|
Home
: News and Events : His Truth is Marching On - Alan Broadbent
His Truth is Marching On - Alan Broadbent
I met Joe almost two decades ago at a meeting of the Social Venture Network in Santa Clara, California, at an old monastery that had been converted to a conference centre. SVN is a wonderful organization of progressives, with a decidedly New Age feel about it. Joe and I, as it turned out, were less New Age than Old School.
We met the night of the first dinner, a buffet, at a table near the edge of the room, where we’d retreated with our trays of steamed tofu, braised eggplant, and seeds. Joe, having lived in California, looked a bit resigned. I, according to him, looked puzzled.
I had met TPI Founder Peter Karoff at an SVN meeting less than a year before at a location we all still refer to as “somewhere in New Jersey”. After marveling at the serendipity of meeting his colleague, the conversation turned to the post dinner program, which included rhythmic drumming and sharing. I wondered if there might be hugging, and Joe said there probably would be.
So, being Old School, we decided to go to the beer store instead, a local supermarket where we discovered a refrigerated beer section that was about forty feet long. Joe had said that he came from nine generations of German brewers, so I let him pick out beer from the best of the California micro-breweries, and then we went back to the monastery, set up a beer tasting on my balcony, all in the name of science you understand, and we began to become good friends.
I joined the TPI board shortly thereafter, and began a rich association with Joe and our colleagues. My relationship with Joe had a number of recurring themes:
• We always ate well, for we loved good food together. We’d always study the menu carefully and we’d both gravitate to the most unusual or unexpected things, and end up sharing tastes back and forth.
• Then we’d go at the wine list, where Joe would parse the viticulture and viniculture to find the hidden gem on the list, almost never the big name or the popular grape, but always a delight.
• And then after dinner, we’d do an urban walk, normally with Joe striding down the middle of a street, because he was always convinced that our old cities were meant to be experienced from the middle of the street, not by skulking along the sidewalk next to a wall.
We both loved cities, and we exchanged articles and references on ways of looking at them and thinking about them. When he came to Toronto, he loved meeting the late Jane Jacobs, and having a chance to talk with her.
Joe was always a lot of fun to be with, and was always both interesting and interested.
But Joe was basically a serious man, and there were two things that mattered the most to him. One of them was what we always called “The Work”. He had worked in and between the private and public sectors, and in a sense it was all of a piece. It dealt with providing the hard and soft infrastructure for effective communities which were just and resilient, and which left nobody out. The Work meant finding ways of matching ideas and resources with needs, and building the community brick by brick, school by school, street by street, and policy by policy. It meant rolling up your sleeves, and we can all picture Joe with his Filene’s Basement sleeves rolled up, and his Filene’s Basement suspenders hitched up, and getting down to work. It meant, in the case of him and his colleagues, red-eye flights back from a meeting half a continent away, maybe a long-shot meeting in the faint hope that a lamp could be lit in a community foundation or a family, a sentinel positioned or a path cleared to a new social contract that could help people and their communities become better.
Joe had a favorite bit of advice from his long and deep affection for baseball, the old line from Oriole pitching coach Ray Miller: “Work fast, throw strikes, change speeds”, and that is what Joe did. He didn’t dawdle. He threw strikes, because he wanted to get to and stay at the heart of the matter, and not cave into shallow sentiment or false bias. And he changed speeds, because he knew how important variety was in holding people’s attention to good causes and actions.
I would always bounce things off Joe when we were trying something new in one of our organizations, because I knew he loved to think about The Work, and that he would have something helpful to say. The last time I did it was a couple of days before he died, and he helped me think through an issue I’d been grappling with. He stayed with The Work right to the end.
The other thing that mattered to him, more than anything else, was Marsha. And Alex and Max. Alex and Max were constant wonders to him, and he would always catch me up on what they were doing, reciting the latest news with clear pride and admiration. But Marsha was his touchstone, the place he would go to reference a truth. It was almost like an iconic presence when he would say, “Well, as Marsha Breiteneicher would say ….” I never knew, Marsha, if you’d actually said all those wise things, or it was just a version of Joe’s shyness, but I’ve been crediting you with a lot of wisdom over the years.
The restorative moments for Joe came when he was at home, and I always relished his reports of weekend meals, what Marsha or Alex had found at the market and cooked, what cheeses or wines that Max and Cabell had found, and what they talked about.
I said to Joe recently that he would live on in the work I do, and that all of his colleagues and friends and
associates do. He influenced the way we think about The Work, he taught us how to be serious about it, and he will live on whenever any of us are trying to serve others and make a better world.
I loved Joe as a friend and a brother, and I admired him as a colleague in The Work. His truth is marching on.
Alan Broadbent, board chair of TPI, is also founder and chair of The Maytree Foundation in Toronto.
|
|