In Kentucky: Defiant Mice from City Hall

By Laurence I. Barrett

Their constituents back home would have been astonished. Fifteen mayors sitting in a row with their eyes closed, pointing their index fingers toward an imaginary ball of light. They are responding to commands from a bearded therapist who soothingly urges them to "draw the healing spheres" to them. After playing a tape of Beethoven's Pastoral, the therapist leads his subjects into a mental pasture, where they are to find a cool stream and feel a pleasant breeze.

A private sanitarium for unhinged politicians? Not at all. The setting is a bare hotel conference room in Lexington, Ky., and the half-hour of "guided imagery" is the climax of an afternoon's discussion about coping with stress. The U.S.

Conference of Mayors, which periodically brings together some of its members for a three-day immersion in expertise, exhortation and empathy, has shrewdly decided that controlling angst can be as important to a mayor's success as drafting municipal budgets.

These mayors from small communities around the country--populations ranging from 2,500 to 68,000--come dressed in similar garments of vulnerability. When Psychiatrist David Morrison flashes a cartoon slide showing a mouse with a defiant middle finger raised toward a fierce owl, there is silence for a moment. Then William Durham, the slight, dapper, boyish mayor of Burlington, N.C.

(pop. 40,000), speaks up: "That's me," he says solemnly. "I've been that little mouse and I've felt guilty about it."

The stereotype of the small-city mayor is a Babbittish burgomaster who divides his time between Rotary luncheons and Boy Scout wiener roasts. In fact, they have the same chronic problems and extraordinary crises that bigger-name politicians have. The group in Lexington includes the mayors of Harrisburg, Pa.

(threatened nuclear disaster), Decatur, Ala. (armed Ku Kluxers on the rampage), and Meridian, Miss, (serious flooding).

Unlike their metropolitan cousins, though, few of these mayors are career politicians. Ted Crozier, a bald, burly ex-Army colonel, retired to his wife's home town of Clarksville, Tenn., and found public affairs more interesting than the restaurant into which he had sunk some of his service savings. Gesturing with his cigarette holder, he says: "I'm trying to prove you can turn things around." Charlotte Baldwin, the slim, red-haired wife of a dentist from Madisonville, Ky. (pop.

20,000), went back to college for a degree in urban studies when her sons were grown, then successfully bucked the crowd that had run city hall for nearly 30 years. Bill J. Dukes had been an executive at the Monsanto Co. but then served two mayors of Decatur as an administrative aide. A tall, handsome, quiet-spoken native of Muhlenberg, Ky., Dukes says: "Finally I decided to try it myself. I wanted to show that Decatur is not what people think. We're a progressive city --even though I'm still considered a Yankee after 22 years."

At Lexington, rapport comes quickly, because they're all trying to cope with similar problems, though without the sophisticated staffs and political clout of their big-city counterparts. Says Dukes, referring to the confrontation between Klansmen and black activists: "That's the main reason I came to Lexington. I had to get away from it for a while."

Not that the program, grandly titled "The Mayors Leadership Institute," is any rest cure. From Sunday night through noon Wednesday, the "students" listen to 18 speakers and to each other. Most of the "faculty" are former city or federal officials who have become full-time specialists in urban fields. They dispense information about arcane money management methods, political techniques, trends to expect in the future and, above all, how to get by in a period of stagnant federal and state aid. One proposed device: juggle whatever cash is on hand adroitly enough to earn maximum interest on it. The mayors respond like pre-med students before final exams, asking the same basic questions and getting writer's cramp taking notes. When Crozier misplaces his pad he scribbles away on a series of napkins which he then stuffs in his pocket.

The formal program is obviously valuable. But like women at their first consciousness-raising session, the mayors are utterly delighted to find other people who share, and above all, understand their problems. As they chat they soon find themselves finishing each other's sentences like old friends. Paul Doutrich of Harrisburg, who looks a bit like bug-eyed Comedian Rodney ("I don't get no respect") Dangerfield, learned about the disastrous doings at nearby Three Mile Island from an enterprising Boston radio reporter who called long distance to check out the rumor of imminent nuclear disaster. It was two days before Doutrich was properly briefed by utility and state officials. Joe Viens of Miramar, Fla., a former state trooper and undercover narc, has a brash, street-wise manner and does Teddy Kennedy impersonations in his native "Baas-ton" accent. But he concedes that he has trouble getting enough precise planning information to make a strong case for the housing program he wants.

Despite an evident, shared disdain for federal regulators and regulations, all the mayors exploit grant programs as much as they can. In Harrisburg, Doutrich would Like to accommodate constituents who want to convert a one-way avenue back to two-way flow. But to do so would violate the state-dictated traffic pattern and risk the loss of a $1 million highway subsidy. Richard Baker of Newark, Ohio, who used to sell and service electronic equipment, has winkled out enough economic development grants from Washington to refurbish his downtown. With some relish he tells about his chess game against the feds. Washington at first demanded that contractors on two projects have at least 10% minority employment on each job--a problem in Newark because the city's 47,000 population is only 1.4% black. Baker persuaded the feds that for the purposes of affirmative action they consider the two projects one, then went to a larger city to hire a minority-owned contracting firm for one development.

The work went ahead.

Dealing with constituents who are also neighbors and acquaintances can be sticky. Charlotte Baldwin, her town's first woman mayor, dresses with a certain flair in Lexington, but sighs that back home in Madisonville she cannot wear her chic sandals on business calls. She feels that conventional pumps will help encourage citizens to take her seriously. Joe Viens remembers a voter who came in to remind the mayor of his campaign support, then presented a traffic ticket to be fixed. Viens said sorry, the only way he could help would be to pay the fine out of his own pocket. "Good," said the man, "you do that." A local eccentric dropped into Doutrich's office, chatted for a while and then pulled a revolver. Visions of the Moscone assassination in San Francisco flashed through Hizzonor's mind. But the gun was empty; its owner finally explained he wanted to turn it in to the police.

To a person, these small-city mayors feel overworked and underpaid.

Those who are supposedly part-time officials, like Baldwin, make as little as $85 a week. Even the full-time incumbents get meager pay, from which must be deducted the psychic cost of public cynicism. Don Quaintance of Marion, Ohio, a white-haired, avuncular former businessman who got to the mayor's chair in middle age, thinks that kind of attitude has grown a lot during his eight years in office. He bitterly recalls a dinner with his wife and some friends at the country club. Talk got around to inflation and the size of his salary, $23,000. Said one of his companions: "Yeah, but he probably has his hand in the till." The needle still hurts.

These gnawing problems and meager rewards, one might expect, would add up to an irresistible desire to chuck it all.

Hardly. Each mayor figures that he really is making a difference. Ted Crozier has shaken up the police department; he has even got his 92-man police force to jog it self into shape. Richard Verbic of Elgin, Ill., a dentist, boasts of completing an other kind of bridge -- a $1.2 million span over the Fox River, which the town needed for 20 years. Richard Baker is proud of having brought the Little League World Series to Newark for the third year running; no other town in the country can match that claim. Don Quaintance thinks he might like to retire, but then he insists that he is the only candidate who can protect Marion from an opponent whom he regards as irresponsible. So he is after a third term this year, as is Baker. And, those cantankerous voters willing, the others too will no doubt hang on to the pains and perks of office. After the Lexington meeting, at any rate, they will know more about mice and mayors, and perhaps remember the advice of a lecturer: "You politic, you massage, and you beg. Will is more important than data."

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