Safeguarding A Community’s Story

I posted a recent essay in recognition of an unsung hero who saved Durham’s beloved Bulls baseball team as a favor to a friend who passed away last fall.

It was not on my radar then but within a month, the Durham Bulls Athletic Park which, in part, resulted from his actions would be celebrating the 20th anniversary since hosting its first game on April 6, 1995.

I had begun to write that post five months earlier but the topic was sensitive and it took me time to not only get the tone and timing right but to research documents to make certain that my memory was accurate.

Seth Godwin reminded us a few days go that “Human Beings are story-making engines, and when confronted with randomness, we make up an egocentric version of what happened and it involves us.”

In fact, this is how legends and other myths evolve over time, often even polluting news stories and official accounts, claiming reporters and editors as victims if they don’t fact-check conclusions drawn from interviews including the use of archives and timelines.

It is akin to a “gentrification” of stories, a term used to describe what happens to neighborhoods and organic commercial districts when they become so hip that the original residents and businesses are forced out, identifies are rewoven and sense of place is lost.

As the owner of the Bulls mused with me while at will call after he had read my account, the story of how Durham almost lost the Bulls and his remarkable and deserved redemption from villain to hero is very complex.

He reminded me that before trying to poach (my word) the Bulls from Durham, the mild-mannered Mayor of Raleigh at the time, Avery Upchurch, had given Durham’s mayor a 30-day ultimatum.

He recalled that Durham’s mayor at the time was Harry Rodenhizer but having recently checked time frames related to the unsung hero post, I was able to clarify that the mayor at the time would have been Chester Jenkins, who also happened to also be the first African-American Mayor of Durham.

Based on the tendency now of some Republicans in Congress to cross lines of decorum to disrespect President Obama in ways unprecedented with other U.S. Presidents, I wondered as I walked to my seat if the fact that Mayor Jenkins was black had somehow empowered that ultimatum.

But in my dealings the issue of race wasn’t Harry’s motivation to run for another term in that office, defeating Jenkins.

He was among tens of thousands of disheartened Durham residents who not knowing what three individuals were doing behind the scenes had felt Durham had been too passive in the fight to retain the Bulls.

We remained friends until his death and he was equally incensed whenever he felt officials had passively failed to rise in defense of the organization I led whenever it seemed to become a lightning rod for resentment due to its role during that period, a small price to pay.

Harry, a fiscal conservative who had sent his children to predominantly black city schools back when nearly all white students were in all white schools, hated injustice of any kind.

It didn’t matter to him when I would explain that once a turnaround such as keeping the Bulls is achieved, it is common for those that took stands to experience some retribution, while others rush to be sycophants as redemption creates a new alignment.

To me, being respected was always more important that being liked or given credit.

But by the time Harry was elected in late 1991 the two unsung heroes I wrote about last month had already rallied enough pressure to send Raleigh officials in retreat including opposition to poaching from state legislators, state tourism related coalitions and local taxpayer groups there.

Harry was greeted in April 1992 by a new ultimatum, this time from the new owner of the Bulls, to “build a new stadium by 1994 or else” but that really wasn’t necessary.

One of the three people in the room back then who had worked behind the scenes to back Raleigh off had also been busy searching for a way to finance a new Durham stadium for the Bulls.

By May 1992, less than eight weeks after the second ultimatum, financing for the new ballpark was approved by the City Council and within five months the Bulls had signed a new lease.

Last year, two local news stories surfaced, with a few weeks of one another, mistakenly crediting an organization with the new stadium that was not in existence at the time.

Although that organization’s formation papers were filed within weeks of the time the stadium being approved, ground had already been broken ground by the time that organization commenced its startup.

I suspect that sources for the story were very uncomfortable to read what had been inferred and may have tried to call or email clarification.

But this is much harder than it sounds, especially when reputations are at stake and particularly with a story this complex.  Unless investigative in nature, even at its best news is but a crude snapshot of the real story behind an event.

I learned during my now-concluded four-decade career leading community organizations to be very careful when using the term “we.”

Humorously, a friend with whom I worked in the 1970s and 1980s at my first two destination marketing organizations would often quip when seeing misattributions or takings of credit:

“It is like having (fill in the blank) in high school.  Those who say they did probably didn’t and those who say they didn’t probably did.

But it is more complicated than exaggerating or downplaying resumes.

Often when telling aspects of the community’s story, good reporters would stop me and stop me when I was rattling off information and ask for clarification of my use of the word “we:”

• “we” meaning you personally?
• “we” meaning your organization and stakeholders?
• Or “we” meaning Durham overall?

I learned to be more careful but sometimes I wouldn’t see how misled they had been until the stories appeared in print and/or over the air.

Those two recent news stories dealing misinterpreting facts from nearly 25 years ago may have resulted from making the wrong inferences from an interviewees use or mistaken use of the word “we” assuming that rather than the editorial “we,” as in Durham, the reference was personal or organizational.

But the errors in those news stories also represent a breakdown in process now increasingly more common in short-staffed newsrooms.

Customarily, rather than leaping to a conclusion if a use of “we” wasn’t clear, newsrooms would not only call back to clarify but they would be sure to conduct a quick scan of their publication’s archives from that period.

That is why it is crucial that these two stories be flagged with clarifications so future stories are not contaminated.

Newsrooms should also be sensitive to the human tendency to unwittingly reweave memories with other fragments of peripheral or later involvement resulting, in the words of Godin, in a far more “egocentric versions.”

According to Harvard researcher Dr. Daniel Gilbert in his book and blog entitled Stumbling on Happiness, our memory doesn’t actually retrieve information.

Memory is rewoven or fabricated from the bits of data scooped up by our personal NSA.  This is why it is so important for organizations, especially any type of community organization, to appoint a staff archivist.

Unless corrections to those two recent news accounts are made, those rewoven versions will contaminate news reports for many decades to come, even contemporary histories, until such time that deeper historical analysis comes to bear.

This is why it is crucial for destination marketing organizations such as where I made my career to take seriously their role not only to tell a community’s story but to have the courage to stand up as that story’s guardian by calling or emailing reporters and editors with clarifications, even corrections.

This includes the responsibility to question other community organizations whenever they are tempted to provide egocentric accounts of the past.

A sense of historical accuracy and the importance of delving into archives is crucial to telling a community’s story in the present.

Understanding how easy it is to be credited with things you didn’t do or in which you only played a minor role may also be why I find myself often in retirement leaving breadcrumbs with many of these essays that hopefully provide broader context to those accounts.

I know it is disappointing to those who trade on information to curry favor or perpetuate perceived wounds or settle old scores but I have purposely not linked to those mistaken accounts or sources.

Instead, I have alerted others who can give them a gentle heads up.  “There but for the grace of God go I.

So, as Annie paraphrased to Crash at the end of the movie Bull Durham from a quote attributed to Walt Whitman in 1888, “…baseball is our game: I connect it with our national character.”

Or appropriate to how quickly legends become repurposed, “Man, that ball got out of here in a hurry.”

Happy 25 to DBAP!

An Unsung Hero

There were only three of us who knew the untold story behind how Durham, North Carolina saved the Bulls.  Now only two of us remain and it is time for me to keep a promise.

Legends are a type of myth that combines fact and fiction in a way that re-harmonizes or re-narrates stories to contemporize them.  This is how villains become heroes and prodigal sons are redeemed.

This happened to the story of how Durham saved its beloved Bulls baseball club, even official accounts and with news stories often quoting people who were not yet in the room.

My purpose in fulfilling this promise to the late Chuck Grubb is not to set the legend straight.  The story as re-narrated is still worthy and the heroes as recast well deserving.

Chuck wanted a fragment of fingerprint left so that generations to come, when harmonizing is less important than it is today, will have some sense of just how close Durham was to losing the team and how the actions of a very few turned that around.

He asked me because I was there from the beginning and the only one of the three of us still living from that time who has remained rooted in Durham.

My role was extremely minor, even reactive. 

My chronicle begins when Chuck brought three of us together after a disheartening meeting took place on March 16. 1990.

That meeting had been less than 24 hours after voters had narrowly rejected a proposal intended to keep the soon-to-be new owner of the Bulls from moving the team from Downtown Durham to a location in Raleigh across the county line.

It had included a few others representing the city, county, chamber of commerce, the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB) and one or two others.

It would be three more years before Downtown Durham Inc. would exist.

The meeting was short.  Everyone was exhausted, angry and out of ideas. The consensus of those who could bear to talk believed the cause was lost and wanted to give up.

I had been in Durham less than 9 months, recruited to jumpstart DCVB, Durham’s first official community marketing organization, an organization intended to become, in part, the guardian of sense of place including assets such as the Bulls.

While at the table, it was too soon to be able to fill that role.

Heavily spending to narrowly sway Durham voters against a stadium proposal, the new owner from Raleigh had commitments there to use prepared food tax revenues, newly granted by the state, but denied Durham, to build a new home for the Bulls.

Soon he would complete an option to buy the Bulls.

As purely a business venture, it was reasonable even though a college student survey project of fans had shown that even fans from Raleigh would be less likely to attend without the authentic, warehouse setting of the old Bulls ballpark in Durham.

Chuck would say I called him.  I thought it was the other way around but we talked later that day and agreed to meet.  I brought along one of my new stakeholders who had been calling me repeatedly about what our fledgling organization could do and encouraging me not to give up.

Ray Hobbs, who after all these years still keeps in touch from time to time had returned to Durham as a hotelier six months after I arrived.  He had traveled here first as a kid when his father was undergoing treatment at Duke.

Ray had previously managed another hotel in Durham in the mid-1980s as Miles Wolfe was resurrecting the Bulls and simultaneously Minor League Baseball overall.

But when I arrived in 1989, Ray was managing a hotel down in Raleigh, while trying to make his way back to Durham.  There he had got to know another hotelier named Hobbs, Jim, but no relation.

When Chuck and I met that day with Ray, I was still far too green to know my way around or what to do, but Ray offered one last “Hail Mary.”

He volunteered to check with Raleigh hoteliers to see how they felt about the new prepared food tax being used to poach tourism assets from other communities.

He found it didn’t set well at all but then as now any real organizational clout of hotels had migrated from local and state to the national level.

But soon the “Hobbs boys” as he calls them connected with T. Jerry Williams who then-headed the powerful North Carolina Restaurant Association and whose ascent had paved the way for Raleigh and Charlotte and their respective counties to have the new food tax.

The “Hobbs boys,” with DCVB cranking out form letters for hoteliers and restaurateurs in both Durham and Raleigh to use, began a letter writing campaign to legislators protesting misuse of the tax to poach the Bulls, while serious threats of a lawsuit were made.

The joint publicity campaign worked.  Raleigh officials, fearful the food tax would be repealed, withdrew the stadium funding.

It is our fault that this part of the narrative is now lost.

Once a turning point is achieved and a change of course seems imminent, anyone behind the scenes in a controversy is usually on pins and needles to ensure redemption of those involved.

The owner of the Bulls now jokingly tells audiences that he was the first to call and offer an olive branch to Durham officials because they were saying such nasty things in public about him.

I recall that Chuck made that call.  But what matters most is that these two individuals became friends and began to work together on a new stadium proposal in Durham resulting in the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (DBAP.)

Ray soon moved on to manage hotels in other communities, eventually heading a chain in the Caribbean and becoming a sought after consultant.

A few years later, the owner of the Bulls called me down to where he was sitting along the first base line during a game with his then-corporate counsel and quizzed me about who owned the old, abandoned Lucky Strike Factory across the street.

Today, DBAP is part of over $100 million in public infrastructure invested in the district encompassing it, while the Bull’s owner has leveraged even more than that amount including invaluable historic tax credits to create a showcase of adaptive reuse that the owner calls the American Tobacco Complex surrounded by newer office buildings and soon a new hotel.

Oh, and the historic Durham Athletic Park that had been home to the Bulls on the other side of downtown since the 1930s and favored by voters who had turned down a new stadium. It has been nicely renovated and serves as home to the NCCU Eagles.

To illustrate how far people will go to re-harmonize a story, a few years ago, until corrected, a person speaking to a group of Minor League Officials went so far as to intimate that the Bulls had built the DBAP to save Durham, completely inverting what actually took place.

This is how legends evolve.

Legends are a form of folklore.  They are ways people make meaning of their lives.  It is a natural form of healing and redemption that stories such as this are re-narrated and harmonized over time.

Heroes are evolved over time to reflect changing cultural values.

Dr. Lynnette Porter, author of several books about heroes, reminds us that King Arthur is an example of a “literary hero who has been reconstructed over time.”  Others such as Galadriel, a royal elf in The Lord of the Rings, worked behind the scenes for world salvation.

So it is equally important that future generations understand complexities and never forget the crucial but quiet, unsung contributions of heroic individuals at pivotal points in a community’s history.

In time, I suspect Ray Hobb’s contribution to Durham’s story will be rewoven back into the narrative of how Durham saved the Bulls.