The Marshall Plans
Thinking outside the (pine) box
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
— T.S. Eliot
By Thom Marshall
Coming out of retirement to write about my plans is like considering a long car trip when all you have is a rusty ratty worn out jalopy. You expect to be uncomfortable and apprehensive the whole way, if you make it that far. So why do it?
Our wonderful land is suffering now from so many aches and pains and wounds that I can almost hear the Statue of Liberty beseeching, “We need plans. A great many plans.
To save us from each other.
To save us from ourselves.
To bring us together.
Plans that will make jobs.
Plans about repairing broken government parts.
Plans for modernizing the outdated things and invigorating the worn and over-patched things.
Also, please include plans to help the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free who are overwhelming our southern border.
It, then, boils down to patriotic duty. Because I have plans. Plans I’m happy to share. I love coming up with them and could never choose to stop.
What I retired from, almost two decades ago, feeling burned out and old, was writing. Now I am really old. Matter of fact, Joe Biden and I are the same age, about. We both were born during the Roosevelt administration (Franklin D., not Theodore).
Life happened. We followed our different career paths and then, several years after my retirement, darned if old Joe didn’t get himself elected president. Not that we are close, Joe and I. In fact, our paths never crossed for even as much as a selfie together.
Still, I feel a connection because we have shared for some 80 years the wild ride on this train called America, now rocking so violently upon such a bad stretch of track that a major derailment and colossal crash appear almost inevitable. I figure, what the hell, if old Joe believes he is up for another term in the locomotive, least I can do is fasten my seatbelt back in the caboose and write again — about my plans. However difficult it might be.
These shaky fingers, now slow and unsure on the keyboard, once danced on letters like Gene Kelly on city sidewalks. It all started back when a manual typewriter was my partner and connecting to readers required the sacrifice of forests.
I was a newspaperman. Earned my pay by making words jump through hoops like circus dogs. Now, one or another of them turns feral and hides from me.
As for my plans, calling them “plans” may be somewhat generous as they generally deal more in generalities than specifics. No blueprints included. Instead of stating, “This is how to do it,” they mean to ask, “What if we tried something like this?” The hope being that my plans might inspire others to offer their plans, and so on, until… well, you know, someone eventually actually makes something work.
To paraphrase Thomas Edison, accomplishments are one percent plan and ninety-nine percent sweat. My earliest attempts admittedly did not amount to a full one percent. Like my plan for leveling the social structure back in the old hometown. In a nutshell, it called for doing away with trains so we could pull up all the rails, resulting in no wrong side of the tracks to live on or be from. It didn’t spark any interest. In a nutshell it belonged.
A bit later, I had a plan to enter the casual wear market with a garment to give the ubiquitous T-shirt serious competition. A simple vest. Easier to don than a T-shirt, with just as much space for silkscreening commentary, advertising, or vacation souvenir pictures. The Berry Vest, would be the brand name, so as to advertise, “The Berry Vest your money can buy.”
Someone suggested apparel could be produced for a pittance in a foreign sweatshop using child labor. I wouldn’t do that. I didn’t even want people to think I might be doing that. So I scrapped the garment plan.
Then there was my plan to introduce a new food item at the State Fair of Texas — one-handed chili. People walking around the fairgrounds holding hands with a sweetheart or a youngster or toting a bagful of souvenir items cannot eat chili with spoons from bowls. So how about Chili CONE Carne, an extra-thick mix of the spicy comestible served in a sturdy cone-shaped tortilla?
But upon considering the amount that one would have to eat just to develop the product, I flushed it. Who likes chili that much anyway?
In the days before Shark Tank and fundraising internet sites, some plans died in infancy from cost considerations. That category includes my plan for a national chain of inner city high rise high class trailer park-ing garages, for RV owners who work downtown and want a familiar and comfortable place to sleep just a short stroll from the office and more affordable than any comparably located apartment.
As one plan after another failed, I came to realize how much I enjoyed making them anyway. Something like an artist painting a bowl of fruit. So what, if you can’t eat the apple? So what, if a plan fails to fly?
One, however, did, for a while at least, about 40 years ago. I saw a newspaper classified ad for a used extended Checker cab with four doors on each side and seating to easily accommodate a dozen passengers. Cheap. I showed the ad to David McHam, friend and coworker at the Dallas Times Herald (which closed in December 1991).
“I was thinking we might go look at this,” I said. “And if we like it we might get a bunch others to chip in and buy it and make it a sort of press club on wheels.”
“You want to go after work?” McHam said.
He was part time at the paper, summers and holidays, when not in front of a university classroom. He eventually set a Texas record for teaching journalism longer than anyone else — 54 years — at Baylor University, Southern Methodist University, University of Texas at Arlington, and University of Houston. His former students may be found atop some leading news media organizations across America. Back when I showed him the ad, McHam already had many former students working in the Dallas area — a pool of potential members.
Thus was born “The Mostly North Dallas and Strictly Better Parts of Fort Worth Rolling Press Club.”
After we arranged to purchase the vehicle, the first co-worker we pitched on charter membership was Molly Ivins.
“How much do you want?” she said, pulling out a checkbook.
Molly, already becoming famous for her column wit, enjoyed membership and took its responsibilities humorously. Upon winning a Dallas Press Club Katie award — a foot tall statue of a nude woman — she promptly unscrewed the figure from its base and brought it to me.
“This nekkid lady aspires to become the hood ornament on our limo,” she said.
Sadly, a lawyer in the club advised that would not be legal as the nearly five-pound statue might injure or kill someone in case of an accident. Molly loved the stretched car no less. When some friends from New York came to visit, she took them in it for a tour of Dallas night spots.
Next morning I found it parked at a strange angle with a note on the windshield.
Dear Thom —
Well, you see, the limo would not fit in the driveway behind all those other cars, so I backed it out again to park it in front of your place and neatly ran over your mailbox.
Now that wouldn’t be so bad — what is another mashed mailbox in this vexatious world — except I impaled the limo on the mailbox post and can’t get it off.
I console myself with the thought that you will greet this somewhat unusual dilemma with your usual calm. I only wish I were around to see you cope.
Yours trusting that a mailbox could never come between friends,
Molly I.
I saved this note inside a book of hers,“Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?,” along with a letter she wrote several years later when I landed a columnist job at the Houston Chronicle.
April 19. 1990
Dear Thom
On the late, lamented ‘Lou Grant’ program there was a character who appeared only once every couple of episodes and he had only one line. The guy was a fat, sleazy, alcoholic columnist and he would come oiling up to the regular reporters — Billie and Rossi — and say in his whiny voice, ‘Has anybody got a good idea for a column?’ You will come to identify with that man.
Welcome to the ranks. It’s not as easy as it looks, on the other hand, it beats real work. Your duties as a columnist include keeping up our image, to wit, that we all start drinking gin at 10 a.m., with occasional breaks for wine at lunch and dinner, never check a fact, call all our colleagues ‘Sonny,’ and never work more than two hours a day. Marlyn Schwartz of the Morning News advises that you should never hesitate to steal good lines from your friends — you can always make new friends but it’s hard to get a column.
Love, and more love
Molly
The Rolling Press Club, a lot of fun for a while, was soon to wind down. Events dwindled from a couple a month, to monthly, to every other, to whenever. And then naught.
Life forces pulled other directions. I became father of a magnificent baby girl. I quit drinking and thus lost interest in partying, which had been the purpose of the club. My wife, Jane, accepted a job at the Denver Post and we left for Colorado, where we had another baby girl, also magnificent.
I spent several months as a stay at home dad and struggling freelancer and then got on as Denver bureau manager for United Press International. The man who hired me was Jim Wieck, UPI Southwest Division news editor based in Dallas, whom I had first met when he joined the Rolling Press Club.
Which goes to show you never can tell what good unintended consequences might result from some silly plan.
I think of all these early plans as practice. Like learning scales on a musical instrument. Lady Liberty wants symphony-level plans.
Such as my plan to end all the turmoil and competitive ego measuring that defines the do nothing House of Representatives. The key word is “representatives,” originally referring to those men who were sent to the capitol to represent all the voters back home who had no timely way to personally learn about or weigh in on weighty national issues. Since instantaneous communications have rendered representatives redundant, my plan calls for voter self representation, facilitated by appropriate computer programs.
When committees are needed to conduct hearings or investigate something, committee members would be randomly picked from a pool of voter volunteers. When any issue reached the voting point, each of us would cast one online, quickly and conveniently and free of complications such as lobbyists handing out bri — uh, campaign donations.
And then there is a Marshall plan to end the border crisis. Pyramids.
Building pyramids makes much more sense than putting up a border fence, for many reasons.
- The fence is an eyesore. A pyramid is a tourist attraction.
- Building pyramids would mean jobs for those who are so desperately seeking employment.
- Pyramid builders could enjoy a sense of purpose, of being part of something big and important, of believing in something mysterious and powerful.
- The border fence is limited to the border but pyramids could be built anywhere.
While West Texas has many spots that seem ideally suited, the plan calls for helping other countries get started on their own pyramids. Mexico already has a great many of them but not a single new one put up in centuries. Might be easy to convince the Mexicans to get with the plan.
Venezuela, Honduras, Haiti… any country losing large numbers of its citizens for lack of opportunities doubtless would see the logic in pyramid projects. Financing could come from a variety of sources. Perhaps a billionaire might buy a burial chamber and naming rights, a la the Tomb of Elon in Pyramid X. Mortals of lesser means might pay to have their cremains mixed in with the mortar or buy building blocks with their names engraved.
The Marshall Plan to restructure public schools. It was early September 1950 and we were still getting to know each other when my first grade teacher hung a sign around my neck and made me stand in the hall while all the other kids in South Ward Elementary walked past at recess time.
“I TALK TOO MUCH,” the sign shouted.
That experience made a couple of indelible impressions on this six-year-old: Teachers were bad. School was a torture chamber.
Ten years later I had a speech class teacher who actually appreciated my voluntary improvisations. At the end-of-school-year awards ceremony where individual students were recognized for a variety of achievements, this good teacher presented me with a special trophy FOR COMEDY.
In between those two teacher extremes I encountered mostly mediocrity throughout my years of public education both as a student and as a parent of students. The reason there aren’t more good teachers and thus good schools is because back when our education system was being developed the men in charge followed the wrong models. Each district was set up like a factory or a plantation — a big boss getting rich at the top, next a bunch of managers making serious bucks, and finally down to the workers who actually produce goods or grow crops but earn pitifully small paychecks.
My plan calls for school districts to be structured along the lines of a circus or a Broadway theater, where performers and actors get top billing and star treatment. A professional sports team makes another good model. Players are appreciated, their talents cheered, and the best of them are rewarded with so many dollars that if placed end to end they would circle the globe, probably. Any time a school has teaching positions to fill, my plan calls for auditions or tryouts to be on the internet so parents and students and other interested parties can evaluate and post comments.
Contract offers would be based upon the talents and skills demonstrated, with top teachers signing for sums greater than those paid to principals or superintendents whose roles would become more supportive and less supervisory. Moreover, classrooms all would have cameras to provide online monitoring throughout the year. Parents and other observers could leave comments that might prove helpful in current lesson deliveries as well as future contract renewal negotiations. Teachers with the magic to inspire students to achieve greatness doubtless would go viral and become YouTube sensations, further enhancing their fame and fortune.
More great teachers, more great schools.
Footnote: The phrase “Marshall Plans” and any reference to “my plan,” are accurately applied, to the best of of my knowledge. However, that does not eliminate the possibility that among the eight billion plus people in the world there easily might be someone else who thought up an identical or similar but even better plan.
Case in point: Some years ago I had a plan, called Writers Rodeo, for a website where word people could submit pieces to compete for cash prizes. I even interested some site-managing people in meeting to discuss it. But it fizzled. Too many hurdles. How would entries be judged? How many different events to accommodate how many genres? How to set deadlines? How to collect and divide entry fees? And so on.
Fortunately, someone else came up with a much better plan to provide writers with opportunities. And here we are.
