At 71, I’m in two halls of fame, but I’ve always had the uneasy feeling they are too much like mausoleums. The late Cuban insurrectionist Che Guevara, for example, is in several such pantheons. So are the revolutionary Robert F. Kennedy and his ideological brother, Malcolm X.
At 71, I’m in two halls of fame, but I’ve always had the uneasy feeling they are too much like mausoleums. The late Cuban insurrectionist Che Guevara, for example, is in several such pantheons. So are the revolutionary Robert F. Kennedy and his ideological brother, Malcolm X.
Now that the scorching flame of the martyred Malcolm’s righteous rage has been safely and eternally doused, everyone hastens to eulogize him. But he would have spat on eulogies from any hypocritical downtown honcho who underserved and exploited kids like my poor, obscenity-mouthing miscreants I’ve tried to reform at Finney for the past four years — droopy-drawered youngsters who skip classes and call each other the ‘N’ word twenty times a minute. And even the treasonous war criminal George W. Bush found a way to invoke the hallowed memory of RFK, as though Bobby wouldn’t have abhorred Bush’s entire essence, let alone his twice stealing the presidency.
I don’t want to be embalmed in a Detroit Public Schools or other public schools pantheon after I, too, am conveniently dead, nor do I want my name on any public structure (except the Finney track that’s already named for me). Instead, I prefer that DPS officials use me rather than eulogize me. The forthright ones needn’t be afraid. Yes, I am outspoken, but I don’t bite anyone who isn’t counterproductive to the educative process. DPS desperately needs my skills — fine-tuned over the past half-century working in four colleges and five school districts, including nearly two decades in DPS.
After getting fired twice from executive directorships during the Burnley years for questioning bad decisions, as I’ve told you before, I recently was rejected for DPS jobs where I was the best applicant, plus one for which an associate superintendent pronounced me “too old.” These included principal and assistant principal jobs, a job supervising principals like the jobs I did with distinction for twenty years, and incredibly a writing job. I had also offered to serve as superintendent without pay.
I’ve discontinued my show on WCHB to have more time to become part of promising new superintendent Connie Calloway’s Cavalry, which I will relish rallying. Meanwhile, there’s one hall I confess I wouldn’t mind entering. That’s the PSL Hall of Fame that longtime coach Andy Rio and I have been trying to get established. (I coached PSL champions and came out of Denby to outrun Olympic champions as a WSU All-American.) It would be nice to have my name emblazoned next to those of Eddie Tolan, Henry Carr, Will Robinson, Lorenzo Wright, Sammy Gee, Ralph Simpson, Spencer Haywood, Glenn Doughty, Marshall Dill, Ron Phillips, Elliot Tabron, “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, Woody Thomas, Brenda Gatlin, Nick Cheolas, Lou Scott, Roy Dues, Walt Jenkins, Darnell Hall, Wendy Truvillion, Jerome Bettis, Jalen Rose, Willie Horton, Cliff Hatcher, Aaron Gordon, Billy Smith, etc. —and many of us are still alive.
If they do put me in a PSL Hall of Fame, I hope they do it while I’m here to enjoy it. I also expect that when they finally dust off my 11,000-word treatise on how to fix DPS, they’ll use its author, too, while this cantankerous old columnist is alive and kicking.
Retired