Joel Packer, the Happy Warrior: Finally at Rest

When you saw Joel Packer at NEA, something big was happening. And usually, he was nearby.

It was February, 2009, during my last year on the NEA Executive Committee. We were going through the agenda of the regularly scheduled Executive Committee meeting, filled with mundane discussions and posturing as it usually was. In walked Joel Packer.

President Dennis Van Roekel knew where he'd been: The White House. This alone compared with the previous eight years was a thunderbolt of good news. The Bush-43 administration, rife with smacking us around with No Child Left Behind's attitude of the-beatings-will-stop-when-morale-improves, had been, well, let's say reluctant to meet with us because that would imply they actually wanted to cooperate--which they certainly didn't. (In fact, so full of themselves were they about 'knowing' that we were misusing our PAC money that the feds conducted an audit of our books in 2005. We gave them all the time and room they wanted. They found, as we had always insisted and contrary to whomever was filling their heads with such nonsense, that no union dues were spent on political action; it was PAC money alone, raised and spent separately, according to law. The auditors even said that after a while it was getting ridiculous. No arguments here.)

But now it was Barack Obama in the Oval Office, and the avenues of conversation had been re-opened. Joel announced that the NEA President had been invited to speak to the President that next morning. Adjustments were made: the appointment was set and our schedule shifted.

It was vintage Packer. He was as ubiquitous an NEA staff member as you could find, if indeed you could find him. I tried his office once. I have never seen piles of paper so high, balanced quite so well. It looked as if a hard sneeze might send those piles streaming right out the door.

But that's the essence of work in government relations, a.k.a. lobbying, a bit of which I did in Texas for another union. No shred of information can ever be cast aside as irrelevant. Nothing can ever fail to be traced to an earlier proposal, bill, or idea that might lead to a bill. It has to be somewhere. Throwing it away might be slamming shut a vital piece of legislation for the members, current politics notwithstanding.

He continued his peripatetic paths while the chief liaison to the Great Public Schools Action Plan, a catch-all for organizing on a grand scale. If anything, his territory widened. I wondered if he needed a bigger desk.

If there was a word for Joel, it was helpful. If he saw potentiality, he reached out to the one possessing it. In my early days on the Executive Committee, with knowledge of inner workings of the NEA building ever necessary but ever elusive, he included me alone on an insider listserv of information concerning Congressional staff connections on No Child Left Behind. But I made a rookie mistake and decided to share it with someone else. Those missives disappeared. Thus did I learn that lesson.

But the fact that for a few weeks I had been the only EC member on it, in my first year as raw as fresh-cut steak meant, and still means, a lot. He had clearly found a kindred spirit. Staff sometimes does that, and EC members get their savvy from such connections.

One of the best things about Joel was that, although he was the information and nerve center of much vital work at NEA, he never overplayed his hand. He never seemed to get out in front of his tasks and think of himself as above the fray or better than whomever sat next to him. But then, with that much responsibility, he often walked a narrow tightrope. Through it all, he never lost his likability. He always impressed me as being a Hubert Humphrey type: Always the happy warrior.

When I took a year to return to Washington to try to find work in 2013, Joel had moved on to work with a progressive public interest organization called The Raben Group. I met with him and he was as helpful as he could be, which wasn't much at that time since the sequestration had dried up a significant number of contract possibilities. But he also let me in on an interesting piece of image-readjustment: Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wasn't quite the dolt he had originally impressed people as being. He was doing some important work. So I wasn't all that surprised when, in 2014, Obama appointed Johnson to be representative to the U.N. General Assembly. (That he is now a 45 sycophant, trying to dredge up dirt on the Bidens, doesn't add luster to Johnson's persona. though.)

He continued to move about within the broader educational community in D.C. He was a 'known name,' not easy to pull off in the snarky cauldron of the nation's capital. He may have been diminutive in stature, but stood tall with influence. Joel retired just a few years ago, and true to form, he and his wife Carolyn became internationally peripatetic. If you managed to friend him on Facebook, you saw that they were joyful world travelers.

So though it was a jolt, I also thought of it kind of fitting when I learned (thank you, Dennis Friel) that he had passed away in Santiago, Chile, on January 23. He had been on the move again, discovering as much of the world as he could.

Nobody needs to tell me that dying in one's 60s is entirely possible; I barely dodged that two years ago. But with Joel Packer's passing, you have to ask: Really? Did it have to be him? He and Carolyn deserved longer with the grandkids, more time to ramble the globe, making up for those extra hours he needed to help the NEA's success.

And yet, and yet: He died doing what he loved with the person he loved the most. Can there be a better epitaph?

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark