New Careers in St. Louis

When I joined B. Associates in 1977, the company was a 150-person, multidisciplinary consulting firm, top-heavy with engineers, especially civils. I joined the Urban Planning Department as a senior planner and assistant department manager. I was immediately thrown into the deep end of the pool and knew it was swim or drown. So swim I did, pretending I knew a lot more about planning than was the case. My experience working for the St. Louis County Planning Department after I graduated with the BS put my feet on the right track but it was the four years as a Planning and Zoning Commissioner in Pittsfield that was my ace in the hole. Sure, the seven years I spent teaching grad and undergrad courses in planning had given me a solid theoretical background. But it was the nitty-gritty, everyday details I learned in Pittsfield that gave me the knowledge I needed to be an effective practicing planner.

My boss, John, was a decent planner and a nice guy. But the majority owner of the company and president, James M., was an Olympic-class prick and one of the most despicable human beings I have ever had the misfortune to know. All the department managers and assistants had to attend a weekly staff meeting that was largely marketing oriented. James M. lorded over those meetings like Attila the Hun, eager to gut someone and rip his entrails out of the gaping wound for all to admire. I came to dread those meetings, not because I was ever one of the victims but because I hated what that fucking asshole did to his employees. To say that he humiliated and degraded them is to under-exaggerate by a factor of ten. He reviled in finding victims and hounding and brow-beating them into groveling submission. James M. strictly managed by fear, not intelligent leadership. For me, working at B. Associates was an utterly degrading experience. I hated even being in the same room with James M. and couldn’t wait to leave.

However, in the two years I was at B. Associates I acquired considerable and varied planning experience, ranging across the spectrum from working with small cities like Sikeston, Missouri, to many assignments with the City of St. Louis, to being project manager for an EIS for Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority. In that sense it was a good job. But because James M. was trying his best to entice me to stick the knife in the back of my direct boss so he could fire him and move me into the vacated position, I decided to look elsewhere.

That experience at B. Associates helped me get a job in 1979 with ____ CRC as Vice-President and head of the St. Louis planning office, which grew to about five or six people. I worked for a guy in Kansas City named Jerry O., an architect who thought he was a terrific planner but who was a terrible boss and jerk of the first rank. Few, if any, of the people who worked for him in Kansas City or St. Louis liked or respected him. He regularly undercut his staff and made all our lives miserable by trying to micro-manage our jobs. But when Ronald Reagan was elected U.S. President in 1980 it didn’t take long for him to cut all the federal programs that keep us planners alive, like the Urban Development Action Grants. In 1981, work slowed down so much I had to let three of the planners working for me in St. Louis go and I could read the handwriting on the wall. By the end of the year I too was history and joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed.

After being out of work for three months my next door neighbor hired me to work at Beacon Paper Company, where I soon migrated into what was called specification sales and sales promotions, calling on large ad agencies, graphic design firms, and large paper users, like Monsanto and Anheuser-Busch. That’s what I did until 1986, though every year I worked on urban planning jobs as an independent consultant. And for five years, from 1980 through 1985, I also taught urban planning courses part-time as an adjunct professor in Washington University’s Department of Civil Engineering. So, that kept me immersed in planning as well.

In 1986 I was hired as director of business development for LEMCO Consulting Engineers, an electrical engineering firm that specialized in transmission and distribution projects. The following posts present several vignettes from those less than fulfilling times.