John U. Bacon

Remember Field Day? For most of us, it was a hallowed year-end school tradition, right up there with ice cream socials, and signing yearbooks. The kids loved it, of course, and looked forward to it every year.

But not at Burns Park, one of Ann Arbor’s oldest, most desirable and most educated neighborhoods – and occasionally, one of its kookiest. There is a reason many townies jokingly refer to it as “The Republic of Burns Park.”

The Burns Park PTO might be the most active one in the state. In the late ’90s, some parents, led by a social work professor, decided the competitive spirit of Field Day was too much for the kids, and changed “Field Day” to “Friendship Day” – replacing foot races, long jumps and tug-of-wars with games that emphasized cooperation over competition.

A noble notion – but the kids hated it. During one event, a cross-section of students from all grades had to walk together on two long boards. The big kids kept yelling at the little ones to lift their left foot, then their right – but the first graders didn’t know which was which. They all fell over, and the first graders burst into tears.

I suspect that’s not exactly what the parents had in mind.

For the students bused in from the less affluent part of town, canceling Field Day really stunk. All year, they had to compete in class against some of the nation’s most privileged students, where success is publicized in every way imaginable. But on Field Day, many of these students were, for the first time all year, winning the medals.

Well, no more of that, either.

I grant the parents had good intentions. I’ll also take a wild guess that some of them wanted to spare their kids the specter of not being at the front of their class for the first time. But few parents seemed to object when their kids got gold stars for reading, writing and arithmetic.

In trying to protect some students from finishing last, they not only denied the bused-in kids their day in the sun – quite literally – they denied their own kids the chance to learn some humility, to realize losing a foot race is no big deal, and to discover the next morning that the sun still came up, right on time, and they were going to be just fine.

Instead, we confuse competing with bullying, which schools are rightly focused on eradicating. But the two could not be more different. Competition, properly taught, teaches respect, fair play, and good sportsmanship – the exact opposite of bullying.

Friendship Day lasted only a couple years – the new P.E. teacher has brought a nice balance of the old and the new – but the effects still linger. A few Burns Park parents and teachers have told me too many kids don’t know how to accept losing – especially the boys. If they get knocked out playing four-square, they simply yell, “Do over!” and that’s exactly what they get.

As one of my friends said, “My kids need to learn how to lose. Without me there. Or any parent. And get over it.”

If you can’t learn these important lessons on the playground, they won’t be any easier during auditions for the high school play or tryouts for the band.

We are raising a generation of domesticated kittens, then throwing them out into the Serengeti. We might feel better about it – but in the long run, they won’t.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

That’s right, I’d like to “kick the can down the road.” I suppose it’s a pretty big can. But it’s a short road – only one week.

When kicking the can down the road, be sure it's a short road and does not contain worms. (Incredible self-portrait action shot by the writer.)

Letting that meeting continue past Monday will be a benefit to the council and Ann Arbor residents, as well as to other public bodies like the Ann Arbor District Library, Washtenaw County, Washtenaw Community College and the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority (DDA).

The city charter requires that by the end of that meeting, the council must approve the city budget for fiscal year 2013 – which begins on July 1, 2012. If the council does not act on the budget before the end of the meeting, then according to the city charter, the budget proposed by the city administrator on April 16, 2012 will automatically take effect. Last year, the “second meeting in May” was conducted over the course of sessions on three separate days, and did not end until May 31, 2011.

Last year’s extension of that second meeting in May – achieved  by recessing and reconvening on subsequent days – stemmed from the council’s desire to achieve clarity about issues related to the DDA. The issue centered around tax increment finance (TIF) capture, as well as the contract under which the DDA operates the city’s public parking system.

This year, one of the amendments that’s almost certain to be proposed on Monday – by Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) – revisits the issue of the DDA’s TIF capture, and provides a recurring revenue source for the city to fund two firefighter positions this year, and perhaps more in subsequent years. Kunselman’s amendment calls for the kind of interpretation of the city’s ordinance on DDA TIF capture for which I’ve previously advocated. [See "Column: Tax Capture is a Varsity Sport"]

So this year, I’d like to suggest that city councilmembers plan now to take advantage of the parliamentary option of recessing their May 21 meeting until May 28 – so that they and the public can give thorough consideration to at least nine other budget amendments (in addition to Kunselman’s DDA/firefighter amendment) that could be brought forward on Monday.

The formal public hearing on the budget was already held and closed on May 7, 2012. It enjoyed the participation of just three Ann Arbor residents. By establishing the May 21 session as an occasion to sketch out the intent and the mechanics of proposed budget amendments, the council would better serve the public’s interest in being able to advocate for or against the various proposed amendments to the budget.

I’d also like to use the occasion of this column to lay out the content of some of the fire protection amendments, and to single out Kunselman’s amendment as one that I think especially deserves the entire council’s support.  

Budget Principle: Recurring versus Non-Recurring

When the city’s chief financial officer, Tom Crawford, talks about the city budget he doesn’t talk only about expenses and revenues. He always bases the conversation on this notion: Are these expenses and revenues recurring or non-recurring?

A simple example of recurring revenue is money from taxes – the city levies taxes every year in a recurrent way. The exact amount might vary based on the economy, but the city’s tax levy will reliably generate money in a way that can be reasonably estimated each year into the future. A simple example of a recurring expense is an employee’s salary. When the city hires someone to do a job – like arrest criminals, or put out fires, or review proposed new buildings – our basic expectation is that we’ll have a recurring need to pay that person’s salary each year.

A simple example of  non-recurring revenue is proceeds from the sale of land. When the city receives a $90,000 payment from the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority for a strip of land in downtown Ann Arbor, the city cannot reliably expect every year in the future that it will have an available strip of land it can sell and that someone actually wants to buy for $90,000. On the expense side, an example of a non-recurring item would be a payment made to induce a police officer to retire earlier than that officer would have otherwise retired. The following year, that payment would not need to recur – because the employee has already retired.

If asked on Monday night to comment during deliberations, one basic principle that Crawford will likely apply to any proposed budget amendment is this: Pay for additional recurring expenses only out of additional recurring revenues.

By way of example, suppose a councilmember were to propose a budget amendment that funds an extra firefighter position (which would cost roughly $80,000) from the proceeds of the land sale to the AATA ($90,000). One way to phrase an argument against that proposed amendment would be simply to say: That’s an attempt to fund a recurring expense from non-recurring revenue.

To be clear, no one on the Ann Arbor city council has proposed funding a firefighter position from the land sale to the AATA. However, at least three different councilmembers have drafted modifications to the FY 2013 budget that would add firefighter positions: Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3), Jane Lumm (Ward 2) and Margie Teall (Ward 4).

Fire Protection – Use of Fund Balance

The two budget amendments drafted by Lumm and Teall are similar, in that they would bring the budgeted number of firefighters from 82 to 88 – for an addition of six, compared to the city administrator’s proposed budgeted levels.  They’re also similar in their approach to paying for the additional firefighter positions. Teall’s resolution stipulates the combination of a federal grant – for which the city has applied through a FEMA program called Staffing For Adequate Fire & Emergency Response Grants (SAFER) – and possible increases in the state of Michigan’s fire protection allocation to municipalities that are home to state-owned institutions.

The state fire protection grant program is based on the fact that state-owned institutions do not generate property tax revenues to the municipalities that must provide those state-owned institutions with fire protection. In Ann Arbor’s case, it’s the University of Michigan that generates no direct property taxes; but Ann Arbor provides fire protection for UM.

However, Teall’s resolution essentially provides direction to the city administration to tap the city’s fund balance reserve –  if a SAFER grant or additional funding from the state is not available or is insufficient. From a draft of Teall’s resolved clause:

RESOLVED, the City increase the General Fund Fire Services Unit FTEs by six, and funding for the positions totaling $477,594 ($79,599 per FTE) be added to the adopted budget, funded from the receipt of additional Fire Protection monies from the State, potential Grant Funds and the use of fund balance, as needed, from the General Fund.

Lumm’s resolution is similar:

RESOLVED, the Administrator’s proposed budget be amended to add six FTEs to the fire department FTE budget (88 FTE total) and $477,594 be added to the fire department GF expenditure budget to fund the expected cost of the six additional FTEs

RESOLVED,  the additional $477,594 in FY 13 GF expenditures be funded in the following priority order: (1) Revenues from the SAFER Grant (2) Revenues from the increase over the Administrator’s budgeted amount in the State Fire Protection Grant  …

Lumm’s draft amendment continues with contingencies for this year based on reducing funds from a possible High Speed Rail Local Match allocation; but it also includes the possibility of drawing on the general fund reserve.

It’s fair, I think, to describe the strategies of Lumm and Teall for funding additional firefighter positions (SAFER grant and increased fire protection grants from the state) as depending on revenues that might be recurring, but that are not yet in hand, and that currently have some uncertainty attached. Their amendments have in common a willingness to backstop that hoped-for revenue with use of the fund balance.

Otherwise put, their amendments have a backstop that would use non-recurring revenue to pay for recurring expenses. In contrast, Kunselman’s fire protection amendment does not depend on the general fund reserve as a backstop.

Fire Protection – Use of Recurring Revenue

In terms of the number of firefighters, Kunselman’s fire protection amendment is less ambitious. It seeks to add just two firefighter positions. However, his amendment identifies a recurring revenue source – the additional revenue that would be distributed to the city of Ann Arbor, if the city’s ordinance regulating the DDA’s TIF capture were interpreted in a particular way.

By way of background, in broad simple strokes, the DDA “captures” taxes that are levied in its downtown district by other taxing jurisdictions. But the DDA does not capture all the taxes levied. It captures only the taxes on the increment between the baseline value of a property and the value of built improvements on a property. And the Ann Arbor DDA captures taxes only on the initial increment – the difference between the property’s initial value, and the value after a site is developed – not on its later appreciation. In this way, it captures taxes that would otherwise go to the Ann Arbor District Library, Washtenaw County, Washtenaw Community College and the city of Ann Arbor.

The city’s ordinance on DDA tax capture appears to limit how much tax can be captured, based on the actual increase in value of property in the district, compared with the projected value in the DDA’s official TIF plan. From the relevant clause from Chapter 7 of the city code [emphasis and extra emphasis added]:

If the captured assessed valuation derived from new construction, and increase in value of property newly constructed or existing property improved subsequent thereto, grows at a rate faster than that anticipated in the tax increment plan, at least 50% of such additional amounts shall be divided among the taxing units in relation to their proportion of the current tax levies. If the captured assessed valuation derived from new construction grows at a rate of over twice that anticipated in the plan, all of such excess amounts over twice that anticipated shall be divided among the taxing units. Only after approval of the governmental units may these restrictions be removed. [.pdf of Ann Arbor city ordinance establishing the DDA]

Last year, the impact of Chapter 7 was pointed out for the first time by city financial staff. It resulted in a combined refund of roughly $473,000 from the DDA to the Ann Arbor District Library, Washtenaw Community College and Washtenaw County. The city of Ann Arbor chose to waive its $712,000 share of the calculated excess. I argued in a column last year that the method of calculation for the excess was wrong, and that the amount returned should have been even greater. [See "Column: Tax Capture is a Varsity Sport"]

Subsequently, the DDA reversed its legal position and contended that no money should have been returned at all. The DDA’s position is based on the following clause of Chapter 7:

Tax funds that are paid to the downtown development authority due to the captured assessed value shall first be used to pay the required amounts into the bond and interest redemption funds and the required reserves thereto. Thereafter, the funds shall be distributed as set forth above or shall be divided among the taxing units in relation to their proportion of the current tax levies.

Without delving into the details of how these TIF calculations work, Kunselman’s budget amendment calls for a Chapter 7 interpretation that is essentially consistent with the one I’ve argued for in the past. It results this year in roughly $200,000 more for the city’s general fund, which Kunselman proposes to use to fund two firefighter positions. From Kunselman’s draft resolution:

RESOLVED, That City Council directs the DDA to interpret and apply Chapter 7 of City Code using:

• both real and personal property,
• the “realistic” capture projection from the 2003 DDA Tax Increment Financing (TIF) Plan,
• a cumulative comparison of projected capture to actual capture; and
• consideration of only debt service payments for TIF related projects (i.e. exclude all debt service for the construction, maintenance, and management of the City’s parking system).

RESOLVED, That City Council directs the City Treasurer to distribute future TIF revenue to the DDA only up to the amount that would be realized in the plan plus any increases that are permissible in Chapter 7;

RESOLVED, That City Council directs the City Treasurer to distribute the excess amounts of future TIF revenue to the taxing authorities from which they were captured; and

RESOLVED, That the increased revenue to the General Fund in the amount of $199,360 be utilized to increase the Fire Department expenditure authorization in FY 2013 and to increase the authorized number of Fire FTEs by 2 positions.

Based on this “cumulative” approach to Chapter 7, the amount of additional revenue will recur.

So it’s fair to think of Kunselman’s proposed Chapter 7 interpretation as roughly approximating the following: From this point forward, new development in the DDA district will directly benefit the district’s taxing jurisdictions – by an amount equal to half the TIF that the DDA would otherwise capture on that new development. Considering all jurisdictions that have their taxes captured by the DDA, the city of Ann Arbor’s rough proportional share (across all funds) is about 60%. So the city of Ann Arbor’s rough benefit from the future new development would be about 30% of the TIF that the DDA would otherwise capture.

Four major projects in downtown will be completed in the next year or two, resulting in additional recurring revenue that the city of Ann Arbor could budget. Those four projects are: the Landmark Building, The Varsity, City Apartments, and Zaragon West.

If Ann Arbor’s proportional share of captured taxes is 60%, what about that other 40% of the TIF?

Inter-Governmental Cooperation

Other than the city of Ann Arbor’s share, the other 40% of the taxes captured by the Ann Arbor DDA are levied by the Ann Arbor District Library, Washtenaw County, and Washtenaw Community College.

The way that the Chapter 7 interpretation played out last year did not serve the city of Ann Arbor’s long-term interests for collaboration and cooperation, in the context of the city’s natural regional partners. Last year, when the Chapter 7 issue arose, the issue should have been identified for all parties who had a stake in the issue. Then, a mutual understanding could have been reached – by the  Ann Arbor District Library, Washtenaw County, Washtenaw Community College, the city of Ann Arbor, and the Ann Arbor DDA – about the interpretation and method of calculation for excess TIF capture.

Instead, when the Chapter 7 issue was first identified, the method of calculating excess TIF was unilaterally decided by the DDA, with the implicit endorsement of the city of Ann Arbor. Also decided unilaterally was the subsequent interpretation of Chapter 7 by the DDA as not requiring any TIF to be returned – last year or in the future. At the time, Larry Whitworth, who was then president of Washtenaw Community College, told The Chronicle that he was disturbed by the DDA’s decision. As recently as March 19, 2012, Josie Parker – director of the Ann Arbor District Library – has expressed a willingness to have a conversation with the DDA about the issue, because she sees the TIF capture issue differently from the DDA.

If the city of Ann Arbor and the Ann Arbor DDA don’t want to invite the other taxing jurisdictions to the table to work out a mutually agreeable interpretation and method of calculating excess TIF capture, then Ann Arbor’s wisest long-term choice is to defend the interests of those not at the table.

What Kunselman’s amendment says to other taxing jurisdictions is this: You can trust Ann Arbor to defend your interests, when your interests depend on the city doing the right thing. Otherwise put: Ann Arbor knows how to be a good neighbor.

Recess, Reconvene

Of course, if the city council were simply to approve Kunselman’s amendment Monday night, they’d be doing that without giving the DDA a seat at the table. That’s partly why I think it’s reasonable for the council to allow the DDA sufficient time to present the city council with a revised 10-year budget plan (a tool the DDA uses for long-range planning) that factors in Kunselman’s proposed Chapter 7 interpretation and method of calculation.

That additional window of time could be achieved by recessing Monday’s council meeting and reconvening it a week later. The additional time would also allow the city council enough time to absorb the substance of Kunselman’s proposed amendment, and to satisfy itself that the DDA would still be able to meet all its financial obligations.

For some councilmembers, it will be difficult to see anything more in Kunselman’s amendment than a continued pattern on Kunselman’s part to use the DDA as a political punching bag, or as yet another way for the council to use the DDA as an ATM machine. As I’ve outlined in this column, I think the substance of Kunselman’s amendment deserves more than that kind of knee-jerk reaction.

In fact, it would not be unreasonable to hope that Teall, Kunselman and Lumm could use the additional time to sit down together and hammer out a fire protection budget amendment they could jointly present to the full council. Kunselman’s amendment could be a starting point for their conversation.

The council could also use the additional time to allow themselves and the public to get more familiar with the substance of at least nine other amendments that might eventually be voted on. [.pdf of set 1 of amendments] [.pdf of set 2 of amendments]

The Chronicle could not survive without regular voluntary subscriptions to support our coverage of public bodies like the city of Ann Arbor. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Teresa Bloodman’s son was thrilled to pass the first two tryouts for his Maumelle, Arkansas, high school freshman basketball team, which allowed him to play on the team for the first two months of the fall. But, when the football season ended, the coach held a third round of tryouts so the football players could come out for the team, and he cut Bloodman’s son.

Teresa Bloodman was so livid she sued the school, the district and the state. She claimed cutting her son was arbitrary, that the lack of a formal appeals process was a violation of due process, and that her son has a constitutional right to participate in school sports.

I can appreciate a mother’s pain seeing her son suffer a setback. And certainly, coaches make plenty of arbitrary decisions, even unfair ones. But if Bloodman wins this case, the rest of us will lose – especially her son.

Her lawyer wants the coach to use a quantitative evaluation system for tryouts – rating each candidate’s skill in dribbling, passing, and shooting, for example – to make the process more objective.

But only an idiot would pick a team on stats alone.

In 1980, U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks decided the key to beat the all-powerful Soviet team was speed, not scoring. And that’s why he cut two-time All-American Ralph Cox, one of the nation’s leading scorers that year, for players with fewer goals but more speed. Brooks’s team won the gold medal. Guess he picked the right guys.

Any coach with a heart will tell you tryouts are the worst day of the season. When I coached the Huron High School hockey team, “cut-day” inevitably ended with a lot of long, private conversations and plenty of Kleenex, but almost all the players and parents handled it extremely well. One mom, however, I will probably never forget.

Before I became head coach, her son had been accused of stealing money from the locker room as a freshman. Unsolicited, he told me he didn’t do it, and I believed him – and even if he had, any ninth-grader surely deserves a second chance.

After my first team finished the season, we let him join our spring team, which was normally reserved for guys who’d already played on the varsity, and our summer team, and our fall team. He asked us to move him from defense, to offense, then back to defense – and we did. But he didn’t play very well at either position, and did no better in our tryouts. With dozens of good players trying out for the team, I felt I had no choice but to cut him – and many others.

It wasn’t fun. I had grown to like him quite a bit, and admired his attitude.

But I thought that was that, until I received a long letter from his mother. She misquoted something I had said to the players in August, when we were running outside. “I can tell even now what kind of team we’re going to have,” I said, praising their dedication and hard work. She wasn’t there, but claimed I’d said, “I can tell right now who’s going to be on the team.”

Not quite the same things – the latter being something only the dumbest coach in the country would ever say.

She added this kicker about her son being cut: “Others have committed suicide for less.”

Wisely, I did not respond then. But I will now. First, some advice:

• Don’t automatically assume your child is telling you the whole truth.
• If your kids have a problem with their teacher or their coach or their choir director, let your kids approach them first. If they don’t learn how, now, who’s going to approach their professor, or their boss?
• If you must write, wait at least 24 hours. And don’t write anything you wouldn’t say to their face. Email gives false courage to cowards.
• Even better, don’t write anything at all, or else you’ll deny your child a vital lesson: Life is tough, and not always fair. But you have to keep going anyway.

In eighth grade, I had had a great spring hockey league, scoring five times more than the other center. But that fall, he made the travel team, and I didn’t. I was crushed. But my parents did something wonderful: Nothing. The next year, I realized a lifelong dream when I made the high school varsity.

A few years later, when some colleges rejected me, I could handle it. When I started out as a writer, and received literally hundreds of rejection letters from magazines, I could handle that, too. And if I couldn’t, you would not be reading this right now.

And I would not have the chance, in print, to thank my parents, for not fighting my battles for me, and giving me the great gift of growing up.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

David Erik Nelson

Mitt Romney and I went to the same high school – three decades apart. This would be immaterial, except the Washington Post just published a fascinating 5,500-word remembrance of Mitt Romney’s hijinks at Cranbrook, a high-pressure prep school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

I attended this same school in the 1990s; it’s an architectural gem, the staff is excellent, the program an academic crucible. Later, as a University of Michigan student, I shared a broken-down house with three fellow Cranbrook alums. One was in a sociology class, and we were delighted when he revealed that his textbook listed Cranbrook as “one of the last vestiges of American aristocracy.”

Because Mitt and I attended Cranbrook exactly 30 years apart, we ended up standing back-to-back on a balmy June evening in 2005 – the same year Mitt received the school’s 2005 Distinguished Alumni Award. The governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and I stood together at the lip of a deep, inset fountain, which gurgled contentedly, almost as though it was whispering ♪♫Daaaaave, I would be an excellent place for a GOP splaaashdown!♫

A Question of Character

Jason Horowitz’s May 10 Washington Post piece is long, detailed, and narrative, but so effectively pulls its punches that (apart from the title, which I imagine was written by an editor) it has no express argument at all.

Yet the piece has elicited a lot of reaction. Clearly, it shows that Mitt is a homophobe! Clearly, it shows he’s a bully! Clearly, it shows he’s a friend of the Jews! Clearly, it shows he’s a classist prick! A meretricious lout! A great practical joker! A disrespectful, bloodthirsty monster! Clearly, it’s totally not germane because no one would pick a president based on what that person was doing in high school!

Clearly it’s not clear what we’re supposed to take from this – but that seems fine, because as of last Friday everyone in the old media and on its coat-tails was perfectly happy to take the dark glass Horowitz delivered us and scry it for meaning.

But, as a Cranbrook alum, and as someone who was bullied [1] in those pleasant pastures among those dark Satanic Mills [2], and as someone who was a Jew at Cranbrook during what might have been the queerest time in history to be a Jew at Cranbrook, what interested me most were the Facebooked reactions of my old classmates. And their thoughts eerily matched mine: That doesn’t really sound so different from what things were like when we were there.

Then, of course, there’s this Wall Street Journal blog post penned by an alum who was gay at Cranbrook a decade after I’d graduated. His concluding sentence: “Call us elitist, or removed, or privileged, but don’t say that Cranbrook hasn’t changed.”

The Promised Land

What initially struck me about Horowitz’s article wasn’t the description of Cranbrook – which was so familiar that it didn’t even strike me that it should have changed more over the 30 most tumultuous years of the 20th Century – but a simple mistake.

In explaining the division between boarding students and “day boys” (who were “day students” by the time I came to Cranbrook, because the two campuses had largely been integrated), Horowitz notes: “Students within the limits of Detroit’s 8 Mile Road had the option to attend the school without boarding.”

This comes just a bit after Horowitz takes pains to highlight Cranbrook’s “significant Jewish contingent” at that time. He even mentions that Romney dated Mary Fisher – the stepdaughter to Max Fisher, who was certainly one of the most notable Jewish-American philanthropists of the 20th Century – and notes how “studiously nondenominational” the school was.

But Horowitz has gotten this admissions policy exactly wrong: By the time Mitt was enrolled, Cranbrook had long taken measures to limit Jewish enrollment (as is both attested and documented in the biography of Cranbrook’s most politically significant alum during my tenure, Daniel Ellsberg). One measure was to mandate that students living south of 8 Mile – i.e., within Detroit city limits – must attend as boarding students (at a much higher tuition rate). [3]

Until the 1970s, the vast bulk of Southeast Michigan’s Jewish population – including my own father (not a Cranbrook alum) – lived within Detroit, largely along its northern edge. When I was a student this policy was characterized as anti-Semitic, not racist, although it obviously affected a huge African-American population. Make of that what you will. [4]

But, I think most tellingly, this was a policy that teachers told us about in the 1990s. I know this will sound absurd – I am, after all, talking about one of the last vestiges of the aristocracy – but when I was a student the school was admirably ahead of the curve on multiculturalism, with classes with names like “Diversity?” and teachers who didn’t play with kid gloves. Our privilege – by dint of socio-economic class, race, gender, creed – was not something we were permitted to blithely ignore. Classroom debates asked us to take a long look at how it was we ended up where we were, and what we might owe the rest of the world as a consequence. The kid gloves were left at the school room door. Our folks got their money’s worth – because this is what they were paying for.

The entire point of bringing up these policies – which, to my understanding, remained in place until the early ’70s – was to discuss how institutions change over time. Cranbrook was – and evidently remains – a smart place, and a complicated place. It’s a classic example of how institutions – real institutions with real traditions, institutions like governments – make their progress: sidling and inch-long, often mind-numbingly slowly, but bending toward justice.

The Rich Are Different

The implied argument in Horowitz’s Washington Post parable – the argument being made explicit by us chattering hordes now – is that there is something to be said about Mitt here, something that can be distilled from these facts about his boyhood cruelty, about an environment that was intense and rarified.

As the caretakers of a half-way decent democracy, this should probably disturb us. The last few election cycles have seen our national discourse stumble into the logical endgame of identity politics. We’ve ceased even to bother asking how a candidate’s identity might influence his or her performance of duties, and instead seem content to ask how his or her identity influences our guts. With John F. Kennedy (a Catholic), or with Joe Lieberman (a practicing Orthodox Jew), our questions about their strange Otherness was at least couched in functional concerns: How might their identities impact their performance of the duties of their offices?

But in the Birther controversy (or lack of one for John McCain, who was born in Panama) and with questions of Romney’s socioeconomic class and upbringing and faith [5], no one seems to be bothering to ask: “Does this obstruct the performance of his function?” It all seems to just swirl around: “Is he like me? Is he too different? Are the rich too different from me? Did He who made the lamb make thee?”

After all, how could your average American possibly expect to see his or her interests effectively addressed by a slightly right-of-center moderate millionaire with an elite education, a pragmatic attitude towards universal medical coverage, and several New York Times bestsellers in bookstores? Are we seriously worried that Mitt Romney might get elected in 2012, or that we already elected him in 2008?

It’s one thing to not want a Jew VP because you fear the President might drop dead during Yom Kippur and there’d be no one to pilot the ship of state until sundown. It’s another not to want a Jew VP because you aren’t a Jew, and Jews are different, and you aren’t comfortable with that, and what if he decided he didn’t want a White House Christmas tree and oh good God won’t someone think of the children!!!

Whatever nebulous feelings we might now have about Mitt and Mormonism and bullies and boys bleaching their hair and growing it long, Horowitz’s Washington Post article has at least brought us one concrete fact: Mitt Romney is an enthusiastic prankster. And that, my Dear Readers, my Trusted Interlocutors, brings us back to me and Mitt standing at our high school reunion in 2005.

We stood together once, Mitt and I. It was June and it was warm and it was breezy and the sun was westering, and there were a lot of other folks there. Because Cranbrook is small, they hold their reunions mod 5, which means that everyone who graduated in 1930, ’35, ’40, ’45 . . . ’65 (like Mitt), ’70 . . . ’95 (like me) share one big reunion. The next year it’s the 1931, ’36, ’41, ’46 . . . etc. kids who reunite, and so on. So Mitt and I shared a reunion.

I was standing in Cranbrook’s celebrated Quadrangle next to that lovely fountain drinking a beer and talking to General Ambrose Burnside (not his real name). The general looked past my shoulder and said, “Holy shit, that’s Mitt Romney!” I turned, and not five feet away, three-quarters turned away from me, was the governor of Massachusetts. He wasn’t flanked by security, or by his wife, or by anyone in particular. He was in an Izod and chinos, smiling and chatting to a young African-American man who, judging from his blue-and-green club tie and navy blazer, was one of the students there to serve the alums. The kid was smiling, hands clasped in front of his belt, asking something complicated. Mitt was smiling back and nodding and squinting a little in the sun.

“Who?” I asked.

“The governor of Massachusetts, asshole,” and then it clicked: Less than a year earlier Romney had backed same-sex civil unions. A few months later some skinny, crazy-named black guy from Chicago had slam-dunked at the DNC Convention. America seemed to be bending toward justice.

“Oh. That Mitt Romney.” I looked again, “That dude either has a huge ass or a terrible tailor,” I said. And it drunkenly dawned on me: I will almost certainly regret not pushing this guy into the fountain. At the very least, I will have assaulted the governor of the Hated Commonwealth of Massachusetts [6].

But those fountains steps can be slick, and I worried he’d brain himself on the way down, and then I’d be the man who murdered the governor of Hated Massachusetts. And I didn’t like imagining the aftermath: Some middle-aged dude, ass-down in a big fountain, the water pouring over him, shocked and ashamed, and stuck in wet shoes for the rest of the evening. I didn’t like the idea of how triumphantly malicious I’d feel, about how I’d screw up that club-tie kid’s chance to talk to Someone Really Goddamn Important, when he ought to be clearing cocktail glasses off of linen tablecloths.

And then General Burnside said, “You want another beer?” and I did.

And we left.

But, maybe, if I’d seen the Washington Post article back then, I would have rushed Mitt.

After all, of all the guys who want to have their finger on the national trigger, we now know that Mitt’s the one who can take a joke.

Notes:

[1] I hate saying that. The cognitive dissonance I experience typing the words “I was bullied in school” is so great that I’m almost overwhelmingly tempted to delete the following 600 words (which, agreed, might well be a blessing for both the reader and me).

On the one hand, the term “bullied” carried nowhere near the weight then – either for kids or for adults in education –  that it does now. Back then it never dawned on me to take my problems to a teacher or administrator. I simply could not fathom what they might do about any of it. Consequently, I’m a big, unstunted grown-up man now, and feel like “it’s all water under the bridge” and “didn’t mean anything.” There are kids – even today, and certainly in the 1960s, as the Washington Post article demonstrates – who suffer a great deal more at the hands of their peers than I ever did. What I experienced was mild by comparison. Or, at least, that’s what I want to say. Hey, I’m fine! “It gets better,” kids!

On the other hand – which I’ll just arbitrarily call my left hand, the one that clicks and grinds when I rotate my wrist even now, 20-plus years on – I was bullied right into a broken arm, and bullied beyond. I was bullied right up until I stopped giving a fuck about what it should mean to be “one of the guys” – which happened to coincide with my classes largely switching to being mixed-gender. (When I attended Cranbrook the middle schools were entirely gender segregated, as were a good portion of the freshman and sophomore humanities classes. Having seen firsthand – both as a student and a teacher – how young American men railroad young American women in classroom discussions, I have trouble beefing with this policy. A lot of the girls really liked it. But if you’re an effete, loud-mouthed, heterosexual fat-boy who has trouble socializing with males, single-sex education is pretty hellish.)

So yeah, I also got pushed and shoved and snotted on and tripped and my hair surreptitiously clipped and that broken wrist and . . . well, that’s as honest as I’m going to be about it. The things that were most hurtful will sound so mild in the telling that maybe it’s better to leave it there. In 1999, when coverage of the University of Michigan’s Naked Mile was interrupted to report on something awful that had happened in a little Denver town with the floral name of Columbine – and in the following years, as we started zero-tolerancing all sorts of bullied kids out of our public schools – I understood those boys, all those terrible boys who made threats, who packed heat, who lashed out. I understood because I remembered sitting on the benches that line Cranbrook’s beautiful, wood-paneled halls with my buddy General Ambrose Burnside (not his real name), and talking about how we might stalk through the Quadrangle, who we’d kill, in what order, and how. But not why. Why was pretty self-evident.

And, just in case it’s unclear why I never finally cracked and curled finger ’round trigger: It was because the classes were small, and regardless of how one’s peers felt and what they said, the teachers valued a loud-mouthed “fat faggot fuckup” who would try answering any question, no matter how obtuse. If my experience is any indication, then a simply mind-boggling number of young lives are saved each year by well-timed – and likely entirely unknowing – chuckles, back-pats, and tossed off attaboys from over-worked, under-compensated teachers.

Anyway, on the up-side, I was a day student, so I didn’t have to share communal showers with those pricks.

Incidentally, since it may begin to seem important, the bulk of folks who picked on me were my fellow Jews – but that’s really just selection bias: The vast bulk of my peers were Jews.

[2] Yeah, okay, I’ll own that this flourish seems totally excessive. The school song I was most familiar with at Cranbrook was not “Forty Years On” – which I vaguely remember singing at graduation – but “Jerusalem,” which is based on a poem by William Blake and, for a Jew, is probably the most fascinating possible thing to sing in a “nondenominational” church during your “nondenominational” graduation ceremony from a school founded to provide that church with choir boys, situated in the richest community in America. “Satanic mills” indeed.

[3] As an aside, I can see how Horowitz cocked this up. A few grafs earlier he quotes a Romney classmate who says he “commuted from east Detroit” [sic] each day. Unless Horowitz is from the Metro area and older than mid-thirties, he has no reason to know that the speaker is almost certainly not talking about the section of Detroit east of Woodward Avenue – which is usually called the “Eastside” – but rather likely meant “East Detroit,” an entirely separate community that’s bordered on its southern edge by 8 Mile, and thus entirely outside, and north, of Detroit. In 1992 East Detroit changed its name to “Eastpointe” for marketing reasons. But, if you came of age even as late at the ’80s, you likely still think of this as East Detroit. See, for example, this Eminem track – with apologies to women, the Beastie Boys, Kid Rock, and the Loch Ness Monster – around the 2 min 6 sec mark.

[4] I’d hate to give the impression that, by the 1990s, there was any hint of institutional racism or anti-Semitism lingering at the school. Far from it, the institution itself sought to be as broad and inclusive as possible, in terms of teaching staff and student body, and was certainly far more diverse than the neighboring public schools (esp. in terms of nationality). It was also overrun with Jews like me. By the time I graduated, the Jewish High Holidays were also school holidays, purely for pragmatic reasons: It was impossible to get anything done on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur because a quarter of the school was gone. I’m not arguing that 1990s Cranbrook was a Rainbow Coalition Utopia, I just want folks to have an accurate picture of what the aristocracy was in the 1990s.

[5] I knew exactly one Mormon who attended Cranbrook in the seven years I was there – which certainly makes Mormons the most extreme minority at Cranbrook, far outnumbered by Jews, Hindus, Muslims, African-Americans, homosexuals, Latinos, Canadians, lady hockey players, etc. He was a nice – if, upon reflection, somewhat odd – kid who was widely accepted, and happened to be either a nephew or cousin to Jim Davis (of “Garfield” fame). Nonetheless, I’d be dishonest if I said anything other than this: “His Mormon cosmology was mercilessly mocked as ludicrous, primarily by the Jews I knew and spent the most time with.” Before you judge us too harshly, please bear in mind that we were total and unforgivable assholes.

[6] At that time I had a beef with Middlesex County, Mass, as a consequence of a snow-emergency/parking/towing/plastic-Santa situation that had gotten somewhat out of control. There’s no sense pointing fingers now, but a bench warrant may have been issued. I have subsequently avoided the Commonwealth ever since.

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Image links to the Google digital scan of the 1,204-page volume "Acts of the Legislature of the State of Michigan Passed at the Regular Session of 1859." The act in this screenshot amended the act that incorporated the city of Ann Arbor.

As this year’s May 15 filing deadline nears for Ann Arbor’s Aug. 7 partisan primaries, Laidlaw reflects on how it came to be that Ann Arbor’s local elections involve political parties at all. 

Ann Arbor was incorporated as a city 161 years ago, by a special act of the Michigan legislature in 1851.

At that time, special acts were required to incorporate cities and business corporations. So Act 101 of 1851, which incorporated Ann Arbor, was the original city charter. Subsequent Ann Arbor city charter amendments were also made by special acts of the Michigan legislature – in 1859, 1861, 1867 and 1889. Ann Arbor was governed under the 1889 special act charter until 1956.

The original Act 101 charter established the offices of a mayor, recorder, marshal, street commissioner, assessor, treasurer, three constables, four aldermen, two school inspectors, two directors of the poor, and four justices of the peace.

Demise of Special Act Cities

The 1908 Michigan Constitution moved control of the organization of cities to the local communities. It virtually outlawed the creation of special act cities. However, existing special act cities, like Ann Arbor, were allowed to continue in that form. The Home Rule Act adopted by the legislature in 1909 provided a procedure for existing or future cities to frame their own charters. But it would be a long struggle before Ann Arbor would adopt its own charter.

Home Rule Ann Arbor charters were proposed and voted down in 1913, 1921, and 1939. A big issue was the “radical” idea of replacing the complex governing system with a city manager. The 1889 Ann Arbor charter spread the administration of local government over a mayor, a common council president, 14 aldermen, a three-person board of public works, a three-person board of fire commissioners, a three-person board of public health, and a three-person board of building inspectors.

The idea of replacing citizen control through the various boards was not popular. Also, the Board of Realtors opposed the 1939 revision because of a fear of high taxes. Nonetheless, the cumbersome system of governance persuaded the electorate to approve the establishment of a charter commission in 1953. The commission’s task was to draft a charter according to the Home Rule Act, that could be put before voters.

The charter commissioners struggled with the concept of a city manager. They announced that they did not want a manager position that had full hiring/firing authority or the usual manager’s budget authority. On the other hand, they said they did not want a mere “errand boy.”

Out of this struggle they came up with the concept of a city administrator. The hiring and firing by the city administrator would have to be approved by the city council. The administrator would not even manage all the departments. The assessor and treasurer would report to the mayor. The planning department would report to the planning commission. (A subsequent amendment made the assessor and treasurer report to the city administrator rather than the mayor.)

Partisan Elections for Home Rule Ann Arbor?

Besides organizational governance, the other key issue for the 1953 Ann Arbor charter commission was partisan elections.

The original Act 101 charter addressed a variety of election issues that were not related to partisanship. For example, the original charter authorized the city to provide part of its financing through a poll tax. Section 31 stated:

The common council is authorized to assess and collect from every white male inhabitant of said city, over the age of twenty-one years, (except paupers, idiots and lunatics,) an annual capitation or poll tax not exceeding seventy-five cents; and they may provide by their by-laws for the collection of the same; Provided, That any person assessed for a poll tax may pay the same by one day’s labor upon the streets, under the direction of the street commissioner, who shall give to each person so assessed, notice of the time and place when and where such labor will be required; and the money raised by such poll tax, or the labor in lieu thereof, shall be expended or performed in the respective wards where the person so taxed shall reside.

The 1851 charter made no mention of political parties. But partisan state, national and local elections were provided by state election laws.

Under the 1889 special act charter and state election laws, nominations for the elected offices had been by a partisan primary election. But the Home Rule Act authorized local elections on either a partisan or non-partisan basis. That was a choice the 1953 Ann Arbor charter commission faced. From persons addressing the 1953 Ann Arbor charter commission, there was little support for non-partisan elections. George Wahr Sallade, who was common council president at the time, submitted a statement saying:

I feel very strongly that partisan elections are an indispensable part of the American democratic process. I have no sympathy with the often repeated argument that there is no Republican or Democratic way of collecting the garbage. After all, that could be pursued further with the statement that there is no Republican or Democratic way to build state highways or direct the state police and therefore the state legislature and the office of governor ought to be filled at a non-partisan election.

[Interestingly, Sallade was elected council president and later a state representative as a Republican. But he later ran for state office as a Democrat.]

Attorney John Dobson told the charter commissioners:

… I urge the retention of the present partisan election system for our local office holders. In Ann Arbor, at least, it seem[s] clear that the citizens have a much greater interest in partisan elections than they do in those which are non-partisan. The records of the persons voting in city government elections as compared with those voting in the city school elections makes this clear. Further, I strongly believe in party responsibility for candidates. By this, I mean that the party offering a candidate for office must assume responsibility for that candidate’s conduct in office. Thus the parties maintains [sic] or should maintain a continuing interest in their candidates performance. They can influence the candidate toward a better performance, and, if this influence is unsuccessful, can eliminate him. I feel that both parties in this community have, generally speaking, met this obligation.

However, a letter from the Ypsilanti manager to the charter commission stated:

I believe whole-heartedly in non-partisan City elections despite the strong argument that partisan politics create interest. I do not believe that a City government’s purpose is to promote interest in politics and parties, as such. I would prefer that government concentrate on service, efficiency and effectiveness and rely on the quality of these to generate and promote interest in local government.

The arguments in favor of partisan elections prevailed. In the report to citizens before the election to approve the charter, the charter commission stated:

The nomination and election of Mayor and Councilmen will continue to be on a partisan basis.

Multi-Party Ann Arbor

Elsie Deeren, who analyzed the 1953 charter commission’s work, offered this explanation for the commission’s recommendation to retain partisan elections:

The support of both political parties had many implications in a town that is predominately Republican, because support by one party only might have made the issue a partisan one rather than a common non-partisan aim for “good government.” Here too it might be said that abandonment of the aim for non-partisan elections was probably very helpful in gaining the support of the Republican party, since, as the controlling party, it would naturally look at any change with a view to the political dominance in town, and non-partisanship would perhaps be regarded as a Democratic device to get more members in office.

To say in 1955 that Ann Arbor was “predominately Republican” was a bit of an understatement. That dominance began with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. In Ann Arbor, Dwight D. Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson by more than two to one. John F. Kennedy did barely better against Richard Nixon. Along the way, several Democrats were elected as mayors. And in 1913 a member of the Progressive Party was elected as an alderman. But Republicans remained firmly in control of the city council until 1969.

Buoyed by a drive to register students, in 1969 law professor Robert Harris was elected mayor along with a Democratic slate of councilmembers. The Democrats gained an eight-to-three majority on the council. Registering students was not an easy task because of a state law that created a presumption that a student’s home town was the place of residency for voting purposes. Students wishing to register in Ann Arbor had to answer questions that would determine whether they still had ties to their home towns. But that changed in 1972 when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the law that created the home town presumption was unconstitutional.

In 1971, the 26th amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted. It guarantees the right to vote for citizens over 18 years of age. It overrode the 21 year minimum voting age in the Michigan Constitution and made thousands of additional students eligible to vote in Ann Arbor. Given the propensity of the students to vote Democratic, it looked like the Democrats had a lock on control of the city council. But student activism had moved to the left of the Democratic party.

In 1972, the Human Rights Party (HRP) elected two members to city council seats and pushed a radical agenda. Ann Arbor became a three-party town. In 1973, the HRP nominated a candidate for mayor. That resulted in a split of the progressive vote between the HRP and the Democrats; so Republican James Stephenson won the mayor’s seat, despite getting just 47% of the vote.

To avoid that situation in future elections, the HRP succeeded in pushing a charter amendment for preferential voting – a variant of instant-runoff voting (IRV). Under that system, voters could designate first and second choices on the ballot. If a voter’s first choice did not win, the second choice would be counted to reach the total. In 1975, James Stephenson got the most first place votes, but when the second choices were added, Democrat Albert Wheeler was declared the winner. The election was challenged in court, but the Home Rule Act specifically authorizes preferential voting, and the election of Wheeler was upheld.

The last year the HRP managed to elect an Ann Arbor city councilmember was 1974. In 1976, voters approved a charter amendment repealing preferential voting, and the HRP faded from the scene. In the following 19 years, city council control bounced back and forth between the Democrats and Republicans. That bouncing was ended by a 1992 charter amendment, which changed election dates. [.pdf of current Ann Arbor city charter]

Moving Election Dates

The original 1851 charter called for city elections to be held on the first Monday in April. That definition of election day persisted for 131 years, until an amendment of the current charter in 1992 moved the election to November.

The amendment moved the city primary election from February to August and the city general election from April to November. Proponents of the amendment contended it would result in city council contests being decided at an election with the largest voter turnout. Eventually, however, the result was the opposite. The Republican Party virtually disappeared from Ann Arbor politics. No Republican has been elected to city council since 2003.

Ann Arbor city council contests are now functionally decided among Democrats in the August primary when the lowest voter turnout can be expected. Ann Arbor is once again a one-party town.

Other Cities with Partisan Elections

Ann Arbor is one of only three Michigan cities that still have partisan voting in local elections. The other two are Ypsilanti and Ionia. [Ypsilanti convened a charter commission last year that submitted to the state attorney general a draft charter that would change Ypsilanti's local elections to be non-partisan. But up to now the attorney general's office has not completed its review of the new language.]

In 1985, a Chamber of Commerce-based group held a petition drive for a charter amendment that would have made the Ann Arbor local elections non-partisan. It appeared that enough signatures had been obtained to put the matter on the ballot. However, one of the circulators filled out the petitions improperly. That flaw proved fatal for getting the matter on the ballot.

But the 2011 Ann Arbor city council elections revealed a small chink in the partisan armor that the charter commissioners drafted for the 1956 charter, and that was ratified by voters. The charter makes it possible only for potential nominees of a political party to participate in the August primary election. However, language that was probably inadvertent allows a person to become a nominee in the November election without a party designation.

In 2011, Jane Lumm – who had served on council as a Republican from 1993-98 – chose that approach in the Ward 2 city council election, and proved that city voters are willing to vote for a candidate who does not have a D or an R printed on the ballot next to their name.

The Ann Arbor city council now consists of 10 Democrats and one independent.

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John U. Bacon

This week, the University of Michigan celebrated the 40th anniversary of Title IX, with a host of speakers and panels discussing the historic legislation and its impact on girls, women and the United States itself.

It all started pretty quietly. Just a sentence buried in the back of the Education Amendments Act of 1972.

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Just a sentence – one that seems pretty straightforward to us, even self-evident. But that little line stirred up our society in ways that few pieces of legislation ever have. We call it Title IX – and perhaps only the Civil Rights Acts changed our nation the past century more dramatically – or did more good.

But nowhere in that powerful paragraph do the authors say one word about sports. It’s not really about sports, but educational opportunities. It says a lot about Americans’ unequaled belief in the value of school sports, that we consider them essential to a comprehensive education.

Unlike the Civil Rights Acts, Title IX didn’t even register with most Americans when it passed. But the NCAA’s leaders recognized its potential immediately, and did everything they could to stop it. They were joined by congressmen, school presidents, principals, athletic directors and coaches coast to coast, all trying to limit it, or kill it altogether. But the durable Title IX has survived every attempt to cut it down.

Still, it seemed like just an arcane legal issue, until a year later, when a seemingly meaningless tennis match – just an exhibition between an old man and a woman 26 years his junior – made it very real, very fast.

The man happened to be a 55-year old guy named Bobby Riggs, a Hall of Fame player who had won six major championships, and swept Wimbledon’s singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles – in 1939.

He was also an incorrigible hustler. When he first challenged Billie Jean King – who would win 39 major titles in her career – to an exhibition match, she declined. But after Riggs crushed top-ranked Margaret Court, half his age, to earn a Sports Illustrated cover story, King felt she had to accept. They would play the “Battle of the Sexes” for the biggest payday in the history of the sport – and bragging rights that would be shared by half the country’s population.

King had no illusions about the stakes. “I accepted the challenge,” she said, “so that girls and women could feel positive about participating in athletics.”

On Sept. 20, 1973, in front of 50 million Americans watching on TV, about a quarter of our population, and a Houston Astrodome packed with more than 30,000 spectators – both still American tennis records – King stayed strong and focused, and won emphatically. In the process, so did millions of American girls, most of whom had not been born yet.

“There should be nothing,” King said, “to stop them from pursuing and fulfilling their dreams.” Before Title IX and the Battle of the Sexes, one in 30 girls played high school sports. Today, more than half do.

Contrary to urban myth, Riggs wanted to win that match, and badly – but his theatrics were mostly promotional. He had been taught the game by a woman, won many mixed doubles titles, and fervently believed women should play sports. It was an act – but a hell of an act.

Over the years, Riggs and King became close friends, and talked often. The night before Riggs died of cancer, King called him to say, “I love you.”

It all started with a single sentence – and it ended with one, too.

In between, everything changed.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

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Local artist Alvey Jones is a partner in the WSG Gallery, at 306 S. Main in downtown Ann Arbor. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our occasional features like Bezonki, which in turn help support a local artist. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

One of the arsenical wallpapers in "Shadows".

It is one of only two known copies to exist in the state. If not for its historical importance, even the most fervent bibliophile might agree: the fewer copies in the world the better.

“Shadows from the Walls of Death” is dangerous not in the sense of a book containing radical ideas. Nor is it dangerous in the way a bomb-building manual might be. In fact, after the title page and preface, the following 86 pages, each one measuring about 22 by 30 inches, contain no printed words at all.

Michigan State University holds the other copy of “Shadows” in its Special Collections library division. The volume is sealed in a protective container, and each page is individually encapsulated.

Prospective “readers” of “Shadows” at the Buhr building must wear blue plastic protective gloves. During a visit to the Buhr some days ago, the book was wheeled out slowly on its individual cart. The marbled pattern on the cover showed through a protective thick-gauge plastic bag.

I held my breath as I gingerly eased open the cover, and while “reading” the pages I was careful to avoid any skin contact. “Shadows” is saturated with a deadly amount of arsenic.

UM alum Robert Kedzie created “Shadows from the Walls of Death.” After receiving his degree with the medical school’s first graduating class, in 1851, Kedzie established a medical practice in Kalamazoo and later Eaton County’s Vermontville. He left his practice, along with his wife and three sons, to serve as a Civil War surgeon with Michigan’s 12th Regiment. Kedzie was captured and imprisoned at Shiloh, but paroled.

In 1863 he returned to Michigan to chair Michigan Agricultural College’s (MSU’s) chemistry department. Some three decades later, Kedzie imported 1,700 pounds of beet seeds from Europe in a campaign to assess the suitability of Michigan soil for sugar beet production. The seed was sent to 400 Lower Peninsula farmers. Of those, 228 responded and mailed beets back to Lansing for analysis. They were found to contain 14% sugar. Michigan’s beet sugar industry was born.

Before donning the mantle of “Father of the Michigan Beet Sugar Industry,” Kedzie was elected to serve with the state’s board of health when it formed in 1873. He chaired the committee on “Poisons, Special Sources of Danger to Life and Health, &c.” Kedzie wasted no time in reporting his chief concern in an essay, “Poisonous Papers,” included in the Board of Health’s inaugural 1874 report.

He called attention to a problem raised by Massachusetts’ board of health in 1872 – the widespread use of wallpaper colored with arsenical pigment.

Another arsenical wallpaper from "Shadows."

The story of Napoleon poisoned by arsenical wallpaper while imprisoned on the island of St. Helena in 1815 is a familiar rumor. Largely forgotten, however, is that arsenical wallpaper was common and widely used in Michigan, Massachusetts, and elsewhere in the 19th-century United States. In 1887, the American Medical Association estimated that between 1879 and 1883, 54–65% of all wallpaper sold in the United States contained arsenic, a third of which at dangerous levels. Over time, the poisonous pigment could flake or be brushed off the wallpaper and float in the air as inhalable dust or settle on furniture in the home.

Kedzie cited several cases of wallpaper poisoning in his essay, including one from a family in Manchester in Washtenaw County.

The walls of one bed-room were covered with a paper the ground work of which was stone color with bands of bright green ornamented with gilt. The daughter, Emma, aged 9, occupied this room for several months. Soon after occupying the room her health began to fail, and she exhibited the following symptoms: Lameness, resembling rheumatism, darting pains in various portions of the body; languor in the morning, feverishness, pains in the head and about the frontal sinuses, sores in various parts of the body, faint spells, turning white about the mouth, and great loss of flesh. The best medical advice that could be procured was obtained, but no essential improvement followed. Whenever she left home for a few weeks her health improved; but she relapsed into her former condition on returning home.

Kedzie tested the paper and found it contained a high level of arsenic. Emma was removed from the room and regained her health.

An Economical Dye

Originally a byproduct of the European mining industry, arsenic offered mining companies a means of profiting from a waste product, and offered manufacturers a means of obtaining a cheap dye. Thousands of tons were annually imported to the United States. The substance produced lovely hues ranging from deep emerald to pale sea-green. Arsenic could also be mixed into other colors, giving them a soft, appealing pastel appearance.

The first application of arsenic as a pigment was as a paint dye. The pale green shade caught on as a “refined” color. American manufacturers began using arsenic to color a range of consumer goods. Children’s toys were painted with arsenical paint. Arsenic-dyed paper was used in greeting cards, stationery, candy boxes, concert tickets, posters, food container labels, mailing labels, pamphlets, playing cards, book-bindings, and envelopes –envelopes the sender had to lick.

“A professor at the Agricultural College,” wrote Kedzie in “Poisonous Papers,” “brought home a package of lead pencils around which was a broad band of beautiful green paper. His little children, attracted by the beautiful color of this paper, wanted it to play with, but he handed it to me for analysis, and I found it contained enough arsenic to poison all of them.” Kedzie went on to cite cases involving a baby’s toy box decorated with green paper, a U.S. Express Co. package with a green mailing label, and green store price tags, all of which tested positive for arsenic.

Arsenic Elsewhere

In 19th-century Michigan, arsenic served as a home rat poison and insecticide – even childrens’ stuffed animals were dusted with it by manufacturers to prevent infestation. Arsenic appeared in green lampshades, cosmetics, and copper cookware. It was used to color candy and glaze fudge. Cheesemakers sometimes threw a pinch or two into the cheesemaking vat in the hope of killing ptomaine.

Ypsilanti druggist Frank Smith sold Paris Green and wallpapers that like as not were impregnated with arsenic, as seen in this 1878 ad.

Arsenic was an ingredient in many patent medicines. As late as 1921 the American Medical Association was still finding arsenic in patent medicines that included Blue Bell Kidney Tablets, Botanic Blood Balm, Wildroot Dandruff Remedy, Dander-Off, Dr. Miles’ Restorative Nervine, La Franco Vitalizer No. 200, and others. Arsenic was also used in mainstream medicine as a treatment for syphilis.

Arsenic was extensively used in 19th-century Michigan agriculture as the ubiquitous insecticide “Paris Green.” It was dusted on tomatoes, potato foliage, cabbage, cucumbers, grapes, melons, and sprayed on fruit trees.

Arsenic-dyed cloth led to an 1860s fad for emerald-green tarlatan-fabric ball gowns. Luckily the trend was short-lived. The 1884 annual report from Massachusetts’ State Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity said, “Attention has very frequently been called to the presence of large amounts of arsenic in green tarlatan, which has given rise so many times to dangerous symptoms of poisoning when made into dresses and worn, so that it is very rare now to see a green tarlatan dress.” The report continued:

This fabric is still used, however, to a very dangerous extent, chiefly for the purposes of ornamentation, and may often be seen embellishing the walls and tables at church and society fairs, and in confectionery, toy and dry-goods stores. The writer has repeatedly seen this poisonous fabric used at church fairs and picnics as a covering for confectionery and food, to protect the latter from flies. As is well known, the arsenical pigment is so loosely applied to the cloth that a portion of it easily separates upon the slightest motion. Prof. Hoffmann after examining a large number of specimens estimated that twenty or thirty grains of the pigment would separate from a dress per hour, when worn in a ball-room.

Two to three grains (130-195 milligrams) could prove fatal if ingested.

Arsenic was also used to dye stockings, underwear, curtains, millinery decorations, artificial flowers, and cloth linings for bassinettes and cribs in a variety of colors. Green flannel boot linings impregnated with arsenic allegedly killed several California gravel miners in 1875. Arsenic poisoning is still a concern for modern-day reenactors who wish to wear authentic Victorian-era clothing.

Mysterious Poisonings

Skin ulcerations are one symptom of arsenic poisoning. Others include headache, abdominal pain, diarrhea, patches of skin discoloration, hair loss, coughing, convulsions, and neuropathy in the hands and feet.

In 19th-century Michigan, those symptoms pertained to a range of diseases. Arsenic poisoning was often diagnosed as conditions that included “general debility,” neuralgia, consumption (tuberculosis), cholera, rheumatism, gastritis, dysentery, or paralysis – all of which commonly appear as causes of death on old Michigan death certificates.

Sometimes the symptoms were not produced by a chronic condition caused by long-term exposure, but by acute conditions deliberately and maliciously created. Over the years, UM served as the state’s resource for toxicological examinations in arsenic poisoning cases.

In the summer of 1846, the Oakland Gazette reported suspicion surrounding the death of one Harriet Russell. Her remains were disinterred and her stomach and intestines sent to Ann Arbor for testing. Silas Douglas of the chemistry department tested the samples and found arsenic. Russell’s husband was taken into custody.

In the summer of 1861, the Grand Traverse Herald reported another suspicious death. Douglas analyzed the stomach contents of one Nicholas Frankinburger of Traverse City, finding a large quantity of arsenic. Douglas’ skills were employed again in 1865 in the notorious Battle Creek Haviland murder case in which Sarah Haviland was accused of poisoning three children. His findings led to her conviction.

In addition to Douglas, other UM toxicologists and pathologists served as analysts and expert witnesses in arsenic poisoning cases. As arsenic was a late 19th-century ingredient in embalming fluid, post-mortem embalming could hide ante-mortem poisoning attempts. In the spring of 1892 the wife of Matthew Millard, a leading businessman of Ionia County, took ill and died. Her husband, a onetime undertaker, embalmed her with injections of arsenic in her mouth and rectum and had her buried.

Pretty green stars conceal a lethal secret.

Due to suspicions of poisoning, Mrs. Millard was exhumed 105 days later and several tissue samples were analyzed. Mrs. Millard was re-buried, then re-exhumed again so that more samples could be taken. Arsenic was found in her internal organs.

The case went to court. The leading toxicological textbook of the day taught that arsenic could not spread to internal organs after death; therefore, said the prosecution, Mrs. Millard’s husband must have poisoned her. Robert Kedzie and UM toxicologist Victor Vaughn testified for the defense, saying that arsenic could indeed spread throughout the body after death; the presence of the poison in the internal organs did not necessarily indicate ante-mortem poisoning. To prove it, Vaughn duplicated the arsenic injection procedure on a corpse and buried it. When exhumed, it was found that the arsenic had spread to the internal organs. Millard was ultimately acquitted.

In the celebrated 1895 New York case of Mary Alice Fleming’s alleged matricide by clam chowder, Vaughn testified for the prosecution. “Dr. Vaughn is the discoverer of tyrotoxicon, the ptomaine poison found in stale milk, and enjoys a world-wide celebrity for original research in toxicology and physiological chemistry,” wrote the June 11, 1896 New York Times. The story went on to say that Vaughn testified about the types and classifications of poisons and described in detail the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. He agreed that it appeared that Mary Alice’s mother had apparently died of arsenic poisoning. Though the prosecution’s case was strong, popular sentiment of the time ran against the death penalty for a woman, and Mary Alice was acquitted.

Vaughn, along with UM pathologist Alfred Warthin also provided analyses in the 1909-1911 Sparling family poisonings in Ubly, near Bad Axe in Michigan’s Thumb area. The father, John Sparling and three of his four sons, Peter, Albert, and Scyrel, died from arsenic and strychnine poisoning in a case that involved alleged improprieties between the mother and a local doctor, Robert Macgregor. Macgregor encouraged her to take out life insurance policies on her family members. Vaughn and Warthin found evidence of arsenic poisoning, and Macgregor went to Jackson State Prison with a life sentence, though he was later pardoned by Governor Ferris.

Nearly four decades earlier, Robert Kedzie had delivered his own verdict: arsenical wallpapers must be eliminated from the state. In 1874 he collected numerous wallpaper samples from Detroit, Lansing, and Jackson stores, cut them into pages, and had them bound into 100 books which he distributed to libraries around Michigan.

The dainty and artistic wallpaper samples stand in contrast to a dire Biblical quotation on the title page of “Shadows of the Walls of Death”:

And behold, if the plague be in the walls of the house, with hollow strakes, greenish or reddish, … Then the priest shall go out of the house to the door of the house, and shut up the house seven days. … And he shall cause the house to be scraped within round about, and they shall pour out the dust that they scrape off without the city into an unclean place.

Kedzie’s public health campaign was reported to have poisoned one lady who examined the book, but it otherwise effectively publicized the dangers of living in a house papered in arsenic. Scraps of arsenical wallpaper may still be found here and there in historical homes, now merely an antique curiosity to be removed for safety’s sake. It is no longer a silent everyday threat disguised as beautiful patterns on the walls.

Mystery Artifact

Last month, Jim Rees and Poohbah correctly guessed that the object was a blowtorch (honorable mention goes to Irene Hieber for guessing that it was an acetylene torch – you were right about the torch part).

Mystery Object

This artifact is a recent acquisition to the author’s collection (translation: scavenged from a curbside pile of junk while walking the dogs) and I can’t wait to try it out!

On second thought, I think I can wait.

This month’s Mystery Artifact dates from an era of more leisurely communication. This tiny cylinder had a specific function, but what was it?

Where in the house could you find it?

What did it do?

Take your best guess and good luck!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and “Hidden History of Ypsilanti.” Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

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Describe what you see, but only what you can see.

Description. Analysis. Explanation. Remember those three concepts.

Last month I participated in a video teleconference with students who are members of Bowling Green State University’s Online News Association. It’s a group that’s advised by department of journalism and public relations faculty member Dave Sennerud. The focus that evening was on hyperlocal news sites, which is a specialty of BGSU’s Mike Horning. Horning recently completed a dissertation on that topic at Penn State University.

I view any interaction like that video conference as a chance to evangelize a bit about The Chronicle’s approach to writing the news – which prioritizes description over storytelling. And that chance came when a general question was posed about advice to journalism majors who will be entering the field.

My advice: Got a journalism degree? That’s great, but I’d prefer that you were a scientist.

As we used to say back in Indiana, that is currently a mute point. Right now, although the amount of advertising and individual subscriber support continues to increase each month, not enough readers subscribe voluntarily and not enough advertisers purchase ads for us to contemplate hiring additional full-time staff. But that’s the direction we’re working towards, to supplement our freelance reporters and to make our own workload more sustainable.

So while we’re not in a hiring mode now, we do anticipate a time when we’ll be making those decisions, and it makes sense to think about the type of skills we’d like a reporter to have.

The main skill a Chronicle reporter needs – and the one I think the entire field of journalism has largely forgotten – is the ability to describe, in detail, an event or an issue in a way that is designed mostly to engage the intellect of readers, not their emotions. It’s actually a scientific skill. But that approach to writing the news contrasts with the way institutional journalism has evolved to train its next generation of practitioners.

If basic description is a part of traditional, institutional journalism, it’s typically well-hidden, behind attempted analysis and attempted explanation – in the form of “stories.” And when I write the word “stories,” I put those scare quotes around it consciously. That’s so it’s not confused with other ways of referring to items that might appear in a journalistic publication, like “articles,” “briefs” or “reports.”

Most items that are written by traditional journalists these days are attempts at “stories” in that term’s literal sense – a narrative with a conflict, a plot, and characters who say interesting and provocative things. But as a reporter, if you begin with the idea of a story you want to tell, you’ve ordered your task backwards.

As a reporter, if you’re injecting description (i.e., facts) into your story only in service of your preconceived narrative, then you might miss the fact that a complete and comprehensive description actually contradicts the conclusion of the story you decided in advance you wanted to write.

As a reporter, if you’re asking yourself, “Can I get a ‘story’ out of this board meeting I’m attending?” then you’re asking the wrong question. The question you should be asking is, “Should I write up a report of this board meeting from the notes I’m taking anyway?”

As a reporter, if you’re idling at a public meeting waiting for the participants to say something quotable, so that the characters in your “story” have interesting lines to deliver, then you’re probably squandering an opportunity. That’s the opportunity to write down and describe all the boring and not-very-quotable, possibly even barely coherent remarks of public officials. Writing all that down could inform a far richer and deeper understanding of your subject matter – for yourself and for your readers.

Now, reports filled with description are not typically rewarded within the field of journalism. But competent news writing depends on the ability to render comprehensive description in the same way that good science depends on good data. Good science understands the difference between description, analysis and explanation. And most science consists of the work of description, which many people find boring.

I’d like to illustrate more specifically what that means by taking a look at two scientific fields – linguistics and chemistry.

Linguistics: Descriptive Work

My experience in the field of linguistics culminated in a failed (undefended) dissertation with the title, “Syllables, Schmyllables.” Among other ideas, it proposed a theoretical notion of the “schmyllable” in addition to the more familiar “syllable.” The schmyllable, I argued, could help analyze familiar phonological puzzles in a way that actually explained the existence of sound patterns across several different languages. It was filled with all sorts of “mathy” talk about sets and 1-1 correspondences and partial orderings.

While that work was long on attempted analysis and attempted explanation, it was short on description. It introduced no new data. It relied exclusively on examples in the published literature. But that’s not what doomed the dissertation to languish undefended.

In fact, based on what I saw – from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s – the field of linguistics actually preferred attempted analysis and explanation over “mere” descriptive work. That’s partly based on a “story” in the form that I recall hearing it from Philip LeSourd. At the time, I was a graduate student and he was a visiting professor at the University of Rochester sometime in the mid-1990s.

In the narrative I’ve preserved in my head, LeSourd had worked on a dictionary project for the Native American language called Passamaquoddy. Now, along the continuum of description, analysis and explanation, creating a dictionary is closer to the descriptive end. For example, the work involves describing the set of sounds used in the language, cataloging them, inventorying words and the like. That’s not to understate the fair amount of analysis required as well. For example, should we consider those noises as one sound that has two predictable variants? Or should we consider them as two separate sounds, which we represent with separate symbols in the alphabet?

But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not deem that descriptive endeavor to merit the award of a dissertation, and LeSourd had to produce additional analyses of Passamaquoddy – in the predominant formal phonological framework of the day – in order for the work to qualify as a significant contribution to the field of linguistics.

It’s from David Perlmutter – now professor emeritus at University of California, San Diego, who was one of LeSourd’s mentors – that I learned to appreciate the difference between description, analysis and explanation. I remember it, because he would often say to me things like, “See now, there’s description, analysis, and explanation. Which, if any, of those things are you trying to do here?”

For readers who are unaccustomed to thinking of linguistics as a science, it’s worth considering a field more commonly thought of that way, like chemistry.

Chemistry: What Do You See?

The lab manual for my first course in high school chemistry was called “Merrill Laboratory Chemistry,” co-authored by my teacher, David Haines. As I recall it, the first laboratory experiment involved lighting a candle and then watching it burn for an entire class period. The laboratory task was to record in the lab manual just what we saw happening.

That was a quintessentially descriptive task. And it’s not as easy as you might think, once you grasp what’s meant by “description” in this context.

For example, here’s the effort of a hypothetical student at this descriptive task:

Candle is burning.
Burning candle, wax is starting to melt.
Liquid wax is dripping down the sides of the burning candle.
Candle is getting shorter.
Flame is flickering.

I think it’s a poor effort. It’s not a poor effort by dint of a lack of detail. It’s a poor effort because it uses words that are already analytical, instead of purely descriptive. A possible commentary on that “description”:

You’ve used this word, “burning.” What do you mean by that? Do you mean to be talking about phlogiston leaving the candle? Or do you mean to be referring to a chemical reaction involving oxygen? Do you really mean to be describing the three-dimensional orangish, yellowish area above the white cylinder that’s shaped roughly like a teardrop and that moves around a bit?

Or take these words “melt” and “liquid.” What’s that exactly? Why are you convinced that the translucent stuff you’re seeing at the top of the white cylinder that tends to move around a bit is made of the same stuff the white cylinder is made of? Is that something you can see? Or have you already analyzed this situation, because you think you know what’s going on? What if that translucent stuff is being created by the orangish area out of some stuff in the air and deposited there on top of the white cylinder?

Of course, any words we might choose as a description are likely vulnerable to the criticism that they reflect some prior analysis that we’ve brought to the exercise. “Orangish,” you say?

Journalism: Let’s Be Scientists

The point of the candle-burning example is not to encourage journalists to start describing burning candles as “white cylinders with three-dimensional orangish areas above them.”

The point is that journalists need the ability to recognize where their language sits along the continuum  of description, analysis, and explanation. For most general purpose descriptive writing, “burning candle” is probably perfectly benign.

It’s a sorry reflection on the profession that people who are trained as scientists have a better shot at grasping the difference between description and analysis than people who are trained only as journalists.

So when we start hiring reporters, the main question I’ll have is not about an applicant’s ability to write or to tell a good story.

The question I need answered is this: How good a scientist do you think you can be?

About the writer: Dave Askins is editor and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle could not survive to describe, analyze and explain each milestone without regular voluntary subscriptions to support our coverage of local government and civic affairs. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

A few weeks ago, I visited Cape Town, South Africa. It’s a famously beautiful city, right on the ocean – but that’s not what I took away from my trip.

The boat ride from Cape Town to Robben Island is just five miles, and takes only 30 minutes. But to the prisoners held there, starting in the 17th century, it might as well be on the dark side of the moon. Only a handful even tried to escape, and none of them made it – most notably Makana, a famed 19th century Xhosa leader, who drowned halfway to freedom.

Sixty years ago, when the Apartheid government rounded up resistance leaders in Pretoria and Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg and Capetown, it sent them to Robben Island. The plan was simple: cut off the snake’s head, and the body dies.

But the prisoners outwitted their captors. By putting the strongest resistors all in one place, the government gave its enemies their first chance to work together – and an ideal training ground for taking down the government when they left.

But for this education, the prisoners paid dearly. The black inmates were given a small, rough mat to sleep on, a blanket as thin as the gruel they ate, and no shoes or coats when the cold came. But the guards were quite generous with one thing: beatings. Some were lethal.

The prisoners broke rocks every day in the quarry. When I stood in the middle of this place, the midday sun off the white stone was so bright, I could barely keep my eyes open. Working here for years, many prisoners went blind. To this day, photographers are asked not to use a flash when they take former prisoner Nelson Mandela’s picture. His eyes can’t take it.

But the prisoners refused to lower themselves to the level of their captors. When the uneducated guards often complained that they couldn’t pass their tests for promotions, the prisoners took it on themselves to tutor their oppressors, and gradually wear down their hatred.

When the prisoners got the nerve to ask the warden to play soccer on Saturdays, he waited several years before granting permission, according to the book, “More Than a Game.” When he finally did, he figured they would be far too tired after a hard week in the quarry to play.

He was wrong about that. They played, and they played. For 30 minutes a week, they were not prisoners. They were free. The feeling was so intoxicating, they formed teams, and then a league they called the Makana Football Association, in honor of the Xhosa warrior who drowned escaping.

They found a rulebook from FIFA, the international soccer federation, in the tiny prison library, and adhered to the federation’s strictest edicts. They kept detailed statistics, they administered training tests for the referees, and they conducted formal hearings to disciplined players and officials alike. They even created their own constitution, which runs longer than our nation’s.

The Makana league became so popular they formed a second league to meet the demand, and then a third. They eventually added volleyball, tennis, and rugby – the so-called “white man’s sport” – and presented their own Makana Olympics.

They learned a lot more than sports. They learned how to negotiate with their oppressors, they learned how to govern themselves, and most important, they learned how to break down their own political and social barriers to band together as one. Only when they stuck together, they quickly discovered, did they have any power at all.

When the warden pushed them too far, the prisoners boycotted the next week’s treasured soccer games. And the next. And the next. Every single one of them stubbornly stayed in their cells. It pained them – but it apparently pained the warden more. He, not they, finally backed down.

When the prisoners were released, they returned to their homeland with more confidence, more determination and more political skill than when they had arrived. The government had intended Robben Island to serve as a quarantine – but by sheer will and wits, the prisoners transformed it into an incubator, where they learned from each other, and taught the next generation what to do.

When the Apartheid government finally fell, and the people elected Nelson Mandela the new president, he filled many of the top posts in his government with leaders from the Makana Football Association – including three cabinet ministers, and the current president. In 2004, these very leaders brought the World Cup to Africa for the first time – which they announced, alongside Pele and other legends, on Robben Island.

My tour guide was a former prisoner. When we talked the next day about the Makana Football Association, I asked him what team he played on.

“The Rangers,” he said, beaming with pride. “We were very good!”

No, I told him, you were not very good.

You were great.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!