Teachers union bares fangs like before

Remember the scene in "All the President's Men" where the heroic reporters get warned by a confidante "your lives are in danger?" 

I can remember twice getting heads-up from people I knew, in this town, re. my apparent expiration notice for my career. Maybe you aren't familiar: I worked at the Morris newspaper for 27 years. That's in the historical record, it cannot be changed. Oh, 15 years for the Hancock Record newspaper too. 

After I left, another person close to me said there'd be a "shock effect" for the community just not seeing me around any more, not making my rounds for the paper in so many ways. Maybe you don't remember but in the latter stage of my career - I really did have a "career" there - I drove the van and handled a lot of the distribution. This was after Howard Moser had to retire due to declining health. I think his retirement was expedited by the company "suits." 

Forum Communications definitely had company suits who moved the chess pieces around. 

I later came to realize that my exit from the paper was at the high water mark for the industry. It really was a question of "when" and "how fast" the decline was going to happen, because so much of our communications was going electronic. Papers could still make money by cutting. The electronic age did bring new efficiency and savings in overhead for papers. But the effect of the digital world would become too much for the papers to really feel vitality any more. Certainly it was not going to be "the good old days." 

Work culture changed too. The silliness and irreverence that we could once show as employees got eliminated. Practical jokes? A little misogyny here and there? Yes Virginia, there was a time when misogyny was accepted in the workplace. Remember how James Carville defended Bill Clinton? 

Carville has since admitted that the stance would not fly today. 

Young people would probably not accept our excuses about how "that's just the way it was then." They'd ridicule us. Do we have it coming? People must realize that our culture goes through significant changes. 

Can we make excuses about how we all once "looked the other way" when it came to smoking cigarettes nearly everywhere? A scene from "All the President's Men" fully illustrated. The Woodward and Bernstein characters get on an elevator. Woodward hadn't previously said anything about his partner's smoking but here he abruptly blurts out "is there any place you don't smoke?" 

So, misogyny and public smoking: a past chapter of American life. And certainly we could cite other examples of how attitudes have changed. 

I had to try to survive professionally as a known skeptic about the local public school teachers union. A friend came to the office one day and advised me on the kind of storm clouds I might be facing. I'll name-drop: Mick Rose. Mick and I were closely associated with the sport of wrestling. Mick has fallen on hard times health-wise. A prayer is in order. 

Mick stopped by to advise me one day after the paper had published a letter critical of me. So critical it was, it's debatable whether it should have been published. Did I as a small town newspaper person really meet the definition of a public figure? Public figures are fair game for pretty sharp criticism. 

The letter accused me among other things of being a "miserable failure." Translation: an element of this town was piqued at how I did not give a rubber stamp to the Morris teachers union. I felt for one thing the union had rather odd priorities at the time. These people were so intransigent. Their emotions bubbled over with the behavior of a particular individual at of all things a sports banquet. 

Ah the irony: these people falling on their swords over an area of school life - extracurricular - that they rather liked to pooh-pooh as being such a secondary priority. What's the word, disingenuous? I could think of some other words. 

The letter to the editor was from a dentist. So Mick advised me that there really was a class of people in town that were, shall we say, trying to gang up on me. To generalize, let's think of the rarefied air crowd of doctors/lawyers and other such folks. Maybe they resented the reach that I had as a journalist/writer without having any lofty credentials for assuming this role, whereas the doctor/lawyer crowd had to go to school for years and years, get specialized degrees/credentials. 

Yogi Berra

I had a B.A. degree but so what? I didn't show up for work in the morning wearing a suit and tie. 

And so now, fast-forward to year 2024, it's deja vu all over again which makes me wonder if Yogi Berra really said this. I know there's a famous quote that everyone wrongly assumes that the Yankee backstop said. Is this the one? A quick check indicates that "deja vu all over again" is a true Berra-ism. So it's in the pantheon with "Nobody goes to that restaurant any more - it's too crowded." 

I digress but it's fun. The "deja vu" quote inspired a well-known Fogerty song that was anti-Iraq war.

 

Here in Motown

It's deja vu all over again with Morris teachers really getting in our face with discontent and demands. I was not prepared to learn all this just recently. It kind of floored me, the rude and threatening language. And now I see lawn signs "support our teachers." I did not realize the teachers were so bereft of support. 

I saw a residence with such a sign out front, where the teachers might have second thoughts because this particular teacher lives at a place that really looks opulent. Downright opulent I tell you. Not a good exhibit for showing need. But we are so human an animal: we all want more money. 

And inflation makes us claw away harder. We're like hamster in a treadmill as the Fed pushes up inflation with its actions. Our local teachers just never change their ways: they are so dogged and determined, they lose a sense of simple decorum which we ought to expect of them. No pleasant surprise now. "Deja vu" indeed. 

The dentist who wrote the letter to the editor has been gone from Morris for a long time now. I think he's in Alexandria. He'd be one of the Morris expatriots in Alexandria. But I'm still here. 

I still enjoy writing about MACA athletics when I can, which is less often than before. I can only try. 

In "All the President's Men," Woodward and Bernstein heeded the warning from their friend, and suddenly started typing messages to each other lest there be a planted tape recorder somewhere. And when I say they "typed," I mean they were banging on the old manual typewriters. 

The two made it to the end of the movie looking like heroes. We see video of Nixon giving his 1973 inauguration speech as we know what's coming for him. I'm not sure Nixon's character flaws were really his main downfall. I think he had allowed the Vietnam war to continue for too long, way too long. What a hero he could have been, had he tried to get our troops home as fast and safely as possible starting after his inauguration speech in 1969. 

What a period of American history to live through.

 

Addendum: A hockey parent who remembered me from years ago said to me, at the hockey foodstand at the county fair, "you look like you could still be doing it." One thing is for sure, newspaper management would have had to call me in and say the money was no longer available to pay someone like me, doing the kind of work I did for the two weekly Morris papers and the Hancock paper. 

But maybe the management would have been conciliatory. They could have been constructive and considerate, suggesting a package that would keep my self-esteem at a decent level while acknowledging the reality of what was happening to print. 

Would I have accepted that? We can only speculate. But it's better to get along with people than to not get along with them. 

And I'd be perfectly happy to put irreverence and misogyny aside as our culture moved forward, moved forward to where your typical private sector employees have their cheeks sucked in. It's "tight." 

One of my favorite economic commentators, the permabear Peter Schiff, says "as soon as you take a job, you start taking risks." Such frank truth. And when one gets older, you get more risk-averse. I can think of so many times in my younger years when I might have been on the edge for disaster. 

But our society was also more loose. 

Maybe back when the Carl Bernsteins of the world were ubiquitous smokers, we were more relaxed because cigarettes are a sedative. So let's go back to that? Remember when DeToy's was Atlantic Avenue Family Restaurant? The air was "blue" as they say. Males hung around there to talk, drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. Today we go to restaurants to eat. And you'd better have a fair amount of money on you.

 

Update: I now remember the quote that is often mis-attributed to Yogi Berra: "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be." It is credited to Peter DeVries. So strong is the assumption that Yogi said it, it's urban legend.

 

- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com