Turning A Corner In November 1965

Earlier in my life, it was not uncommon for me to associate songs on the radio with a particular place and time.

On a snowy Idaho Monday in mid-November 1965, during our junior year in high school, we had just finished listening to the Unchained Melody by Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers as I turned my ‘57 Chevy onto the street where my newly steady girlfriend lived after school.

We had formed a bond at a school dance the Friday before that would last for more than four years including, but not enduring an extended absence as we turned 20 and giving me an understanding looking back of the song Unanswered Prayers.

As we slowly tooled down her street Yesterday by Paul McCartney then of The Beatles, began to play, which I believe was still #1 on the charts.  What can I say; we were schmaltzy Idaho Upper Snake River Mormon kids.

As a trivial aside, both songs were originally recorded as solos, although later sung live on tour with their singer’s respective groups.  The latter, with McCartney’s steel stringed acoustic guitar, was also the first time studio musicians were used on a Beatle’s, and maybe the last.

To bring the trivia full circle, McCartney now owns the rights to Unchained Melody, which my mother, when she was alive, was sure to remind me was a 1930s song, and one better known by my grandsons from the TV series, Glee.

As I pulled away after dropping off my girlfriend and heading to my job at a small, family-owned market, a news report came on the radio about a battle that had been raging in the central highland mountains of Vietnam called Ia Drang for the river that runs through it.

Less than four months earlier, there were only 75,000 troops in Vietnam but by year’s end there would be 189,000, and by the time I graduated the next spring, another 100,000 had been deployed.

Less than seven years older than me, my uncle was preparing less than 90 days later to be deployed to Vietnam as a newly minted fighter pilot with the 389th TFS where he would go on to fly an extraordinary 325 missions over North Vietnam through waves of enemy Migs and SAM missile defenses.

Unbeknownst to anyone in his family until I was given his personal effects, he had soon become highly decorated receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak leaf clusters, the Air Medal with 26 oak leaf clusters, and a Bronze Star.

But I had mixed feelings about the war on my way to work that November afternoon in 1965.  In the months prior, several Americans had immolated themselves to protest the war including a Jewish woman in her 80s who had survived the Nazis during WWII.

In the hallways at school though, me and handful of friends talked each morning with three of us planning to enlist if we were not drafted the next summer after registering when we turned 18.

But the sobering news that afternoon was about a regiment of 7th Cavalry troopers; (Custer’s unit at his Last Stand) which had been overrun by North Vietnamese troops but they had still managed to fight them off.

The newscasts were already masking the significance with gruesome body count comparisons.

The acclaimed 2002 movie about that engagement entitled We Were Soldiers left something out from the book upon which it was based, co-written by then General Hal Moore and a journalist who was there, Joe Galloway.

The book, acclaimed for its insights had been published in 1992 three years after I moved to Durham, North Carolina, where I would finish a lifelong career in community destination marketing.

The book is highly recommended although it is the haunting theme song from the movie, a lament written and sung by Joseph Kilna MacKenzie that has stayed in my memory.

The song is named Sgt. MacKenzie in honor of his great-grandfather of the Seaforth Highlanders, a unit in WWI, but the lament was inspired while the author was grieving the loss of his wife.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem that officials sending troops into Afghanistan and Iraq had read General Moore’s book.  If they had, they may have done things differently.

Coincidentally, in the terrorist implosion of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 was Rick Rescorla, a prominent part of the book who was left out of the movie.

I believe he was the trooper fleetingly depicted in the movie who after the battle found a bugle taken from a French unit massacred near there in the 1950s.

In the summer of 1966, while eagerly registering for the draft, I was advised that if I ever wanted to serve, I needed to have a football injury to my knee repaired.  Unfortunately, the advice was flawed.

With or without the surgery, the knee caused me to be rejected several different times as I repeated tried enlist over the next several years, using a variety of different avenues.

My last hope came while sitting in the student union cafeteria at Brigham Young University and watching the first draft lottery in December of 1969 revealing the order of draftees to be called the following year.

Signified by my birthday, July 8th, my number came up #13 out of 366, a portend causing some of my friends around me to gasp.

A year later, my uncle who had returned from three tours in Vietnam and having come to also oppose the war there was trying to talk sense into me.

When his superiors failed in their attempt to have his enlistment moved from reserve to regular Air Force, he was discharged, unable to fly for commercial airlines due to an injury to his ear drum when forced to eject during his first tour.

On June 7, 1966, he and another pilot had been on 15 minute ground alert status with a full load of napalm and 20mm cannon to support ground troops when needed, such as those that had been trapped 6 months earlier along the Ia Drang, a battle still raging.

They were scrambled, but declassified records show that while on takeoff, fire suddenly filled the left wing wheel well and the take-off was aborted with a crash landing beyond the end of the runway.

It wasn’t uncommon for fighter planes to take enemy fire during takeoff and landing.

Fire began to envelope the cockpit as the my uncle hurriedly tried to unbuckle the other pilot, who was trapped, just as the fire began to reach the plane’s ordinance causing fire fighters to withdraw leaving the shell shown in this essay.

Their plane may have been headed to the A Shau Valley, north of Ia Drang a similarly narrow funnel between mountain ranges for crucial supplies coming from the north down Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The battle there had been raging since that spring, when less than five months after parts of Hal Moore’s unit was overrun, a similar trap was sprung on Special Forces troops there.

From Idaho like my uncle and a former pilot for the Idaho National Guard then turned-regular Air Force, Bernard Fisher had volunteered to go to Vietnam in the summer of 1965 to fly in support of ground troops with his WWII era Skyraider, a single-seat propeller attack-plane with a distinctive engine sound I would often hear in Alaska when flown by hobbyists.

Fisher wasn’t the only pilot from Idaho over cloud-laden A Shau that day but in charge he repeatedly guided rescue helicopters in under the cloud cover along with other Skyraiders strafed the overrun fort below.

On the second day, he landed his plane under withering .50 cal. machine gun fire and pulled a downed pilot into his already cramped cockpit before taking off, receiving the Medal of Honor for his heroism.

But A Shau became emblematic for the war as a whole as did Ia Drang.

This all came back to mind as I drove through Idaho last August with my grandsons to a family lake-side retreat in the Northern Rockies and heard the news that Bernard Fisher had passed away at his home in Kuna.

Our stop for lunch along the Caribou Mountains not far from where my uncle grew up gave me an opportunity to tell his story as well as that of their great-grandfather and more than a dozen other ancestors who have served back to conflicts in the 1600s in this country.

Today, my uncle’s 389th TFS is also back in Idaho, an hour southeast of where Bernard Fisher died.

Sorting through ancestral documents and artifacts to organize them into histories for future generations gives me pause to reflect on what I was thinking on that November day in 1965.

Two friends who did make it into that war, one as a door-gunner on an Air Cav helicopter such as those pioneered by Moore, made it back safe, although it took years to fully resume their lives.

They, too, were soldiers once…and young.

Why Curators and Archivists Make Good Community Marketers

History, it turned out, was the perfect background for community marketing.  Or maybe it was just that community marketing was appealing to a person with a degree in history.

Marketing communities involves leveraging for economic and cultural development the three general types of place-based assets distinct to a particular place:

• Culture and Heritage
• “Built”
• Natural

I don’t just mean the date and event type of history told through documents although that is useful because learning to see patterns and connections - the essence of historical analysis - is also key to marketing innovation and strategy-making.

But also valuable to community marketing are related studies such as:

• Economics:  history viewed through commercial transactions,
• Geology:  history told through rocks and physiography,
• Archeology: history told through artifacts and material remains,
• Anthropology: history told through societies, languages, and values,
• Environment: history told through human interaction with the natural world,
• Genealogy:  history told through family relationships and DNA.

There are others but hopefully these are enough illustration for those who haven’t thought of community marketing as a career or marketers who view it far too narrowly or were taught it only from a commercial perspective.

I’m a little slow.

For all that preliminary background in history, it still took me over half a life-long career to connect those dots.

It also wasn’t until my third startup that I even more formally embedded archives.

Perhaps this is why I was amused to learn recently, the history of my first startup was apparently rewritten exclusive to a much later addition of a word to its name and the second one seems also to have written a revisionist notion of its founding.

Fortunately, should anyone care, I still have personal documents proving my existence there and the roots of each of those organization including their pre-history fingerprints. (smile.)

Frankly, many marketers, even those trained in communications, often seem to play a bit fast and loose with facts and context either because they are too lazy to fact-check using what archives were kept or to make a political statement or even to flatter later executives.

Even more troubling, journalists often pick up these reinterpretations, further contaminating the public record with anecdotal hyperbole.

Thus, the “Research Triangle” is misattributed in a 1957 state brochure as the “brain child” of a later state governor.

And some of us involved in later stages of community turnarounds are flattered with in inaccuracies proclaiming that until our charge these places were a “sleepy backwater,” of that “tumbleweeds blew down empty streets,” or working there was “a death sentence.”

Not true, of course, but that is how history gets polluted.

Part of the problem is that Durham, North Carolina where I finished my career and now live in retirement, while arguably blessed with the deepest, most diverse history of any community, still lacks a full-fledged museum of local history.

This source of resident frustration is indispensable, not just as a cultural amenity but as a touchstone-repository to help newcomers and future generations gain, regain and keep perspective.

Even commercial enterprises, according to Advertising Age, now grasp the importance of “curating, cultivating and preserving the histories of their brands,” not only to inform marketing efforts but because “employees are looking for that heritage and lineage – how they fit into the family tree.”

Many CEOs, according to an article in the Portland Business Journal last summer understand that “the past is a powerful tool in public relations, marketing and branding.”

Or that ultimately they can perpetually “mine the past to recharge the present.”

Dr. Paul Bloom at Yale is often quoted from presentations and papers that “we are obsessed with origin and history…things get value because of their history.”

Consulting archivists at The Winthrop Group, Inc., quote Pendleton’s CEO Mort Bishop as relating “Our heritage is a lot more than a simple matter of using historical materials in marketing…It’s our DNA.”

Others wrote couple of years back in the Harvard Business Review, “A sophisticated understanding of the past is one of the most powerful tools we have for shaping the future.”

A McKinsey executive noted that it is “essential for every one of our partners and colleagues to understand our history and how our values were shaped over time.”

Even Entrepreneur Magazine’s startup-rich content heralds the value this depth can bring to storytelling's role in creating brand value.

So why are so many community marketers pinned under the thumbs of those who don’t get it?

In past essays, I’ve frequently noted research showing that even among visitors who skew more to fantasy activities such as shopping, sports, performing arts or amusement parks, destinations that preserve and cultivate authenticity foremost are by many times over the most appealing.

Yet so many elected officials, enabled by their community’s marketers and propelled by “edifice envy,” have, or are quickly surrendering, the authenticity of their particular places.

Maybe my sense of urgency is because it took half a career to dawn on me, and many places won’t have that luxury.

Archaeology of A Career

Last week, I was invited back to an incredible retrospective on the early years of my fifth and last community economic development startup.

Former staff and governing board members returned for the event, and the Durham community was treated to a short video created by Wil Weldon and Growler Productions from hours of video captured by DCVB for its archives.

It was humbling, heartening and a reunion with old friends.  The board member who first interviewed me credits start up experience for making me standout.

It made me realize that for anyone keeping count since I retired nearly five years ago, the number of startups in the first half of my career has continued to increase even though my last was for Durham in 1989.

I was involved in many other startups after that including grassroots efforts such as Durham Image Watch and Durham Wayfinders.  Many other startups involved strategic alliances such as the Durham Pubic Information & Communications Council and Durham Heritage Alliance to name only two.

Three in the first half of my career involved community destination marketing organizations, but I was also involved in two other closely related startups.

One occurred when I stayed a year longer in Anchorage to jumpstart from scratch its economic development corporation before taking a year and a half sabbatical mid-career from community marketing to catch my breath and try new things.

My first startup was as a student working as the supervisor for the BYU Office of Tours & Conferences under Gary Bascom, then a unit of University Relations which fell under an Assistant to the President.

The office had been around since the 1960s but our charge was to go beyond campus tours and other public relations duties such as the President’s box at sports events.

We jumpstarted the proactive recruitment, facilitation and hosting of conferences, associations and events from around the nation to fill capacity during summer term.

The office also coordinated with related units the handling of public relations, the campus visitor information desk, sports information and community and government relations.

My job also included coordinating production of marketing materials including concepting, writing, photography and production of print materials that not only communicated the allure and sense of place of the campus, but would serve as a guide to detailed event planning.

Coupled with my previous job of inventorying all campus buildings, it was fun and I was good at it, the perfect introduction to skills needed in my eventual career.

But my dream at the time was law school, a path that ultimately led back to my real purpose.

Thinking back, that first taste was, in fact, community destination marketing without the community.

But, of course, a university the size of BYU even back then was a small city of nearly 40,000 students, staff and faculty.  At the time it was 63% of the size of its surrounding community.

We were so successful that within a year or two after I graduated, BYU took a breath and reorganized.  Now that aspect falls over with Continuing Education and Alumni Affairs.

It has its own conference center and hosts many times the off-campus  events, camps and conferences that we did, including another 70 sports camps facilitated by Athletics.

Startups aren’t for everyone because of the sense of urgency, drive and strategy involved.  There are other ways to build a career in my former field of community destination marketing.

But one thing it may uniquely cultivate is an entrepreneurial sense of urgency, engagement, drive and timing.  It embeds an organic sense of continuous and never-ending improvement.

When as fortunate as I was, startups can also provide a unique fusion of the passion and purpose that makes me tick, one that was non-transferable to or from solely profit-making enterprises.

I am often asked to tell the story of how my career evolved.  It is an interesting archaeological exercise that never ceases to amaze me as new resurfaced connections arise.

Leaving Stuff - Treasure or Burden?

Memories and time seem to compress as you get older.  Or maybe it is just that in retirement, I get enough sleep to sweep out my brain, something researchers at the University of Rochester reported last month will consolidate memories.

One of those memories that I recall whenever I stop in Sioux City, Iowa to gas-up on cross country trips, is of the horrific crash there of United Flight 232’s DC 10 during an emergency landing just weeks after I relocated to Durham, North Carolina to jump-start our community marketing agency.

Next summer, author and essayist Laurence Gonzales will publish an account of that crash that is sure to be excellent entitled Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival.  I’m usually a fan of his writing but I couldn’t disagree more with an essay he published in this month’s Rotarian magazine.

Entitled “The Things We Leave Behind", Gonzales makes the case that leaving our stuff behind when we die is a burden to loved ones.  I can see the point that these artifacts, mementos, photographs and papers should be well organized, preened and put in context, but I disagree that they are a burden.

After carefully storing them during my earlier years, my parents inexplicably discarded several things over the years that would be priceless to me now.

They included a trunk with my father’s WWII army uniform and his high school lettermen’s sweaters and an incredible collection of hundreds of 78 RPM records from the 1930s and 40s.

In 1980, during my stint in Anchorage, Alaska before coming to Durham in 1989, I destroyed several packets of letters that my first wife and I had exchanged to each other.  Made in haste, It was an emotional gesture to relieve the pain and toward moving on but the correspondence would have been priceless now to our grown daughter.

Thankfully, one or two survived.

Since retirement several years ago, I’ve taken a few breaks from writing Bull City Mutterings to organize the artifacts I will leave behind.  Each pass is an improvement.  They include a few things left to my parents by my grandparents that were eventually passed to me.

I so wish there had been more.

Especially with photographs, the archeology inherent is often far more important than the primary subjects in the photographs when they were taken.

For example, the two shown in this blog are important because they also show things that no longer exist, e.g. my pass-me-down first horse Gypsy, the old miniature covered wagon used on cattle roundups and the old horse barn.  But it is important that I leave captions behind with these photos, especially on digitally archived versions.

The photographs taken of my grandparents, great grandparent, great-great grandparents and great-great-great grandparents are definitely not a burden to leave for my grandsons and my daughter, they are a treasure beyond compare.

Even when not of personal value, the stuff we leave behind may be important to local community history museums and other historic sites.

It isn’t that hard to distinguish “stuff” from items that may be rare artifacts from a bygone era, like my dad’s leather “Ashton Huskies” football helmet that disappeared.

Leaving stuff behind can be priceless gift.

Tracing Routes Thousands of Years Old

Within a decade after non-natives first set eyes on the Grand Teton Mountains, in the shadows of which I was born and spent my early years, five sets of my great-great-great grandparents were already migrating westward from their ancestral homes in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

They stopped for a few years at various points along each side of the Mississippi River before continuing their migration. I’ve traced the routes they took during the four cross-country trips I’ve taken over the last thirty months with Mugsy, my English Bulldog.

But my ancestors were traveling the 1,500-mile Native American trade routes carved at least 2,000 years ago between that Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, where I was born, and the Hopewell Culture through which I traveled on the outbound leg of my most recent trip after I cut across the Ohio River on the 2,700-foot Ravenswood Bridge and up scenic US Highway 33 through southeastern Ohio to Columbus.

One of the first tasks I faced in each of the three cities I represented as a community-destination marketing executive over the last forty years in my now-concluded career was to deepen historical sketches for each place beyond the date used by the respective chambers of commerce which all began when European-Americans commenced commerce.

Bear Gulch is where I learned to ski, that is after I had proven to my father at age six that I was capable of hiking to the top of a hillside behind our ranch house and repeatedly “snowplowing” down.

The ski area had been developed in the late 1930s along the Idaho boundary of Yellowstone Park about a dozen miles from where my grandparents and great-grandparents had homesteaded to raise cattle and horses.

It had been developed by Norwegian-Americans, still the dominant ethnicity in Fremont County today and a T-bar or Poma-lift was developed about  the time I was born. For me though, my early skiing was on the Teddy Bear rope tow at Bear Gulch.

During my college years, Bear Gulch was supplanted 45 miles south along the Tetons by the development of Grand Targhee Resort just off the road we often traveled during the 1950s before cutting up over the pass to have Sunday dinner at a café in a much less pretentious Jackson, Wyoming.

A few months after I was recruited to come to Durham NC in 1989 and where I still live, the facilities at Bear Gulch burned. However, over the years, Bear Gulch, Idaho had become famous as the source of obsidian points shaped and traded by Paleo-Indians as much as 10,000 years ago and found in what is southern Ohio today.

But obsidian isn’t the only thing produced in my native land that finds its way across the Great Plains to the Midwest. Thanks to the data curated into a spectacular new book entitled, The Atlas of Yellowstone, I now understand why the area where I was born and raised is known as the “Headwaters of the Nation.”

Waters from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem drain into the Pacific Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California. They fuel huge drainage basins for the Columbia-Snake, Green-Colorado and Missouri-Mississippi river systems.

The Archaeology of Family

One of my interest-based passions in retirement is family archeology. While I’m often seen in a tattered leather flight jacket, I’m no Indiana Jones, although I confess to being intrigued by Durham’s more than 700 archeological sites identified on the top-secret state inventory.

My interest in archaeology involves the close study of family artifacts including documents and photographs to help me piece together family histories, something that has always intrigued me but is now further inspired by two young grandsons, one of whom expresses similar interests at age eight.

My father, who passed away suddenly at age 77 just weeks after 9/11, was famously brief with family and personal details although he recognized my interests as early as age four.  Kids my age were fascinated by WWII, often playing “army” with artifacts brought back by many of our fathers less than a decade before.

But other than humoring me by letting me frequently examine a knife given to him by a liberated Russian POW or a JP Sauer pistol confiscated from a captured German officer or an array of foreign coins and currency he kept in a yellowed plastic case intended to keep a pack of cigarettes dry, my father was famously stingy with details.

He would only say that he got there as the War ended and did everything he could to get back home as soon as possible.  But a box I received from his second wife, Margaret, included not only his Bible but a treasure trove of other miscellaneous documents including a certificate listing eight books he had read and reported on in 7th grade.

One of those documents, a one-page, two-sided form entitled “Enlisted Record And Report of Separation Honorable Discharge” suddenly brought a spike of emotion as I saw his right thumb print.  Coupled with information contained in several letters he had written home to his older sister and then relayed to me by a cousin, his time overseas came into sharper detail.

He was assigned to a Cavalry Squadron of the 35th Tank Battalion of the vanguard 4th Armored Division of U.S. Third Army headed by General George Patton who died later from injuries sustained in a car accident.  Famous for helping to liberate Bastogne earlier that year during the Battle of the Bulge, when my father arrived, the 35th Tank Battalion was pulling back from the chunk of Czechoslovakia it had liberated after rushing across southern Germany at the war’s end.

Today we think of the culmination of WWII as tidy, when compared to the chaos that occurred when both Iraq and Afghanistan fell so suddenly, but that wasn’t the case.  Documents reveal that we were just as unprepared when Germany surrendered.

Units such as the 35th Tank Battalion suddenly became police and border patrol while existing police weren’t trusted and prematurely disbanded at a time when individual Nazis were making a run for it through Austria and Switzerland to safe havens in places like Uruguay and Argentina.  It was a zoo.

The 35th Tank Battalion including Cavalry morphed into the 35th Constabulary Squadron.  With five officers and 155 enlisted men organized into five troops each organized much like the mechanized cavalry troop had been just weeks earlier as the war ended, but with individual weapons and mounted on horses, motorcycles or Jeeps.

One of Dad’s letters home refers to riding for days on horses liberated from the German SS, so it is possible that, with his ranching background, he rode for a time in one of several “horse platoons” that patrolled the otherwise inaccessible forests that rise from Bavaria up into the Alps.

If so, he would have carried his rifle in a "scabbard," like the ones we used on the ranch and he would have worn britches and cavalry boots. But I think he was mostly in the Jeep patrols of B Troop.  He would have had an opportunity to be in a motorcycle troop as well but he wasn’t, as least based on what I have discovered so far.  Curiously, my interest in motorcycles didn’t bloom until a decade after his passing.

I will only know more as I pursue more archaeology.

The Constabulary was also involved in processing prisoner-of-war exchanges with the Russians and riot control in refugee camps as Germans fled from Austria and other countries liberated from occupation.  At the same time forces were dangerously depleted as soldiers were shipped home as quickly as possible.

Before things had really settled down, Dad was shipped home too, leaving a day and two years before I would be born.  He had entered the Army at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, Utah and returned through Fort Lewis, midway between Olympia and Tacoma, Washington, details he had never mentioned even as he lived out the last several decades of his life just 50 miles north of there.

My Mom was just going on 17-years-of-age when he arrived back at the ranch.  They had to become reacquainted over the year before they would start a family.  He was asked to give up the habits of cigarettes and beer that he had learned in Europe and she had to re-acclimate from the life she had known living and working in Denver to the solitude of ranch life.

Piecing together my prehistory is something I not only enjoy but it affords me an opportunity to leave a richer understanding for generations to come.