May 26, 2011 - the allure of Sally

Recently I visited a friend. Her name is Sally Maguire. She’s dying.

We all are, I suppose. But Sally, age 85 83, has a rare and fast-moving cancer. It started in her sinus cavities, and quickly spread to the rest of her body.

Francis, her husband, died 14 years ago. “It would be nice,” Sally said, “if I believed that I’d see him again when I died.” She looked me straight in the eyes. “But I don’t.”

Sally doesn’t believe in an afterlife. Neither did Francis. There are no cards for secular humanists (I think); but if there were, she could carry one.

Yet, she told me, she wasn’t afraid to die. She’d had a good, long run, and wasn’t interested in extraordinary measures, extraordinary stress and nausea, that would buy her just a few more months.

Instead, she believed that her prognosis – more and more sleep, less and less appetite – didn’t sound like a bad way to leave the world.

Sally and Francis were two of the first people I met in Douglas County. They had a lot to do with why I decided to come here. Any place with people like them, I figured, had to be good.

It took me a while to realize that Sally and Francis would have been rare anywhere.

Sally hailed from the east coast. She attended a fine women’s college there – it eventually merged with Rutgers. Later, she worked in the world of New York PR. She retained, all her life, a passion for clear and grammatical prose.

Sally was also a much-decorated volunteer for the library. She gave many hours to the now long gone Perry Park Library. She was there at the very beginning of our Douglas County History Research Center, and in fact contributed to local history in "The Perry Park Story" (available at the Douglas County Libraries).

Sally was also one of the brains behind the 1990 campaign that formed our library district, and the 1996 campaign that secured our current mill levy.

And she was there at the old Philip S. Miller Library on Plum Creek Boulevard my very first week. She provided me a steady stream of newspaper clippings about all my predecessors.

Most of those folks didn’t last very long. Sometimes, the reasons were … exotic. No Douglas County library director has ever been run out of town on a rail. But a time or two, it’s been close.

It was a good orientation for a new director.

My wife Suzanne and I were frequent guests at the Maguires. They were unfailingly witty, urbane, and engaging hosts.

When last I visited their beautiful home, Sally showed me a photo from her 1955 honeymoon. She and Francis were sitting in Galatoire’s Restaurant (209 Bourbon Street).

Francis looked like he always did – sharp, animated, and a little quirky. Sally looked both gamin and radiant. The photograph captured a fetching gaze.

If I’d been around back then (as a contemporary, I mean), I would given Francis a run for his money.

I would have lost, of course. Francis was a Harvard man, just back from India. I went to a state college. I was outgunned. But a boy can dream.

Finally, none of us gets out alive. But Sally remains for me – always – the model of graciousness, an allure that is both sophisticated and real.


[Note: Sally Lovelace Ward Maguire was born July 6, 1927, in Danbury, CT to Helen and Conrad Ward. She died at her home in Perry Park, Larkspur, CO on July 25, 2011.]
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Last week’s column by David Farnan seems to have stirred up a lot of curiosity.

He asked,” In which book was the significance of a literary work not what was written but what it was written with?"

The answer? First, let me say, as David said to me, that you really should read the book.

But he read it, and still didn’t know. The Battle of the Books kids did, though. The answer is “Shakespeare’s Secret,” by Elise Broach. See page 172. The literary work (a poem) was "written with a diamond on her window at Woodstock."

Additional reading lists can be found on our web page:

douglascountylibraries.org/kids/resource/battle-books-3rd-4th

douglascountylibraries.org/kids/resource/battle-books-5th-6th

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LaRue's Views are his own.

May 19, 2011 - no losers in battle of the books

[This week's column is by David Farnan, Associate Director of Community Service for the Douglas County Libraries.]

In which book …

…was the significance of a literary work not what was written but what it was written with?

It’s okay if you don’t know the answer. It is highly likely that you don’t know. I’ve read the book, and I still didn’t know. And yet, 5 nine year olds knew last Friday night in the final round of Battle of the Books.

What is Battle of the Books?

Where do you go on Friday night to see Iron Horse Elementary Principle Steve Getchell and Pioneer Elementary Principle Tim Krabacher duke it out with oversize boxing gloves with the theme song from Rocky blaring in the background as the warm-up act to charge up their team?
Battle has cheering crowds, nervous jitters, wringing hands, tears, and most of all heads coming together in vigorous whispered debate. All that “thrill of victory, agony of defeat” stuff happens in the library.

Schools invent exotic names for their teams; “The Book Brawlers,” “The Killer Bookworms,” “Little Freddie Muffin Muffins.” Clear Sky Elementary even tie-died their shirts. Kids sign each other’s t-shirts, ask for autographs, invent ways of high-fiving to celebrate a correct answer.

It should be televised. It would be perfect for the Wide World of Sports or ESPN. The library should sell tickets. The kids are THAT good.

And guess what?

It’s all about reading.

The library has been hosting Battle of the Books for 3 years. This year over 30 elementary schools and more than 450 kids participated. Battle is a 5 month apprenticeship in the art of competitive deep reading. It’s the kind of examination of the written word that in centuries past was reserved for monks and ministers and rabbis engaged in Biblical exegesis and Talmudic hermeneutics. It is a full-on literary-smackdown the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Council of Nicea, the Diet of Worms, and the Baraita – all accompanied by cheering crowds.

Where else can you find this kind of entertainment?

I spoke to Principle Alan McQueen of Heritage Elementary. Heritage had teams reach the finals for the 3-4 and 5-6 grade. He attended each match. “Battle has totally changed the culture of our school. All the kids are talking about it. This year we had 55 kids try out just to make the two five-person teams that would compete. We talk about it in assembly. Kids convene during lunch to talk about the books. Reading is cool.”

In the Parker 5th and 6th grade finals there were around 100 parents and grandparents, teachers and administrators, there to root on the kids. When the 20 questions were over, the teams were tied. It went to a tie breaker, and then a second tie breaker. The teams huddled together in heated debate whispering and gesticulating, teetering toward consensus.

When the answers were turned in, and the final correct answer was announced, the crowd roared to their feet. Wild applause. High fives. Kids jumping up and down. Crying. Hugging. It seemed more like the Rockies won the series, than a reading competition.

Winning and losing is never easy. But it mimics life, and its lessons learned. Several kids on winning and on losing teams burst into tears: a release after 5 months of studying minute intricacies of 10 books.

One mother on a losing team came up to me afterwards. Her son’s eyes were dry and clear, flickering with excitement. You could never tell his team lost. She said, “Before Battle he had only read Calvin and Hobbes. Since Battle began last fall he has read all the books on the list, plus all the other books by the authors on the list and he’s still going strong.” Elizabeth, the librarian, asked him, “Did you know there was a sequel to Dog’s Life?” “No,” he said. “Do Bone and Squirrel meet again?” “I’m not telling,” Elizabeth shot back. “You are going to have to read it yourself. Then we’ll talk about it.” He immediately bounded away off into the library.

In reading, if you play, you win.

May 12, 2011 - harness the power of play

Imagine an underground train station. Coming out of the station, commuters can take the stairs, or take the escalator. Most people take the escalator.

Now suppose that you wanted to get more people to take the stairs.

If you were to pose that problem to most adults, they would offer all the usual strategies.

* A campaign of shame. Put up posters of really fat people. Then show the young, attractive ones taking the stairs. Make people feel bad for being lazy.

* An educational campaign. Write a series of newspaper articles, do a few grim video shoots, deploring the epidemic of escalator dependency, and pointing out the alarming, no, the enormous consequences of waddling commuters, including health care, not to mention the rising costs (get it?) of escalator repairs. Make people feel righteous for taking the stairs.

* A campaign of incentives. Pay people to take the stairs, or give them a discount on their train ticket. Figure out how to enforce this later. Different turnstiles, maybe.

* A campaign of punishment. Levy fines on fit people who take the escalator when they should be taking the stairs. Of course, you'd have to have exemptions for various medical conditions. So you'd need escalator permits, probably.

Or Google up "underground stair piano" to see a delightful alternative (it should be the first hit -- a Youtube video from Stockholm). They simply replaced the stairs with enormous piano keys. When you take the stairs, the steps (black and white) play musical notes.

A hidden camera tells the story. Without seeing any advertising or exhortations at all, by the end of the first day, 66% more people took the stairs. They not only walked up the stairs, they bounced up and down them, and even teamed up to do coordinated melodies. Many people, particularly children, literally danced up the stairs.

How often have you heard that "nobody likes change?" Nonsense. When it's more fun to change than to stay the same, change is embraced.

For instance, I learned more about physics ("the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of refraction") in pool halls than in physics classes. In pool halls, I paid attention.

This is called the Theory of Fun. When we want to change people's behavior, we get quicker results when we appeal to their sense of play than when we appeal to their sense of duty.

Now apply this to management. Let's face it: even the most enlightened managers tend to fall back on top-down and even punitive approaches. We tell people how things are going to be, by God. Then, if they don't move fast enough, we write them up. If they still don't do what we want, there are consequences.

Another approach is "appreciative inquiry." We try to appeal to people's pride, their accomplishments, their desire for a better future.

But none of that seems to be as immediately effective as just giving folks the opportunity to fool around.

Recently I attended a workshop about organizational culture. There are three levels for any organization. First, there's what you see: the physical attributes of a place, and what that says about what matters. Second, there's what the leaders of an organization tell you about what matters. Third, there's how things really are. It's rare when all those things match up.

I wonder what American public service and corporate culture would look like if we all tried a little harder not to try so hard. Wouldn't that be fun?

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LaRue's Views are his own.

May 5, 2011 - will we face facts, or collapse?

Jared Diamond is the man who wrote "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Published in 1997, it was the story of how, where, and why civilization developed. I just finished reading "Collapse," his book about how and why civilizations end. It came out in 2007.

Diamond's curiosity, erudition, and exposition are impressive. There's no one explanation for why a society falters -- or thrives. In fact, he identifies five concerns: climate change, hostile neighbors, collapse of essential trading partners, environmental problems, and failure to adapt to environmental issues.

Using fascinating scientific evidence from the Mesa Verde area (dendrochronology, or the study of tree rings, and the information extracted from packrat middens, which are the remains of rat nests), he makes a persuasive case that the disappearance of the Anasazi basically came down to drought. The cycle of such droughts is long - too long for a pre-literate people to remember as they expanded their population.

Other environmental problems are more directly manmade. For example, there was the complete deforestation of Easter Island. Today, it is farming and lumbering practices that lead to "mining" the soil (extracting nutrients for short term crops) instead of sustainably farming it, as in Australia.

An example of "hostile neighbors" is the abandonment of their little North American colony by the Vikings, whose idea of announcing their presence was to kill every Indian they met. There were rather more Indians than Vikings. The Vikings got into trouble again in Greenland when their connection to Europe was disrupted by increasingly icy seas.

In addition to his exploration of the distant and not-so-distant past Diamond analyzes more current challenges, such as those faced by Haiti, Montana, and the author's home town of Los Angeles.

He also takes a hard look at big business and the environment. Some of his conclusions may surprise you. For instance, guess who runs what has become "by far the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea?" Answer: Chevron, which is fact operating an oil field.

Then there's mining. An all-too-common story is Galactic Resources' Summitville Mine right here in Colorado. The owners, eight years after getting an operating permit for a gold mine and apparently doing quite well, abruptly declared bankruptcy, failed to pay their sizable tax bill, laid off all its employees with a week's notice, abandoned the site, and left taxpayers to clean up a cyanide spill into the local water supply. Cost: $147,500,000.

Diamond doesn't blame the companies. Or at least, he doesn't just shake his finger at their "rape and run" morality. He states flatly that if we want mining, we have to figure in the full costs of good stewardship and clean-up. Those are the costs of doing business, and we need regulation to ensure that we identify them and hold the company accountable. We also have to track the supply chain, and let the consumer know the full cost of a sustainable economy. Most Americans will indeed pay a little more for the green product -- if they have the option.

Some civilizations fall. Others face facts, address both the cultural and scientific factors of their situation, and solve their problems. Will we be one of them?

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LaRue's Views are his own.

April 28, 2011 - let's face budget realities

Let me make my position clear at the outset: I think everybody else is crazy, and I'm not too sure about myself.

I do know that the current budget discussions at the national, state, and even local levels are really about the purpose of government. But that never seems to get directly addressed.

At the federal level, Paul Ryan's budget seems incoherent to me. He claims that we are in such dire economic shape that we must cut programs that benefit the elderly, the sick, and the poorest among us.

Yet, he continues, we must also cut taxes for the wealthiest among us. If the combination of these two is "revenue neutral," as Ryan claims, then we haven't solved a budget problem, have we?

Meanwhile, Forbes magazine reports that GE and Exxon, who owed a combined $25 billion in taxes last year, paid no federal income taxes at all, mostly by transferring assets overseas.

Perhaps Ryan believes in "trickle down economics." But that has now been thoroughly tested in both the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. It has one wholly predictable and reliable result: a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. Today, the top 1% of U.S. society has more money than the combined total wealth of 95% of the bottom.

If it's bad, if it's "socialism," to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, then why is it good when redistributed in the other direction?

At the state level, Speaker of the House Frank McNulty calls for more sacrifices from state employees. These are the same state employees who (a) haven't gotten a raise in three years, (b) have in fact had their salaries reduced through forced furloughs, and (c) have had their salaries reduced again through forced increases in their retirement contributions.

When McNulty points out, truthfully, that many businesses have made even more drastic cuts, he ignores a crucial fact: businesses make cuts because they aren't as busy as they used to be.

But precisely that same set of circumstances means that state government is busier than ever, particularly in health care and human services.

Asking state employees to "share in the sacrifice" of a recession caused not by the public sector but the private, when demand for public services is increasing, not decreasing, when mega companies get generous tax breaks and subsidies is, if I may be so bold, asking the wrong people.

The purpose of government is not to promote business; it is, to quote the preamble of the Colorado State Constitution, to "promote the general welfare." They're not always the same.

Are all government programs worthy of increased funding, without end? No.

Are taxes too high for some businesses? They are, although clearly not for the big companies. In Colorado, the problem is something called the Gallagher Amendment. It adjusts tax rates between business (29% tax rate) and residences (7.96%) to give homeowners a disproportionately low rate.

We can fix that. All we have to do is vote, statewide, to even things out. We could raise our residential taxes to lower the taxes of local businesses. It would be more fair. It would improve our economic environment. Of course, by itself, it wouldn't generate any more money, either, just change who pays it. To raise money will take even more tax increases.

Is the electorate willing to do that? Are you?

If not, demonizing and further punishing the state's beleaguered employees - at a time when the demand for their services is greatest - won't be enough to solve the state's budget crunch. We will, instead, cut the only place that remains to be cut in the state budget: K-12 education.

It's either wishful or deceptive thinking - or just plain crazy - to pretend otherwise.
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LaRue's Views are his own.

April 21, 2011 - library interviews community leaders

The Douglas County Libraries has been trying something new. We call it "the community interview." In brief, a group of librarians identified some 30-50 community leaders around the county (government, business, non-profits, and faith-based), then met with them to ask three questions:

* What are the key concerns of your constituents over the next one to two years?
* What do you wish you knew to help you make good decisions about those issues in this next year or two?
* Who else should we talk to?

Why did we choose interviews rather than surveys? It's true that interviews may not be quite as statistically significant as a scientific poll.

On the other hand, people who occupy positions of leadership, whether elected, appointed, or assumed, by necessity spend a lot of time talking to other people. And what humans do by nature is seek patterns. Leaders, by sifting through many other sources of information, become an information source in themselves. What's even more important is that they make meaning; they find the pattern in the data.

Why were we doing this at all? There are two reasons.

First, having a solid grasp of what's going on in the community helps the library to plan better. Every institution exists within a larger social environment. Identifying some of the movers and shakers in Douglas County and gleaning their insights helps us anticipate what people might look to us for.

Second, librarians have long responded to our patrons' needs on an individual basis. But might there be something we could do to help the community at large? Are there ways in which the library can add value by helping to clarify the bigger picture?

We've completed most of our interviews, and met with one another recently to try to make sense of the findings. Three main concerns came up over and over:

* Economic recovery. Concerns ranged from individuals looking for work or worried about foreclosures, to small business owners wondering how best to survive or even thrive during a recession.

* Water. There's a lot of anxiety about our relationship with this fundamental natural resource. There's a lot of confusion, too. Different communities have different concerns: Highlands Ranch is not Parker is not Castle Rock. But everyone senses that water will have a lot to do with the future of our county, and that a lot of money is going to change hands. One municipal leader quoted an old Western proverb: "Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting."

* Civic engagement. At first, many of our leaders made it sound like the problem was one-way communication. How do we let people know what's going on? But upon probing, it was clear that the issue was deeper. As one pastor put it, the many smart people who have moved to Douglas County (mostly from far away) clearly exhibit most of the signs of grief. They are a separate people, disconnected from deeper webs of friendship and social connection. They go "home" for vacation.

Politics, at least as currently practiced, seems more about further fracturing our communities than about bringing them together. But the thirst for community is real.

Over the next several months, the library will be further summarizing our findings, and assembling some resources to better inform our residents about the issues they say matter most to them.

Many thanks to all our gracious interviewees. Thanks as well to the librarians who found the experiment so rewarding.

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LaRue's Views are his own.

April 7, 2011 - do you trust the news?

Suppose you're at a party and some guy quotes a "fact." You ask him, "Where did you hear that?" And he says "Fox News."

If you like Fox News, that's credible. If you don't, you're dubious.

Same thing if he says, "NPR." If you think well of NPR, then you're likely to accept it. If you're suspicious of NPR, you're suspicious of anything they say.

But suppose he tells you, "I heard it on both Fox AND NPR."

The odds of that happening may be small. But should such a remarkable consensus occur I'm guessing almost everybody would go along with it. The biases cancel out. When sources on the opposite sides of a political spectrum say the same thing, it just might be true.

That core principle - getting sources from "the other side" - is one of the principles that leads to news trustworthiness.

When Fabrice Florin, who consulted for Music Television and worked for both Apple Computer and Macromedia, approached his 50 year birthday,he found that he wanted to "give back." So he tackled what he saw as a big social challenge: how could he help grow fact-based journalism in the age of the World Wide Web?

Eventually he launched a new non-profit, called Newstrust.net. It builds and offers various online tools to help people "find, check, rate and present trustworthy news."

It's not only high school students who need to think critically. We should all be on the look-out for well-reasoned analysis, not just something that comports with our ignorance or prejudice.

The effort is timely. I just read a Pew Report that said if you're under 30, you now get more of your news from the Internet than from TV. It might be a good thing for our country if our citizens worked a little harder to sort fact from fiction.

You can see the results in a project in Baltimore. Newstrust.net uses a unique "pro-am" approach to rate the news. The idea is that a panel of invited participants, some "pro" journalists and some "amateur" citizens, scan stories in the local paper and rank them according to several crtieria:

* Is it factual?
* Is it fair?
* Is it well-resourced (citing more than one information source)?
* Do you recommend it? And finally -
* Do you trust it?

These panelists then post a review, in essence, ranking the story for credibility. Those reviews add up to a "rating" -- a non-partisan and participatory consensus about the quality of reporting.

What's interesting is that the raters are themselves rated. Readers can also rank the reviews. If well-rated reviewers comment favorably on an article, then the article carries more "weight." It's a credibility filter.

The idea is that people would work their way up the pyramid of trust: visitor, member, reviewer, host, editor, staff. But you have to get positive ratings from a lot of critical viewers to do it. At present, Newstrust.net has about 100,000 visitors, and 5 staff. The rest of the work is done by software.

Isn't that fascinating?

Newstrust.net has partnered with schools. It hasn't yet worked with libraries, although I'm intrigued enough to investigate it further. I'm also intrigued by another collaborative citizen service called Truthsquad (see newstrust.net/truthsquad). It "crowd sources" news fact-checking in a way that feels more like a game than a research project.

Newstrust.net is also interested in digital knowledge "curation" - archiving and providing public access to journalism. That's another potential role for librarians.

For more information, see this video interview: tinyurl.com/libraries-newstrust. Or visit the Newstrust.net national site: newstrust.net/about. Teachers, try this one: newstrust.net/guides/teachers.

It's good stuff. Trust me.

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LaRue's Views are his own.