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Riding the Buses

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

It was another rainy day in Washington as I drove the 60 miles from Olympia to Seattle to interview for the post of executive director of Seattle Metro. In all honesty, the bleak weather fit my mood. My head was throbbing, and I felt uneasy, nervous, lacking in confidence-partly because I would be interviewing with [...]

Evensong at Salisbury Cathedral

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Spiking the sky some 60 miles southwest of London is Britain’s tallest spire. It belongs to Salisbury Cathedral, a magnificent Anglican cathedral built between 1220 and 1258. Several years ago I had the honor of attending an evensong, or evening worship service, there. It was a very powerful experience, one that I can describe only [...]

My First Martini

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

While vacationing on Chappaquiddick with my parents one summer during high school, I got a call from Stuart Higley, one of my dad’s friends, asking if I wanted to walk up the beach and join him for lunch. Chappaquiddick Island I had always enjoyed Mr. Higley. He was a bit different from some of my [...]

Hank Rust

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

Once a year I used to fly up to Alaska to do some serious salmon fishing with my friend Bob, my workmate Pete, and Pete’s wife Linda. Upon arriving in Anchorage we would hop over to Lake Hood, just a short distance from the airport, purchase several cases of beer, and board a single-engine float [...]

School Politics

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Pete was everything an eighth-grade guy wanted to be. As a star on the football team and president of Saxe Junior High, he was loved by girls, praised by parents-and envied by boys. And during the second semester of eighth-grade, I decided to run against him for the coveted junior high presidency. I wasn’t naive. [...]

Sam Smith

Monday, August 31st, 2009

When I was executive director of Seattle’s METRO, I reported to a board of directors forty people strong. Amongst them were the mayor, all nine city council members, the elected county executive, all five county council members, mayors of several nearby cities, and various others. In short, all the key elected officials in the region [...]

The World’s Most Determined Bird

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

When I was thirteen years old, vacationing with my family on Cape Cod, I had a seagull encounter that stuck with me. I loved to go running over the many sand dunes, and on one particular run, I must have gone too close to a seagull nest, because a gull started attacking me. Twenty-five years [...]

Twenty Summers of Life

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

A good friend of mine once explained to me her philosophy of life as she gets older. She calls it the “20 summers philosophy.” I continually give her all the credit for coming up with this, but she claims someone else deserves the real credit, perhaps the guys who wrote the book Twenty Good Summers. [...]

Before ATMs

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

In 1971, at the age of 27, I took my first trip to South America. I had just finished spending the summer in Panama City, Panama, consulting for Booz, Allen and Hamilton. Since I’d earned a lot of vacation credits and was already halfway to South America, I decided to keep heading south for a [...]

Getting a Date in the ’50s

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

During my late teen years, my two best friends and I didn’t have the best success rate getting dates. Why? Because Clipper, Phil, and I would wait until the eleventh hour to try to find dates-well, more specifically, till 5 p.m. on a Saturday night. After playing sports all day-usually tennis-we’d come back to my [...]