Reg Weaver, former NEA president, has passed away at 86. They took a couple of hours to memorialize him a couple of weeks ago on Chicago's south side, where he was best known, but by the time he passed, that was a close competition; he made you feel as if you knew him, you were close, by his very presence. More than one person at the mike noted: Everybody's got a 'Reg' story. He was a man of radiant charisma and fairly glowed with emotions and feelings he wanted to share on behalf of a union that he loved so dearly. Let me tell you the story by which I remember him the most. (P.S. I couldn't make it to the ceremony; had a dizzy spell in recovery from my latest malady.)
My familiarity with Reg Weaver was acquired over time. I served on the NEA Executive Committee for six years, five of which came while he was president. That meant that at all meetings in the NEA building in Washington, DC, both planned and unplanned, he was the chair.
That's not where you get to know someone. A chair of a meeting rarely has a chance to show you who he-she is. They have to keep track of Robert's Rules of Order, make sure people get heard within limits of propriety, and generally move the agenda. That takes work, energy, and careful attention. Those who are good at it get respected, sometimes grudgingly so.
One of the raps on Reg was that he didn't run small meetings well. Small, as in 15 to 20 people there, of which there were no end at the NEA. I never found this to be so. He did fine at running meetings of the NEA Board of Directors, I thought. Passive? Yes. But the importance of the matters being discussed, as well as the egos at the table (sometimes enormous, and not falsely earned; all Executive Committee members, for instance, have to win their positions by campaigning nationally), dictated to him that he would rather people get a chance to express themselves with the process's 'rules' being bent a little.
Just a little, though. He had understood, far before I did, that less was more. When he would say that enough was enough, his voice, which had many tones and could get impressively powerful, dictated that in no uncertain terms. He was charismatic, to be sure; many still say how inspirational he could be, and you don't get to a high-ranking position in the NEA unless you can speak publicly, fairly leap at the chance, and are at least pretty good at it. But there is the business of conducting business, and at that for him anyhow, less expressed control tended to work its own way out.
No, it was elsewhere that I saw it. It was the spring of 2008, the last one in which Reg would be serving as president. NEA officers get invited all over the place to speak to members, so it was no surprise when I learned that he was to speak in the great Wisconsin "up north" to a group of Native Americans. When the NEA president shows up in your home state, and you're on the Executive Committee in a supportive role, you do not hesitate; you try to make it whether you're asked to do so or not. It was a long drive for me from the Milwaukee area, over three hours.
Didn't mind that a bit. He was the same old Reg: a simple message, simply put--you have more power than you ever thought. Don't give up on yourself. He was fond of reciting a poem that had as its central core the phrase, "Don't you quit." He was dressed in what we have come to know as a leisure suit, this time a brown one, but with additional, Native bling around his neck: a bolo and with matching cufflinks, all in turquoise, all in respect for the tribes to which he spoke. The colors stood out in contrast but somehow worked. His speech was, as always, a smash hit.
I thought it was really nice of him to ask me to drive him to the Rhinelander airport to catch his connecting flight back to DC. We chatted partly about my future, which had been thrown to the wolves in a sense by my school district, which hadn't wanted me back from my skein as a member of the Executive Committee.
Then we saw it: a pub advertising food. Reg, as solidly rounded as he was as a former wrestler, looking far more like a block of black granite than the Pillsbury Dough Boy, didn't miss too many meals. He was hungry and said so. We pulled in.
It was about 2:30 or so on a Friday afternoon, so I didn't think much of what we were going to see because I didn't think it would be much. It was, after all, northern Wisconsin, largely a rural area, where small-town folks did small-town things. I figured the place to be largely vacant, being about an hour or so before the 3:30 crowd would head in for a weekend nosh, perhaps, and brewski or two before embarking on their weekends of fishing or something similar.
That supposition was quite inaccurate. The place was teeming with country boys, yowling and laughing and cussin' out somebody or other. We had walked into something akin to an unofficial clubhouse, the kind that's stronger than the ones that have names, the kind where you can puff up for a moment and discard the world around you.
It was sufficiently odd that someone with a tie on, like me, would walk into a joint where the most formal thing people could imagine was a flannel shirt. Taking one look around, the last time someone had looked like me was probably about the time Eisenhower was president. That made it uncomfortable enough.
But with Reg, a black dude from Chicago? That may have been unprecedented. It suddenly turned stone quiet: the foreboding silence of those just waiting for trouble to begin.
I thought momentarily about the scene in "48 Hours" where Eddie Murphy, playing a criminal on temporary parole, is looking for a thug and he and Nick Nolte, playing a cop, saunter into a nightclub filled with good old boys. The same brooding silence, the same odd looks: what the hell are you doing in here? Murphy eventually jives his way out of the situation, taking firm control of it but busting a few jaws and breaking a few glasses en route.
There was a moment, a fleeting moment, when I thought we would be bombarded with insults in an attempt to pick a fight. But that moment passed. "We're looking for something to eat," I said rather loudly, faking a natural panache. I tried to make the implication clear: and that's all we're doin'. Reg hadn't yet said a word. You could cut the tension with a bar coaster. While everybody acted politely, we weren't there to campaign for Democrats and they weren't there to listen.
With my next breath, though, I also thought: Reg has been through a few of these, too. His home state of Illinois, especially the southern three-fourths, has its share of similar clientele. Now that we had seated ourselves at the bar, we sure as hell couldn't walk out: that might bring about the very thing that had edged toward trepidation . At the very least, it would demonstrate fear, which Reg, I'm sure, could not have abided.
We both ordered chili, which I tend to eat when it's on the menu to compare it with my own. It was damn good, actually. Probably didn't hurt to say so, which I did.
The sounds gradually returned, Everyone decided to mind their own business, which is still what America's supposed to be about: Live and let live. They would move on with the rest of their days, probably noting a unique story upon returning home: You'll never guess who waltzed into the bar today.
But on the way out, Reg showed his effectiveness as a leader. I've never returned to that bar, and undoubtedly neither did he; we would never see those fellows (they were all male) again. Yet, he went out of his way to introduce himself, shake hands, and engage in brief small talk.
To read their faces, he had caught them off-guard. It was his friendliness, not applied union power, that had touched them. I hope it occurred to them what had happened: A very special, very black person had shown up, had chosen this locale, and sought to make new acquaintances.
He could have made them feel very intimidated. He did not. He chose the opposite: You attract more bees with honey than you do with vinegar. I watched that in awe. Neither one of us knew what was inside those walls, but he made the best of it.
He chuckled as we pulled away; his familiar, earthy chuckle. I had been a one-person audience to something I didn't see before and haven't seen since. It sure wasn't the south side of Chicago. In cordiality, you show respect. Then you move on.
The deeper you get into the union experience, the more you tend to descend into a kind of bubble, one in which the reality of the outside tends to blur, while all that happens in the inside, the micro-events, tend to take unbalanced dominance. Reg had never lost that balance; that was clear. An NEA president, no doubt, has to keep that in mind.
It wasn't always roses between us, either; some thorns got in the way, too. Reg openly rebuked me during a public Executive Committee meeting once, for something for which I meant no harm. Later, privately, he apologized.
I was moved by that, too; it takes a big person, sometimes, to say you're sorry and mean it. And NEA presidents don't have to apologize to anybody about anything; the job is incredibly demanding, and decisions have to be made that nobody else can or wants to make. I knew, though, that he felt all right about me by the simple amount by which I came to be asked to speak in his absences at various places, sometimes at the drop of a hat. As highly regarded as he was, an NEA president also can't be everywhere at once.
Anyone who rubbed up against him will carry part of his soul with them until they join him in the hereafter. They are glad, as am I, that they got close to him--great speaker, great advocate; he made you feel warm if you gave him half a chance--while he walked the earth. I hope someone still thinks that in Rhinelander, too.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
