A RUBE IN THE PENTHOUSE
Last week, rooting again thru my ancient office middens on campus, a file box the size of a child’s casket slid open to reveal a trove of materials sent to me long ago by the Aspen Institute. In a former life, I worked as a consultant to Aspen, directing discussions at some of their Young Leaders Seminars and attending many other Aspen programs led by others. Aspen was founded by Chicago business executive Walter Paepcke (Container Corporation of America), who came up with the idea while visiting the Colorado ski resort in 1945. He had in mind something reminiscent of the Parisian salon, or the New England chautauqua, but with a new spin: a center for ideas and discussion aimed at the edification of the new American professional. Paepcke said he saw in Aspen’s inspiring setting “an ideal gathering place for thinkers, leaders, artists, and musicians from all over the world to step away from their daily routines and reflect on the underlying values of society and culture.” Mid-career continuing education in the liberal arts tradition was what he envisioned for American elites; and he knew as well as anyone how soul-stifling work in the corporate sector could be. The Aspen Institute soon became an American institution and the prototype for all manner of high-end educational non-profits designed to help people think.
That big file box contained a former life of mine. I was a man of many institutes in the two decades before coming to Whitman to take up full-time teaching. There was the Aspen Institute, where I became a regular for a time. And the Telluride Institute in Colorado with its second “Ideas Festival,” conducted in 1986 (That was where I spent two days in the presence of a young Georgia Congressman named Newt Gringrich; also, the last time I saw Edward Abbey alive – I had dinner with him one night in Telluride.) I did several programs with the wonderful Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and later joined its board of directors. I attended conferences at Richard Hart’s Institute of the American West in Sun Valley, Idaho, and co-founded the Gallatin Institute, a writers’ collective, with my friend John Baden in Bozeman. My part-time academic appointment at the University of Montana in the three years ahead of Whitman involved directing the Environmental Writing Institute, its summer writing program conducted in the Bitterroot Valley. And, to be sure, my steady employment of eighteen years occurred under the roof of the Northern Lights Institute in Missoula. NLI was a public policy think-tank, molded to fit the interior American West on the eve of the region’s immense transformation.
When you hang around institutes, you meet rich people. They show up at the conferences and seminars, they establish private foundations that give money, they sometimes join the boards of directors. Over the years, I had a handful of wealthy people on my board at Northern Lights, and they were excellent members – as thoughtful and hard-working as others on the board, and sometimes generous in ways other than simply giving money. Rich people know others of their kind and thus are in a position to help introduce a struggling young idealistic executive director like myself (then) to networks of private foundation staffers. Three of the wealthy angels on my board lived in coastal cities – and that’s where the money is, and where the Institute staffer has to go for grants. An old adage among grant-seekers is this: People don’t give money to projects or programs or ideas; people give money to people. Meaning: no matter how compelling your proposal may be, you’re always better off, as a grant-seeker, to go meet the people who run the private foundations. So a big part of my job at Northern Lights was to make two or three circuit-trips a year, following up on grant proposal submissions by meeting the foundation folks who had received them. A New York–DC–Minneapolis circuit was common for me, as was a Bay Area trek which involved renting a car at the airport to visit foundations in a wide swath of northern California – Menlo Park, Marin County, Santa Rosa and the like. My grant-seeker colleague Baden in Montana did the same sort of thing for the non-profit groups he led, and he gave me a colorful metaphor. John often said he had to go check his trap lines.
One of my first fundraising trips – this would have been around 1984 – took me to New York City, where a few plump family foundations had given nibbles to my initial proposals issued as the new executive director of Northern Lights. We were based in Missoula, still a strong union town then, with Burlington Northern freight trains passing through, and huge plywood and paper mills flanking the valley, and a large contingent of loggers and millworkers knocking down decent paychecks. The film “A River Runs Through It” was still nearly a decade in the future, but to those of us carefully studying economic trends and reading cultural signs – this is precisely what Northern Lights was established to do – the fate of Montana and the rural West already seemed sealed. Radical transformative change was roaring on the horizon, and my job was to anticipate it and see what my tiny organization could do to help gentle the shocks. My board and I were worried about little things like democracy, violence, civil discourse, wild ecosystems, the safety and well-being of environmental protectors, and rural and small-town traditions of friendliness in the face of a seismic shift. The recreationists and retirees were coming, the waves just beginning to hit, and our task at Northern Lights felt ever more urgent by the day.
Trouble was, East Coast philanthropists were largely ignorant of all matters pertaining to the small-town and rural West. Everyone knew where Yellowstone was, but hardly anyone in a spot to give money to the things Northern Lights valued could tell you which three states contained the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Or even what the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem was. Water rights, river protection, public lands issues outside the national parks, the ranching way of life and the peculiarities of irrigation agriculture – these things seemed to inhabit an unknown universe. As a stripling fundraiser, I had the added disadvantage of heading an organization with a peculiar name the board invented long before they hired me. The “Northern” in “Northern Lights” referred to the Northern Rockies states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming – at the time the least-populated and wildest states of the West. Like Lucy, I had some esplainin’ to do.
I also had a board member who lived on Manhattan’s upper East Side. She was the daughter of former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, held a seat on one or two of the Rockefeller family foundation boards, and had a foundation of her own. She was (still is) a brilliant woman with a deep social conscience and a rock-hard grasp of real-world realities, such as the sources and means of great wealth. She and the staff at her foundation helped me make appointments around town, but it was up to me to go alone and make my pitch. She seemed to sense my nervousness and insecurity, green as I was, and so made me a very kind offer. On the evening following my arrival in New York, after I had set up my little base camp at a hotel on the west side, she invited me to her penthouse apartment for dinner. She had her personal assistant send me the address and urged me to take a cab. “Time it to account for traffic,” was the simple instruction I received. I arrived early.
I imagined a quiet evening at a well-appointed condominium, my board member and her assistant and I seated at a cozy table several hundred feet above a busy boulevard below. I would be funny and charming in my Western way, and I would get to know her and her key staffer a lot better (we had met only once, at a board meeting in the Yellowstone Valley), and we would establish a solid, if casual, foundation for later dealings. I intended to succeed on my job and hold it for a long time.
What I did not imagine was a dinner party. Nor could I have possibly imagined the guests even had I known about the party:
My hostess’s uncle David, as in David Rockefeller, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Peter Drucker, the Austrian-born savant – and the most influential and renowned management theorist of his generation.
Daniel Yankelovich, the premier public opinion pollster of the era, founder of the New York Times/CBS News Poll.
T. George Harris, one of the powerhouses of the magazine publishing industry; T. George had invented American Health, the bible of the 1980s U.S. wellness movement (this was after his stunning success in turning Psychology Today from a struggling unknown publication into the best-selling monthly of the 1970s). T. George also happened to be married to my board member, and as such, was my co-host for the evening.
My hostess’s personal assistant greeted me at the door, and a maid with hushed crepe-soled shoes approached from behind to take my overcoat. She would later be the one who served the table, ushering dish after dish from a kitchen I did not see. The food was expertly prepared, the wine understated and superb. Someone early in the evening mentioned that Robert Redford owned the condo below and asked if I happened to see him on the elevator.
It was not a trap, it was merely a dinner party to which I had been invited, since I was “in town.” I was 33 years old at the time, a veteran environmental activist, but new to the institute business. I had known stock tanks but not think tanks, as I surely signaled with my apparel. While the other gentlemen at the table were in suits – very dark, very muted, very New York – I wore brown western-cut slacks (full polyester), a tan wide-wale corduroy shooting jacket I had ordered from L.L. Bean (it had a belt with large leather buttons), and my brown-and-black Tony Lama boots which I had purchased in Cheyenne in the fall of 1977. I remembered getting the boots from a downtown western wear shop, and I remembered why: I had just taken my first job with an environmental group – the Wyoming Outdoor Council – whose job was to monitor and lobby the state legislature, and I was told by my new boss, a Wyoming native, that no one elected to the statehouse in Cheyenne would pay any attention to me unless I wore cowboy boots. Wyoming called itself “The Cowboy State” and apparently meant it. I had not had a pair since third grade, but I bought them at the end of my first day on the job, took good care of them, and now thought to wear them to an upper East Side dinner party in lieu of dress shoes. They did go with the jacket.
After the party I went meekly back to my hotel room. I did not take a cab – I walked in the cold, hard New York air – and, burning with embarrassment, it gave me time to think. I thought about my father. He had a high school education, took the best job he could find after graduation, and hoped to remain in rural Utah for the rest of his life. He worked as an underground coal miner, paid by the ton at first, and then later running shifts in the mine, 2,000 feet underground, so that his son could one day go to college. He was frugal and loved my mother with a quiet understated passion, and was perhaps the most honest man I have ever known. He didn’t speak much but when he did, he said what he thought. He taught me to hunt and fish, and to value all the time I could find outdoors. His one wish for me, which he expressed from time to time, was that I not follow in his footsteps. “Don’t be a dumb coal miner like your dad,” was his blunt way of putting it.
What would my father-of-few-words make of my evening on the upper East Side, listening to the witty and erudite banter among five of the country’s most influential people, their lives and careers for the most part derived from the highest ranks of American free enterprise? What would my honest father think of me going begging on the steel-hard streets of Manhattan, wearing the clothes I thought would make a good impression, when what they did was make me a feel like a fool? They were clothes, after all, that he would have worn.