February 4, 2007
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- The Little Guy
Kevin Moloney for The New York TimesJoseph Johnson, left, bought a McDonald’s franchise in Colorado Springs from Steven T. Bigari, right, and continues to use many of the practices he learned from him to offer support to low-wage workers.
Jessica McGowan for The New York Times
Daryl Simmons, a producer and songwriter, said he, too, had helped some of his employees to buy cars and to learn about financial management.Thinks Big About the Little Guy
IN 1990, Steven T. Bigari was running a string of McDonald’s franchises in Colorado Springs and spending most of his working hours thinking about the big bad wolf at his door, otherwise known as Taco Bell, which was killing his business with a promotional menu of items costing only 59 cents each.
One day, the restaurants’ owner, Brent Cameron, who was also his mentor and friend, sat down with him over breakfast at one of the franchises, just off Highway 83. “O.K., Steve, what’s your plan?” he asked.
Mr. Bigari outlined the situation, and it was dire: their operations were hemorrhaging cash. Then he presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. What happened next would change Mr. Bigari’s life.
“Brent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,” Mr. Bigari said. “He said, ‘You can afford to give up your rizzing-razzing vacation, but they can’t, so I hope you have a better plan than that.’ “
Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald’s franchisee himself — eventually owning 12 stores, three patents and a reputation for clever ideas, like letting customers pay with credit cards and outsourcing the drive-through. Even as his business grew, he kept Mr. Cameron’s crew benefits in place, and began adding to them.
Indeed, over time, he went much further. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together or creating an array of services, from arranging day care to organizing transportation to making small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers.
Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit — as, he said, it did for him.
This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don’t want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will see the light when they see the return they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers.
MR. BIGARI, 47, is an unlikely candidate to save the working poor. He is a millionaire who lives in Colorado Springs, a politically conservative city that is far from the coastal enclaves of most social entrepreneurs, the catch phrase for people who come up with innovative, nongovernmental ways to address social problems. He has the no-nonsense short hair and straight back of a West Point graduate. (He was in the class of 1982.)
He acknowledged that his employees’ pay scale — an average of $7 an hour in 2006, when he sold his stores — was less than a living wage in Colorado Springs, which he estimated at $12 an hour. He said that competitive pressures and overhead costs, including loan payments and licensing fees, prevented him from offering more, though he said he paid 25 to 75 cents an hour more than other local fast-food outlets.
It is true that Mr. Bigari is relentlessly upbeat. The only time he recalls taking failure personally was in high school, when his football team, which had not lost a game in the three years he was a player, was crushed in a state semifinal. (He still remembers the name of the opposing player he could not block.) He was traumatized, but he eventually realized he had learned a great deal from this setback. He has created in himself an ability to see beyond failures, which he says he has all the time, and treat them as lessons learned.
Over the last three years, he has moved his life in a different direction to help achieve his goal. He spent one year on a social entrepreneurship fellowship, sold his McDonald’s franchises to devote himself fully to his nonprofit organization, America’s Family, and received backing from a venture philanthropy fund.
He had no such plans a decade ago, when he decided to continue Mr. Cameron’s practice of making small, short-term no-interest personal loans to his employees to help them pay their rent, buy tires or meet other immediate needs. (He says he lent about $30,000 a year for 10 years, and only $960 was not paid back.)
Back then, his goal was not to be a high-minded social entrepreneur or even an old-fashioned do-gooder. He just wanted to reduce employee turnover — the rates could hit 300 percent a year — by easing some of the problems that led so many of his workers to miss shifts or to quit.
He did more than lend money: he worked with a local church to set up day care, and he educated employees about public services available to low-wage workers — in some cases, available to those whose incomes are up to 200 percent of poverty level.
Reliable transportation was a near-universal problem for workers, so he started sneaking out to police auctions during lunch on Saturdays, the busiest period in his restaurants, to look for cheap and dependable cars. At first, he resold them at cost to his employees, then experimented with renting them to workers. He has tried other approaches, but has settled on having the foundation take in donated cars, then sell them to a local dealer who fixes them up and resells them to employees.
By 2001, Mr. Bigari was calling his collection of programs McFamily Benefits, and it worked well, for his employees and for him. So well, in fact, that three professors at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs studied the program.
They found that from 2000 to 2002, turnover rates fell sharply at all of Mr. Bigari’s restaurants; three had rates at or below 100 percent. All of the employees who used some part of the programs said they felt motivated to work harder. In the same period, his profit margin rose more than three percentage points.
Debra Powell, a divorced mother of five who managed one of Mr. Bigari’s restaurants, said the program helped many of her crew workers, which in turn made her job easier. She herself had money problems, and Mr. Bigari found a budgeting course at a local nonprofit agency; it worked so well for her that she required all the managers in her store take it, partly because many of them had never had checking accounts.
She used Mr. Bigari’s program in 2003 to get a loan for a personal computer and in 2004 to buy the first car she had ever purchased, a used Chevrolet Cavalier she still drives.
She says she misses Mr. Bigari at work, though she receives bigger bonuses now that the McDonald’s Corporation runs her store. (Franchisees pay rent and licensing fees to the corporation that can total 16 percent of gross receipts, Mr. Bigari said. Company-owned stores do not have to pay, so they can be more generous to employees.)
“I would trade the money to go work for him again,” Ms. Powell said. “He’s not in it for himself; he’s in it for the people.”
Inevitably, some of the people he helps suffer setbacks and cannot honor their obligations. Keeping track of them began to consume more and more of his workday, and those of some of his store managers. “That’s when we knew we had to change the model,” he said.
In 2002, the same year he remarried (he and his first wife divorced in 2000), Mr. Bigari morphed McFamily Benefits into an independent nonprofit group called America’s Family. He chose the name because the goal was to offer the working poor the kind of guidance and support that traditionally came from families.
He arranged for a local car dealer to create a used-car warranty program for participants, and persuaded a local credit union to make loans for things like cars and computers, and to make small, short-term loans so that employees could break free from rapacious payday lenders.
America’s Family had to guarantee the loans, but it was helping employees to build credit histories, even though many of them had never before used a bank. He also began working more directly with local charities and government agencies to ensure that employees who needed services got them, sometimes even persuading government offices to change their operating hours to help meet workers’ needs.
HE also began talking to local businesses about using America’s Family. His first takers were two business owners who went to his church, Springs Community Church, part of the mainline Reformed Church in America. But, as even he has acknowledged, his plan needed a lot of work.
“Steve is a rah-rah-everything’s-wonderful-here’s-what-we’re-going-to-do type of guy, and he’s got this vision in his head, but it was difficult to get it boiled down for business owners,” said Rebecca Kolb, who sells and supports janitorial franchises for a company called Jan-Pro.
Ms. Kolb says that Mr. Bigari has refined his message and expanded America’s Family’s offerings in the last five years, and that she can now see clearly that it helps her franchisees retain employees. When Mr. Bigari is ready to expand America’s Family nationally, she said, she will ask Jan-Pro to adopt it.
He was spending more time on his charity efforts, but Mr. Bigari said he had no thought of selling his McDonald’s franchises until he became an Ashoka fellow in late 2004. “This would’ve just been a cool hobby if Ashoka hadn’t come along,” he said. Ashoka International finances social entrepreneurs worldwide.
Trabian Shorters, a co-director of Ashoka U.S., said the group was drawn to Mr. Bigari by the unabashed scope of his dream. “Steve wants to fix working poverty, period, for everybody,” Mr. Shorters said. “That’s audacious, but he means it.”
Barbara R. Kazdan, Ashoka U.S.’s other co-director, credited Mr. Bigari’s nonprofit group with devising a systemic rethinking of how to help the working poor. “He looked at the whole system that low-income people were caught up in and wanted to create a different kind of system to give them the support they need,” she said.
As an Ashoka fellow, Mr. Bigari stepped aside from his franchises for a year to focus full time on his foundation. After his fellowship ended, in early 2006, he returned to his business. At one point, he told Mr. Shorters that one of his McDonald’s outlets had bested a rival franchisee’s record for serving customers at a drive-through — 371 in one hour. Mr. Shorters congratulated him, then asked, “How do you top that?”
That got Mr. Bigari thinking about what he was doing with his life. Last February, at Mr. Shorters’s urging, he went to a social entrepreneurship conference called the Gathering of Leaders, organized by New Profit Inc., a philanthropic venture fund. He left the meeting convinced that he should become a full-time social entrepreneur, and by June had sold his McDonald’s franchises.
That kind of speed reflects how Mr. Bigari likes to move. He jokes that he operates on Bigari Standard Time, which is a bit like life stuck in fast-forward. He is a consultant and a motivational speaker. He wrote and self-published a book about his ideas, “The Box You Got,” in three months, after a conference organizer asked if he had a book that it could give to those in attendance.
When Mr. Bigari got a too-good-to-be-true deal on a headquarters building for America’s Family in Colorado Springs, he bought it in spite of the fact that it was 135,000 square feet too large. Then he brainstormed with friends and associates to build a mini-theme park called Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center, complete with laser tag, Go Kart racing and other diversions, and had it up and running in less than six months. (Biggs is his nickname, and he likes to talk about Bigg ideas; a sample: “If you are afraid of failure, get over it. Everybody fails.”
Mr. Shorters says it is not unusual for social entrepreneurs to juggle several projects that may seem unrelated. Tom West, an investor who is chairman of Exit41 Inc., a point-of-sale software company that has worked with Mr. Bigari, said in all seriousness: “You don’t want 100 percent of Steve. Ideally, you want maybe 12 percent of him.” (Exit41 helped him develop a call center that saved money by consolidating the taking of drive-through orders from his McDonald’s outlets.)
Mr. Bigari notes that he is using the restaurant in his amusement center to train chefs and other food-service workers, and that his speaking gigs can motivate businesses to pay attention to low-income workers, whom he calls “the invisible people.”
Mr. Bigari says that he is at a starting point for the foundation, with a long road ahead; Ms. Kolb and others who know him said he has to prove that he can make the ideas work at businesses where the owners aren’t part of his social network. He is using a $250,000, two-year investment from New Profit to expand his staff and develop his foundation’s business model. He recently hired a sixth employee at America’s Family, which has an annual budget of about $500,000.
HE is also starting to sign up celebrity advocates who can help build his foundation’s profile. His first is Daryl Simmons, a producer and songwriter, whom he met while negotiating a real estate deal. Mr. Simmons said he, too, had helped employees to buy cars and to learn about financial management. But, he added, “I’ve only done a crumb of what he’s done.”
For his part, Mr. Bigari says he is inspired by people like Joseph Johnson, who had to drop out of college after a family emergency. After working for a time in Phoenix, he sought a job at a McDonald’s in Colorado Springs where Mr. Bigari was then the operations manager, becoming operations manager himself when Mr. Bigari became an owner. Today, at 37, Mr. Johnson owns his own McDonald’s, one of the franchises that Mr. Bigari sold in June. (The McDonald’s Corporation bought the rest.)
Mr. Johnson says that Mr. Bigari is a genuine leader, one who had no compunction about pitching in alongside minimum-wage workers at a fry station or behind a counter. “The one thing we could all appreciate about him was he wasn’t just the guy who would vision up something — he’d be the guy who was there to execute it, too,” he said. “You weren’t calling him in his timeshare in Hawaii; he was right there next to you.”
Mr. Bigari says he knows he is tackling a far bigger problem than a McDonald’s franchise has to face — a point he illustrates with a story about a beach strewn with starfish. A boy is throwing them back in the ocean, one by one, when a man comes by and says: “What are you doing? You can’t possibly make a difference here.”
Without looking up or pausing, the boy picks up another starfish, tosses it in the ocean and says, “Did for that one.”
- Flannery O’Connor
Susana Raab for The New York TimesThe writer Flannery O’Connor’s desk and typewriter in her bedroom at Andalusia, her farm near Milledgeville, Ga. She was a master of the Southern Gothic.
Story Excerpt: ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ (February 4, 2007)
The New York TimesIn Search of Flannery O’Connor
THE sun was white above the trees, and sinking fast. I was a few miles past Milledgeville, Ga., somewhere outside of Toomsboro, on a two-lane highway that rose and plunged and twisted through red clay hills and pine woods. I had no fixed destination, just a plan to follow a back road to some weedy field in time to watch the sun go down on Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia.
Somewhere outside Toomsboro is where, in O’Connor’s best-known short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a family has a car accident and a tiresome old grandmother has an epiphany. The fog of petty selfishness that has shrouded her life clears when she feels a sudden spasm of kindness for a stranger, a brooding prison escapee who calls himself the Misfit.
Of course, that’s also the moment that he shoots her in the chest, but in O’Connor’s world, where good and evil are as real as a spreading puddle of blood, it amounts to a happy ending. The grandmother is touched by grace at the last possible moment, and she dies smiling.
“She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
O’Connor’s short stories and novels are set in a rural South where people know their places, mind their manners and do horrible things to one another. It’s a place that somehow hovers outside of time, where both the New Deal and the New Testament feel like recent history. It’s soaked in violence and humor, in sin and in God. He may have fled the modern world, but in O’Connor’s he sticks around, in the sun hanging over the tree line, in the trees and farm beasts, and in the characters who roost in the memory like gargoyles. It’s a land haunted by Christ — not your friendly hug-me Jesus, but a ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of the mind, pursuing the unwilling.
Many people — me for instance — are in turn haunted by O’Connor. Her doctrinally strict, mordantly funny stories and novels are as close to perfect as writing gets. Her language is so spare and efficient, her images and character’s speech so vivid, they burn into the mind. Her strange Southern landscape was one I knew viscerally but, until this trip, had never set foot in. I had wondered how her fictional terrain and characters, so bizarre yet so blindingly real, might compare with the real places and people she lived among and wrote about.
Hence my pilgrimage to Milledgeville this fall, and my race against the setting sun.
O’Connor’s characters shimmer between heaven and hell, acting out allegorical dramas of sin and redemption. There’s Hazel Motes, the sunken-eyed Army veteran who tries to reject God by preaching “the Church of Christ Without Christ, where the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” Hulga Hopewell, the deluded intellectual who loses her wooden leg to a thieving Bible salesman she had assumed was as dumb as a stump. The pious Mrs. Turpin, whose heart pours out thank-yous to Jesus for not having made her black or white trash or ugly. Mrs. Freeman, the universal busybody: “Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings.”
People like these can’t be real, and yet they breathe on the page. And there is nothing allegorical about the earthly stage they strut on: It’s the red clay of central Georgia, in and around Milledgeville, where O’Connor spent most of her short life. She lived with her widowed mother on the family farm, called Andalusia, just outside Milledgeville, writing and raising peacocks and chickens from 1951 until her death in 1964 at age 39, of lupus.
O’Connor was a misfit herself, as a Roman Catholic in the Bible Belt, a religiously devout ironist writing for nonbelievers. She liked to gently mock the redneckedness of her surroundings. “When in Rome,” she once wrote, “do as you done in Milledgeville.”
But Milledgeville is not the backwoods. It’s a city of 19,000, on the Oconee River in Baldwin County, 30 miles from Macon. It is the former capital of Georgia, trashed by General Sherman on his March to the Sea. It has a huge state psychiatric hospital and a prominent liberal-arts college, Georgia College and State University. The old Capitol building is now home to a military school. There is a district of big antebellum homes with columns and fussy flowerbeds. Oliver Hardy lived here when he was young and fat but not yet famous.
Milledgeville now looms huge beyond these modest attributes because of O’Connor, or Mary Flannery, as she was known in town. Her output was slender: two novels, a couple dozen short stories, a pile of letters, essays and criticism. But her reputation has grown steadily since she died. Her “Complete Stories” won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1971. Her collected letters, “The Habit of Being,” banished the misperception that she was some sort of crippled hillbilly Emily Dickinson. They revealed instead a gregarious, engaged thinker who corresponded widely and eagerly, and who might have ranged far had illness not forced her to stay home and write.
O’Connor’s own trail begins about 200 miles southeast of Milledgeville, in Savannah, where she was born and spent her childhood among a community of Irish Roman Catholics, of whom her parents, Edward and Regina Cline O’Connor, were prominent members. The O’Connor home, on a mossy historic square downtown, is landmarked and has been closed for renovations, but is reopening for public tours in April. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist is across the square, although nothing in it informs a visitor that one of the country’s most prominent apologists for the Catholic faith worshiped and went to parochial school there.
O’Connor learned her craft at the University of Iowa and at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She lived for a while in Connecticut with the poet Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, and thought she was leaving the South behind.
But she got sick, and went home to Andalusia, four miles north of Milledgeville.
Andalusia was a working dairy farm run by Flannery’s mother, Regina, who as a prominent widow businesswoman was something of a novelty in town. No one has lived there since O’Connor died in 1964 and Regina moved back into downtown Milledgeville.
Strip malls have long since filled the gap between town and farm, and you now find Andalusia by driving past a Wal-Mart, a Chik-fil-A and a Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, where a man shot his wife and killed himself a few days before I arrived. You pass a billboard for Sister Nina, a fortune teller who reads palms in a home office cluttered with votive candles and pictures of Catholic saints. (To judge from one consultation, she is capable of divining that a visitor is a bearer of dark sorrows, but not exactly skilled at pinpointing what those sorrows might be.)
Across the highway from an America’s Best Value Inn, a tiny sign marks the dirt road to Andalusia. I turned left, went through an open gate and there it was, a two-story white frame house with a columns and brick steps leading up to a wide screened porch. Through the screens I could see a long, tidy row of white rocking chairs.
I drove around back, between the magnolia and pecan trees, parked on the grass and walked back to the house past a wooden water tower and an ancient garage, splintered and falling in on itself.
I was met at the door by Craig R. Amason, the executive director of the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation, the nonprofit organization set up to sustain her memory and preserve her home. When the affable Mr. Amason, the foundation’s sole employee, is not showing pilgrims around, he is raising money to fix up the place, a project that is a few million dollars short of its goal. The foundation urgently wants to restore the house and outbuildings to postcard-perfection, to insure its survival. Last year the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation placed Andalusia on its list of most endangered places in the state.
For now, the 21-acre property is in a captivating state of decay.
There is no slow buildup on this tour; the final destination is the first doorway on your left: O’Connor’s bedroom and study, converted from a sitting room because she couldn’t climb the stairs. Mr. Amason stood back, politely granting me silence as I gathered my thoughts and drank in every detail.
This is where O’Connor wrote, for three hours every day. Her bed had a faded blue-and-white coverlet. The blue drapes, in a 1950′s pattern, were dingy, and the paint was flaking off the walls. There was a portable typewriter, a hi-fi with classical LPs, a few bookcases. Leaning against an armoire were the aluminum crutches that O’Connor used, with her rashy swollen legs and crumbling bones, to get from bedroom to kitchen to porch.
There are few opportunities for so intimate and unguarded a glimpse into the private life of a great American writer. Mr. Amason told me that visitors sometimes wept on the bedroom threshold.
The center hall’s cracked plaster walls held a few family photographs: an adorable Flannery, age 3, scowling at a picture book, and her smiling older self on an adjacent wall. There was a picture of Edward O’Connor, but none of Regina, who died in 1995 at 99. In the kitchen, an old electric range with fat heating elements sat near a chunky refrigerator, the very one Flannery bought for her mother after selling the rights to “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” for a TV movie in which Gene Kelly butchered the role of the con man Tom T. Shiftlet. In the center of the room, a small wooden table was set for two.
A walk around the grounds summoned all manner of O’Connor images. In a field of goldenrod, a lone hinny, a horse-donkey hybrid named Flossie, with grotesque clumps of fat on her rump, kept a reserved distance. I followed a path below the house down to a pond buzzing with dragonflies. Mr. Amason had told me to keep to the mowed areas to avoid snakes, so I wasn’t too surprised to encounter a black rat snake, stretched out like a five-foot length of industrial cable, by a footbridge at the far edge of the pond. I tickled it with a turkey feather and it curled to strike faster than I could blink.
Back in Milledgeville’s tidy downtown, I went to Georgia College and State University, which was Georgia State College for Women when O’Connor went there. The library displays her desk, paintings and other artifacts, and a librarian took me in the back to see her papers and books — a daunting array of fiction, classics and Catholic theology. The book of Updike’s poetry looked well read, but not as much as the Kierkegaard (“Fear and Trembling” and “The Sickness Unto Death”), whose binding was falling off.
I found Sacred Heart Church, where Flannery and Regina worshiped, and was amazed when the pastor, the Rev. Michael McWhorter, suggested that I come back the next morning for the funeral service of O’Connor’s first cousin Catherine Florencourt Firth, whose ashes were coming home from Arizona. I sat quietly in a back row, then shrank into my jacket when Father McWhorter announced my presence from the pulpit. But the mourners, clearly accustomed to Flannery admirers, nodded graciously at me. The pastor had a shiny round head and tidy beard, and applied incense with medieval vigor, sending curls of sweet smoke around Mrs. Firth’s urn until the tiny sanctuary was entirely fogged in.
I am not accustomed to crashing funerals, so I did not linger afterward. I was grateful for the kind offers from Mrs. Firth’s relations to come back and visit longer next time.
My last stop was also O’Connor’s: Memory Hill Cemetery, in the middle of town, where mother, father and daughter lie side by side by side under identical flat marble slabs. A state prison detail was prowling the grounds, trimming hedges. They had sloppily strewn oleander branches on Flannery’s grave, which I brushed clean. I found a plastic bouquet to place at its head. I looked at the dates:
March 25, 1925
August 3, 1964
She died young, but not without saying what she wanted to say. I thought back to my journey the night before, when I captured the O’Connor sunset I had been looking for. I found a road that led down to the edge of a kaolin mine. Standing beside huge mounds of white chalky dirt, surrounded by deep treads left in the red clay by earth-moving machinery, I watched as a sentence from one of my favorite stories, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” slowly unfolded, as if for me alone:
“The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.”
By the road’s edge I spied an unusual-looking vine. It was passion flower, with purple blossoms that look like a crown of thorns, and the nails for Christ’s hands and feet. I picked a bunch of strands, with their immature fruit, like little green boiled eggs, and got back onto the road to Milledgeville, under a blackening sky, to put them in some water.
VISITOR INFORMATION
WHERE TO STAY
Milledgeville has a lot of chain motels, but only one Antebellum Inn (200 North Columbia Street; 478-454-5400; www.antebelluminn.com), a stately bed-and-breakfast with big white columns, dark woodwork and four-poster beds with flowery linens. A co-owner, Jane Lorenz, is from Hawaii, a Southern state legendary for its hospitality, and when I stayed there the house echoed with sweet Hawaiian slack-key guitar music. Doubles from $99.
In Savannah, the Hamilton-Turner Inn (330 Abercorn Street; 912-233-1833; www.hamilton-turnerinn.com) occupies a corner of Lafayette Square, near O’Connor’s childhood home. Rooms are named for famous Savannah personalities. The Flannery O’Connor room (with whirlpool spa) was taken during my visit, so I settled for the Casimir Pulaski. Doubles from $179.
WHERE TO EAT
Sylvia’s Grille (2600 North Columbia Street; 478-452-4444; www.sylviasgrille.com) is steps from Andalusia‘s driveway, in a Wal-Mart shopping plaza, but it’s no chain restaurant. It has wine tastings, live music and dishes like duck confit and cioppino. Lunch every day and dinner every day but Sunday. Dinner for two with wine is about $50.
Little Tokyo Steak House and Sushi Bar (2601 North Columbia Street; 478-452-8886) serves grilled steak and seafood and impressive sushi, which says as much about the worldliness of little Milledgeville as you need to know. Open for lunch every day but Saturday; dinner every day, for about $60, with sake or wine.
Firefly Cafe (321 Habersham Street; 912-234-1971), in Savannah, serves breakfast, lunch and dinner and weekend brunch. An unassuming place with delicious food, especially the corn chowder with crab and the cranberry-pecan-spinach salad. Dinner for two with wine is about $60.
WHAT TO DO
Andalusia (2628 North Columbia Street; 478-454-4029; www.andalusiafarm.org) is open for tours on Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and by appointment seven days a week. The 21-acre farm complex includes buildings in varying states of authentic decay, a pond, wild turkeys and snakes. The gift shop sells O’Connor’s works, bumper stickers (“I’d Rather Be Reading Flannery O’Connor”) and cards bearing O’Connor epigrams, intricately lettered by her first cousin Frances Florencourt. My favorite: “Total nonretention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”
Sacred Heart Catholic Church (110 North Jefferson Street NE; 478-452-2421), where O’Connor and her mother worshiped. Sunday Masses are at 9 and 11:15 a.m. and 5 p.m.
O’Connor’s grave at Memory Hill Cemetery (300 West Franklin Street; www.friendsofcems.org/memoryhill) is on the east side in Section A, Lot 39. The cemetery is also the final resting place of Congressman Carl Vinson and of Edwin F. Jemison, the scrawny Confederate soldier whose doleful portrait is one of the best-known Civil War photographs.
Sister Nina (3054 North Columbia Street; 478-453-8288) offers crystals, palm and tarot readings by appointment.
The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home (207 East Charlton Street, Savannah; 912-233-6014; www.flanneryoconnorhome.org), now closed for renovation, is to reopen in April.
WHAT TO READ
O’Connor’s short stories and two novels, “Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away,” appear in numerous paperback editions and the Library of America has published her collected works. “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose” includes essays and lectures in which O’Connor gives a reader invaluable insight into what she’s doing. An essential companion is “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor,” which is literate, self-deprecating and deadly funny.
In Milledgeville, you might want to prowl garage sales for signed first editions of “Wise Blood,” her first novel, which scandalized the society ladies of Milledgeville in 1952. They never expected young Mary Flannery to write such a strange book full of grotesque violence and occasional s-e-x. Craig R. Amason, a local expert on O’Connor, suspects that after the book signings and teas, quite a few copies ended up in attics, unread.
LAWRENCE DOWNES is an editorial writer at The Times.
- Veterinarian Says Goodbye
Matt Rourke/Associated PressDr. Dean Richardson became emotional at a news conference about Barbaro Monday.
Veterinarian Says Goodbye to a Patient
KENNETT SQUARE, Pa., Jan. 29 — In the minutes before an overdose of an anesthetic was given to Barbaro on Monday morning to terminate his life, Dr. Dean Richardson took a moment to say goodbye. For Richardson, the surgeon who worked so hard to save Barbaro’s life and who developed an emotional attachment to his famous patient, it was a final, and intensely poignant, moment.
As he spoke at a news conference at the University of Pennsylvania‘s New Bolton Center later in the day, Richardson, the chief of surgery at the Center’s Widener Hospital for Large Animals, was clearly upset. He choked up and stopped talking several times, in one instance for at least 10 seconds. He would then take a deep breath to regain his composure and begin speaking again.
Even amid the tears, the 53-year-old Richardson, who has been an equine surgeon at the New Bolton Center for 27 years, had other work to do. Not long after Barbaro was euthanized at 10:30 a.m., Richardson had to attend to another horse. It was an obligation, he said, that helped take his mind off Barbaro. But as the day wore on, the sadness was there, even outright grief.
“I knew that if this day came, it would be very difficult to keep my composure,” Richardson said. “It is what it is. It’s not the first horse I’ve cried over.”
The decision to end Barbaro’s life came more than eight months after he shattered his right hind leg in the opening moments of the Preakness Stakes and was taken to the New Bolton Center. Barbaro’s owners, Roy and Gretchen Jackson, were determined to do everything possible to save Barbaro’s life, and in the tall, even-tempered Richardson they found an experienced surgeon with a national reputation who would share their devotion to the difficult task. For Richardson, in some respects, it was the challenge of a lifetime.
In the months that followed, Barbaro and Richardson had any number of good days. In December, Barbaro was doing so well that there was talk that he might soon be released from the New Bolton Center and continue his recovery at a farm in Kentucky. It seemed possible that he would eventually be able to recover enough to move on to a life as a sire.
Richardson was among those who began saying that a corner had been turned in Barbaro’s recovery.
“I’m human,” he said Monday. “There were many times I was optimistic he would make it. But at the same time, I am smart enough to know intellectually that all these challenges were there throughout and remained. But it would be hard to get up and go to work every day if I didn’t think this could work.”
Only a week ago, Richardson was in Beverly Hills, Calif., with the Jacksons, to accept a special citation at the horse racing industry’s annual awards dinner, an event that primarily honors the sport’s top horses of the previous year. The award cited the Jacksons and the team at the New Bolton Center for their efforts to save Barbaro.
But by then, a new set of problems had begun for Barbaro. The condition of his left hind foot, which developed laminitis in July and imperiled his life, was again proving troublesome. As the week progressed, the difficulties mounted. But through it all, to the final moments, Richardson found it hard to give up. A graduate of Dartmouth and the Ohio State College of Veterinary Medicine, the son of a Navy doctor, he battled until he had to surrender.
“I’m very comfortable we made the right decision, which was something that was very difficult to do,” he said. “As your typical egotistical surgeon, I would have loved to prove what I can do on a daily basis. But you have to do what is best for the patient.”
Only once on Monday did Richardson’s sadness turned to anger — when he was asked how much Barbaro’s care since May 20 had cost. He refused to answer the question and barked at the questioner, “It’s not relevant.”
“The only gratification I will get out of this is that this horse had eight, nine months of time, the vast majority of which he was a happy horse,” he said.
Richardson said his experiences with Barbaro would make him an even better surgeon.
“If I had a horse come in with the same injury tomorrow, I honestly believe I’d have a better chance of saving his life and that’s because I probably wouldn’t make the same mistakes,” he said, adding, “You have to believe you’re going to get better at what you do.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company- Barbaro
Julien Goldstein for The New York TimesLittle Tommy Fella, distant kin to Barbaro, trains in France, where stamina is prized as well as speed
Julien Goldstein for The New York Times
HIS COUSIN BARBARO Little Tommy Fella, above, at a training center in Maisons-Laffitte, France, shares a bloodline but little else with Barbaro.I’m Not Barbaro, for Lots of Reasons
PARIS
THE captivating story of Barbaro came to an end last week when the colt succumbed to complications from the injuries he suffered in the Preakness Stakes last spring. I’m miles away from the drama, but I have a link to Barbaro: he’s standing in the barn across the street from my house in Maisons-Laffitte, France.
My 3-year-old colt, Little Tommy Fella, shares a bloodline. Barbaro’s grandfather, Roberto, is Tommy’s great-great-grandfather. The line goes back to Man o’ War, and still further to the Godolphin Arabian and Byerly Turk, two of the foundation stallions of the modern breed, begun in England.
Like many distant relatives, they have, actually, very little in common — not least because Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby champion, won over $2 million in his brief career, and Tommy hasn’t yet opened his bank account (although I’m confident he soon will). The branch of the thoroughbred that has taken root in America and the ones that remain in Europe are turning out to be quite different animals, and racing on the continents has turned into something like two different sports.
American racing has followed American culture, with an emphasis on short, exciting bursts of speed. In Europe, where organized racing began, tradition takes precedence, with a focus on longer races over rolling turf courses. In the United States, racing has evolved into a statistician’s paradise, dense with timed workouts, speed ratings and dosage figures. On the gallops in France or England, I have yet to see a stopwatch.
That drive for speed has come with some baggage. The rate of fatal accidents on racetracks in the United States is about 1.5 per 1,000 starts, according to David Nunamaker, professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Pennsylvania‘s New Bolton Center, where Barbaro was treated. That may not sound alarming, but consider it this way: Last season at Arlington Park outside of Chicago, 21 horses died on the racetrack over three and a half months. In California, Del Mar’s summer season was marred by 16 fatalities. By contrast, in Hong Kong, fatalities are 0.58 per 1,000 starts — which translates into the deaths of 26 horses over the last five years. In England, the rate is 0.65 per 1,000 starts.
The série noir of Arlington and Del Mar, coupled with Barbaro’s arresting accident, has caused no small amount of hand-wringing in the United States over how to reduce the risk. Examining the track was the first step, and a result was a rush to rip up the dirt and install synthetic “polytrack” surfaces, which have been used for some racing in Europe for several years. Keeneland in Kentucky was one of the first courses in the United States to switch to the synthetic track, and others followed. California is requiring all tracks to switch to the surface, and Arlington is changing, too.
But while there is anecdotal evidence of fewer injuries on polytracks, it’s too early to declare the surface the solution.
“No one did very much scientific work to prove it,” Dr. Nunamaker said. “People have gotten excited about it, and they’re pouring a lot of money into it. I hope it’s a solution, but I don’t know that it is.”
Most racing in Europe and Asia, where fatalities are lower, is on turf — and not necessarily golf-course-perfect turf. My mare, Well Done Clare, has had the luxury of running at Longchamp and Chantilly, two of France’s premier courses, but she has also had to carry me through amateur races at places like Chalons en Champagne, where tight turns are banked to the outside and only a thin layer of grass covers chalky ground. In the race before ours there, one horse finished in the adjoining hay field after failing to negotiate the first turn. There are more than 250 courses in France, and many are tiny country tracks with wooden stakes or hedges instead of a rail. Despite this, it is rare to see fatalities at such tracks.
Differences in training and breeding are part of the reason. Horses in Europe generally are not trained at racecourses, but in private yards and training centers. They are often ridden miles every day, over different types of surfaces. And breeders are looking for soundness and stamina rather than precocious speed.
Gary Stevens, the retired champion jockey who rode briefly in France a few years ago (and acted in “Seabiscuit”), told me then that he had no idea how tough thoroughbreds could be until he came here.
There’s another big difference between the United States and much of the rest of the racing world: medication. Horses racing in America are allowed to be injected with various drugs on race day, the most common being Lasix, a powerful diuretic, and phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory medication. Many trainers use whatever medications are permitted whether or not they believe a horse needs it. If they don’t, the thinking goes, they will be giving an advantage to a competitor.
Brian Stewart, head of veterinary regulation for the Hong Kong Jockey Club, said that while it was impossible to scientifically link drugs to injuries, “we believe medication adds a risk factor, not only to injury, but to inconsistent racing performance.”
Hong Kong has a zero-tolerance policy on any medication in a horse’s system on race day.
“A horse will try his hardest,” Dr. Stewart said, “and if he can’t feel pain he will run through it, increasing the risk of injury.”
Paul-Marie Gadot, director of veterinary services for France Galop, the jockey club under whose rules I compete, put it even more bluntly: “We have the responsibility to make sure the horse is healthy and fit to compete. If it needs medication, it is not fit.”
There are signs that the United States is recognizing that race-day medication might be a problem. Kentucky has trimmed the list of drugs it allows, and California is considering banning steroids in yearlings being prepared for sale.
“Medication has become a bit of a crutch,” said Dr. Rick Arthur, equine medical director at the California Horse Racing Board. “It’s hard to change these things. But people who enjoy horse racing and think about the future of horse racing believe that we are going to have to re-evaluate our stance on many of the medications we permit.”
A rise in the popularity of international racing, with big-money, high-profile events in Dubai and Hong Kong, is also nudging the sport toward a global set of rules.
But Maurits Bruggink, executive director of the International Federation of Horse Racing Authorities, said diplomatically, “Medication is, of course, a very politically sensitive topic.”
Barbaro was running on Lasix in the Preakness, and there is no evidence that this had anything to do with his accident. But his story became a rallying point for improving safety for thoroughbreds.
“Any accident brings public attention to the sport, and the public are less and less accepting that this kind of accident is inevitable,” Dr. Gadot said.
My first hope as a trainer — and sometimes jockey — is that I will never be faced with the kind of decisions Gretchen and Roy Jackson had to make for Barbaro. I’m backing up my hopes with plenty of hay, oats, water and long gallops through the forest, as well as on the track.
My second hope is that Little Tommy might live up to a fraction of his distant American cousin’s potential. Hope is what keeps us all in the game.
DefinitionsThe Racial Politics of Speaking Well
WASHINGTON
SENATOR JOSEPH R. BIDEN‘S characterization of his fellow Democratic presidential contender Senator Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” was so painfully clumsy that it nearly warranted pity.
There are not enough column inches on this page to parse interpretations of each of Mr. Biden’s chosen adjectives. But among his string of loaded words, one is so pervasive — and is generally used and viewed so differently by blacks and whites — that it calls out for a national chat, perhaps a national therapy session.
It is amazing that this still requires clarification, but here it is. Black people get a little testy when white people call them “articulate.”
Though it was little noted, on Wednesday President Bush on the Fox News Channel also described Mr. Obama as “articulate.” On any given day, in any number of settings, it is likely to be one of the first things white people warmly remark about Oprah Winfrey; Richard Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Deval Patrick, the newly elected governor of Massachusetts; or a recently promoted black colleague at work.
A series of conversations about the word with a number of black public figures last week elicited the kind of frustrated responses often uttered between blacks, but seldom shared with whites.
“You hear it and you just think, ‘Damn, this again?’ ” said Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.
Anna Perez, the former communications counselor for Ms. Rice when she was national security adviser, said, “You just stand and wonder, ‘When will this foolishness end?’ ”
Said Reginald Hudlin, president of entertainment for Black Entertainment Television: “It makes me weary, literally tired, like, ‘Do I really want to spend my time right now educating this person?’ “
So what is the problem with the word? Whites do not normally object when it is used to describe them. And it is not as if articulate black people do not wish to be thought of as that. The characterization is most often meant as a form of praise.
“Look, what I was attempting to be, but not very artfully, is complimentary,” Mr. Biden explained to Jon Stewart on Wednesday on “The Daily Show.” “This is an incredible guy. This is a phenomenon.”
What faint praise, indeed. Being articulate must surely be a baseline requirement for a former president of The Harvard Law Review. After all, Webster’s definitions of the word include “able to speak” and “expressing oneself easily and clearly.” It would be more incredible, more of a phenomenon, to borrow two more of the senator’s puzzling words, if Mr. Obama were inarticulate.
That is the core of the issue. When whites use the word in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment. It is similar to praising a female executive or politician by calling her “tough” or “a rational decision-maker.”
“When people say it, what they are really saying is that someone is articulate … for a black person,” Ms. Perez said.
Such a subtext is inherently offensive because it suggests that the recipient of the “compliment” is notably different from other black people.
“Historically, it was meant to signal the exceptional Negro,” Mr. Dyson said. “The implication is that most black people do not have the capacity to engage in articulate speech, when white people are automatically assumed to be articulate.”
And such distinctions discount as inarticulate historically black patterns of speech. “Al Sharpton is incredibly articulate,” said Tricia Rose, professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. “But because he speaks with a cadence and style that is firmly rooted in black rhetorical tradition you will rarely hear white people refer to him as articulate.”
While many white people do not automatically recognize how, and how often, the word is applied, many black people can recall with clarity the numerous times it has stopped them in their tracks.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, said her first notable encounter with the word was back in high school in Chester, Va., when she was dating the school’s star football player. In post-game interviews and news stories she started to notice that he was always referred to as articulate.
“They never said that about the white quarterback,” she said, “yet they couldn’t help but say it about my boyfriend.”
William E. Kennard, a managing director of the Carlyle Group and a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, recalled that in his days as partner at a Washington law firm in the early 1990s written reviews of prospective black hires almost always included the words, “articulate and poised.” The characterization was so consistent and in such stark contrast to the notes taken on white job applicants that he mentioned it to his fellow partners.
“It was a law firm; all of the people interviewing for jobs were articulate,” said Mr. Kennard, 50, who is also on the board of The New York Times Company. “And yet my colleagues seemed struck by that quality in black applicants.”
The comedian and actor D. L. Hughley, a frequent guest on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” says that every time he appears on the show, where he riffs on the political and social issues of the day, people walk up to him afterward and tell him how “smart and articulate” his comments were.
“Everyone was up in arms about Michael Richards using the N-word, but subtle words like this are more insidious,” Mr. Hughley said. “It’s like weight loss. The last few pounds are the hardest to get rid of. It’s the last vestiges of racism that are hard to get rid of.”
Sometimes the “articulate” moniker is merely implied. My colleague Rachel Swarns and I chuckle wearily about the number of times we have finished interviews or casual conversations with people — always white, more often male — only to have the person end the meeting with some version of the statement, “something about you reminds me of Condoleezza Rice.”
Neither Rachel nor I look anything like Ms. Rice, or each other for that matter, so the comparison is clearly not physical. The comment seems more a vocalized reach by the speaker for some sort of reference point, a context in which to understand us.
It is unlikely that whites will quickly or easily erase “articulate” and other damning forms of praise from the ways in which they discuss blacks. Listen for it in post-Super Bowl chatter, after the Academy Awards, at the next school board meeting or corporate retreat.
But here is a pointer. Do not use it as the primary attribute of note for a black person if you would not use it for a similarly talented, skilled or eloquent white person. Do not make it an outsized distinction for Brown University’s president, Ruth Simmons, if you would not for the University of Michigan‘s president, Mary Sue Coleman. Do not make it the sole basis for your praise of the actor Forest Whitaker if it would never cross your mind to utter it about the expressive Peter O’Toole.
With the ballooning size of the black middle and upper class, qualities in blacks like intelligence, eloquence — the mere ability to string sentences together with tenses intact — must at some point become as unremarkable to whites as they are to blacks.
“How many flukes simply constitute reality?” Mr. Hudlin asked, with amused dismay.
Well said.
