist</a> in sentiment. <p>It had its share of secessionist scheming. <p>But given the opportunity to vote for secessionist candidates to a convention, it overwhelmingly instead voted for Unionist representatives who voted <a href="http://www.yandtblog.com/?p=262">99-1 against secession</a> and 70-23 against solidarity with Southern slave states. <p>Most telling about my great-great grandfather’s decision is that <a href="http://www.yandtblog.com/?p=262">those fellow Missourians who enlisted to fight for the Union</a> outnumbered those who enlisted to fight for the Confederacy by nearly 4-1 (110,000 to 30,000.) <p>Mystery solved at least for my great-great grandfather.</p> <p>Unfortunately, far too many Americans are still fighting that war.</p>Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-76909038309990112272016-03-21T13:06:00.001-04:002016-03-21T13:06:58.914-04:00Origins of a Divide That Still Haunts Tourism Today<p>Once you turn off the country road toward our place on Mayo Lake there is a mile of gravel road before you reach the last stretch of pavement leading to our lakeside retreat. <p>It is what was called “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macadam#/media/File:Makadam.jpg">macadam</a>” when road surfaces in America first started to be improved in the 1820s (as depicted in the image below.) <p>Many so-called paved roads in the countryside today are macadam bound together with a little asphalt tar. <p><a href="http://www.durhamresearchportal.org/images/visitor_research_stat/fullsize//population_growth2010.pdf">By 1909</a>, just as what is now called North Carolina Central University was founded, Durham, where we alternatively live a part of each week, was being heralded for already having laid 82 miles of macadam road. <p>Nationwide at the time, only 700 miles of road, about 10% of the total were as good or better than those in Durham. <p>By that year there were almost 306,000 cars and a few more than 6,000 trucks registered in America, up from 8,000 overall in less than a decade. <p>Those known as “highway progressives” were already shifting the economic impact rationale for good roads from “farm to market” to “tourism.” <p>But ironically, roads had long been politically, as well as ideologically, controversial.<img style="float: right; display: inline" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Makadam.jpg" width="320" align="right" height="237"> <p>Other than military roads, Founding Father progressives on both sides of the isle, such as Washington and Jefferson, had only been able to push through the first “<a href="https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/back0103.cfm">national road</a>” along what is now I-40 as a means to open up western settlements for Revolutionary War veterans. <p>Conservatives argued that roads were too expensive and that they should be a state issue. <p>Then at the state level, such as in North Carolina, they were often able to <a href="http://www.bullcitymutterings.com/2016/02/north-carolinas-earliest-post.html">pigeonhole roads</a> as a county-by-county issue clear up until the eve of the Civil War. <p>It was about this time that pleasure driving/riding in carriages took hold, usually limited to grand city parks such as those created by Fredrick Law Olmsted or in cemeteries. <p>But in 1888 the <a href="http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/dunlop.htm">re-invention of the pneumatic tire</a>, which had been unsuccessfully introduced in 1846, galvanized a grass-roots coalition of activists to push for good roads. <p>The coalition was spearheaded by bicycle riders who teamed with “farmers, nature-lovers, conservationists and tourists” to spawn a national movement not only better roads but a national network of “<a href="http://www.byways101.org/images/publications/Journal/journal_2.pdf">hard-surfaced, all-weather roads</a>.” <p>Soon they were joined by nascent automobile manufacturers. <p>The roads envisioned were a means to an end such as farm to market or home to resort but all roads were intended to be scenic along the way. <p>Then as the movement gained steam between 1911 and 1926 “highway progressives” were overwhelmed by commercial interests who coopted the movement. <p>It created a schizo-polarization of tourism that persists today. <p>At one end are those with a deep respect for sense of place, authenticity and scenic preservation. <p>On the other is a hawker-huckster form frenetically enabling billboards, developer churn, mainstream mega-facilities and other forms of cookie-cutter architecture. <p>To overcome conservative opposition to a system of national roadways, “highway progressives” had begun to tout tourism as a rationale.</p> <p>To enlist communities along proposed roadways they encouraged them to “manufacture” reasons for tourists to stop along these routes.</p> <p>Rather than look to innate qualities, community boosters egged on by a chamber-of-commerce mentality fell instead for hyperbole, thus the manufacture of roadside amusements along with monikers such as the “Grand Canyon of the East” or the “Paris of the South.”</p> <p>By 1930, many states, <a href="http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p249901coll37/id/3644">including North Carolina</a> had begun to fight back against blight but the forces of blight this has fueled including a faction of tourism that had found political cover among a wing of conservatives. <p>This wing of conservatives, which cut across party lines, has consistently and inexplicably argued that blight is good for economic development, something still being repeated by a candidate running for governor in the last election. <p>Tourism, if it was more open to introspection as well as critical and strategic thinking would align in such a way that it could shift this paradigm. <p>But don’t hold your breath. <p>It isn’t just that one side of the schizo-divide is somewhat superficial. More problematic is that the other side lacks the moral courage and passion of those early “highway progressives.” Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-43988992226922162812016-03-06T15:25:00.001-05:002016-03-06T15:25:23.204-05:00Tracing The Influences of a Strategic Foresight<p>You wonder what was on the mind of North Carolina’s greatest entrepreneur in the last three decades of his life.</p> <p>I suspect it was dirt.</p> <p>By the 1930s, the Piedmont region of North Carolina had lost an average seven inches of soil to erosion, up to 18 inches in some places.</p> <p>The reddish, sometimes yellowish, clay so prevalent now is actually a subsoil laid bare by this erosion according to historians such as <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=GnKoCgAAQBAJ&dq=Let+Us+Now+Praise+Famous+Gullies:+Providence+Canyon+and+the+Soils+of+the+South+(Environmental+History+and+the+American+South)&source=gbs_navlinks_s">Dr. Paul Sutter</a>.</p> <p>The effects of that erosion are clearly evident today. It is why nearly all of our creeks, streams, rivers and lakes are muddy and will be, according to ecologists, for a thousand years.</p> <p>A hundred years before we had “climate change deniers,” we had “erosion deniers.” They, too, had policy makers who tried to outlaw science.</p> <p>Deniers of both are still in office in some states today.</p> <p>James Buchanan “Buck” Duke, who died in 1925 at age 69, would not have been among the latter nor were he alive today, the former I suspect.</p> <p>Duke was eight and living with family in Greensboro during the chaotic <a href="http://www.civilwardurham.com/">end of the Civil War</a>, as it was being negotiated near his home in Durham even as his recently released Confederate father, a Unionist, made his way back home.</p> <p>He was 17 when his father moved their tobacco factory into town and just 21 when “Sons” was added to the name of the enterprise. His father delegated manufacturing and marketing to Buck.</p> <p>He is widely regarded today as the first genius in modern marketing.</p> <p>But before relocating those four miles into Durham, Buck had earlier left the family farm during his teens first to attend what is now Guilford College in Greensboro.</p> <p>But he soon left there to attend a business college called the <a href="http://www.lostcolleges.com/#!eastman-business-college/c8q4">Eastman National Business College</a>, a school of business in Poughkeepsie, New York (the image <a href="http://www.officemuseum.com/Eastman_Business_College_Practical_Office_Banking_Depts_Preparatory_Dept_foreground.JPG">at this link</a> dates to his tenure there.)</p> <p>He may have been the quintessential Tar Heel at the time, accent, chaw of tobacco and all, but uniquely for his time he also had formal business training including a curriculum that included practical experience to inform his innate entrepreneurial and strategic gifts.<a href="http://cf067b.medialib.glogster.com/media/44/44422c267eee411c9af7fb1192dffc6129605de43e65095e1067786b3e0322fc/duke-j-b-young.jpg"><img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://cf067b.medialib.glogster.com/media/44/44422c267eee411c9af7fb1192dffc6129605de43e65095e1067786b3e0322fc/duke-j-b-young.jpg" width="275" align="right" height="393"></a></p> <p>At 24 he was made chief executive of his family’s business and opened a branch in New York. Before he was 30 he took the company public. By the time he turned 34, Buck Duke headed a trust that controlled 80% of tobacco production in the world.</p> <p>In what we call today a SWOTs analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats,) he was well aware that one of the biggest threats to his company came not from federal regulators but the soil depletion associated with growing cotton and tobacco.</p> <p>At first tobacco had required fertile land. But the weed-like varieties that yielded a much milder and more popular tobacco not only formed the basis of the Duke corporate empire but they grew on lands depleted by cotton.</p> <p>But after a few years, even this tobacco wouldn’t grow without huge amounts of fertilizer, which became prevalent after the Civil War, as well as large quantities of water and eventually pesticides.</p> <p>Still growing tobacco was leaving swaths of abandoned farm land unproductive because its topsoil had washed away.</p> <p>Buck Duke did not know of tobacco’s harmfulness to health but he could readily see during his time that it was not good for the environment or future business.</p> <p>With half of his life still ahead of him including new entrepreneurial pursuits in hydroelectric power and higher education in his home state, Duke bought a farm 45 miles west of New York City and assembled nearly 40 others, for a total of <a href="http://www.dukefarms.org/en/Visit/">over 2,700 acres</a> in all.</p> <p>Northern New Jersey had been deforested for agriculture and charcoal by 1850, resulting in heavy erosion into the Raritan River adjacent to his land. </p> <p>Any forest remnants that remained, here and there, were in poor condition.</p> <p>Buck Duke foresaw by several years a call in 1896 by the state geologist for reforestation and protection of watersheds. Primeval forests were extinct and nearly half of the state had been cleared of trees.</p> <p>Forest fires were ravaging what remained to the south. half of them caused by sparks from locomotives.</p> <p>Through much of his 40s, Buck Duke worked feverishly to recreate more of a nature area than an estate including excavating and/or rehabilitating, enhancing and connecting a chain of nine lakes and associated waterfalls.</p> <p>All of this was protected by extensive reforestation of more than 2 million trees.</p> <p>His vision, in the wake of deforestation, was to create a natural “wonderland,” but he also experimented with sustainable hydroelectric power there and methods to make both land and water more sustainable as well.</p> <p>Within a few years, his work would be the inspiration for forest parks in New Jersey.</p> <p>Coincidentally, this was the same period in which his father, Washington Duke, aided by other Durham leaders was busy relocating the 1830’s <a href="http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/253/entry">Trinity College</a> to Durham as the foundation for what would later be renamed Duke University.</p> <p>But rather than a retirement for Buck Duke, this period of creating what is called Duke Farms in north-central New Jersey was more of an entrepreneurial interlude to be inspired by his intrigue with hydrology and forestation.</p> <p>It was also about this time that soil research became a national priority, including its indispensable role in life and its birth from forest.</p> <p>The system Buck created with his natural restoration at the turn of the 19th century was designed to pump a million gallons of water per day from a canal above the Raritan River up to a reservoir.</p> <p>From there the water was then controllably-released through gravity to flow successively down through nine excavated lakes and related waterfalls as well as restored meadows, lagoons and other wetlands before being reintroduced to the river much cleaner than when it was removed.</p> <p>Lets just say that before he turned his attention a few years later, when not yet 50, to a startup back in his home state that would become Duke Energy today, Buck Duke knew what he was doing.</p> <p>That experience through his 40s gave him an understanding of how to later rehabilitate thousands of acres of depleted farm land in his hometown of Durham by laying the groundwork near the end of his life for what would become Duke Forest as part of his transformation of Duke University.</p> <p>Soil scientists estimate that in North Carolina where under virgin forest exists, it would take approximately <a href="http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/about/history/?cid=nrcs143_021398">468,000 years</a> to remove a topsoil layer, something that takes only a matter of minutes with today’s method of site preparation in advance of buildings.</p> <p>Soil science is a discipline fathered as we know it today by another North Carolinian, <a href="http://www.sssnc.org/about/century.pdf">Hugh Hammond Bennett</a>.</p> <p>But some who had previously also cut their teeth in North Carolina had been “erosion deniers,” as some policy makers are today.</p> <p>Back then, evidence was mounting in some studies that would show that an average of 5.3 feet of topsoil sediment had discharged between 1820 and 1830 atop pre-settlement floodplains.</p> <p>Ironically, many areas we consider treasured wetlands now were really created by these sediment avalanches.</p> <p>As a ten year old, Bennett has been observing erosion on his family farm near Wadesboro at about the same time Duke was experimenting with how to prevent it as well as restore and protect polluted waterways.</p> <p>Bennett was graduating from UNC and starting out his career by performing soil surveys in North Carolina counties in the two years before Duke returned to his native Tar Heel state.</p> <p>One subsequent <a href="http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_MANUSCRIPTS/north_carolina/durhamNC1920/durhamNC1920.pdf">1920 survey of Durham soils</a> is filled with descriptions and information about Durham at the time Duke spent much of the last years of his life back here.</p> <p>Based on a plan hatched in 1919, Buck Duke at the time of the survey was already buying up what would be 5,000 acres (today more than 7,000) of mostly depleted farmland in Durham dotted here and there by remnants of old growth forests. </p> <p>But this was much more than what was needed for what are now Duke University’s West and Central campuses.</p> <p>While much of the land he acquired would be reclaimed by forest, telltale gullies are visible today in the undergrowth, tombstones for an era of topsoil erosion.</p> <p>Only today, the culprits behind that continued destruction are more likely to be mechanized site preparation for buildings which not only scrape off or crush fragile top soils but compact it so as to be impervious.</p> <p>Most credit those acquisitions from 1919 through the early 1920s stretching across west and southwest Durham as well as west into Orange and eventually Alamance counties to Duke’s strategic sensibilities, a means that guaranteed access roads and water availability.</p> <p>But his past experience suggests something even more strategic. </p> <p>The School of Forestry created five years after Duke’s death is <a href="http://www.foresthistory.org/education/curriculum/Activity/activ6/act6es.html">credited to William Preston Few</a>, a longtime friend who was the university’s then president, along with a Forest Service veteran turned professor and researcher named Clarence Korstian, with the creation of Duke Forest.</p> <p>Korstian had served in the United States Forest Service out West including a stint in the Pacific Northwest during the period of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003WJQ7JO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1"><em>The Big Burn</em></a> in 1910 before an assignment in the North Carolina Mountains.</p> <p>He followed that with a stint at Yale before returning for a consulting assignment at Duke.</p> <p>Few had spent a lot of time with Buck Duke, and while intrigued by Harvard Forest, in the mid-1920s he had recruited an ecologist named A.S. Pearse who was even more intrigued with the potential of the lands Duke had purchased.</p> <p>Pearse <a href="https://nicholas.duke.edu/about/news/our-deepest-roots-nicholas-school%E2%80%99s-25-years-success-owes-much-three-programs-which-it">connected Few with Korstian</a> in 1927. Buck Duke had died suddenly in late 1925 leaving behind one last stroke of entrepreneurial genius, a vast endowment so visionary it is as relevant today as it was then.</p> <p>At his death, he was one of only 23 multimillionaires who had been born in the South, out of 331 nationwide. But unique to others, he directed his philanthropy back to his roots.</p> <p>It isn’t a leap to conclude that his influence was very present as Few, Pearse and Korstian envisioned Duke Forest. Not at all.</p> <p>If only shorter sighted policy makers in Durham today had the strategic sense of this earlier native son when it comes to the overall urban forest canopy.</p>Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-52488979131492271042016-02-29T11:48:00.001-05:002016-02-29T11:48:02.972-05:00North Carolina’s Earliest Post Progressives<p>Following the American Revolution and creation of a new system of government, North Carolina spent the first four or five decades of the 1800s under the control of regressives. <p>Before delving into the small but determined resistance to regressives during that period and what they would be able to eventually change, as well as a state icon they couldn’t in time, it may be helpful to explain what regressive means. <p>Philosophically, regressives differ from other conservatives because rather than just seeking to tap the brakes on what they see as unbridled progressivism, regressives actually seek to reverse progress. <p>Following the American Revolution, most were not among the third of North Carolinians still loyal to Great Britain or, of course, the 25% in bondage. <p>But regressives represented a faction that lobbied for a return to those pre-war values and ideals. <p>In the Tar Heel state, a slightly higher percentage were regressives than than those who were characterized as radicals or rioters because they wanted even more change. <p>Together, these two group narrowly outnumbered the remaining loyalists, most of whom would emigrate elsewhere. <p>Throughout the nation, as other states perpetuated the progressivism upon which America was founded, regressives in North Carolina during those early decades earned it a reputation as the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Van_Winkle">Rip Van Winkle</a>” state. <p>As a result, land values plummeted as more than a third of North Carolinians moved away. <p>Between 1830 and 1840 alone, nearly half of the counties lost population according to a superbly documented book entitled, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/North-Carolina-Through-Four-Centuries/dp/0807818461">North Carolina Through Four Centuries</a></em>. <p>The 1850 census revealed that 31% of all native North Carolinians still living in the United States resided in some other state. Backwardness had driven away more than 400,000 Tar Heels, two-thirds of whom were white. <p>This was equivalent to half the state’s <a href="http://lwd.dol.state.nj.us/labor/lpa/census/1990/poptrd1.htm">population in that census</a>. <p>For the first half of the 1800s, the legislature was controlled by less than 10% of the population, including slave-holding planters living down east who were adamantly opposed to public education, roads, government in general and taxes. <p>Fast forward two hundred years. Sound slightly familiar? <p>Between 2000 and 2010, half of North Carolina’s counties were again losing population with most relocating to the state’s more progressive cities. <p>Regressivism is as much a part of America as any other view, if not a bit ironic in a nation forged by progressives. But it doesn’t take popularity for this view to seize control. <p>Because very few voters today are able to vote for the handful of legislators who are in control of setting legislative agendas in many states, including North Carolina, those decisions are also essentially controlled by about 10% of the electorate. <p>In part, it is an inherent flaw in representative democracy vs. more “popular” forms of democracy, but not perhaps, a view currently held by regressives who often seem to rationalize overriding the views of the majority of voters by insisting that the same would be done to them were they not in power. <p>Fueling this partisan view of “screw them before they screw you back,” is the fact that <a href="http://demography.cpc.unc.edu/2016/01/12/republican-or-democrat-fewer-than-40-of-nc-registered-voters-will-have-a-choice-in-both-state-house-senate-in-november/">since 1998 “fewer than 10%</a> of both state senate and state house seats have been competitive,” a factor driven by partisan gerrymandering of districts. <p>The thing to remember is that during much of that earlier period of regression following the Revolution, a handful of deeply concerned and resilient North Carolinians were persistently advocating progressive ideas, which following the Civil War, would put “the state on a totally new course.” <p>They were named Yancey, Caldwell, Fisher, Swain, Gaston, Morehead and Graham. <p>But their architect was Judge <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Murphey">Archibald DeBow Murphey</a> who was born in <a href="http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ncccha/memoranda/churches/redhousechurch/redhousechurch.html">Red House</a>, which is now called Semora, a crossroads just northwest of what is now Hyco Lake, a twin in Person County just west of Mayo Lake where we now split time with our home just south in Durham. <p>The area of Murphey’s origins is now a part of Caswell County, but when he was born it was a part of Orange County. <p>Judge Murphey eventually practiced law down in Hillsborough a few miles west from what is now Durham and established a residence in Hawsfield (southwest of current-day Mebane.) <p>It was during this period that Murphey crafted his plan for North Carolina’s salvation including “<a href="http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/5114">establishment of a public education system, construction of canals and turnpike roads, as well as a general public welfare system</a>,” and eventually railroads. <p>In fact, regardless of sympathies, North Carolinians weren’t paying much attention to succession leading up to the Civil War. <p>Instead they were focused on constitutional reform and a struggle over <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_valorem_tax">ad valorem taxes</a> as a means for wealthy plantation owners to pay their fair share to fund Murphey’s vision. <p>Many of Durham’s founding generation were heavily influenced by Murphey’s strategic views including his close friends here, the Camerons. <p>They encouraged others in what would become Durham to push for statewide progress such as building railroads and a strong banking system. <p>Keep in mind by 1820, <a href="http://www.bullcitymutterings.com/2014/02/devolving-to-local-government-by.html">only 7% of Americans lived in cities</a> and progressives such as Murphey saw a scalable role in development and progress for state government. <p>There were only 61 settlements with more than 2,500 people in the whole country at the time and only five with more than 25,000 people so progressives such as Murphey were clearly farsighted. <p>But progressives at the time were not able to save the longleaf pine forests that provided North Carolinians their “tar heel” nickname as well as a species of our state tree. <p>In pre-settlement times, these savannah-like forests dominated a swath from northeast North Carolina in a strip that straddled the fall line between the Piedmont and Coastal Plain continuing in an arc down through the south all the way to Texas, 90 million acres in all. <img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://www.learnnc.org/lp/media/collections/cede/cedefire02.jpg" width="289" align="right" height="385"> <p>These would have been the forests where my 8th great grandmother Mary Jane was born on Salmon Creek, more than three hundred years before I would uncover my North Carolina roots. <p>But from a time before North Carolina earned its “tar heel” nickname until the mid-1800s, these trees were used for naval stores or in other words tar, pitch, rosin and turpentine. <p>More than just shipping, it was the “wagon” industry that relied on grease produced from these distinct trees as well as uses for their wood by settlers, such as fencing. <p>Colonists would gird or strangle the trees to death while replacing the understory savannah grasses with corn and other crops as well as letting livestock such as hogs range wild. <p>Soon huge numbers of hogs, cattle, horses, mules, sheep and goats eventually trampled through these forests contributing to their demise while depleting the soil across much of North Carolina by 1900. <p>By 1920, the longleaf pine was virtually extinct. <p>Gone were not only trees that take 100 to 150 years to reach full size (between 98 and 115 feet) and may live to be 500 years old, but gone too were seas of understory savannah grasses. <p>Environmental and science historians have placed nearly as much blame on these practices for the sediments that will muddy North Carolina’s streams, rivers and lakes for a thousand years, as they do on the farming practices used to raise cotton and tobacco. <p>Another factor is that we know now that our soils in the South are much more fragile than other parts of the country. <p>Fully two-thirds of the deforestation that has taken place across America over the last 400 years occurred <a href="http://www.bullcitymutterings.com/2012/01/learning-from-devastating-60-year.html">during the sixty years between 1850 and 1910</a>. <p>When a movement took hold to re-plant pine trees in North Carolina, <a href="http://www.longleafalliance.org/archives/documents/general-longleaf-restoration/lla86.pdf">short-leaf pines such as loblolly</a> were used instead of longleaf pines because they grow faster, much closer together and don’t require ground fire to reproduce. <p>Since the 1960s when collectively pines were named North Carolina’s state tree, efforts have been underway to re-establish longleaf pines using prescribed fire along their base as <a href="https://ui.uncc.edu/story/north-carolina-old-growth-longleaf-pine-uwharries-preserved">well as protecting the tiny old growth stands</a> that have been discovered. <p>But one thing is for sure, for now this means that North Carolina has a much different natural sense of place than it once had. <p>It is in the wake of this desecration that culminated in the early 1900s that another strategic wave of progressivism took hold in North Carolina, launching its mainstream status as a tourism destination. <p>More on that in the next post, including a fourth wave in the early 1970s that voters embedded in the constitution, something that legislators including regressives today choose to ignore. Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-80425788387085440192016-02-23T13:34:00.001-05:002016-02-23T13:34:44.337-05:00Perspective About the Open Range<p>I’ve waited until the illegal occupation of the <a href="http://www.fws.gov/refuge/malheur/">Malheur National Wildlife Refuge</a> was behind us before responding to friends who have wondered what I thought about it because of my background.</p> <p>I was born and spent my early years on ranchland that my great grandparents and grandparents had homesteaded as well as assembled, along the Henry’s Fork River in view of the Tetons.</p> <p>But as the only son of an only son, I was also the end of 5 generations of Idaho ranchers in that line stretching back to the early 1860s when it was yet to emerge from what remained of Oregon Territory.</p> <p>My dad and grandfather were true ranchers. In rhetoric, they would have probably shared a few of the rational sentiments expressed during the occupation in Oregon.</p> <p>But they would not have sympathized with the militants.</p> <p>There have always been a few ranchers and “rancher-wanna-bees” in the West, who not only didn’t respect public property but didn’t respect any property that wasn’t their own, as illustrated by <a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/2016/02/firearms_explosives_and_trench.html">the way militants desecrated the property</a> they occupied.</p> <p>We often forget that the <a href="http://www.bullcitymutterings.com/2014/04/what-if-it-were-our-property.html">roots of private property</a> have always been conditional.</p> <p>My grandfather was famous even before I was of school age because he had fired a warning shot from a Winchester Model 1894 .32 WS Saddle-Ring Carbine that I still have hanging on my wall as an heirloom.</p> <p>It was a Sunday morning and he had caught another rancher stealing water while others were in town attending Sunday School. “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne%27er-do-well">Ne’er-do-wells</a>, moochers and thieves” he would have called these recent militants.<a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Npa1z6LQEng/VsymQOvepSI/AAAAAAAADPE/HHeRYuPQ6xo/s1600-h/01624_s_aaeuyfyqe00253.jpg"><img title="01624_s_aaeuyfyqe0025" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; float: right; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px" border="0" alt="01624_s_aaeuyfyqe0025" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5ywj3oOG2_0/VsymQgCUHkI/AAAAAAAADPI/WEU6b3dbtOM/01624_s_aaeuyfyqe0025_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="244" align="right" height="168"></a></p> <p>He also had a respect for public lands and land managers that at least philosophically, had waned somewhat in my dad when he took over the ranch.</p> <p>It probably didn’t help that in the early 1950s dad was once forced to admit to poaching a moose out of season, when his best friend, a rural mail carrier, had left his wallet behind.</p> <p>Dad knew the two WWII were guilty but he had rationalized it by dismissing the importance of the regulations to sustainable wildlife and most of all he resented having to take the fall to preserve his friend’s federal government job.</p> <p>But I remember dad suddenly slamming on the brakes to our Jeep one day as we crossed the Vernon Bridge on our way back from the courthouse in Saint Anthony and then sprinting down an embankment.</p> <p>It was common to see my dad angry. He was one of those people who seemed to express several different emotions that way, including fear, but I had never seen him about to come to blows until that day.</p> <p>He had caught a neighboring rancher dumping trash in the river and came close to kicking this particular ne’er-do-well’s butt all the way up the embankment because of it.</p> <p>But ironically, he would have probably complained if a government official had been doing the same thing he had done. </p> <p>To understand some of the controversy between ranchers and public lands’ managers, you have to understand a new breed of rancher that came along after 1936, four decades before termination of homesteading led to the so-called <a href="http://www.hcn.org/articles/a-history-of-the-sagebrush-rebellion">Sagebrush Rebellion</a>.</p> <p>But before I touch on what occured eight years ago, it may help to understand that up until the 1880s, even in states such as North Carolina where I’ve lived for nearly 40% of my life, laws about property were very different than they are today.</p> <p>Up until that time, it was legal for other people to run their livestock on your land unless you fenced it in. Everything was fair game unless it was fenced, pretty much the opposite of what it is today.</p> <p>That began to change in North Carolina when in 1873 five counties, including one from which Durham, where I live, was carved eight years later, petitioned the General Assembly to pass legislation <a href="http://ncpedia.org/fences">enabling local “no-fence” laws</a>.</p> <p>It was a movement that was not implemented statewide until 1958.</p> <p>No-fence laws meant that instead of putting the onus on property owners to fence their land or be overrun by livestock, instead the owners of livestock were required to fence them in. </p> <p>But as this movement took hold in North Carolina, out West <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_County_War">range wars</a> were raging in states such as Wyoming.</p> <p>Only instead of intimidating public land agencies, cattlemen bent on running their livestock anywhere they damn pleased were hiring gunmen back then to run off settlers, usually immigrants.</p> <p>Just as Harney County, Oregon does, Idaho still has <a href="http://idrange.org/ranchers/Open%20Range/open-range">open range laws</a> today which include areas west/northwest of our ranch that we occasionally used, including some forested summer range, where at age 6 I participated in my first roundup.</p> <p>However, we kept areas fenced where we didn’t want other livestock to range including meadows and areas where we raised winter feed crops such as hay, oats and barley.</p> <p>Pivot irrigation has meant that farmers have increasingly pushed into that area now and parts have been set aside as herd districts, which is a designation by counties set aside from open range.</p> <p>But long before the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act provided for grazing rights on public lands, smart livestock growers, including sheepmen, were careful not to overgraze these area.</p> <p>They leased state lands and set up an allotment/share system governed by a board of directors, similar to the way they handled water rights, that kept the range healthy by limiting the number of animals.</p> <p>This allowed the rangeland recover, a form of stewardship that apparently these militant ranchers today don’t grasp or practice.</p> <p>But like today, there were always some ranchers who weren’t smart in this way.</p> <p>That’s why I have no sympathy for ranchers who overgraze public lands out West, let alone renege on fees for that privilege and then threaten bodily harm to folks just doing their jobs. </p> <p>That goes, too, for those who do sympathize with that behavior.</p> <p>You get a sense of this corrupted logic when you read reports where some of militants in Oregon were <a href="http://www.hcn.org/articles/malheur-occupation-oregon-ammon-bundy-public-lands-essay?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email">actually interviewed</a>.</p> <p>My earliest Idaho ancestors, dating back 155 years ago had an appreciation for public lands because, well, it was almost entirely publically owned back then.</p> <p>They understood that their ability to thrive was due to policies that leveraged some of these lands so railroads were built and to provide for homesteading, water reclamation, wildlife management, timber products for shelter and fuel, as well as roads and schools, even electricity.</p> <p>But between 1870 and 1900, the number of beef cattle in the 17 western states increased from 4.1 million to nearly 20 million while sheep increased from 5 million to more than 25 million, overtaxing very fragile rangeland.</p> <p>The federal government did what they could to legislate some sort of control on public lands but little was done until the Great Depression resulting in the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act.</p> <p>This established what were thought to be sustainable livestock numbers as well the number of ranchers permitted to graze on public lands, as well as the fees to be paid for that privilege, part of which went into range restoration.</p> <p>But almost immediately, a few ranchers began to abuse the system by buying tiny amounts of land around a water source adjacent to public lands and then expecting the public to shoulder the burden of providing their rangeland while relentlessly bullying land managers to let them overgraze.</p> <p>By the 1970s, when I was in college, public sentiment turned in favor of other legitimate but competing uses of public rangelands including recreation such as hunting and fishing and protection of wildlife habitat, endangered species and cultural assets, not to mention water quality.</p> <p>Small towns near public lands today are much more likely <a href="http://www.hcn.org/articles/should-this-national-monument-become-a-national-park?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email">to petition for a change to a higher status of public land designation</a> than they are sympathetic to the agenda of militants such as those who took over the Oregon bird sanctuary recently.</p> <p>In addition, economists have noted that rural communities adjacent to public lands are <a href="http://headwaterseconomics.org/wphw/wp-content/uploads/West_Is_Best_Full_Report.pdf">thriving economically</a> far more than those that aren’t.</p> <p>I also have no doubt that some regulations as well as regulators have grown too thick and cumbersome, ironically in an effort to stem the very behavior the militants exhibit.</p> <p>Unfortunately, news coverage of this far more prevalent side of the story is meager let alone coverage of ranchers seeking reasonable solutions compared to the overly simplistic “hate government” narrative.</p> <p>Like I’ve said before, my parents and ancestors were very conservative philosophically but they had no patience for ne’er-do-wells especially if veiled as armed militants.</p> <p>They appreciated the role of the commons and were suspect of anyone with a sense of entitlement.</p>Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-30316050937554772192016-02-16T14:44:00.001-05:002016-02-16T14:44:40.223-05:00My Five Generations Began with a Cub River Dugout<p>My earliest of five generations of Idaho roots trace to a temporary dugout my 2nd great grandparent Neeley carved into a hillside.</p> <p>It was a little more than three miles up the Cub River from the fort at Franklin, where it flows down out of a canyon near where it is then joined by Maple Creek.</p> <p>The headwaters of the Cub River are formed from a <a href="http://www.outdoorphotographer.com/gallery/assignments/185-brooks-streams-and-rivers/2342841-cub-river-headwaters.html#.VsHujvIrKUk">mountain spring</a> now encompassed by the Cache National Forest. But it is better known for willows, and remains a habitat for Moose and other large mammals.</p> <p>I assume from looking at the area, near a crossroads they named Nashville, that the Neeley’s farmed and ranched rich bottomland.</p> <p>But Armenius Miller Neeley, who went by A.M., also worked as a lineman for the telegraph when lines were extended first to Franklin in 1868 and then up Cub River Canyon and across the mountains to Paris, Idaho in 1871.</p> <p>Most famously, though, he was an interpreter with the Bannock and Shoshone peoples long indigenous to that area for at least part of the year, following a “calling” or designation from Mormon leaders.</p> <p>Coincidentally, both of my grandmother Adah’s grandfathers served as interpreters with Native American people indigenous to Cache Valley, as did one of my maternal grandmother’s father and grandfather further south for the Paiute and Hopi nations respectively.</p> <p>My great (x2) grandfather Neeley was born in eastern Illinois where his native upstate New Yorker parents had settled in the 1820s and then returned there after a brief stint in 1830 when they unsuccessfully also tried to settle Wisconsin.</p> <p>Both sets of his grandparents became Mormons in 1832, within two years of the formation of that faith. His parents followed by the time A.M was born in 1836.</p> <p>Including another ancestor who had become only <a href="http://www.bullcitymutterings.com/2015/01/a-rare-pedigree-of-orneriness.html">the 31st member</a> of that faith, this means there are roots on both sides of my father family tracing back to the first thousand converts to that faith, something rare among its now 15 million worldwide.</p> <p>While we both became inactive nearly all of our adult lives, we respected that being Mormon can be as much about a culture as a faith.</p> <p>Following conversion, my Neeley ancestors migrated across Illinois to its western edge where other Mormons gathered for a short time, creating the settlement of Nauvoo from a swamp.</p> <p>By the time it vied for the second largest city in Illinois, they were forced to flee for the safety of the Rockies in 1846.</p> <p>My 3rd great grandmother “Betsy,” whose father had fallen during Missouri’s at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haun%27s_Mill_massacre">Haun’s Mill massacre</a> a few years earlier, died on the banks of the Missouri River in route to he West.<a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0ilx6aMjjq8/VsN8JMzTVzI/AAAAAAAADOU/e-kzTtlnhW4/s1600-h/df5b1e91-ba12-4602-bdc3-2b63cc3caa04%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img title="df5b1e91-ba12-4602-bdc3-2b63cc3caa04" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; float: right; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px" border="0" alt="df5b1e91-ba12-4602-bdc3-2b63cc3caa04" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-mzXy3bXCDwM/VsN8Jhdqe4I/AAAAAAAADOY/bxl2pJbmtO0/df5b1e91-ba12-4602-bdc3-2b63cc3caa04%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="230" align="right" height="305"></a></p> <p>Barely 14 years old, my 2nd great grandfather Neeley made it across the Rockies by 1850.</p> <p>Shortly, he migrated north first near Brigham City before marrying my 2nd great grandmother, Susan Morgan, a Welsh immigrant.</p> <p>She was just 15 and he was 19. By 1862, they pioneered across the 42nd parallel into what would be named Idaho, even before it had been organized into a territory.</p> <p>They would have probably moved back temporarily in 1863 to the safety of the rectangular fort of Franklin during an attempt by A.M. and others to mediate with the Shoshone after a settler shot and killed a brave.</p> <p>But soon sixty cavalry troopers rode through the fort and what is called the <a href="http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/01/29/native-history-bear-river-massacre-devastates-northwestern-shoshone-153317">Bear River Massacre</a> ensued a few miles north on what is now US 91 near what, a few years later, would be settled as Worm Creek, now called Preston.</p> <p>History tells me that my 2nd great grandparents the Neeley’s and Shumways were among the Franklin settlers that tended to wounded soldiers and Shoshone in the aftermath of what is the largest massacre by the U.S. Army.</p> <p>Susan died during childbirth in 1877, a few months after dispatch riders had galloped into Franklin where they first telegraphed the news of Custer’s massacre to the East.</p> <p>A.M. re-married a widow named Clark who hailed from near Spartanburg, South Carolina. She famously smoked a corn cob pipe.</p> <p>My line of Neeley’s eventually migrated north along the Henry’s Fork where my grandparents met and where my father, me and my sisters were born. </p> <p>Also not far off US 91/89, it is the furthest north point along more than a thousand miles of what I call the Meridian of my DNA, because it is along this route that my ancestors created dozens of settlements from 1847 until the end of the Frontier was declared 5 decades later.</p> <p>But my grandmother Adah knew here grandfather A.M. very well. He didn’t pass until she was in her late teens and and ventured further north along the eastern edge of Idaho.</p> <p>A.M. died two months after the creation of Cache National Forest a bit further up the Cub River as a nurturing influence below. Coincidentally, it was also, just as the Targhee National Forest was created in back of the ancestral ranch where I spent my early years.</p> <p>Grandma Adah told me stories A.M. while I was growing up and also left historical sketches that illuminate details whenever I fail to recall them.</p> <p>I sure wish I had asked her a lot more questions. To compensate, I weave these narratives for my young grandsons and their descendants to come.</p>Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-13062530638932538882016-02-12T11:51:00.001-05:002016-02-12T11:51:41.917-05:00Triggering Personal Change<p>Right now my partner and I are half way through a month-long “wine fast.” <p>It’s also, coincidentally, the anniversary of when we also added twice a week strength training to our exercise regime a year ago under the guidance of an excellent personal trainer. <p>We’re what is called moderate drinkers, according to dietary guidelines, sticking exclusively to red wine. <p>A <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/people-who-drink-alcohol-outlive-those-who-abstain-study-shows-8995879.html">recent study</a> conducted over two decades found that moderate drinkers were more than 40% less likely to die within that timeframe. <p>Drinking red wine <a href="http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/05/13/red-wine-resveratrol?cmpid=tpfood-eml-2014-05-17-wine">doesn’t mean</a> you will live longer -- nor does weight training or taking a daily brisk walk -- but the latter two may mean you may die a whole lot better. <p>Studies have shown though, that fasting from alcohol for even a month (we chose February for a reason that should be obvious) <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/01/06/372088383/going-dry-the-benefits-of-a-month-without-booze?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news">has health benefits</a> such as lowering liver fat by as much as 20% as well as cholesteral and blood sugar by an average of 16. <p>Alcohol (and <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/189182/obesity-rate-climbs-record-high-2015.aspx?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_content=morelink&utm_campaign=syndication">obesity</a>) can cause your liver to process fat differently. <p>I wouldn’t be surprised if we cut back from two glasses to one at dinner in March even though my liver tested normal before this wine fast. <p>Either way, my doctor will probably be as happy when I have my annual physical in March, as he has been with the fact that exercise over the last several years has normalized my triglyceride levels. <p>For anyone who reads regularly, you’re probably wondering how I can be descended from five generations of Mormons, dating to back to that faith’s first 30 members and drink alcohol, or for that matter coffee. <p>For the last forty years I have mostly been Mormon in culture only. But you might be surprised to know that abstinence from alcohol or coffee or tea hasn’t always been associated with being a Mormon. <p>Living what is called the “<a href="https://www.lds.org/topics/word-of-wisdom?lang=eng">Word of Wisdom</a>” did not become a litmus test for members of that faith until the 1920s, nearly a hundred years from when it was first revealed during a time when similar dietary concerns were commonplace. <p>In fact, coffee and wine were provisions on the vanguard wagon train west in 1847, which included three off my ancestors. Others who followed over the next ten or so years even planted vineyards. <p>I’ve already written about the tobacco chewing prowess of one of my pioneer ancestors. One of my grandfathers on the other side, who was born in 1888, still drank coffee and beer while I was growing up.<img src="https://d13yacurqjgara.cloudfront.net/users/43762/screenshots/1387661/dribbble-fitbit.gif" width="269" align="right" height="202"> <p>He’s either smiling or shaking his head as I write that drinking coffee and red wine have now been found to actually have health properties. <p>With all due respect, the most prevalent dietary vice among Mormons is definitely sugar. <p>But I digress. <p>I average 3 miles a day of brisk walking now, and that includes at least a 2-miler even after weight training. <p>So what brought about this change regarding exercise? I grew up playing all kinds of sports but as an adult I was better known for a quarter-pounder a day with fries, often twice a day. <p>It isn’t the Fitbit I wear. I’ve had one since they came out but wearing it didn’t increase my exercise. <p>The first sign of a thin layer of film in one of the carotid arteries in my neck was a wakeup. <p>Having a partner who shifted gears with me has also been a major influence. <p>Unlike some in a <a href="http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/news_events/news-releases/jordan-etkin-tracking/#.Vrze2VgrKUl">recent study here in Durham</a>, tracking activity on a wearable has not made it a chore. In fact, using a Fitbit to track various daily goals has made it fun and measurable. <p>Measurability is a key to motivation, at least for me. <p>It is also educational. I’ve never thought much about “active steps.” <p>It is now a proven metric by several sources and studies that getting at least 10,000 steps each day is good for you. The average American gets 5,100. <p>Just as important, or even more important for me, is the metric called “active minutes.” <p>The CDC recommends about 30 per day but defines them in increments of 10. So Fitbit awards active minutes after 10 minutes of continuous moderate-to-intense activity such as walking at a brisk pace. <p>Moseying or sauntering doesn’t count and I shoot for at least 100 a day, hoping to get my heart rate, during walks, up into the cardio or even peak zone for at least 30 minutes each day. <p>Some weeks now I average about 150 “active minues” a day. <p>Coupled with this was avoiding sugar as much as possible and using another app to zero in on and then maintain my caloric balance. <p>I’m a few months from turning 68. For people over the age of 65, the CDC recommends two and a half hours of moderate-intensity activity a week, about a two mile brisk walk at my pace. <p>Also recommended is strength training two or more days a week covering all of the major muscle groups. <p>So we’re doing more than okay by those standards. <p>Some people live their last 20, 30 or even 40 years sick, in poor health, with limited mobility and with a variety of ailments that impede their quality of life. <p>We’re hoping (and there is research to back it up) that by staying strong, active and healthy, although we may not live more years, we will be ale to add quality to all those years in front of us. <p>We’ll see. What started as an interest in losing weight, improving tests and toning some muscles has turned into a complete life style change. <p>And we couldn’t be happier.</p>Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-57309692137116572582016-02-01T16:40:00.001-05:002016-02-01T16:40:32.314-05:00The Incredible Market So Many DMOs Overlook<p>People were amazed when it first became apparent in the late 1990s, that Durham, North Carolina drew a higher percentage of visitors through the jointly owned Raleigh-Durham International Airport than any other city in its vast service area. <p>Studies a few years earlier had also confirmed that the vast majority of these visitors as well as overall visitation to Durham were point-to-point, meaning that the “Bull City” was their ultimate destination and they were not just passing through nor only tacking it on as a stopover. <p>Many DMOs and even more state and local officials obsess with airports as gateways, but on average, nationwide, including places such as Durham, more than 85% of domestic person-trips taken, including the overwhelming majority of those taken for business including conferences, are done as road trips. <p><a href="https://www.ustravel.org/research/domestic-travel-market-report">Fully half are instate</a>. <p>This isn’t counting visitors from within a 50 miles radius, although studies show that Southerners are inclined to travel as far as 244 miles round trip for a day trip, or up to <a href="http://www.travelpulse.com/news/car-rental-and-rail/enterprise-study-americans-prefer-shorter-weekend-road-trips-to-long-vacations.html">122 miles each way</a>. <p>This is the sweet spot that many Destination marketers miss, especially small, emerging destinations where it should be the strategic focus. <p>It is useful to focus on Gen X and Baby Boomers because more than half of Millennials feel they don’t have the time for even a day trip, and even then it is primilary a foodie trip (35%.) <p>So studies of road-trippers focus on people who are 45+ years old where the incidence for leisure road trips is between 85% and 89% although it is people in their 60s who are the most active road-trippers. <p>Only a third of road-trippers fully plan their trips in advance and only half try new new destinations. But while for men driving it is the destination that matters, women are more given to relaxation and rejuvenation. <p>An exception may be road-trippers who use <a href="http://www.wyndhamworldwide.com/news-media/press-releases/travelers-are-hitting-road-summer-finds-wyndham-vacation-rentals%C2%AE-study">vacation rentals</a>, where half of women drivers put the “pedal to the metal” while 29% of male drivers are open to the “long and leisurely” route. <p>Outside of trips for year-end holidays, road trips potential overall is evenly spread from May through October. <p>Making road-trippers unlikely to being “intercepted” enroute is that 72% stick only to the main roads - while 5% take scenic routes and 23% take a combination. <p>Billboards are especially useless for this purpose because 73% of road-trippers now use GPS including 43% who have in-dash systems. Google is the other preferred app for pit stops along the way. <p>It is more likely that a destination can appeal to the 30% of road-trippers who look beyond the ultimate destination by reaching them online as they search popular end-desintations, more so on the outbound leg than the return.<img src="http://am1050.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Road_Trip_logo.jpg" width="249" align="right" height="140"> <p>Cities or towns town are the most popular destinations, followed by a friend or family members home. Cities in the South are twice as popular as beaches and seven times more popular as mountains. <p>Only 2% take cross country road trips such as you have read about on this blog and only 1% starts off with no particular destination in mind. <p>For those who are open to stop-overs, a destination might appeal to 29% for a park or beach for a little over three hours. The same percentage is open to stopping in a city or town along the way for up to 4 hours. <p>Local culture falls next in popularity with museums appealing to 15%, winery tours (8%), concerts/theater (5%) and sporting events (3%.) <p>But remember, even in these instances, any stops in route are more likely outbound than on the return and 4-in-10 make absolutely no stops enroute. <p>For nearly three-quarters, road trips are their favorite way to travel and 87% make them three times a year. <p>DMOs for unfamiliar destinations are best advised to focus on nearby cities for demand and then for day trips and short weekends until that demand can justify additional capacity. <p>Any advertising done by a DMO trying to encourage stops enroute or in an an attempt to draw day trips or short weekend road trips from residents of nearby cities needs to be online, not on billboards, with a focus on search results. <p>Remember 3-in-4 use GPS and more and more move that direction each year. They are more and more likely to be annoyed by roadside blight. <p>So a priority must be ensuring the regular submission of indepth GPS data for streets and highways as well as continually prodding and assisting all tourism related businesses, organizations and events to secure and “own” their online/GPS “real estate.” <p>Many states, including North Carolina, still seem to perpetuate the illusion that road trips are serial in nature and/or that visitors to a destination can be lured into driving to other communities for things easily found where they are visiting. <p>In part, this is why so many communities still engage in predatory marketing. <p>But that model hasn’t been aligned with consumer behavior for 50-70 years, if ever. Travelers via all modes very rarely venture more than seven miles even within their primary destination. <p>DMO marketing doesn’t have to be “rocket science” but hubris, including that among local officials as well as misinformation from other DMOs, can make it a lot more difficult. <p>Focusing on instate road-trippers may lack sex appeal but it is a very lucrative strategy for destinations of any size. </p>Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-20379628038651946732016-01-25T14:42:00.001-05:002016-01-25T14:42:59.561-05:00The Southern Roots of a Fifth Generation Idahoan<p>As a fifth-generation Idaho native dating back to its first permanent settlement (other than Native Americans, of course), I didn’t learn of my deep Southern roots until one day in the early 1950s.</p> <p>When I first remember her telling me about this part of my heritage, I was a preschooler helping my paternal grandmother Adah tend to family graves in the tiny hill-top cemetery, above our ranch house with a view of the Tetons.</p> <p>It was a bit of “commons” carved into that ancestral ranch stretching for 270 degrees around that hill. By then my grandparents had turned the place over to my parents when my Dad, their only son, came back from chasing down Nazis as they fled into the Alps.</p> <p>Because of my insatiable curiosity, my dad gave me the nickname “windy,” but I have long wished that I had asked my grandmother far more questions such as the location of the 12 x 12 homestead shack where she and grandpa first lived.</p> <p>It was before they moved into the ranch house down below the cemetery where a bend of the road cuts across Snow Creek. This is where my dad was born and where my parents first brought me and my two sisters home.</p> <p>I wish I had been more curious about the abandoned house at the end of the meadow where my great-grandparents had lived and ranched and died, leaving it for me as a favorite place to explore and reflect.</p> <p>I’ve carried the smells of sagebrush, my horse Gypsy, a fresh mown meadow and rain on a dirt road wherever I’ve lived since.</p> <p>But it would be more than five decades after my grandmother’s revelation before I would find my Carolina roots, both North and South, dating back three hundred years and before the permanent settlement of either.</p> <p>By 1860 when those roots first crossed up into Idaho Territory, and during their previous twelve years since crossing the Rockies, they had already helped create at least three other settlements including Fort Union and Fort Mendon.</p> <p>My second great grandmother, Amanda Sarah Graham, had been born in 1843 near DeKalb in Kemper County Mississippi.</p> <p>Her father Tom famously protected settlements from Grizzly Bears until he was mauled to death by one. He also was also a farmer, carpenter and butcher, as well as a saw mill operator where he fashioned ox bows and handles for pitchforks, rakes and hoes.</p> <p>He was heralded for reportedly being able to spit tobacco across his cabin and through a latch hole. </p> <p>For much of his life he had also been a third or fourth generation slaveholder.<a href="http://ilovehistory.utah.gov/people/images/ft.-union.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://ilovehistory.utah.gov/people/images/ft.-union.jpg" width="315" align="right" height="189"></a></p> <p>Only 3% of first generation Mormon settlers were from the South and after crossing the Rockies, Tom freed slaves by the names of Isaac Green Flake, Aunt Hannah and Robert.</p> <p>He set them up with land of their own outside Fort Union (rendered in the image above), at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, named not for the land of cotton but for a type of poplar tree long-common along streams even in the arid west.</p> <p>Cottonwoods later became known as “Mormon trees” because they mark where settlements were created along the <a href="http://www.bullcitymutterings.com/2014/04/the-meridian-of-my-dna.html" target="_blank">Meridian of my DNA</a>, stretching from the Salt River to my native Henry’s Fork.</p> <p>Fort Union was in a ravine down the canyon from where Alta and Snowbird ski resorts are today.</p> <p>Leaving instructions for his children to help their former slaves with the transition to freedom whenever asked, my Southerner third great grandfather headed further north along the Rockies.</p> <p>During the migration west, Tom’s wife, my third great grandmother Sarah Ann, had died along the journey during childbirth near what became Winterset, Iowa two years later and now known for the Bridges of Madison County and as the birthplace of actor John Wayne. </p> <p>My Graham great (3) grandparents had once owned plantations along both sides of the Tombigbee River.</p> <p>The first was on three parcels above the Sipsey River, a free-flowing Alabama swamp, 50,000 acres of wetland Cypress, Cottonwood, Hardwood and Pine forests.</p> <p>Today, this area is known for canoe and hiking trails, as well as game and tree preserves, but in the 1830s it was settled by all sides of Tom and Sarah Ann’s families including the Grahams, Bradfords, McCrorys and Gilmores.</p> <p>They had fought, at times side by side in the same regiment, during the Revolutionary War and Tom’s father in the War of 1812, as well. </p> <p>The McCrory’s who were Scotts-Irish immigrants, left North Carolina for Tennessee after the Revolutionary War with Andrew Jackson, a family friend.</p> <p>Near Nashville is where my great (3) grandmother Sarah Ann was born.</p> <p>Her soon-to-be husband Tom was born in the Kershaw District of South Carolina but my fifth great grandmother was at least second generation North Carolinian on both sides. Still they are not my earliest roots from here. </p> <p>McCrory’s then migrated to western Alabama, probably down a military road through Mudtown, now Birmingham, while the Grahams and Bradfords preceded them by a few years, probably migrating down through what is now Greenville and Athens around the southern Appalachians and across through Mudtown.</p> <p>There is no evidence that McCrorys ever held slaves but both my Graham and Bradford ancestors did generations before.</p> <p>These migrations from the Carolinas were motivated by more than wanderlust. One reason was the political tensions following the Revolutionary War. </p> <p>Even victorious, my patriot southern ancestors were in the minority.</p> <p>A majority of North Carolinians and even more South Carolinians were either ambivalent about the Revolution or loyalists to the British Crown, known as “conservatives” following the war. They wanted a return to those values.</p> <p>Another reason for their migration was soil depletion in the upper South. Landowners, especially plantations, viewed the soil back then as something to be cleared and planted in staple crops such as cotton, tobacco and even corn and wheat, until no longer useful.</p> <p>Slavery and public land policies made it cheaper to move on to new lands than to manure and rehabilitate depleted soils.</p> <p>Rare today in the Carolinas are clear waterways such as Mayo Lake where we have a place. Even here, when rains come after upstream harvests the “sheet” erosion overwhelms the ability of wetlands to filter the runoff, resulting in a temporary turbid invasion.</p> <p>Southeasterners, especially it seems elected officials, who dismiss or undermine water quality standards have come to believe the waters in North Carolina are naturally muddy.</p> <p>But southern soil historians such as Dr. <a href="http://www.colorado.edu/envs/people/paul-sutter">Paul Sutter</a> note that “a little more than a century of cotton culture…transformed the ecology, hydrology, and geomorphology of southern watershed in way that <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25159638-let-us-now-praise-famous-gullies">may last for thousands of years</a>.”</p> <p>On April 6, 1842, my third great grandparents Graham along with Tom’s mother, Jane, followed Mormon missionaries down into the Sipsey River to be baptized into the 12-year old, distinctly American restorationist Christian church.</p> <p>In early 1846, after briefly owning plantations across the Tombigbee in Mississippi, the Grahams and their young daughter, Amanda Sarah, along with her older siblings and their three slaves loaded up wagons and headed cross state and up the Mississippi River past Saint Louis to where Mormons were already fleeing west.</p> <p>Tom went ahead after his wife died crossing Iowa and then returned to bring his children across the Plains and over the Rockies.</p> <p>When she crossed over the Rockies, my second great grandmother, Amanda Sarah, was about the age I was when my grandmother revealed my southern roots that day while tending graves in sight of the Tetons.</p> <p>It was also the age my grandmother had been when she had briefly lived with and cared for her grandmother Amanda following a Trolley accident during a visit from Idaho to Salt Lake.</p> <p>When I travel through these places of my roots and along the routes my ancestors took, I don’t romanticize as much as it probably seems to some readers.</p> <p>I leave the traces in this blog as testimony to descendants through my two grandsons that the values found in our gene pool are complex and varied - a merger of many different backgrounds.</p> <p>I often wonder, when judging my slaveholding Southern ancestors what we may hold common today that will be similarly revolting through the lens of future generations.</p> <p>I suspect they will look back at our short-sighted “utility” economy and the havoc it is wreaking for future generations with similar disgust.</p> <p>On a future visit, I plan to take my grandsons to visit the grave of Isaac Green Flake, one of the slaves freed by my southern ancestors, who was also from North Carolina, where I have lived for nearly three decades now.</p> <p>Mr. Green Flake. who also elected to be baptized Mormon before the trek west, was born in eastern Anson County, North Carolina just east of Charlotte and just north of where my third great grandfather Tom was born in South Carolina in 1807.</p> <p>But when their parents were born, there had been no such distinction between the Carolinas.</p> <p>After Mr. Flake was given his freedom and land of his own, he worked for a time as a carriage driver for Brigham Young before also heading up into southeastern Idaho where his son had homesteaded Grays Lake near the mountains east of Blackfoot.</p> <p>He also stayed in touch with the children of my Southern ancestors.</p> <p>But he asked to be buried down at the old Fort Union cemetery in the shadow of the mountains he had crossed 60 years earlier and where he at last had become free.</p>Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-69306997345704179322016-01-04T08:01:00.001-05:002016-01-04T08:01:52.998-05:00Bear River Mountain Reflection<p>On the return leg of one of my cross-country road-trips a few years ago, Mugs, my English Bulldog, and I made a brief stop high up on a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bench_(geology)">bench</a> that runs along the western slopes of the Bear River Mountains. <p>I had never been there but the tiny town three and a half miles below of Richmond in upper Cache Valley, Utah lies along what I call the Meridian of my DNA. <p>That’s because the scores of settlements my ancestors helped found over just the six decades beginning in 1847, stretching from southcentral Arizona to my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, all fall a degree or so along the 111th Meridian West. <p>By highway, it is US Route 89 as it zig zags its way from the banks of the Salt River to the banks of the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, and all but the southern tip along the Rockies that comes closest to each of these ancestral settlements. <p>In retirement I try to take in a cross-section on road trips out west from my home in Durham, North Carolina. The first of these ancestral settlements was founded more than a hundred years before I came along. <p>Back five generations, all of my ancestors had all become Mormons including four lines who were among the very first who crossed the Rockies and descended down into the Great Salt Lake Valley, then a part of Mexico. <p>By the Civil War, they had been joined by 12 other lines of great-great grandparents. <p>Many lines of ancestors on both sides of my family tree crossed paths on arrival before fanning out, some to the south and others to the north, to open up Cache Valley below where I stood that crystal clear winter morning. <p>This included a few who ventured another six miles north from where I stood to establish the first permanent settlement in what would soon be Idaho Territory. <p>I overlooked where my Bowman ancestors settled in 1860 after crossing over the Rockies in 1856 to Wight’s Fort where my great grandfather was born in 1859 in what is now West Jordan. <p>This is south of Big Cottonwood Creek and the area where different than Salt Lake, settlers were living out the land they worked and near today where I’ve watched my grandsons play in a basketball league. <p>In Richmond they were given a plot along the Northside of the fort and, as customary, about 17 or so acres to the east to farm or use, and about that many acres up on the bench for grazing. <p>For a few years, it would be too dangerous to live or leave livestock outside the fort at night because of Shoshone Peoples native to that area and Grizzly Bears. <p>But Mormons also believed strongly in the commons and worked together there to quickly build a meeting house/school house and dig irrigation canals. <p>Unlike my great grandfather Hyrum Edward who was the first in six generations of horsemen continued today by my niece, my great-great grandfather, Hyrum Webster, was more of an entrepreneur. <p>He ran freight to the settlement and built a molasses factory below the bench where I stood before also building a sawmill there on Cherry Creek as well as manufacturing brick at one time. <p>He also had the first horse-powered and then steam grain threshers in the area to harvest grains from throughout the valley. <p>In the beginning the family lived in a log home with a dirt floor and a dirt roof and my great grandfather and his siblings wore burlap wrappings for shoes in those early years, always working side by side in these enterprises. <p>Today people build homes along the bench for spectacular views across the valley and Richmond below. <a href="http://img.deseretnews.com/images/article/midres/1638769/1638769.jpg"><img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://img.deseretnews.com/images/article/midres/1638769/1638769.jpg" width="269" align="right" height="150"></a> <p>This is where my great grandfather once raised and bred horses and where higher up behind the bench toward Cherry Peak, my grandfather Ernest Melvin first herded cattle as a boy. <p>Today that area has become Utah’s 15th ski resort. <p>By the time my great-grandparents married in 1881 and started a family it was clear there would not be land available in Cache Valley for their children. Nor were the small acreage plots there optimal for livestock growing. <p>Nor was even the 160 acres per settler that could be homesteaded further north in Idaho which was nearly ten times the amount allotted settlers in upper Cache Valley. <p>In his report three years earlier to Congress, John Wesley Powell had recommended 2,560 acres per settler for livestock growing in semi-arid areas, based on defined watershed boundaries. <p>Judging by the ranch where I was born and spent my early years, which had been cobbled together from homesteads and contiguous land purchases, Powell was right. <p>I believe my newlywed great grandparents Bowman were ready to head north in 1881 but two things held them back. <p>Even though Margaret Rita’s mother had just passed, my great-great grandfather Kent lived nearby. <p>Hyrum Edward’s mother Hannah who went by Annie, was estranged from his father, and needed her first son’s support until she passed three years later. <p>There would have been a lot of excitement about the far reaches of the Upper Snake River Valley in Idaho. A federal land office had just opened at Oxford just across the border in Idaho. <p>In the 1870s, contrary to the asessment of explorer John C. Fremont, it was discovered that the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho was ideal for settlement. <p>My newlywed great grandparents had watched the first settlers head north as far as the terminus of the Henry’s Fork. <p>Great swaths of waist high bluegrass had been found growing along the banks of that north fork of the Snake, punctuated further up the river by sagebrush, indicating the soil was excellent. <p>But this part of the west was still very much wild. <p>While Yellowstone had been made a national park less than a decade earlier, only three years before my great grandparents married, Cavalry troopers were fighting running battles in pursuit of Chief Joseph and bands of Nez Perce as they fled across the nook. <p>Outlaw gangs, a third of whom were from Mormon stock, were rustling cattle and robbing banks up and down the valleys of Idaho, Wyoming and Utah just east and would for another decade or more. <p>But I think something else made my grandparents hesitate. </p> <p>My great great great grandfather Bowman was one of the 3 or 4 percent of Mormon males asked to take more than one wife, similar to that practiced in the Old Testament.</p> <p>He had married one of two plural wives when my great grandfather was eight years old. My great-great grandmother did’t want anything to do with it and separated.</p> <p>As most did, he apparently maintained the households in different towns. In 1870, nearly 30% of the population of Richmond came from polygamous families which varied greatly by community. </p> <p>However, even though monogamous, the practice is estimated to have touched the lives of a majority of Mormons in some way. The practice was waning at the time my great grandparents married and was even more extremely rare in that second generation.</p> <p>It was rarer still across the border in Idaho where, as the percentage of the population who were Mormons reached 17%, less than 1% there were engaged in polygamy.</p> <p>But as my great grandparents contemplated the move to Idaho, the US Congress debated the Edmunds Act to disenfranchise Mormons and an anti-Mormon arm of the Republican Party in Idaho was taking control of the legislature.</p> <p>Mormons were predominantly Democrats so the move had more to do with partisan politics and dominating the constitutional convention leading up to statehood in 1890.</p> <p>Seeing that the strategy was working, an anti-Mormon wing of Democrats joined forces to throw their fellow Democrats under the bus by wording the constitution to effectively disenfranchise all Mormons.</p> <p>They also deparately hoped to acheive statehood before Congress learned in the 1890 census that this reduced the population necessary to qualify for statehood. It was an unsettling time in Idaho or to contemplate a move there.</p> <p>After losing in the Supreme Court, in 1890 Mormon leaders issued a manifesto disavowing polygamy in practice or teachings, two years after my grandfather Bowman was born.</p> <p>Two years later the right for Mormons to vote was restored in Idaho just as my great-great grandfather died. But that clause wasn’t removed from the Idaho constitution until 1968 I believe.</p> <p>Today, 24% of Idaho is Mormon by religion and probably more by culture. Ironically, like the state, nearly all are Republican.</p> <p>In 1907, my great grandfather rode up into the far reaches of the Henry’s Fork and purchased a 360 acre ranch where his sons, including my grandfather, could homestead adjacent land.</p> <p>The family left the bench above Richmond that year with their belongings and equipment loaded into three iron-wheeled wagons each pulled by four teams of horses.</p> <p>Following was my great grandparents horse drawn white-top buggy and a little side-spring black top buggy, along with 100 cattle my grandfather, brother and cousins drove on horseback during the 15 day, 200 mile trip.</p> <p>Richmond was undergoing something of a growth spurt at the time before going into decline by 1920 only to rebound to about 2,500 by ther time I stood looking down from that bench along the Bear River Mountains.</p> <p>Soon after settling along the Henry’s Fork, four and a half miles west of the newly established village of Ashton, these Bowman ancestors too had become Republicans.</p> <p>They were drawn to progressivism and the western and rancher/farmer-friendly policies of President Teddy Roosevelt, including water reclamation.</p> <p>My great grandmother died in 1918 during the Great Influenza Epidemic and was buried in the small cemetery (Ora) carved into our ranch. My great grandfather passed away in 1936, twelve years before I would be born.</p> <p>By then my grandparents had consolidated 1,100 acres of ranchland along with a similar amount of range that was operated by my parents after my dad returned from WWII.</p> <p>I visited and played around the headstones of my great grandparents in that cemetery while growing up, stopping often to gaze at the Tetons rising across the Henry’s Fork.</p> <p>My great grandfather’s HB brands, a variation for horses and cattle, were also a constant reminder as was that buggy which I found abandoned in a grove while herding cattle. </p> <p>I haven’t been back since 1976 when my grandmother died, nor have I been a practicing Mormon since before that time. But transcending religion, it is a culture that literally runs through my veins.</p> <p>Until the day I die, it will lead me to research the lives of my ancestors and the places and times in which they lived. More than flesh, bones and DNA, each has contributed to who I am.</p>Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-47347318521107305972015-12-16T13:37:00.000-05:002015-12-16T13:44:35.114-05:00Six Million Businesses and Shrinking<h3 class="post-title entry-title">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">There are only 6 million active businesses in America. Another 20 million
are in name only <a href="http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/186638/killing-small-business.aspx?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_content=morelink&utm_campaign=syndication" target="_blank">according to Gallup</a>.</span></h3>
<br />
They report that “Of the 6 million, 3.8 million have four or fewer
employees,” otherwise known as micro businesses.<br />
<br />
According to <a href="http://www.smallbusinessmajority.org/small-business-research/downloads/100912-micro-business-report.pdf" target="_blank">another study</a>, most micro businesses never want to grow to
more than 10 employees, which would place them among the one million businesses
today with between 5 to 9 employees.<br />
<br />
That means there are “only 2 million small, medium and large businesses in
the United States,” including about 1,000 companies in the “big business”
category with 10,000 or more employees.<br />
<br />
For sources of “dark money” and undue, often opaque influence among lawmakers
look to the larger employers, something shown in an investigative piece <a href="http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/the-destruction-of-workers-compensation?utm_source=Pacific%20Standard%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=b3b53dc6de-daily-rss-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a4fd1bcb7e-b3b53dc6de-76440229" target="_blank">just re-published in <em>Pacific Standard</em></a>.<br />
<br />
For job creation, however, look to those first two groups, especially micro
businesses.<br />
<br />
So how do we foster more of these concerns that generate the vast majority of
new jobs?<br />
<br />
Buy local, obviously.<br />
<br />
Some experts point to enforcing regulations evenly along with simplifying
some. Most, however, point to making credit more available.<br />
<br />
The rub is that over the last 15 years, small business loan volume is down
14% and loans <a href="https://ilsr.org/change-volume-bank-loans-businesses-loan-size-2000-2012/" target="_blank">made to micro businesses are down a third</a>.<br />
<br />
What happened? One indication is that since 2008 alone, one in four “local
banks” have simply vanished.<br />
<br />
When I graduated from high school in 1966, more than 7 out of every 10 banks
were small, single-office local banks, totally more than 10,000 nationwide.<br />
<br />
Branch banking had become the norm by the time I moved to Durham, NC in
1989.<br />
<br />
Today, there are half as many commercial banks overall as there were when I
graduated from college in 1972 and <a href="http://ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/number-banks-1966-2014.jpg" target="_blank">fewer than 1,000 single-office or truly local banks in the entire
country</a>.<br />
<br />
Even so, small banks and credit unions make <a href="https://ilsr.org/small-business-loans-as-share-of-assets-2014/" target="_blank">most of the loans to small businesses, including micro
businesses</a>. There are just fewer and fewer of them.<br />
<br />
Contrary to lobbyists, the decline of small, local banks isn’t due to
regulatory reform after the great recession. <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2518690" target="_blank">Click here</a> to download an excellent review of the reasons.<br />
<br />
<img align="right" src="http://ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Bank-Assets-Pie-20141.jpg" height="382" style="display: inline; float: right;" width="400" /><br />
Far more compelling is that this problem began with policy changes more than
a decade earlier.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Bank-Assets-Pie-1995.jpg" target="_blank">In 1995</a>, small banks and credit unions held 27% of bank market
share compared to the 17% held by giant banks.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Bank-Assets-Pie-20141.jpg" target="_blank">Today</a>, giant banks control 59% of bank market share, more than
five times as much as small banks and credit unions, and just four mega banks
control most of that.<br />
<br />
Now, the <a href="http://ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Bank-Assets-Pie-20141.jpg" target="_blank">four largest banks alone control 42% of all banking</a>, yet they make a
very small share of loans to job creating local businesses. Nor do they play
nice with one another.<br />
<br />
These four mega-banks alone control nearly four times the amount of banking
as all of the remaining small banks and credit unions put together.<br />
<br />
In the four years leading up to the great recession about <a href="https://ilsr.org/number-of-new-banks-created-by-year-1993-to-2013/" target="_blank">300 commercial banks disappeared each year</a> but we were
creating nearly half as many.<br />
<br />
The vanish-rate continues, but we’re creating only 6 new banks a year on
average according to the <a href="https://ilsr.org/" target="_blank">Institute for
Local Self-Reliance</a>, the source delving into much of these data.<br />
<br />
Good policies and lending by small - usually stand-alone local banks -fueled
the growth of America’s middle class in the 1960s and 1970s before
anti-government rhetoric and deregulation began to hollow it out. <br />
<br />
It is likely no coincidence that today this powerful segment of households is
rapidly shrinking or that the deaths of businesses now outnumbers the births of
new businesses.<br />
<br />
As a moderate Independent, fiscally and socially, I find analysis intriguing
that shows that nine out of the last ten recessions occurred under Republican
presidents while Democratic presidents created nearly twice as many jobs per
year.<br />
<br />
Of course, this illustrates how intricate and complex economic development is
but that the underlying principles always come back to main street as well as
the political courage to resist powerful special interests.<br />
<br />
<br />
It is also ironic that conservative states such as North Carolina where I
live <a href="https://ilsr.org/procurement-more-than-a-policy-change/" target="_blank">regulate cities and local governments</a> from practicing the most
basic tenant of economic development – buying local.Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-18240933861281592492015-12-07T11:33:00.001-05:002015-12-08T09:21:22.253-05:00This Ongoing War 150 Years Later<p>In North Carolina, it’s no surprise to learn that “since 1960, one third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion.”  Nor, according to scientists, that “46-58 thousand square miles of forest are lost each year – equivalent to 36 football fields every minute.”</p> <p>Tar Heels have witnessed the link between depleted soils and deforestation in the decades before the Civil War when more than a third of North Carolinians moved away.</p> <p>By 1850, 31% of native North Carolinians then living in the United States resided in some other state.</p> <p>Backwardness regarding slavery and race relations as well as resistance to public education and infrastructure played a big role in the out migration as did poor land use practices by plantations.</p> <p>It’s well documented by unapologetic <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2841903-north-carolina-through-four-centuries" target="_blank">historians</a> such as the late Dr. William S. Powell.</p> <p>I’ve been reading or rereading two others recently, one written the year I was born (1948) entitled <em><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106223.From_Slavery_to_Freedom" target="_blank">From Slavery to Freedom</a></em> and another just released entitled, <a href="http://nc-historical-publications.stores.yahoo.net/4717.html" target="_blank"><em>The Old North State at War: The North Carolina Civil War Atlas</em></a><em>.</em></p> <p>Both shed new light<em>.<a href="http://nc-historical-publications.stores.yahoo.net/4717.html" target="_blank"><img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://ep.yimg.com/ay/nc-historical-publications/4717-14.gif" width="303" align="right" height="200" /></a></em></p> <p>The latter shows the population breakdown by race and freedom-status broken down by county just prior to the Civil War, as well as the vote by county for or against succession.</p> <p>You can see a divide back then running down between what is now Durham and Wake/Raleigh with 5 points more slave-holders in Wake.</p> <p>Wake/Raleigh also had twice the number of slaves as Durham/Orange and nearly three times the number of free Blacks out of 30,463 statewide.</p> <p>There were a little more than 125,000 households in North Carolina in 1860 and 28.2% owned slaves.</p> <p>Yet in 1861, Durham/Orange voted by more than 3 to 1 against succession from the Union while Wake/Raleigh voted for it by a few hundred votes.</p> <p>As the rhetoric heated, the state as a whole was almost evenly split on the issue with a slight nod against.  People’s minds back then were more focused on the wealthy paying more in taxes here.</p> <p>Within weeks though, secessionists won out both because of a general sentiment of “you can’t tell us what to do” and being surrounded by states that had or were succeeding.</p> <p>The North won the Civil War that resulted, which effectively ended with a surrender in Durham.  Thanks to resistance by Southern Generals Lee and Johnston there wasn’t the subsequent guerilla war Southern leaders wanted.</p> <p>But that didn’t mean war was over.</p> <p>Another war erupted almost immediately between Democrats who were controlled by white supremacists and Republicans.</p> <p>Just as a small percentage of the population had monopolized power in North Carolina and kept it backward, then pushed it into a war to defend slavery as a way of life for a few, a similarly small percentage held power in this follow up war.</p> <p>Political rhetoric is powerful as we still see today.  It can close minds more easily than open them, something given comprehensive coverage a few days ago in an <em><a href="http://www.onthemedia.org/story/on-the-media-2015-12-04/" target="_blank">On the Media</a> </em>radio show entitled <em><a href="http://www.onthemedia.org/story/on-the-media-2015-12-04/" target="_blank">Lies, Lies, Lies</a></em>.   </p> <p>Republicans lost this follow up war and soon became all but extinct across the South because the party had became divided into an increasingly conflict-weary faction seeking social justice leading to a takeover by its Wall Street wing.</p> <p>Just as Democrats had become divided into factions over slavery leading up to the Civil War, resulting in President Lincoln’s election, factionalized Republicans lost the follow up-struggle.</p> <p>Following the South’s defeat and preservation of the Union in the Civil War, reunited Democrats fell sway to the rhetoric of a small fraction of white supremacists who this time sought not only to reinstate limitations on civil liberties, but to virtually annihilate the Republican Party in the South, which they did.</p> <p>As a result, civil rights in the reunified country were put on hold for another hundred years and even today, seem lodged between ongoing <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/22/why-we-are-not-cured-of-racism/" target="_blank">institutionalized bias on one hand and a futile obsession with effacing racist symbols on the other</a>.</p> <p>The two political parties have switched roles today.</p> <p>It began gradually in the decades leading up to the 1930s on issues of social and environmental justice, then became increasingly apparent after WWII and symbolized by the 1960s.</p> <p>As someone who was raised a staunch Republican which I remained until nearly 25, I have been particularly interested in the history of the Republican and Democratic parties.</p> <p>My Republican roots go back to the party’s founding.  But many of those ancestors would no longer be welcome there.  People who sense I lean Progressive probably don’t realize that it is the Republican Party that has shifted.</p> <p>Understanding how the parties have evolved helps me understand how I briefly moved to the left in my mid-20s before finding my comfort zone as an Independent except wherever forced to briefly sign up so I could vote in primaries. </p> <p>Today it is Republican ideology that seems to view everything as a threat to way of life, dominated by a few who seem to want to annihilate not only Democrats but anyone who dares to be moderate.</p> <p>We see it in the refusal to negotiate or reach bipartisan agreement, even when Democrats sign on to Republican-generated innovations such as carbon credits or healthcare overhaul using exchanges that emulate the requirement for car insurance.</p> <p>Further evidence is research showing that the root of Republican opposition to addressing climate change is the knee-jerk stereotyping of anyone concerned about the environment as a “watermelon,” green on the outside, red (as in Commie for you Millennials) on the outside. </p> <p>The one thing that remains constant is that just as a tiny minority held North Carolina back after the U.S. was founded and the Civil War was fought to preserve the way of life lived by only 28% of Tar Heels, policies here are still driven by a small percentage in power.</p> <p>The only thing certain is that the pendulum will swing yet again, but not the problem.</p> <p>The parties may reverse roles yet again one day and apologists, as always, will try to smooth everything over like propagandists did between 1866 and 1966 by transforming the issue of slavery into “states’ rights.”</p> <p>Democracy truly exists only when a majority of people vote, not just when the vote is a majority of those showing up.   Maybe similar to governing boards, popular elections should be valid only when there is a quorum?</p> <p>As a moderate Independent who more and more has a little “time on him” as they say in my native Idaho, I am more and more aware of the dangers of failing to admit to myths when in pursuit of greatness as a nation or perpetuating a way of life.</p> <p>I know far too many reasonable Republicans and far too many crazy Democrats to believe the rhetoric when one or the other party gives in to zero sum thinking.</p> <p>But as President George Washington lamented in 1795, the problem may be in the nature of political parties, meant as a means to help people make decisions but then used as a reason not to think:</p> <h3><font style="font-weight: normal" size="3"><em>“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”</em></font></h3> <p>Lament indeed!</p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-3802691053791216252015-12-03T09:01:00.001-05:002015-12-03T09:01:49.616-05:00An Action Plan for Green Infrastructure<p>Once again, the U.S. Forest Service and its stakeholders such as the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council have clarified something a few otherwise forward-thinking communities still don’t get.</p> <p>A community’s urban forest includes “all trees in the city, on public and private property,” including homeowners’ yards as well as school and corporate campuses, 3.8 billion trees overall in America.<a href="http://www.urbanforestplan.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/FinalActionPlan_Complete_11_17_15.pdf" target="_blank"><img style="float: right; display: inline" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUreJ4gUEAEZL-b.jpg" width="220" align="right" height="309" /></a></p> <p>The <a href="http://www.urbanforestplan.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/FinalActionPlan_Complete_11_17_15.pdf" target="_blank">ten year action plan</a> issued several weeks ago includes progress made over the previous ten years as well as overarching principles, metrics, goals, strategies and steps to guide urban forestry efforts through 2026. It also includes strategies at the local level.</p> <p>Management of an urban forest begins with a plan predicated on a comprehensive community wide inventory and assessment.  Many communities, such as the one in North Carolina where I have lived for more than a quarter century, have neither.</p> <p>But across the South now, 649 communities have management plans, an increase of 43% in the past decade compared to 70% nationwide. </p> <p>Still, less than half of Americans (47%) live in communities that have programs to plant, protect and maintain their urban forests. More than 40% feel much more needs to be done.</p> <p>The <a href="http://www.urbanforestplan.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/FinalActionPlan_Complete_11_17_15.pdf" target="_blank">report</a> is “must reading” for people who care about their communities and should be required for anyone holding or running for elected office.</p> <p>The report provides <a href="http://www.urbanforestplan.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/FinalActionPlan_Complete_11_17_15.pdf" target="_blank">supporting metrics</a> useful for public information and that will lessen the tendency of some to either dismiss trees merely as just “nice to have” or those who ironically knee jerk about anything environmental as a threat to their way of life.</p> <p>One cannot read this report without gleaning that a community’s trees and vegetation are indeed important infrastructure. </p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-27659147397453813842015-11-20T11:00:00.001-05:002015-11-20T11:00:10.223-05:00In Pursuit of Dialogue<p>By necessity I became a pioneer in what is now called “reputation management” during the last half of my now long concluded nearly four decade career in community destination marketing.</p> <p>This involved standing up for the communities I represented during that span. In the words of an IBM exec in Durham who came to my defense, I was just insisting on what was “justly due” that community.</p> <p>With the backing of a grassroots group of residents we called Image Watchers, we turned the community’s reputation around over a span of about nine years.</p> <p>A turn-around is marked by when a negative positive-to-negative ratio climbs into positive territory.</p> <p>As you might expect, reaching this milestone was not without a cost to my personal reputation, which to the consternation of friends and supporters, I never defended with the same passion.</p> <p>There may have been more if you consider the spectrum of sycophants but there were only a handful of detractors that were publicly vitriolic judging by their thinly disguised verbatim comments on community-wide surveys of my performance.</p> <p>One even passive-aggressively returned a business reply envelope with a hand-written epitaph and taped to a brick hoping to run up the cost to my organization.</p> <p>You can see the handiwork of one of these detractors who was then a public official if you Google my name. Though not the one quoted in the story, this official planted the story along with misrepresentations he knew to be false.</p> <p>Even though it was explained that my severance upon retirement was not a severance but a payout of income that had been earned month by month over two decades but deferred, I suspect the temptation to juice up the story headline and lead in without revealing the source was too much.</p> <p>During the last decade of my career, I added satisfaction with my leadership to periodic surveys of several hundred civic and business leaders to help my governing board discern if the complaints these individuals were making to them were generalizable.</p> <p>They weren’t, but one or two board members always worried about the effect those efforts to undermine me might have, so I was annually tasked with meeting with each of them to learn more about their concerns.</p> <p>But I had already met with each of these complainants numerous times, including one time four-on-one and would continue to do so until I retired, but to little avail.</p> <p>It didn’t help that I could provide data-driven responses. It seemed they could never really articulate what bothered them, especially those who didn’t have an issue but sought to curry favor with someone who did, essentially the definition of a sycophant. </p> <p>But I sensed it had to do with a misunderstanding of roles complicated by misperceptions of power and influence, seasoned with a little envy.</p> <p>In other words, politics.</p> <p>Only two or three of these individuals were ever constant. When a couple would drop out, replacements who were unfamiliar with the facts or previous discussions were recruited, perpetuating yet another round of meetings in pursuit of yielding understanding.</p> <p>No one likes to have enemies, but meeting with people who disagreed with me and/or the organizational strategic direction we were executing was something I had made a practice during my entire career.</p> <p>The habit took root when I ventured to meet with a powerful official who had set out to get me fired from my first community destination marketing organization in Spokane.</p> <p>It was second nature when a clique attempted to do the same in Anchorage.</p> <p>So it wasn’t a matter of if - but when - a handful in Durham began to take shots at me, for I had learned that truly being a change agent inevitably invites discord and carries risk.’</p> <p>It is temping to either pander to these interests or to write them off instead with the 18th century French saying “<em>on ne saurait faire d’omelette sans casser des oeufs” or “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”</em></p> <p>My goal in meeting with people who were openly contrary or covertly hostile to either me or our mission was always to gather understanding, but often the questions I was able to answer also begrudgingly garnered respect.</p> <p>It helps to keep in mind when going into meetings such as these that there is a difference between someone being uninformed and ignorant. </p> <p>You have hope for the former but be prepared to face the latter or at the very least understand that changes of heart and mind take time, often occurring after you are gone.</p> <p>In the words of Seth Godin, "Ignorant’ used to be a fairly vague epithet, one that we often misused to describe someone who disagreed with us.</p> <p>Today, because it represents a choice, the intentional act of not-knowing, I think it carries a lot more weight.”</p> <p>In his short but inspiring book entitled <em>Healing the <a href="http://www.couragerenewal.org/healing-the-heart-of-democracy/" target="_blank">Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit</a></em>, <a href="http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/#bio" target="_blank">Parker J. Palmer</a> wrote of such seemingly inscrutable encounters:</p> <blockquote> <p align="center">“A movement can be saved…only by openly engaging those who disagree.”</p></blockquote> <p>Through much of my career, I made it a practice to meet with at least one person every week who disagreed with me while learning to listen carefully and only intervene when asked a question. <img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/36/36336-004-B879EB35.jpg" width="255" align="right" height="255"></p> <p>That, for me at least, was really hard work as was learning not to tell myself a story based on microaggressions.</p> <p>Unfortunately, those habits I learned through necessity and experience are now increasingly rare.</p> <p>For instance, NPR journalist <a href="http://wunc.org/people/alan-greenblatt#stream/0" target="_blank">Alan Greenblatt</a> reported that “Indeed, over the past 50 years, the percentage of people who said they would disapprove if their children married someone from the other party has spiked from 5 percent to 40 percent.”</p> <p>But just meeting with someone with whom you disagree does not guarantee dialogue even if they are brave enough to be vulnerable and explain why and how they disagree with you.</p> <p>In an essay published a few months ago entitled “<em><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/living-room-conversations/ten-reasons-not-to-talk-w_b_7949938.html" target="_blank">Ten Reasons to Stay Away from Your Political Opposite</a></em>,” the co-authors of <em><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14533676-you-re-not-as-crazy-as-i-thought-but-you-re-still-wr" target="_blank">You’re Not As Crazy as I Thought (But You’re Still Wrong)</a></em> defined genuine dialogue:</p> <p>“Perhaps it would be a step forward simply to recognize that genuine dialogue must entail the <em>bilateral</em>, free and un-manipulated engagement of at least <em>two </em>persons, <em>two </em>unique perspectives and ultimately <em>two </em>distinct agendas.”</p> <p>They continue by writing, “The moment a space becomes, in actuality, a site for unilateral, instrumental and manipulated engagement, it arguably <em>ceases to be “dialogue</em>.”</p> <p>It is an easy trap to fall into when the answers you get are, “just because,” or “I just don’t agree.” Over time, I learned that in these encounters I had to dial back my passion and determination.</p> <p>In the essay, the authors also happen to quote from a book I had been assigned to read back in 1971 while earning a degree in history at BYU entitled <em><a href="https://libcom.org/files/FreirePedagogyoftheOppressed.pdf" target="_blank">The Pedagogy of the Oppressed</a></em> by Paulo Freire an expert in the philosophy of education:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s ‘depositing’ ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be ‘consumed’ by the discussants.”</p></blockquote> <p>It is unfortunate that this book might not now be permitted at BYU. Freire felt that education could not be neutral. It either functions to bring about conformity or functions to develop critical thinking which can lead to transformation.</p> <p>Transformation was inherently my job during my entire career. But in the words of a <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Lydgate" target="_blank">13th century Monk</a> and later adapted by President Abraham Lincoln:</p> <blockquote> <p align="center">“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.</p></blockquote> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-27530812830417235052015-11-06T11:55:00.001-05:002015-11-06T11:55:09.817-05:00My “Fortunate Son” Myth<p>While delving into family history I am often reminded that I am the only son of an only son who was a fourth generation Idaho horse and cattle rancher.</p> <p>This meant that I also carried the weight of what I came to call being the “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40JmEj0_aVM" target="_blank">Fortunate Son</a>,” by my 21st year after the late ‘69 Creedance Clearwater Revival hit.</p> <p>It’s an “anti-war” anthem, a cause I wouldn’t embrace for another two years yet.</p> <p>For me though, the feeling of being a fortunate son began almost as soon as my parents brought me home to the ranch in 1948.  I grew up with the sense that I was treated differently.</p> <p>By that, I mean that my patriarchal grandparents treated me differently, as did my aunts on both sides.</p> <p>It was different than how it seemed they treated cousins who were both older and younger, male and female and different too than my two sisters when they came along.</p> <p>Maybe it was just a response to the patriarchal ranching culture along the Rockies but to me the feeling came to symbolize getting things I didn’t deserve.</p> <p>It is a feeling that revisits whenever I receive recognition as I did a few days ago with an award named for <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/charles-kuralt-9370166" target="_blank">Charles Kuralt</a>. </p> <p>He was from North Carolina where I’ve lived for going on 27 years but his heart was along the Big Hole River in Montana, just across the Centennial Mountains from the ancestral Idaho ranch where I spent my early years.</p> <p>Through his One the Road series, Kuralt happens to also be one of my influences  to follow a four-decade career in community destination marketing.</p> <p>The sense that I was a fortunate son also meant that to me people expected things I couldn’t deliver, such as being a three sport standout in school like my father.</p> <p>To their credit, my parents -- especially my mother – worked hard to instill humility in me but that came soon enough with the embarrassment, if not shame, of failure.</p> <p>I failed to have my father’s bone structure or speed for that matter.</p> <p>I was also left-handed which presents some learning challenges beginning with tying my shoelaces or lasso a moving steer from horseback.</p> <p>These and many other tasks were complicated by an essential tremor in both hands which, in and of itself, was embarrassing enough.</p> <p>Still, it took a while before I fully grasped that “fortunate son” was a myth.</p> <p>Failure was an option with my parents but giving up and especially not trying were not.</p> <p>In retrospect, I look back at my life through a lens of grit, determination, perseverance and success because it felt that way and people have reinforced those qualities and outcomes.<a href="http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1429551713l/23493818.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1429551713l/23493818.jpg" width="243" align="right" height="380" /></a></p> <p>But closer examination reveals an incredible number of failures, including failed relationships, but they were not for want of trying.</p> <p>But for fortune and luck, there would have been more I am sure.</p> <p>But as an exercise in memory and to reinforce humility and empathy for my less fortunate, from the safety of distance I look back at the failures now.</p> <p>Failure and shame seem closely associated for me.  Each one played a role in propelling me forward just as for many others they seem a permanent disability.</p> <p>Having been invited by third graders to play tackle football during recess, I picked a fumble up as a first grader and ran the wrong way.</p> <p>I was called out as a fourth grader by my teacher for using my finger on each word as I read.</p> <p>I was cut from my little league baseball team as a fifth grader.  I got a C in P.E. as an eighth grader and quit the football team only to come back as a ninth grader.</p> <p>I screwed up as a senior and let my grades slide and flunked my renewal drivers license exam test for using my left foot on the brake.</p> <p>I’ve lost any reliable count of how many times I disappointed my parents.</p> <p>I failed my military draft physical due to a football injury, and then failed five different times over the next four years as I relentlessly attempted end-runs to enlist in other branches of service.</p> <p>I got fired from three different jobs before I turned 40.  Oh, and then there were those failed marriages.  As I retired in 2009, I read a great book by essayist and poet David White entitled, <em><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6052036-the-three-marriages" target="_blank">The Three Marriages</a></em>.</p> <p>The book’s subtitle is “<em>Reimaging Work, Self and Relationship</em>.”  It is not a book about balancing the three but for me especially it explained why I was so successful at the first and until late in life a failure at the third.</p> <p>My take away was that only when I understood the marriage to self was I able to transfer my success at work over a four-decade career to an enduring relationship, which now seems so effortless.</p> <p>One of Whyte’s most memorable metaphors is that “We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory we travel.”</p> <p>In his book of essays entitled, “<em><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/146153.What_Are_People_For_" target="_blank">WHAT ARE People FOR</a></em>?” Wendell Berry wrote about solitude that “Human beings are creatures of belonging, though they may come to that sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and loneliness.”</p> <p>I needed a lifetime of relationship-“exile and loneliness” as a part of consummating my marriage to self.  I simply had two of Whyte’s marriages in the wrong order.</p> <p>He observes that “We often enter a marriage with images of how it will enhance our sense of self, increase the happiness we already possess and end a sense of loneliness.”</p> <p>But, Whyte continues, “After the initial euphoria, we just as often find that in the marriage itself our sense of self is obliterated, our previous sources of happiness disappear and our sense of isolation is made more acute…”</p> <p>Those failures of relationship were at most, a failure to know and understand myself enough.</p> <p>Work was another matter for me but again fortune played a role.</p> <p>I set out to be a lawyer and backed into the perfect career: community destination marketing.</p> <p>I was always highly “engaged” in my work, as is 30% of the workforce according to Gallup, give or take a point or two depending on the year.  </p> <p>But I believe much of that engagement was due to being and finding a line of work that was “purpose-oriented.”</p> <p>This is the good fortune currently shared by 28% of the American workforce according to a <a href="https://www.imperative.com/index" target="_blank">study by Imperative</a>, a company founded by Aaron Hurst, author of <em><a href="http://purposeeconomy.com/" target="_blank">The Purpose Economy</a></em>. </p> <p>It is probably part of what made me so much more successful than many peers. </p> <p>Purpose-oriented employees who pursue work as fulfillment and as a means to help other people are found distributed across the workforce and in every occupation.</p> <p>I feel it is a mistake for those who aren’t to see themselves as a victim and look to management to fill them with purpose and engagement.</p> <p>Tom Rath, a best-selling author and senior scientist for Gallup has written a new “must-read” entitled <em><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23493818-are-you-fully-charged" target="_blank">Are You Fully Charged?</a></em></p> <p>He concludes that if you seek engagement or purpose directly you may not find it.  But if you seek meaning you will find happiness and engagement.</p> <p>As in a sentiment my daughter forwarded recently, “Do what you love, love what you do.”</p> <p>Find meaning and purpose in whatever job you do and you will find engagement, something I realize was one of the early values embedded by my parents. </p> <p>For me the stars just aligned more closely than for many not because of the “fortunate son” myth but thanks to parents who put the emphasis on trying.</p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-38476746014671779112015-11-02T12:58:00.001-05:002015-11-02T12:58:50.231-05:00Underlying Our Fear of Crime is a Paradox<p>The news media often rationalizes its obsession with violent crime by purporting that this is what people are interested in and/or concerned about.</p> <p>A new Gallup poll once again dispels that notion.</p> <p>It is true that 17% of Americans frequently or occasionally worry about getting murdered, as do 16% who worry about being sexually assaulted.</p> <p>However, many times more Americans are worried about being the victim of theft, which is borne out by reactions on neighborhood listservs or increasingly now related apps.</p> <p>Over the last ten years, the proportion of <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/186404/americans-fears-robbery-theft-down-2015.aspx?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_content=morelink&utm_campaign=syndication" target="_blank">Americans who perceive that crime is going up</a> has roughly climbed back to what it was in the mid-1990s.</p> <p>This has been true while the violent crime rate has steadily trended downward.  The misperception disconnect is as likely among Americans who have not been victims as it is among those who have.</p> <p>Puzzling is that this misperception is far higher among Republicans than Independents overall as well as Democrats, and 23 points higher among conservatives than it is among liberals.</p> <p>What makes this relevant is that Republicans are more likely to be “cocooned” where they live.  The news media sees politicians in states such as where I live as pitting rural areas against cities.</p> <p>But for several years, analysts have noted a “Red State – Blue City” divide.  As shown by Josh Kron in <em><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/red-state-blue-city-how-the-urban-rural-divide-is-splitting-america/265686/" target="_blank">The Atlantic</a></em>, “people don’t make cities liberal – cities make people liberal.”</p> <p>Some of “America’s bluest cities are located in its reddest states.”</p> <p>Only 37% of Americans live within a mile of an area where they would be afraid to walk alone at night which is roughly what it was in 1965, even though the proportion of Americans living in cities has increased over that span from 69.9% to 80.7%.</p> <p>This is why examining the role of the news media and news outlet proliferation during that span as related to what we fear is important.</p> <p>In 1999, then USC sociology researcher and now Lewis & Clark College president Dr. <a href="https://www.lclark.edu/offices/president/bio/" target="_blank">Barry Glassner</a> published a book entitled, <em><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41231.The_Culture_of_Fear" target="_blank">The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things</a></em>.</p> <p>Using data that is even more relevant now, he took to task politicians, advocacy groups, and news media for being “peddlers of fear.” </p> <p>As tragic as the circumstances were in Ferguson, MO, as well as a series of subsequent events, the rush to judgment over the past 16 months in the news and among advocacy groups regarding law enforcement is an example of what Glassner was writing about.</p> <p>Many researchers too have been enablers by failing to explain in news reports that correlation is not causation nor even always very useful.</p> <p>Race isn’t always a factor, but for many violent crimes it is sometimes relevant.</p> <p>For example, 48% of Americans who are parents of school age children fear their children will be physically harmed at school.  This is an underreported reason “<em><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/abby-norman2/why-white-parents-wont-ch_b_8294908.html" target="_blank">Why White Parents Won’t Choose Black Schools</a></em>.”</p> <p>Even among liberals, according to author Abby Norman, “They want diversity, just not too much.”  </p> <p>But most school shooting are committed by white males.  That fact should naturally end up a factor while delving into solutions just as race as well as parenting should not be off limits while studying other types of crime.</p> <p>Geo-studies of gun violence have found that 50% trace to just 3% of a community’s street segments and intersections.</p> <p>Half of the overall crime in a community, including the break-ins that most concern Americans, traces to just 4% of street segments and intersections.</p> <p>Sociological researchers such as Harvard’s Dr. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opinion/sunday/the-real-problem-with-americas-inner-cities.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share" target="_blank">Orlando Patterson</a>, who happens to be black, have found that between 12% and 28% of the youth in neighborhood hot-spots such as these has a contempt for laws and institutions.<a href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/media.wbur.org/wordpress/11/files/2015/03/0319_patterson-headshot-e1426790804525-203x300.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/media.wbur.org/wordpress/11/files/2015/03/0319_patterson-headshot-e1426790804525-203x300.jpg" align="right" /></a></p> <p>He notes that they are infected “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opinion/sunday/the-real-problem-with-americas-inner-cities.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share" target="_blank">with a threatening vision of blackness openly embraced as the thug life</a>.”</p> <p>He also notes that in tackling the present series of crises “it is a clear mistake to focus only on police brutality, and it is fatuous to attribute it all to white racism.”</p> <p>It is, he contends, “a culture reinforced by contemporary conditions like poverty, racial discrimination, chronic unemployment, single parenting and a chemically toxic, neurologically injurious environment, like lead paint.”</p> <p>But it is a culture nonetheless.  Certainly not black culture per se, but a culture fostered among a very small minority in these specific locations where a majority of inhabitants happen to be black, hard-working and lawful.</p> <p>This is also why researchers who assume traffic stops or resulting fines in certain areas should reflect the overall make up of a community are misleading the general public when commenting during news reports.</p> <p>Just as with whatever is leading disturbed white males to shoot up schools, the culture Dr. Patterson is citing is not evenly distributed.</p> <p>News reports often not only generalize crime to an overall community, but misperceptions are often exaggerated by double coverage when the media in nearby communities jump on the same stories rather than shining a balanced light on similar issues at home.</p> <p>The answer is more coverage of crime, not less.</p> <p>But headlines and reports should be far more geographically specific and as quick to signal why some crimes should not be a source of generalized fear.</p> <p>It would also help if editors were a eager to provide details such as property that is left unsecured or the role of underzealous parenting in addition to overzealous enforcement.</p> <p>It would also help if news stories called out politicians and groups seeking to capitalize on misperceptions and geo-generalizations.</p> <p>Seth Godin recently said something that could as easily be applied to this which was, “as with pollution, because no one owns the problem, no one is working very hard to solve it.”</p> <p>But journalists who are concerned about this paradigm and accept some responsibility can not only set an example but begin to raise the bar for others.</p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-29008251522959231482015-10-30T08:56:00.001-04:002015-10-30T08:56:31.628-04:00The Paradox of Micromanagement<p>Associates who struggle and fail to fit into an organization’s culture and strategic system will often complain that they were micromanaged and not allowed to do their jobs.</p> <p>Having found myself more than occasionally on the receiving end of that parting shot, I made it a point, with the objectivity of organizational psychologists, to learn more.</p> <p>Was it true or an excuse, and why was it was perceived that way?</p> <p>Over the years I perpetually honed my management style as well as the cultures of the organizations I managed.</p> <p>We had always hired based on various characteristics including as much technical know-how as we could afford.  But many people we hired failed to understand that technical know-how is only a start of being a good employee.</p> <p>It take time to develop alignment and paradoxically, often what feels like micromanagement is actually not being managed and coached closely enough.</p> <p>This is especially true in small, high-performance, strategically aligned entrepreneurial enterprises such as the community destination marketing organizations I led.</p> <p>People in these settings must not only work independently but at the same time synchronizing with others within a culture and strategic direction as though they were all one.</p> <p>There is little margin for error so whenever possible mistakes and learning best take place within the organization.  By that I mean inside the four walls…not out in the community or with visitors.</p> <p>Reputation management is crucial to sustaining credibility and relevance with external audiences, but far too many organizations either seem to play fast and loose or redirect their energies into looking good rather than doing or being good.</p> <p>To paraphrase an old law school meme, more than technical understanding, success takes good judgment which comes from experience which in turn comes from bad judgment.</p> <p>In other words, learning from failure.</p> <p>In a classic 2011 article in <em><a href="https://hbr.org/2011/04/strategies-for-learning-from-failure" target="_blank">Harvard Business Review</a></em>, organization behavior researcher Dr. <a href="http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6451" target="_blank">Amy Edmundson</a> broke failure down into a spectrum.<img style="float: right; display: inline" src="https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/hbr/1104/R1104B_A.gif" align="right" /></p> <p>At the blameworthy end were failures due to deviance, inattention and lack of ability while failures due to uncertainty about the future, hypothesis testing and exploratory testing fall at the praiseworthy end.</p> <p>Process inadequacy and task challenge fell in the middle.</p> <p>Unfortunately, people quick to complain about “micromanagement” are often still on a steep learning curve and/or don’t see failure and coaching as a pivotal part of learning. </p> <p>Worse, they don’t take responsibility for their failures.</p> <p>Researchers such as Dr. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-theories-Motivation-Personality-Development-Psychology/dp/1841690244/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1446035758&sr=1-3&refinements=p_27%3ACarol+Dweck" target="_blank">Carol Dweck</a> have found that the ability to view failure as just a part of learning is a mindset gleaned by the third grade.</p> <p>Regrettably, many people come into the workforce with a fixed mentality, resistant to not only critical thinking and teaching, but going so far as to view questions as criticism.</p> <p>They contribute to the 51% of the workforce who are “not engaged” in their work (just putting in time,) <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/181289/majority-employees-not-engaged-despite-gains-2014.aspx" target="_blank">according to Gallup</a>, as well a fair proportion of the 18% who are “actively disengaged” and working to undermine workplace.</p> <p>Last year, researchers at <a href="http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/14-104_59aab8f4-6050-403c-bb0e-c91728b95f02.pdf" target="_blank">Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill and Harvard</a> found that when we take personal ownership of our failures we are much more likely to learn from them and work harder.</p> <p>Last January, in a speech to the students there, the president of <a href="http://home.byu.edu/home/" target="_blank">Brigham Young University</a> argued that any quest for perfection should place the emphasis more on “quest” than on perfection.</p> <p>The ability to learn from mistakes and failure as well as soak up feedback and make adjustments are propensities similar to character, all of which are best inculcated between birth and the age of 8.</p> <p>Non-cognitive factors, such as perseverance, motivation and grit are tough to teach or learn in school, let alone the workplace.</p> <p>This is true even when reading and applying science in books such as John Medina’s <em><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2251306.Brain_Rules" target="_blank">Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School</a></em>.</p> <p>Hint: men learn best when given the gist, women want details.</p> <p>As with so many issues such as poverty and academic achievement, things such as this get gridlocked in the “chicken and egg” divide between those who argue that it is an issue of capacity and those who view it as individual responsibility.</p> <p>In my experience, the solutions are both/and with far to little emphasis in society, it seems, on the latter.</p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-12224877875385227882015-10-29T08:34:00.001-04:002015-10-29T08:34:10.577-04:00Parting Ways and New Beginnings<p>I parted ways with an good friend yesterday.</p> <p>We had only been together for a little more than six years. </p> <p>It may be a sign of how tightly I firewalled my professional life from my personal life that when we first became acquainted many people seized on the relationship as part of my identity.</p> <p>Or was it just that people found us seemingly such an odd couple, a community marketer and a biker.</p> <p>My departed friend is a <a href="http://images.mcn.bauercdn.com/upload/217712/images/1752x1168/02harley-crossbones.jpg?mode=max&quality=90&scale=down" target="_blank">Harley-Davidson Cross Bones</a>.<a href="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-oekqbpSknrg/VjISPygRmmI/AAAAAAAADII/ah0UHYg9qNo/s1600-h/Reyn_on_Bike_13.jpg"><img title="Reyn_on_Bike_1" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; float: right; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px" border="0" alt="Reyn_on_Bike_1" src="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-LvYnba-fSjw/VjISQRdr1eI/AAAAAAAADIM/F-CNvLIiUZU/Reyn_on_Bike_1_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="244" align="right" height="184" /></a></p> <p>I had always wanted to learn to ride a motorcycle so at the age of 61 I went at it with purpose, learning to ride and enjoy what are called heavy bikes.</p> <p>The curb weight of a Cross Bones when outfitted like mine is just north of 750 pounds.  That means with my weight and gear and occasionally a passenger, I had to learn to balance and maneuver as much a half ton.</p> <p>The urge to learn to ride was instilled while riding behind a close boyhood friend on his mini-Honda Trail 50 in the early 1960s.</p> <p>Having said goodbye to the “Bones,” we have a new challenge now, or better said an old one.</p> <p>It is a well-maintained 1985 Century Mustang II inboard-outboard bow-rider roundabout boat that we keep at the nearby lake where we spend a few days each week.</p> <p>When I was about 9, I first learned to water ski behind an old plywood boat that was powered by a little 35 horse power Evinrude.  The one we have now is closer to the one my parents had in the late-1970s.</p> <p>It came to me while writing this bit of memoir that I often left activities behind during my career.</p> <p>I don’t know about you but I’ve often wondered about the seeming association of activities such as this with place and time and why we leave some behind and take up others.</p> <p>For instance, I left downhill skiing skiing, tennis and water skiing behind when I moved from Spokane to Anchorage in 1978 although there was ample opportunity for both in each city.</p> <p>Downhill and Nordic skiing were actually more accessible in Anchorage with <a href="http://www.anchorage.net/winter/things-to-do/skiing/" target="_blank">several areas</a> right in the municipality including <a href="http://www.alyeskaresort.com/" target="_blank">Alyeska</a>, a resort 40 miles from downtown that has been ranked among the top 25 destinations.</p> <p>Big Lake lies a few miles across Knik Arm from downtown Anchorage but 60 minutes by highway skirting that waterway.  The “bridge to nowhere,” would have actually had a destination.</p> <p>Similarly I carried on a love of nature photography when I moved from Spokane to Anchorage but then left it behind when I moved to Durham in 1989. </p> <p>Part of the reason, I guess, could be that a person’s career tends to intensify over time, at least the way I went about mine.   Or is it just that our leisure pursuits become more ambitious?</p> <p>Another reason is that my job in community marketing meant that when I wasn’t showcasing activities such as these, I was spending my time thinking about how to do it better.</p> <p>But about five years before I retired when I gave notice to my governing board and the community, my mind opened to what I would be able to do when that time came.</p> <p>I started going down the list of what I had been postponing doing such as learning to ride a motorcycle, learning to fly an airplane, digging into family history and researching and writing essays such as these.</p> <p>During my four decade career and into retirement has been the overarching dream of spending time lakeside.</p> <p>Now that that time has come, for as long as I’m able my leisure, physical and intellectual activities will revolve around the lake, which is just fine with me.</p> <p>I can always rent a bike from time to time.</p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-81086828573843204052015-10-23T07:30:00.001-04:002015-10-23T07:30:51.393-04:00The New Community Marketing Model<p>I promised during the last post entitled, “<em><a href="http://www.bullcitymutterings.com/2015/10/community-marketing-malpractice.html" target="_blank">Community Marketing Malpractice</a>”</em> to touch in this sequel on the “<a href="http://adage.com/article/news/p-g-chief-model/101188/" target="_blank">new model</a>” that has replaced the marketing paradigms that were found so broken ten years ago.</p> <p>For many marketers, not just community marketers, nothing has really changed. It is tragic that their marketing practices remain frozen in time even though they began to lose steam thirty to fifty years ago.</p> <p>Oh, they may have added some new jargon and layered on a new tactic or two such as digital but at the core, their approach really hasn’t changed from what was done more than two generations ago.</p> <p>To be fair, many community marketers who want to change remain captive to stakeholders and officials who are trapped in the past.</p> <p>Overall, though, at the root of this inertia is a multi-billion dollar “industrial complex” that in the words of Seth Godin is trapped because “no one owns the problem,” so “no one is working very hard to fix it.”</p> <p>When no one appears to be taking accountability, a friend of mine calls that, “No one owning the file.” </p> <p>Casualties are not only malpractice and negligence in marketing but a failure at its own hand of a model that has until now underwritten information and entertainment in our culture.</p> <p>Those marketers, though, who are blazing a new model have one thing in common.  They never saw marketing as static, not because they have “schpilkas,” a yiddish term used to mean “ants-in-the-pants.”</p> <p>They understand that the underlying purpose of marketing is differentiation and that includes differentiation of how one conducts marketing.</p> <p>These pioneers are also fortunate to have stakeholders who give them that latitude.<a href="http://cdn.grid.fotosearch.com/CSP/CSP799/k7994497.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://cdn.grid.fotosearch.com/CSP/CSP799/k7994497.jpg" align="right" /></a></p> <p>So what is the new marketing model?  For one, it is truly data-driven which means that advertising is dead and that doesn’t just mean traditional advertising.</p> <p>The essence of new paradigms is almost always found evident in the ones that are replaced.</p> <p>Marketers have long distinguished earned media from paid media, although both cost money.  The latter is an attempt to buy consumer attention while the former involves working hard to earn it.</p> <p>In the old days, it meant generating interest through publicity including news coverage (earned) vs. trying to buy that attention (advertising,) which has always been much more cost-effective.</p> <p>But today it involves a wide range of ways to engage customers including “<a href="http://marketingland.com/earned-media-rising-the-earned-media-ripple-effect-56528" target="_blank">search, social and content marketing</a>.”  It is why analysts predict that by next year <a href="http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=202&mode=2&PageID=5553&resId=1871515" target="_blank">marketing will involve greater technology budgets</a> than organizations typically devote to IT overall.</p> <p>Another equally important element of this new marketing model is the <a href="http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/max/2015/pdfs/state-of-content-oct.pdf" target="_blank">importance of content design</a>.</p> <p>Others helping to shape this new model distinguish <a href="https://www.titan-seo.com/newsarticles/trifecta.html" target="_blank">earned, owned and paid media</a> with things such as a web and/or mobile site, blogs and social media channels falling under “owned” media and search engine optimization overlapping with “earned” media.</p> <p>They still use paid media but only where its turn-on ratio far exceeds any turn-off such as where the medium reinforces owned and earned media, e.g. an official visitors guide to a community or state or local, state or regional lifestyle magazines and websites.</p> <p>One of the key metrics is Word of Mouth (WOM) impact on business.  <a href="http://womma.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/STUDY-WOMMA-Return-on-WOM-Executive-Summary.pdf" target="_blank">Studies</a> show that two-thirds will be offline and one-third will be via social sites, blogs, reader boards and photo and video sharing tracking positive, neutral and negative.</p> <p>Recent studies show that two-thirds of the impact of word of mouth is direct and one-third is as an amplifier of paid media.  The impact is also more immediate compared to traditional media.</p> <p>Up to 80% of offline WOM occurs in the first two weeks as well as up to 95% of online WOM, compared to between 30 and 60% for television.  WOM drives 5 times more sales than paid advertising impressions.</p> <p>It happens that in Durham, North Carolina where I live, the DMO is one of the first in North America to use an approach to measuring WOM called <em>The Net Promoter Score</em>.</p> <p>Building on its pioneering public opinion research, the Durham DMO uses the method to not only measure promoters, passives and detractors among both internal and external audiences but the net strength of those sentiments.</p> <p>It measures how likely people are to recommend visiting Durham.  More on the latest results in a few weeks but based on studies of the sources <a href="http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/authenticity-and-design-how-consumers-feel-about-online-content-60002/attachment/adobe-consumer-views-trustworthiness-of-content-oct2015/" target="_blank">consumers find most trustworthy</a>, it is one of the most crucial marketing metrics.</p> <p>Analysts have also found that earned and owned media has 10 to 100 times the value of a paid advertisement.</p> <p>Nielsen, which is in the business of quantifying traditional paid advertising, <a href="http://www.inpwrd.com/the_role_of_content_inpowered.pdf" target="_blank">has found</a> that “on average, expert content lifted familiarity of a brand 88% more than branded content and 50% more than user reviews.”</p> <p>They also found that expert content far outperforms paid content for lifting purchase consideration.  Other Nielsen <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2200730/organic-vs-paid-search-results-organic-wins-94-of-time#" target="_blank">studies</a> have found that organic search wins out over paid search results on Google and Bing, for instance, 94% of the time.</p> <p>The new paradigms for marketing are more staff intensive and require a lot harder work as well as a pioneering and innovative organizational culture.</p> <p>They also require new levels of <a href="http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/authenticity-and-design-how-consumers-feel-about-online-content-60002/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=mc&utm_medium=thumbnail" target="_blank">sincerity and authenticity</a> as consumers grow ever more vigilant about content and <a href="http://www.marketingcharts.com/traditional/only-4-in-10-american-adults-trust-mass-media-59756/" target="_blank">media in general</a>.</p> <p>It will be both/and for a while longer as all such shifts are but the fulcrum has shifted quickly and dramatically in favor of earned and owned content compared to paid content.</p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-2333636879240058912015-10-19T11:17:00.001-04:002015-10-19T11:17:29.717-04:00Community Marketing Malpractice<p>My degrees were in history and political science. I also studied law. But my career was in marketing; or more specifically, the marketing of communities.</p> <p>Fortunately, my collegiate exposure to marketing was a theoretical survey course using the provocative teachings of Harvard’s Dr. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Levitt" target="_blank">Theodore Levitt</a>.</p> <p>So I always had a much different, and many would say provocative approach to community destination marketing than my DMO peers, who over-relied on the components of traditional sales and advertising.</p> <p>Results would suggest far more successful too, than those who over-relied on the components of traditional sales and advertising.</p> <p>Far too many still do today, which is puzzling. This post may help young community marketers avoid what had been termed “marketing malpractice” by the time I retired nearly six years ago.</p> <p>A lot about marketing has changed during that span. Maybe it intrigues me as to why many DMO execs aren’t keeping up because my intellectual curiosity hasn’t yet retired.</p> <p>Marketing includes the elements of sales and advertising but it fundamentally differs in its overall purpose.</p> <p>Myopically, to use one of Dr. Levitt favorite words, “selling” customarily has focused on the needs of the seller.</p> <p>Many use the term relational “selling” today but then still pretty much focus on what “they” have to sell rather than what the customer needs.</p> <p>Advertising is and has always been focused on “getting” attention. Trying to “demand” attention is far more like it, which is why so many marketers call it a form of “yelling.”<a href="http://www.economicsofattention.com/site/templates/images/placeholder-blue.png" target="_blank"><img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://www.economicsofattention.com/site/templates/images/placeholder-blue.png" width="282" align="right" height="212"></a></p> <p>This is confirmed in this age of waning attention spans when so many lazy practitioners desperately seem to only know how to “yell” louder and louder. </p> <p>Marketing weaves these and five or so other components into a blend designed instead on creating and satisfying customers, according to Levitt, which means “un-creating” customers for your community if that means directing their attention to destinations more suited.</p> <p>A longitudinal study at USC determined in 2010 that traditional advertising now has an overall negative return of investment but that its decline began three decades ago, a decade before the Internet was made available for public use.</p> <p>Still, many of those who bothered to read the study theorized that the demise of advertising was due to the Internet or the fragmentation of media or even clutter, meaning a proliferation of too many ads.</p> <p>But marketing historians were aware that complaints about ad “cutter” date, at least, to January 20, 1759 when a copywriter and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idler_(1758%E2%80%9360)#No_40._The_art_of_advertising_exemplified_.28Johnson.29" target="_blank">essayist</a> noted, “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused.”</p> <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=522373" target="_blank">Thales Teixeira</a> (Tech-Sarah,) a contemporary Harvard marketing researcher, is an expert in what he calls the “<a href="http://www.economicsofattention.com/" target="_blank">economics of attention</a>.” </p> <p>From various studies he has graphed that attention to even television ads had plummeted from 97% of viewers in 1990 to fewer than 2 in 10 today, even though ads are more than 75% shorter in length.</p> <p>Attention to ads was plummeting long before the Internet was an alternative and had fallen by nearly half when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiVo" target="_blank">TiVo</a>, the first DVR device that enabled ad-skipping was introduced in 1999.</p> <p>This was also long before mobile devices divided the attention of the 44% of viewers who multitask into even thinner slices.</p> <p>Illustrating the desperation of advertisers, including most that are oblivious to the drop in attentiveness, is that during that span the cost per 1,000 primetime viewers has skyrocketed from $18 to nearly $200 per view, while the quality of attention has severely degraded.</p> <p>Dr. Teixeira calculates that “Attention is one of our three most valuable, scarce and fungible resources.”</p> <p>Now even Levitt recognized in his 1993 treatise entitled <a href="https://hbr.org/1993/03/advertising-the-poetry-of-becoming" target="_blank">Advertising: “The Poetry of Becoming</a>,” that ads at the very least provides “variety and changes the pace.”</p> <p>It’s not unlike the rationale one my friends argues on behalf of billboards, a long-obsolete medium. But this calculus fails to take into account the turn-of to turn-on ratio of ads.</p> <p>Yup, and a few people only buy print magazines that are purposely laden with ads. But attention today, and for several decades now, is something you earn rather than demand.</p> <p>It is about “them,” not “you” and “yelling” about your product, your community, your brand is a turn-off even when you try to be cute and entertaining.</p> <p>In the words of Seth Godin, “the goal of marketing interaction isn’t to close the sales, any more than the goal of a first date is to get married. No, the opportunity is to move foreword, earn attention and trust and curiosity and conversation.” </p> <p>Trust is the key to earning attention and “you must build trust before you need it,” or want it.</p> <p>Godin also explains why advertisers seem clueless and only respond by increasing clutter. “And as with pollution, because no one owns the problem, no one is working very hard to solve it.”</p> <p>“Advertising” he argues, while explaining why consumers are now “using a sledgehammer to block them all” is in “<a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/09/ad-blocking.html" target="_blank">a relentless race to the bottom</a>.”</p> <p>A former classmate of mine at BYU who is now renowned Harvard business professor by the name of Dr. Clay Christensen, argued several years before I retired that <a href="https://hbr.org/2005/12/marketing-malpractice-the-cause-and-the-cure" target="_blank">the paradigms of marketing itself are broken and must be reconfigured</a> beginning with the way we segment customer prospects.</p> <p>He shows how any communication under the umbrella of marketing, including advertising, must, in the end, show consumers what “job” they need to hire your product or community to do, exposing the flaw in communities that try to be appealing at everything, only to find they have sold their soul.</p> <p>Christensen, who is famous for coining the concept of disruptive innovation, would not only agree with me that many of my peers, though much younger are marketing dinosaurs but that they are committing “<a href="https://hbr.org/2005/12/marketing-malpractice-the-cause-and-the-cure" target="_blank">Marketing Malpractice</a>.”</p> <p>I will continue this primer in the next post by reviewing why techniques such as advertising, not just roadside billboards, are now so obsolete. </p> <p>Unfortunately, most marketing dinosaurs probably didn’t get this far (sigh.)</p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-72103184786342355532015-10-15T08:59:00.001-04:002015-10-15T08:59:45.026-04:00Where Durham Dawdles<p>While one of the most <a href="http://www.durham-nc.com/includes/content/docs/media/accolades_poster_8.5x11_UpdatedMar2015b.pdf" target="_blank">broadly acclaimed communities</a> in America, Durham, NC where I live seems to be dawdling its way to one 15 year-old best practice only in fits and starts.</p> <p>Before I get to the theory of why that is, as given to me this week by a landscaper friend of mine, let me share why even this practice requires yet another layer of best practice to be truly effective.</p> <p>While Durham has dawdled, some cities are closing in on fulfilling a goal to plant 1 million new trees.  The movement stems from a goal by then Republican Vice President George Bush in 1991 encouraging Americans to plant 30 million trees.</p> <p>He was bucking popular members of his party and some Democrats who had the convoluted notion that trees cause pollution.  In some cases they can, but science before and since has clarified that trees are crucial to regulating climate.</p> <p>Deforestation hawks eventually undermined the initiative but it inspired many cities and states to take up the cause.  Tree hawks eventually stalled state initiatives but many cities forge ahead.</p> <p>Most notable is New York City which faced much more daunting challenges than others.</p> <p>Many cities were doomed when they tried to do it on the cheap using only donations and volunteers while failing to factor in ongoing maintenance.</p> <p>However, NYC began with research in 2006 and 2007 to <a href="http://www.milliontreesnyc.org/downloads/pdf/nyc_mfra.pdf" target="_blank">quantify both its municipal trees as well as the overall tree canopy</a> across all five boroughs.</p> <p>Then the city set an ambitious goal to plant a million new trees, 70% of which would be on city property such as along streets and right-of-ways, parks and public housing while rallying <a href="http://www.milliontreesnyc.org/html/about/getting.shtml" target="_blank">another 30% planted by homeowners, landlords, apartment complexes, businesses and non-profits</a>.</p> <p>But what makes the NY program truly stand out is that it not only incorporated caring for the trees into the initiative but worked with nurseries and growers to provide supplies of quality trees that would be sustainable in order to truly optimize long-term benefit.</p> <p>An effort this strategic is only possible when elected officials and administrators weave it throughout each agency and department as well as <a href="http://www.milliontreesnyc.org/downloads/pdf/MTNYC_Research_Singles.pdf" target="_blank">understand the need</a> for intensive, unrelenting data-based marketing communications.</p> <p><a href="http://www.deeproot.com/blog/blog-entries/1-million-trees-vision-or-nightmare" target="_blank">The folks at Deep Root</a> have calculated, in part by using i-Tree, that to plant a million trees using the right kind of trees with proper planting and maintenance will generate a $25 billion return over 50 years compared to a minus $3 billion if done improperly.<img style="float: right; display: inline" src="http://payload53.cargocollective.com/1/6/222683/3379538/MTNYC.jpg" width="271" align="right" height="202" /></p> <p>Only when leaders grasp that trees are a form of infrastructure is this type of commitment likely.</p> <p>So why are so many other cities such as Durham failing to catch on or mount a concerted, strategic effort such as New York?</p> <p>My landscaper friend believes it is we all in general, including elected leaders and administrators, even the one-percenters, make the same strategic mistake at home.</p> <p>Even rich people put $100,000 into landscaping but then balk at paying a $100 a month for maintenance.  These same people also insist on overplanting to create a short term impression and expressing shock when it inevitably must be thinned and then, over time, ages out and must be replaced.</p> <p>It isn’t just governments that often don’t get it.</p> <p>While opinion polls in Durham show a high regard for tree canopy, the reality is that we don’t understand nor are we led to understand the true cost of things.</p> <p>So many taxpayers complained at the $16 million cost of building the Durham Bulls Athletic Park only to be flabbergasted when it costs another $20 million to refresh it after two decades.</p> <p>Part of the problem is that we, as the general public, don’t get it.</p> <p>But we also don’t have leaders who deluding themselves don’t educate us.  In fact, many play into our ignorance by fostering resentment of government and taxes without revealing that we will be cutting off our nose to spite our face.</p> <p>Durham leaders may eventually catch on and fully embrace its coveted tree canopy.  If and when it does, hopefully we do it right and learn from NYC. </p> <p>Why is he so grumpy, some readers are probably muttering? </p> <p>Hey, I spent a good share of my heart and soul defending Durham but that never stopped me from shining a light on areas where I believe we must improve.</p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13200055.post-68645859056287842952015-10-13T13:23:00.001-04:002015-10-13T13:23:55.810-04:00Perceptions of Teachers and Teacher Pay<p>It’s funny how some people get when it comes to how much other people get paid, so I was curious when Harris polled Americans about perceptions of <a href="http://www.theharrispoll.com/politics/Are-We-Paying-Our-Teachers-Enough.html" target="_blank">what school teachers make</a> where they live.</p> <p>Six in ten Americans <a href="http://www.theharrispoll.com/politics/Doctors__Military_Officers__Firefighters__and_Scientists_Seen_as_Among_America_s_Most_Prestigious_Occupations.html" target="_blank">consider teaching a prestigious occupation</a>, with 21% holding it in high esteem compared to 10% who feel it is not prestigious at all according to an earlier Harris Poll.</p> <p>Eight in ten would encourage a child to pursue teaching, double the proportion that would encourage being a member of Congress, for instance.</p> <p>Perceptions of teacher pay have changed since I was in high school 50 years ago. At that time 42% of Americans perceived their local teachers were paid too little and 2% thought it was too much.</p> <p>Today, more than half of Americans believe local teachers are paid too little while 8% believe they are paid too much.</p> <p>The perceptions vary by region, urban vs. rural and, of course, political philosophy, but maybe not in the way you might think based on Tea Party rhetoric or the influence they appear to have had on lawmakers in some states.</p> <p>Conservatives, overall, are five times more likely to believe teachers <img style="float: right; display: inline" src="https://www.sandiegounified.org/sites/default/files_link/district/files/dept/teacher_preparation_and_support_/hgih-school-teachers.jpg" width="228" align="right" height="148">are paid too much compared to liberals. No surprise. </p> <p>But they are also more than twice as likely as moderates to believe this, although these days ultra conservatives often seem to fail to distinguish liberals from moderates.</p> <p>A greater percentage of rural Americans hold that view, but news to many lawmakers where I live is that only 2% of Southerners think their teachers are paid too much, while a national high of nearly 7 in 10 in the South think teachers are paid too little.</p> <p>The stinginess is also not about resentment of institutional burdens on taxpayers vs. what individual teachers are paid. Southerners are also more likely than Americans in other parts of the country to believe that not enough is being spent on public schools overall.</p> <p>Surveys such as these illuminate the growing disconnect between the lavish news coverage of Americans who are either fiscally and cultural angry or estranged, and that given to the opinions of Americans as a whole.</p> Reynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11145518270132427900noreply@blogger.com0