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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday June 3, 2002 Volume IV Number 22 |
FOCUS - Eagles and Vultures
The United States of America was not the first to capitalize on the symbolic power of the Eagle. It’s magnificence was recognized in early Roman mythology associating the powerful bird with the deity Jupiter. Later, the Romans, the French, the Russians, the Germans and the Hungarians (among others) attached their national identity to the hawkish and fierce bird of prey; long before the Revolutionary War.
In our country, the proud bird with the piercing eyes and the sharp yellow beak, the shiny black feathers and the snow white crest of a headdress, and the pointed talons grasping a gnarly branch, this hawk at the ready represents something of the best nature and the things we highly value as a nation. The Bald Eagle is a carnivore, a meat-eater. He is anything but timid. He knows who he is, and what he wants. He is proud. And when he spreads his mighty wings, he takes flight with a giant flap. He soars on the updraft. He hunts from high altitude. And when he spots his prey, he is silent on the wind. He relies on the element of surprise, and swoops into position, and with a powerful grasp and quick pull, he brings his dinner home.
The Turkey Vulture is sometimes mistaken for an Eagle. But only from a distance. Look into an Eagle’s eyes, and you are filled with inspiration. Look into the eyes of a Vulture and you feel disgust. The vulture has rarely been associated with Deity. He’s not a national symbol either. His red, wrinkled face, borders on hideous. He, too, is a carnivore, but his preference is carrion – rotting flesh. He preys on road-kill. No contest. His foul diet gives him a reputation for carrying disease – though scientists argue that this is a myth. He’s also called a buzzard.
If you describe someone as possessing the attributes of an Eagle, you are paying him or her a high compliment. You are suggesting that this person is an achiever, separated from the rest; an individual of distinction worthy of praise. If you describe another as a Vulture, you are suggesting something sinister. That his person is a human predator, preying on the weak. Willing to live on the spoils of another; one who takes advantage and then feels no remorse. A vulture has an insatiable appetite for the very things that repel the rest of us.
I have never seen a Bald Eagle in the wild. I remember once being told that in the distance, high on a cliff, in a clump of bushes there was an Eagle who lived there, and maybe, maybe that’s him… Look! I did look, and saw nothing, and my companion wasn’t sure he saw anything, either. Friends of mine, returning from far-away places like Alaska or the Rockies of Western Colorado or the Pacific Northwest have made claims of Eagle sightings, and come back with enthusiastic reports. An Eagle sighting might be one of life’s most memorable moments, it appears.
I’ve seen plenty of vultures. They seem to be everywhere - floating in groups, circling above some wretched beast, weak, breathing his last; or picking away on some highway off in the distance distorted by the heat waves rising from the surface of the asphalt baking in the sun gnawing on carrion.
Vultures, a plenty. But I’ve never seen an Eagle. Not in the wild. Until this week.
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Andrew Carnegie started out as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill shortly after he moved from his native Scotland to Pennsylvania. Ever curious about machines and gadgets, he set his mind on the telegraph key. Soon, he left the mill and took a position as a telegrapher on the Pennsylvania Railroad. His leadership skills and technical know-how earned him several promotions. Still in his early twenties, Carnegie took responsibility for the finance department of the railroad, and his increased earnings allowed him to invest in a business enterprise. His Pullman Palace Car Company, providing upscale travel for the wealthy, succeeded. Carnegie invested some of his profits in oil wells that produced prolifically, and in time, the foundation of his fortune was well laid.
The Civil War escalated, and Carnegie served with distinction in the War Department.
His reputation for philanthropy was established by the time he was thirty-five. Earning $50,000 per year (a staggering sum in 1870) he went on record saying “Beyond this never earn, make no effort to increase fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes.”
Andrew Carnegie loved books and the arts. He believed in education. He also loved to build. He turned his business attention to Reconstruction. He believed in the Union. He knew the war had devastated the American economy and decimated the nation’s infrastructure. He took the technology of railroading and oil drilling, and the engineering required in both, and focused on building bridges to enhance transportation and shipping of manufactured goods. He became a major purchaser of all the steel the nation’s cities could produce. It was the steel mill that made Andrew Carnegie one of the richest men who ever lived. Weary of depending on the existing steel factories, he built his own. The rails went down. The bridges went up. And the national economy roared like a steam locomotive.
Carnegie’s fortune multiplied. He believed that a great nation needed more than infrastructure. It needed an educated people. It needed the energy and joy derived from music and art. He wanted more than an economic revolution. He believed in a cultural revolution. So he set out to invest his fortune in the nation’s education and build grand structures for the performance of great symphonies and choirs; a showcase for the finest artists the nation could produce.
His crowning achievement - Carnegie Hall.
While most of us know about Carnegie Hall (“Question - How does one get to Carnegie Hall? Answer – Practice.”), lesser known are Carnegie’s efforts to provide for the needs of educators. Or his Foundation’s investment in small town libraries all across the nation. Carnegie understood that our nation’s teachers and professors are the backbone of the whole system. Carnegie considered education a noble profession. He also knew that the lack of public money left many teachers underpaid and penniless at retirement. His foundation provided millions to reward teaching professionals at retirement with life annuities.
He also believed that the tools of education should be available to all. Carnegie was the beneficiary of good parenting and a good education. But for the most part, he was a self-made man. He knew what he needed to know, and sought out the information by his own initiative. So he directed his foundation to make millions of dollars available to small towns across the country to build and supply Public Libraries, making volumes of books and classics openly available to the general public, free of charge. At the turn of the century, these libraries popped up all across America. No one can calculate the positive impact that investment made on our nation. If it were possible to measure, the results would be staggering.
I’ve spent two memorable days in two of those libraries. The first, a couple years back in the high country of western Colorado. Silverton, to be precise. It’s a far away place, even today, at the end of the Silverton-Durango steam rail line. The Carnegie Library operates today, as it has for nearly a hundred years, housing a fine collection of classics and reference geological works recording a couple centuries of mining activities up and down the local Rocky Mountains.
The second visit was this week in Port Townsend; an historic docking point strategically placed on a corner of the Olympic Peninsula protecting the entrance to the Puget Sound and the harbors at Seattle and Bremerton. The Carnegie Library is perched up on the bluff, in a neighborhood that overlooks the waterfront. It stands tall in the company of a hundred other historic landmarks, Victorian homes preserved as they were a century ago, many of them Bed and Breakfast establishments. The Carnegie Library of Port Townsend remains an intellectual and cultural center to this day.
In that Library, Carolyn made a great find.
* * * * * * *
Dr. Ronald Rietveld, a Lincoln Scholar, began his life-long journey as an historian with a unique specialty as a fifteen year old high school student. Young Ronny traveled to Springfield from his home in Iowa to work as the special guest of Illinois State Historian, Dr. Harry Pratt. While rummaging though a long neglected cardboard box containing old letters and documents he found a hand-written letter describing a forbidden photograph. It was a warning that the photo had enormous consequence, and was taken clandestinely, against a clear governmental order, and should be kept in the highest security. In other words, the photo must not see the light of day.
Attached to the letter – the illicit photo.
When President Lincoln was shot in the balcony of the Ford Theater in Washington that fateful evening, his wife, who sat close enough to be deafened by the pistol shots, entered into a dark grief that would even surpass the depths of mourning that rolled in like a tidal wave when her beloved son Todd died in the White House just two years before. While she went into seclusion, and suffered horribly, the nation, also sick with grief, put the President’s corpse in an ornate coffin, and paraded his remains to several major cities on a sort of grim farewell tour. Reporters and photographers received a strict order. No photographs. Period. Out of respect for the family and the memory of the cherished President, that order, supported fully by Mrs. Lincoln, was vigorously enforced.
With the one exception of Union Military officers Rear Admiral Charles H. Davis and Brigadier General E. D. Townsend.
While in New York City, while laying in state in the huge Rotunda of the great City Hall, just before the coffin was open to over one hundred and twenty thousand mourners, the two officers hired a local photographer to capture the moment, with the two men standing in uniform at attention on either side. It was, no doubt, a daring stunt, both knowing full well that they were violating a clear order, and morbidly exploiting the moment with a vulgar bid to become a part of history. When word reached Washington, and worse, Mrs. Lincoln, that the photograph was taken, the two officers were sharply reprimanded, and instructed to destroy all copies, plates and negatives… immediately. Proof of their destruction was required.
The two, now deeply embarrassed, complied. But just because he couldn’t bear the loss, Gen. Townsend kept two copies. For nearly a hundred years, it remained out of view… attached to a letter of instruction, unnoticed, until in 1952 a high school boy from Iowa climbed the stairs of the Illinois Archives in Springfield, holding a photograph of a man in a coffin with two officers standing upright as sentinels on either side; the dead man bearing a clear resemblance to the Civil War President.
Life Magazine published the photo as a two-page spread with a long feature article, September 15, 1952. Two weeks later, they published a letter from the “high school boy who discovered the photograph” along with a picture of the horn rimmed student holding a bust of the President. Life quotes Dr. Pratt as calling him “a real Lincoln expert.” Ron Rietveld, from Pella, Iowa.
Dr. Rietveld, soon to retire after nearly four decades as an esteemed Professor of History, recalls that moment of inspiration as the starting point of a wonderful career. As he closes out his work at the University, he will celebrate, as a member of the Planning Commission, the opening of the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield Illinois scheduled for the Fall of this year.
As I sat in a corner of the Carnegie Library in Port Townsend this week, I noticed a rack of shelves dedicated to the storage of Life Magazines going all the way back to World War II. Carolyn saw it, too, and began the search. We remembered that the articles appeared in the early fifties, probably in September or October of one of those years. We'd heard about them. But we'd never seen them.
After awhile, I looked up from my computer notebook screen, and there was Carolyn with one of those victory smiles. She held up the September issue, and pointed to the photograph of our friend Dr. Rietveld as a fifteen year old High School student… horn-rimmed glasses and bust of Lincoln. Right there in the original magazine, at the time a national favorite, now nearly fifty years old.
Ron Rietveld found his life’s work. His passion.
It filled up a career.
* * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
So which is it? Are you going to be a vulture today? Or an eagle? Like the one I saw riding the wind on the rocky coastline of the Puget Sound?
Dr. Rietveld found a photograph. But it was much more. It became his identity. His passion.
How about you? Have you made a discovery that energizes your day? Something that feeds your good ambitions and gives you something to build on?
If so, spread those wings and get after it today.
If not, get yourself into the archives, and start looking again for whatever it is you missed. Get on the search for that one thing that will cause you to rise up with wings like an eagle.
To run and not be weary.
To walk, and not faint.
Posted in Vancouver, BC, Canada
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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