Pondering that alternate path in life

I remember fondly when I dropped off my articles at the Sun Tribune as a "stringer." Maybe that was my peak as a journalist. Ah, such an air of innocence. I was a total Morrissite at that time. Occasionally I wore my orange and black letter jacket.
Those were the days when all articles had to go through a "typesetting" process. We worked on manual typewriters. It was an ungainly system in many ways, so much so, people were not really attracted to the profession. We worked with scissors and waxers. Worst of all, there was a photographic darkroom that was an absolute sinkhole for problems and expense.
Yet I personally was attached to journalism. We easily forget that in those days, roughly in 1970, writing was not considered fun. Typing was not considered fun. We used "white-out," remember? Didn't Michael Nesmith's mother invent that? So the legend goes. We corrected errors, sort of, with white-out. Writers would prepare a story and then make corrections all over the place with a ballpoint pen. The piece would look like a battlefield at the end. But we viewed this kind of product as the fruit of committed labor. It was like a badge.
Reporters had rolled-up sleeves and often smoked. We might go to the bar at the end of a rigorous "press day."
As a stringer for the Sun Tribune I didn't deal with press days. I did articles on a piecemeal basis and dropped them off. I remember describing a Tiger sports victory as "heartfelt" and Arnold Thompson changed it to "especially savory." Years later I would take criticism from the likes of Lee Temte, that I over-used "savory" as an adjective for public suppers. "Savory dinners." A forensic writing analyst would have me pegged in no time.
Having been out of the work force for eleven years, I often speculate on how my life could have turned out different. I never really wanted to leave Morris. Because I was always worried about how people perceived me - Perry Ford gave me a hard time about this - I felt I had to follow mores and try to leave home. Which would have been fine, had it really been in my best interests. For one thing, I wasn't ready.
School classes had terrorized me for years. I was so obsessed with simply surviving in school, I neglected priorities like simply mastering life skills. Get up in the morning ready to pursue certain priorities that have nothing to do with school. Take pride in how you approach those tasks. Forget about those school teachers who lorded over us so much. Who gave them the power to do that, to behave as if they practically owned us? Our parents? I really doubt that.
Public schools developed as a big government enterprise - monopolistic government - in part because it was big government that won World War II. It is a truism that government does nothing better than to fight wars. There is no substitute for it. A generation that should have known better - Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation -  put public schools on a pedestal as a bastion of big, uncontested government.
Then we saw the emergence of teachers unions which became the absolute bane of my existence, my Achilles heel as it were. My perspective as a full-time employee of the Morris paper, beginning in 1979, gave me full view of the highly political and parochial machinations of teachers unions which I saw as so regressive and depressing. Parents would get cowed by them.
Our Morris public school system became steadily ossified until the late 1980s when suddenly a whole bunch of parents began seeing things the same way I had. At the heart of the difficulties was a cultural problem among school staff. The "deconstructionist" attitude of the 1970s, so in vogue for a time, had seeped into the local consciousness way too much. Part of this was a dismissal of extracurricular activities as being rather Neanderthal. Maybe, though, it was more a matter of teachers using their union leverage, to "take care of their own."
As we heard so often: "You can't fire a teacher." Nobody savors the thought of anyone getting fired. But teachers seemed to escape all accountability. They brandished their power to set their own agenda and wag a middle finger at the general public if need be. Taking on that ossified and regressive mess was not going to be easy. I learned we weren't alone here in Morris. A friend of mine whose profession was in financial services said "this is happening everywhere." He continued: "You'll have a biology teacher who has a coaching certificate and he probably isn't the best coach."
Teachers protected their own in a tired guild fashion. It was all political - who was friends with who. Man, I suffered as a result of that. Had I been a mere stringer for the Sun Tribune through the years, I might well have just backed away, withdrawn for a time. My critics would say "yeah Brian, and you could have withdrawn permanently, you stupid a--." You see, those are the terms on which they attacked me: I was stupid. I was a hopeless writer, which of course I'm not.
Those people would not have wanted to debate me on the merits of the issues at hand. That would have challenged their mentality too much. It was easier for them to create and spread a meme that I was an incompetent writer. The meme hurt me so much, I was greatly restricted in sharing my talents over the last 20 years of my career - a great shame. After the goalpost incident at UMM in 2005, certain people attacked me on a base level and it was all political, in my view. People had an ax to grind, and it was all because I was unwilling to rubber stamp the objectives of the local public school teachers union in the 1980s.
I consider the teachers union of the late '70s and '80s to be the most pernicious influence in the history of this community. I get the sense the climate is much more calm and positive today.
I remember when it was well-known how much the teachers absolutely hated the superintendent. That individual was Fred Switzer. Like him or not, there was an orderly process for school administration that involved the board hiring and then supporting the superintendent.
Remember the local Mn-DOT union? Remember when they called a big strike? I don't think Mn-DOT operates like that at all anymore. I think organizations of all kinds have evolved to where we don't have this line drawn between "management" and "labor." The contemporary organization consists of "team members" all of whom have their valuable role.
I think we have seen our last strike by employees of the U of M-Morris. Remember those picketers with picket signs? Today, educational institutions are strongly promoting private giving. It is much harder to nurture that in an environment where "labor" goes on strike periodically.
It was common in the early 1980s to see public school teacher strikes. They especially tore apart our small outstate Minnesota communities. The powers that be must have recognized the great damage being done. We don't hear about strikes or threats of strikes from teachers anymore.
I might have withdrawn as a stringer from the Sun Tribune because of internal problems there. Namely, this was the dominance on the staff of non-Morris sports parents, who were being allowed to have way too much influence in the sports department. "Yeah," my detractors would say, "then we would have been rid of you." What pleasant people. Many of these people were regular consumers of alcohol and often attended house parties where they all reinforced their preferred agenda re. school objectives, appointments etc. I often heard the word "clique."
I wasn't alone in assessing the situation this way. I remember that soon after a lightning rod individual left the school district - because he was even too much for the entrenched powers - there was a letter to the editor deferential to him. It was signed by most members of that clique. Mary Holmberg's name was not there. I'm sure she was approached about it.
Later in one of my informal conversations with Dennis Rettke ("background"), he talked about "that damn letter" and said he had told Mark Torgerson that the letter almost cost him his head boys basketball coaching appointment. Oh, I'm not sure it would have. An act of God would have been required to prevent that appointment, a lifetime appointment as it turned out. Rettke hired a coach named Chris Baxter for the boys, but that was vetoed by the political climate. Call it "the good old boys" at work.
Perhaps the greatest unanswered question in the history of Morris is how Baxter would have done, had he gotten a head basketball appointment right away. He was widely perceived as following a different drummer. He was totally traditional and intense. He thought the purpose of a sports program was to try to utilize all your resources to try to win. Not to segregate all sophomores on the 'B' team.
I know about Rettke's intentions because I heard it directly from him. Morris was dragged through a less than placid transition to a new era in which the "deconstructionist" stuff was thrown out. It was belated. This should have started at roughly the same time Ronald Reagan was elected president.
This blog post is a somewhat painful retrospective on a time that could get lost in the hourglass, lest I preserve it. The truths are painful but they are most certainly true. Like the "pet rocks" of the 1970s.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com