An Archaeology of Connections

While nosing around in my own history, I ran into some interesting connections that also relate to others.

In college at BYU I was named a Hinckley Scholar during my junior and senior years.  The private scholarship recognized a 3.8 grade point and “service to community.”

Many sought it for prestige, others such as me out of need.  Each grant was around $1,500 which in today’s dollars would be more than $8,000.

Among the 1,300 students the fund has recognized to date are Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a Supreme Court clerk and law school dean and three college presidents (no humblebrag intended – smile.)

But then there are a whole lot of folks like me, who also devoted their lives to community service.

Robert, the Hinckley son who, with his brothers, endowed the scholarship in 1954 in honor of their father, college professor Edwin S. Hinckley, was a “New Deal” FDR-Democrat.

What makes that particularly interesting is that Robert H. Hinckley also endowed the first of its kind bipartisan Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah where conservative-Republican-guru Karl Rove cut his teeth.

Rove is the operative currently floating rumors about Hillary Clinton’s health (one of his trademarks…remember swiftboating?)  At the Hinckley Institute he was taught to participate in politics and do it “in a decent and honorable way.”

As his mentor once lamented, Rove apparently only learned the first of those two lessons.

Bob Hinckley was a Mormon, who in his 20s cut his teeth in public service as a state legislator representing the overwhelmingly Republican Sanpete County which had been settled by my great-great-great grandparents in 1849.

Like his father, he was a liberal Democrat, but married into the family of a wealthy Republican rancher who grew Marino wool and bred Rambouillet sheep for export.

Then came the Great Depression and Bob Hinckley soon found himself appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to oversee all New Deal programs in Utah.

This was at the time that some Mormon leaders, egged on by an influential former official in the ousted Hoover Administration, were bent on undermining the New Deal.

Fear-mongering about putting people on “the dole” reached such a fevered pitch in that state that Mormons eventually created their own “dole,” but during the Great Depression, it didn’t come anywhere close to relieving the need, including those of 75% of Mormons.

While Mormons are notoriously resilient and self-sufficient, Utah back then had the highest per capita use of federal welfare programs in the nation.

While Utah is about 40% active Mormon today, in the 1930s it was 65-70% Mormon.

For every tax dollar Utahans transferred up to the federal government during the New Deal, they received seven in return.

Another way to view it is that Utahans received ten times as much from federal programs between 1936 and 1940 as they did from Mormon Church welfare.

In actuality, Roosevelt's federal administrators such as Harry Hopkins hated “the dole” too, preferring work relief programs instead, according to Hinckley’s papers.

In 1934, for instance, Utah was hit by a devastating drought.  Ranchers turned stock loose and thousands of families were drinking from irrigation ditches.

Hinckley implemented a $600,000 Water Conservation and Development Program, putting Utahans to work drilling 276 wells, developing 118 springs, lining 118 miles of irrigation ditches and laying 98 miles of pipeline.

As Hinckley predicted, this saved the government several millions of dollars in relief.

It was also a year later that U.S. Forest Service research led to conversion of an old mining site into Alta Ski Area and the foundation of Utah’s reputation for snow skiing.

Robert H. Hinckley went on to serve as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce and chaired the aviation administration during the construction of Washington’s National Airport and oversaw pilot training for WWII.

He was a driving force behind formation of the “Tuskegee Airmen.”

He also led a war effort to build strategic airfields around the United States.  This, along with aircraft technology fueled during the war effort, laid the groundwork for the subsequent explosion in air travel during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Taking his first flight in 1913 with famed female aviator Mellie Beese, he acquired a Dodge Brothers dealership in 1915 (touring car shown) which his descendants owned for four generations.

He founded Pacific Airways in 1927 and invested early in radio. Hinckley obviously had an eye for useful technology, innovation and entrepreneurship.

D.C.’s airport is now ironically renamed for conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan.

Even more ironic is that both Hinckley and Reagan would be considered moderates today while Mormons have become the most conservative faith in America.

Still more than 1-in-3 are moderate or liberal, more than 1-in-5 are Democrats or lean Democratic and 36% overall would like to see a bigger role for government while nearly 60% of Mormons overall believe environmental laws are worth the cost.

Hmm, so much for stereotypes I guess.  Why is this news to many Mormons?  Perhaps many are just softer spoken.

It was a Hinckley Institute Fellow and resident scholar at a conservative think tank who co-authored the recent bestseller entitled, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the Politics of Extremism.

A quick read of this book will reveal why many otherwise reasonable people, when grouped together in control of the North Carolina General Assembly, have turned zany, mean and vindictive.

But the book’s author Dr. Jay Ornstein apparently did pay attention to the Institute’s full curriculum.

One of the easiest ways to spot today’s extremists anywhere is not only by their lack of empathy but by their serious deficit when it comes to ethics.

Two years before I was born, Bob Hinckley teamed with Ed Noble (of Lifesavers fame) in 1946 to found the American Broadcast Company, building it into what it is today, merging with Paramount and taking a 35% stake in Disneyland along the way.

Some of that ABC stock found its way into the scholarship fund from which I benefited in college.

I hope I’m able to repay that scholarship one day.  At one time it was the largest private scholarship endowment at BYU.  To return the irony, maybe Mitt would consider making it even larger, if he hasn’t already.

I have two other connections to Edwin S. Hinckley in whose name the fund was created by his sons.  He was born in Cove Fort, down by what is now Fish Lake National Forest in 1868, a contemporary of my great-grandfather Hyrum Edward Bowman.

His father Ira knew many of my earlier Mormon ancestors very well.  Those who created settlements south (most headed north where I was born) such as the Shumways and Sheltons, would have seen young Edwin playing as they repeatedly traveled through the fort.

Edwin graduated from BYU back when it was a combined high school/college academy and then took his family to Ann Arbor for graduate work in geology at the University of Michigan before returning to teach at BYU.  He retired after twenty years in 1915.

He then took charge of reforming the State Industrial Reform School for several years before returning to Provo to put his stamp on economic development.

Juvenile delinquency had reared its head among Mormons as early as 1868.  Gangs had formed by the 1870s including the “Squirter’s Squad” known for spitting tobacco juice on goods put out for sale resulting in creation of the territorial reform school in 1888.

Edwin S. Hinckley died on the eve of the Great Depression and didn’t witness his son’s role in the nation’s recovery.

He is famous for saying, "When one man says something can't be done, he is usually interrupted by someone else doing it."

His son Bob is famous for saying, “Democrats are for the people,” and “Republicans are for things…they favor property over people every time.”

A contemporary of my grandparents, he was also famous for saying, “I was just born lucky.”

Before I could say thank you, Robert H. Hinckley died just prior to beginning my final stint leading the DMO for Durham, but I’ve read and occasionally reread his autobiography, an oral history monograph.

Entitled I’d Rather Be Born Lucky Than Rich, it was published about the time I headed from Spokane to Anchorage to lead my second DMO and long before I made any connection.

I agree, and part of my luck was paid forward by him.

My Genesis of Career Values

I seeds for my career in destination marketing were planted during the first 33 months of the 1970s, while working my way through BYU in a windowless below-ground level nook of the administration building, situated next door to the dispatchers for campus police.

Universities are microcosms of communities, and I’ll explain later how this was also when the seeds were planted for me about the importance of community appearance including a passion for trees.

Back then we were a staff of two, then three, and later four or five of us who handled campus tours, administered the president’s box during football games and actively marketed the campus across the nation as a site for camps, workshops, summer youth conferences and events which included assisting their production.

My job title was conference coordinator.  The Office of Tours and Conferences back then fell under the director of University Relations, a division that fell under University Communications which had been headed until the year prior by the late Dr. Stephen R. Covey, then only 36 years old.

I quickly earned a supervisory role, and following a detour for law school, this experience would anchor what would become a 40-year career as a community-destination marketing executive for communities in Washington, Alaska and North Carolina.

The general idea of the then-Office of Tours and Conferences was to fuel demand for campus food services, housing and campus facilities to sustain year round employment and to engage professors and grad students during what were at the time very low volume summer school sessions.

Apparently the ground-work paid off because as I graduated it was spun off and today there is an entire three story visitor center (a tower of which is shown in this blog) located at the main campus entrance devoted to tours, public affairs, alumni affairs, guest relations, reunions, community relations and even a speakers bureau etc.

Up the hill north and east of Lavell Edwards Stadium is now a dedicated conference center where staff still in continuing education now coordinate and produce workshops, camps, special events and professional and association meetings.

It is a long ways from that basement hovel, but the most remarkable physical transformation since I graduated is the presence now of incredible landscaping and towering trees, part of a makeover that was initiated just as I left.

One of my last classes at BYU was a field botany class during the early summer session focused on trees.  BYU has always been a top undergraduate research university so my professor for the class taught us much more about the value of trees than just how to identify various species.

While I was growing up, BYU had undergone a tremendous building boom that had expanded the number of buildings from 6 to nearly 300 on a relatively flat plateau in the shadows of Y Mountain, a peak in the the Wasatch Range of the central Rocky Mountains.

The campus was manicured and grassed but found lacking at the time in overall landscaping, especially trees. This was not lost on two other people as I graduated in August of 1972 including Roy Peterman, a classmate, and fellow-Idaho native Jack Wheatley and his wife Mary Lois who as I graduated were just dropping off their eldest son for his first semester.

Peterman and I graduated from the same department, he in psychology and me in history but we each found our 40-year careers while working for the university part-time.  He worked in grounds keeping becoming director in 1978, I found my calling in community-destination marketing.  Both involve fostering and preserving sense of place including scenic character.

The Wheatley’s are more contemporary with our respective parents.  Jack was born in Pocatello, at the opposite end of the fault line of my youth.  He and his late wife built a business in Palo Alto, California in residential and then commercial real estate including construction of buildings on the campus of Stanford University there.

Neither had ties to BYU.  He graduated from West Point and she from arch-rival University of Utah.  But by the time they dropped their eldest son off to attend BYU, they had shaped a deep appreciation not just for buildings but the extraordinary value landscaping brings not only to both the built and natural environment but to human inspiration.

Wheatley’s are the name sakes for an incredible Institution housed in the same building as the visitors center at BYU.  In part, The Wheatley Institution’s purpose is to foster the teaching of ethical business behavior in universities.

They have also single-handedly donated thousands and thousands of trees to populate the 560+-acre BYU campus along with overall landscaping inspiration and design for waterways, walkways, outdoor art and natural areas that foster learning and creativity.

As a result, even though hundreds of additional buildings have been erected there since I graduated, the BYU campus has since become a spectacular example of the powerful force of biophilia on our lives.

The term was coined a decade after Jack and Mary Lois began to transform BYU’s campus with trees, art and gardens.  Biophia is now the well-proven concept that scenic preservation “optimizes productivity, healing time, learning functions and community cohesion” (Go Cougars!) as well as economic development.

Jack Wheately’s understanding of the importance of natural and scenic aesthetics is unique among engineers, builders and real estate developers.  He served during the Korean War with the US Army Corp of Engineers before achieving extraordinary financial success in commercial office building and leasing including R & D facilities in Silicon Valley.

Much of this occurred in the ten years before he turned his attention to scenic preservation on BYU’s campus in the early 1970s.

Maybe in part it was the influence of his wife, an art major.  Maybe it came from studying the evolution of the beautiful Stanford campus, or maybe it was from meeting the needs of tech entrepreneurs who seem sensitive to the tie between creativity, innovation and natural environment.

Regardless, if we could only clone Jack and infuse all commercial developers with his humility, understanding and commitment to biophilia, maybe community’s would no longer need to seek establish minimum requirements in order to protect their sense of place and environments.

The Long View Imperative for Leadership

When my daughter was very young she briefly thought I was a fireman after overhearing me describe to a reporter over the telephone that a significant amount of my time as a community-destination marketing executive involved “putting out fires.”

It is an unfortunate condition of executive management that far too much time is diverted to problem-solving, but as noted in an address earlier this year for The Wheatley Institution, a think tank founded by another Idaho native, that seeks to strengthen society’s core institutions, Dr. Roger B. Porter, IBM Professor of Business and Government for the Harvard Kennedy School noted that leadership is more than just problem-solving or hyper list-checking.

I’m not so sure myself, but during my now-concluded 40-year career as an exec in community economic development, some flatteringly claimed that I stood out as strategic while critics, including a couple of friends, cautioned that personally and organizationally I took on too much.

For today’s community-destination marketing execs, taking what Porter calls “the long view” is de rigueur as anyone leading an organization that has been truly accredited knows.

As Porter, who graduated from Brigham Young University a year ahead of Mitt Romney and two years ahead of me, explains, a problem-solver is reactive while a strategic or long-view leader is proactive, viewing each problem and solution through a “prism” of “overarching goals and objectives.”

Those who thought I was strategic during my career perceived that I was always using such a prism.  Those who feared that I took on too much in defense of the identities of the communities for which I fought during my career didn’t realize that I was equally determined to filter all tactical, day-to-day actions, including “putting out fires, through that prism.

Use of a long view prism is also what distinguishes some who are able to see through “special interests” from the many who front for them instead, basing decisions on “who’s asking.”

As Porter eloquently notes in an essay adapted this month from his remarks at Wheatley, “long view leaders” are “searching the horizon not for problems that need solutions [or I might add, problems to fit preconceived pet solutions or beliefs] but for the surest and most efficient path to the overarching goals they have established.”

Today, organizations can no longer afford leadership at any level including elected office that doesn’t take the long view, or to adapt the words of Dr. Helen Fisher, a researcher in behavioral anthropology at Rutgers University who blogs at www.chemistry.com from an essay published last week by US News about the “genetics of politics” (which applies just as well to management,) leaders need a little less testosterone and a lot more estrogen with a constant supply of dopamine.

According to recent biographies of two of America’s greatest and most beloved Presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, a trait that made both uniquely successful was their willingness to surround themselves with aides and advisors representing a wide range of dissenting viewpoints, a trait that frustrates many advocates as well as detractors of President Barack Obama.

As Washington and Lincoln each addressed seemingly insurmountable challenges, this trait enabled them to take the long view, always being aware of historical precedent, forgiving in victory, willing to adapt ideas even from their enemies while, even in the midst of crisis, never losing sight of the overarching importance of infrastructure and the indispensible role of debt, even as each struggled to balance their personal check books.

These Presidents had no patience for partisan bickering or lock-step ideologues or favor-seeking lobbyists or anything that short changed the common good and upward mobility such as today’s no-tax pledge.  They were moderate realists.

As Porter concludes about great leaders of every stripe: “They are not diverted by the seemingly urgent…[they] concentrate on the important and eschew the less important.”

Just as importantly, according to Porter, great leaders “are more concerned with investing in the future than in immediate gratification, and they value dynamism, change, and innovation over security and stability.”

To me, these observations and lessons are as applicable to small community organizations as they are world leaders and central to any job description today for management or leadership, appointed or elected.

Just One Person Removed From Mitt!

While not the 33,000 enrollment it has today, Brigham Young University had a large student body even back when I attended.  So I suspected it was a long shot when I got a call from a Washington Post reporter asking me for my recollections of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

Before I could jump to the conclusion that maybe someone does read this blog, a quick online search while we were talking confirmed that Mr. Romney and I were separated only by the name of my best friend, the late Bob Cardon in the 1971 BYU Yearbook listing of members of the Cougar Club, athletic booster group.

Mitt was president and the club wasn't large back then, but we had special seating together during games so I suspect we knew one another although more than forty years later I have no recollection of any member except Bob. All I could recall for the reporter was that both BYU and the Rocky Mountain West were certainly a lot more ideologically diverse back then than they seem to be today.

However, we were all united even then by the desire to beat Utah, a rivalry every bit as intense as Duke, located where I live now, and nearby Carolina!

The call brought back a flood of memories of Bob who moved to the mid-Atlantic South nearly two decades before I would when he landed a job in Washington DC at one of the big accounting firms after graduation. Bob flew up to join me during my first visit to New York City, a business trip in 1976, during which Tom Lucas, another friend from law school, who was studying tax at NYU, snapped a photo that is now haunting reminder of the World Trade Towers.

Bob and I stayed in touch, which was a bit unusual for either of us when it came to friends we left behind.  We first became acquainted year or two before I was married and I remember waking up in the wee hours each morning to the sound of Bob playing songs by The Ventures on his acoustic Gibson guitar in our shower where he could replicate the reverberations on songs such as Apache.

The next year he was a frequent visitor to our apartment on Center Street in Provo the site of an indelible memory of when he and I first heard the hit song Joy To The World by Three Dog Night on the radio.

Shortly after I was recruited to Durham in 1989, where I still live, Bob was diagnosed with cancer in the bone of one of his legs.  He fought the disease valiantly, including trips abroad for experimental treatments and then one day I received a call from his wife that he had lost that battle.

I still miss him and if he were alive I’d bet (but not $10,000) that he would remember Mitt.

Go Cougs!

Resisting More Than Coercive Parenting

I never was much of a parent and thank God every day that my daughter and only child understood and has been so forgiving and become such an extraordinary person and parent herself.

I marvel at how well my parents did, being ages 19 and 24 when I was born.  I watch as others so often struggle while some friends and my two sisters and daughter seem so naturally gifted as parents.

But I’ve never read three more helpful pages than the document I’m linking here in BYU Magazine, my university alumni quarterly, from an article by regular contributor M. Sue Bergin entitled Resisting Coercive Parenting.

Ms. Bergin’s not writing about physical abuse but forms of manipulation and coercion that experts find can be equally harmful such as “quilting, shaming, withdrawing love, wounding with sarcasm or condescending remarks” even before they escalate to yelling and harshness.

She also notes another form of psychological coercion at the other end of the spectrum but often practiced in tandem, being “overprotective,” which can lead to “withdrawal and anxiety” and “feeling incompetent.”

I know parents with all of the best intentions who practice the full spectrum.  They are good people who want the best for their children.  Unfortunately, they also practice these techniques on other adults, co-workers, youth league coaches and school personnel.

These practices are also rampant in other parts of society.  Just get between some development interests or their advocates and elected officials and you’ll see these techniques up close and personal from both sides.

One expert cited by Bergin also notes that the result of these techniques on young people is that they have a hard time learning “inward control” because they are so focused on meeting parent demands.

Lack of inward control is also something David Brooks notes from experts in the new book The Social Animal; The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement as a pivotal reason holding generations back from true social mobility.

There is much more to this brief article and hopefully the small part I’ve touched on will motivate you to read it and then re-read it.  And if you’re not a parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle, it is every bit as useful in other roles in life.

If you like this article, in light of Father’s Day, next month, you may also benefit from one by the same author published last winter by clicking here.

Facing Extinction

The Founders of this nation, including Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant mind who laid the groundwork for today's market economy, were as fearful of unbridled capitalism as they were the tyranny of monarchs.

I only have two experiences with labor unions: one during a brief stint before law school when I worked as a production foreman in the plate inspection area for Kaiser Aluminum Trentwood Works and another a year earlier while researching and writing a college senior thesis about Wayne D. Holley, who was a labor leader and a active member of the Communist Party in this country while also an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon,) now the most politically conservative of all religions in the nation.

Of course, I should probably include the last year of high school debating both sides of the notion of compulsory arbitration for labor-management disputes.

These experiences are also my only window into the thinly veiled political motives exhibited by some Republican Governors bent on trashing collective bargaining.

My personal experience with USW-Local 838 workers at Kaiser was positive.  Folks there worked hard and several helped teach this then-management-novice the ropes and how to get the most productivity without crossing the line.  This also happened to be the same union in which Holley was active at Geneva Steel just north of where I obtained my undergraduate degree in history.

But I've heard the war stories about unions.

Not just corruption which, while far more publicized and reviled, is really no more prevalent than management white collar crime.  This includes the current mess which has resulted as described in an op-ed published last week by President Reagan's budget chief and “trickle-down-economics" guru David Stockman in “a quasi-bankrupt nation saddled with rampant casino capitalism on Wall Street and a disemboweled, off-shored economy on Main Street."

I think union reform begins not with trashing collective bargaining, but internally by getting rid of anything that protects or rewards people who don't do their job or that erodes productivity or throttles innovation.

Unions today and the country in general need people like Wayne D. Holley, not because he was able to juggle two seemingly contradictory values such as deeply, conservative Christian beliefs with Communism and Socialism, but because he refused to be pigeonholed by either/or labels.

Incidentally, Holley was my current age when I conducted hours of interviews with him on the big lawn at the house he shared with his wife Helen (who passed away a few months ago at age 92) in the small town of Mapleton, Utah, just south of where I was nearing college graduation.  The 32-page paper that resulted suddenly came to mind again when I received a recent message via Facebook.

It seems that two young college students were unable to find a copy of that 1972 paper.  They apparently could see it cited in a few other papers and speeches published by true scholars, as well as in university archives. Unable though to put their hands on a copy, they wondered if I happened to still have a copy and if could I send it to them digitally.

So I dug out my fading forty-year-old mimeographed copy (the format required at the time,) scanned it and created a link for them to access, and at the same time, to better preserve it for the family history I'm creating for my grandsons, who are now nearing ages 6 and 8. 

It is weird now that I’m retired to read something I wrote prior to the beginning of my career.  I had forgotten how early on I gained appreciation for iconoclasts, something for which my current hometown of more than two decades is well known, and a term some occasionally applied to me during my now concluded four-decade career in community marketing.

Today, we could use more people like Wayne Holley, who passed away eight years ago at age 93, not just because he was a Mormon and a Communist and a labor leader but for the reasons I revisited while rereading my 40-year-old Introduction to that paper:

“It has long been understood that an imperative requirement for survival in any society is the ability to maintain a flexible, viable, changing posture.  It has been common experience that those institutions that insist on facing the complicated, multi-factored problems of modern society with unchanging, inflexible and rigid attitudes face extinction.  The core issue involved is the age-old difficulty of getting along with those who think differently, learning to accept disbelief systems with a graceful, open mind.”

The response I received from the two students after I forwarded a digital link to this old student paper was “not bad Dude!”  But I think they meant “not bad” for an old Dude facing extinction.

Change Anything On April 1st–No Foolin’

Even before Jimmer Fredette, some great things have come out of my alma mater BYU and another derivative is being released on April 1st entitled Change Anything by the Vital Smarts guys who brought us books like Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations.

These guys convert research into personal success into information including “how to” techniques and this book deals with the “science behind personal success,” maybe even including the recent research I cited at West Point on the role of “grit” in success.

Watch the illustration-music-only video below and read the first chapter.  I can hardly wait to download this book, from my local independent bookseller that is.  If this book is anything like Crucial Confrontations was for me, it’s a game-changer.