Saturday, October 20, 2012
DISORGANIZED CRIME, CH.1 CONTD., by Sonny Patini
Speaking about ol’ metal garbage cans, which were a common sight on every tenement street in those days: when I was about 13 or 14, one of the staff members in the Boys Club, Frank “Frank the Tank” Raucci, asked me if I wanted to be an assistant to a Bellevue counselor and get a free trip to Coney Island. He explained that the counselor was from Bellevue’s psyche ward on 30th Street and 1st Avenue and was taking a group of emotionally disturbed kids on an outing to Coney Island. The counselor called the Club to ask for an assistant. Frank said I could go on rides all day long, so I agreed.
A school bus pulled up at the designated time and I got on. Along the way the counselor showed me a bag of soda bottle caps and told me he was going to hand them out to the kids and let them pay for the rides with the caps, trying to teach them financial responsibility. We get to Coney Island, which is closed to the public, and the first ride the kids head for is the Merry-Go-Round.
As the kids are going around on the wooden horses, I start bullshittin’ with the teenager at the booth taking the tickets. While we’re talking, the counselor comes over and tells the ticket taker about giving the kids the soda bottle caps to pay for the ride and says he’ll straighten up with him after they finish the ride. The young ticket taker agrees and goes on the ride collecting the caps from the kids. He brings a bag of ‘em back to the booth and after the ride, as I’m next to him, he sees the counselor walking away with the kids. He yells to him and when the counselor comes over, the teenage ticket taker empties the bag of soda bottle caps on the counter and says, “you wanna’ straighten up with me?”
The counselor says, “Oh, yeah!” and throws a metal garbage can cover on the counter and says, “Here, ya’ got change of this?”
About 1957, in a lot strewn with rubble from a recently demolished tenement, four of us, Al LoBrutto, Eddie Schultz, Jerry “the Touch,” and I decided to call ourselves the “Four Horsemen” and along with another good friend, Howie Storm, promised to stay friends forever...fifty-five years later, we're still keeping the promise.
****
From his book Disorganized Crime, by Sonny Patini, published
by Blue Mountain Productions (2012). Contact him at sofian7847@gmail.com.
Friday, October 19, 2012
MINNIE S. GRAHAM JUNIOR HIGH, 1955-56
From TING AND I: A Memoir
If you buy a second-hand iron, do not merely turn it off after use; be sure to pull the plug from the wall socket, especially if you leave on an outing for the afternoon. Having thus inadvertently burned the interior of the apartment that we were renting in Inwood, we moved to Mt. Vernon, NY, the southern, not the affluent, region of Westchester County.
At the Minnie S. Graham Junior High School, a rough, racially mixed institution, my grades continued to be good and my fight record continued to be mixed.
We did have a champ in the family, however. Duke won best in show, mixed-breed category, at the local park. When the local paper referred to Duke as a “Husky-Retriever,” a competitive young friend of mine felt slighted by the write-up: “My dog is husky, too,” he said about his Beagle. Sure.
My desk encyclopedia tells me Huskies are known for their intelligence and gentle temperament. Duke was smart and gentle, but tough on other dogs. He even chased down a milk tanker truck when we lived in the country; he was so badly injured that the vet wanted him put down. My mother refused and nursed Duke back to health. Duke learned to make do with three working legs rather than four after that.
I played baseball for the “Tom Godfrey” team in Mt. Vernon’s PONY league that summer. I did well in the try-out session and was very pleased to have been picked. I still have a picture of myself dressed to play: the team had handsome uniforms, and my fielder’s glove was carefully anointed with 3-in-1 oil, making it very dark and very flexible. I was part-time second baseman and right fielder, where I could do little harm. Batted a modest .246. Had three hits one game. In another I caught a fly ball with my bare hand when it bounced off my glove. This was before video cameras accompanied every parent to the games, so there are no highlight clips available. Memories are made of these rare moments.
No memorable romances occurred for me in Mt. Vernon. I did have a good fight, though: I heard him running up behind me, and I dropped down just before we collided, sending him sprawling over my back. Then, I outran him.
If you buy a second-hand iron, do not merely turn it off after use; be sure to pull the plug from the wall socket, especially if you leave on an outing for the afternoon. Having thus inadvertently burned the interior of the apartment that we were renting in Inwood, we moved to Mt. Vernon, NY, the southern, not the affluent, region of Westchester County.
At the Minnie S. Graham Junior High School, a rough, racially mixed institution, my grades continued to be good and my fight record continued to be mixed.
We did have a champ in the family, however. Duke won best in show, mixed-breed category, at the local park. When the local paper referred to Duke as a “Husky-Retriever,” a competitive young friend of mine felt slighted by the write-up: “My dog is husky, too,” he said about his Beagle. Sure.
My desk encyclopedia tells me Huskies are known for their intelligence and gentle temperament. Duke was smart and gentle, but tough on other dogs. He even chased down a milk tanker truck when we lived in the country; he was so badly injured that the vet wanted him put down. My mother refused and nursed Duke back to health. Duke learned to make do with three working legs rather than four after that.
I played baseball for the “Tom Godfrey” team in Mt. Vernon’s PONY league that summer. I did well in the try-out session and was very pleased to have been picked. I still have a picture of myself dressed to play: the team had handsome uniforms, and my fielder’s glove was carefully anointed with 3-in-1 oil, making it very dark and very flexible. I was part-time second baseman and right fielder, where I could do little harm. Batted a modest .246. Had three hits one game. In another I caught a fly ball with my bare hand when it bounced off my glove. This was before video cameras accompanied every parent to the games, so there are no highlight clips available. Memories are made of these rare moments.
No memorable romances occurred for me in Mt. Vernon. I did have a good fight, though: I heard him running up behind me, and I dropped down just before we collided, sending him sprawling over my back. Then, I outran him.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
DISORGANIZED CRIME by Sonny Patini - CHAPTER ONE
1. THE CITY
New York City was a wonderful place to grow up in during the fifties and sixties. The different neighborhoods were like little communities and with a little imagination it became a concrete Disneyland.
Games like Johnny on the Pony, ringelevio, moonshine, hot beans and butter, manhunt, kick the can, off the point, king, punchball and stickball were played out on the Street all day long. In the summer we would turn on the pump (fire hydrant), put a hollowed-out beer can over it to direct the water spray and have our own waterfall.
The stickball games were usually weekend events, where a pitcher would pitch the Spaulding ball on one hop to the batter. Two sewers would be home plate and second base, with first and third base marked off halfway between them. A “3-sewer man” was the best hitter. The Bronx paid homage to the game by renaming an Avenue “Stickball Blvd.”
Scully was another game that was played in neighborhood’s around the city, but wasn’t too popular in ours. Johnny on the Pony was my favorite game…one kid would put his back against the wall and the rest of his team, usually about 5 or 6 more, would bend over facing him and hold on to each other. The same amount of the other team would line up across the Street, run as fast as they could and jump as far up the “pony”, closest to the kid with his back on the wall. You wanted to get the heaviest kids on your team because the idea is to cave in the “pony” (the kids on the bottom).
“Buck, Buck, all the horses are up” is the chant we’d yell when all of us were up. If the kids on the bottom didn’t cave in, they’d get a chance to get to jump on the top team by guessing the amount of kids on the team. If they were wrong, or caved in, they’d stay on the bottom. We called the punishment for losing “moonshine”, which was throwing the Spaulding ball as hard as you could at one of the losing team bent over leaning against the wall.
The girls played potsy and hopscotch.
The Manhattan neighborhood I grew up in was bordered by 23rd Street to the south, 30th Street to the north and went from 1st to 3rd Avenues. I lived on 29th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenue.
Twenty-Ninth Street was the epicenter of the neighborhood. The reason was Our Lady of the Scapular school, Carmelite church and Madison Square Boys Club were all on that block. Our Lady of the Scapular school (often called Carmelite) was taught by the Sisters of Mercy. Sometimes I thought that name was an oxymoron….during lunch recess one afternoon, I just walked out of Gus Gillis’s candy store, located in the storefront of my building, with two round pieces of red licorice you could buy for a penny called “wheels.” A female classmate, Jane King, was taunting me so I threw one of the wheels at her (I ate the other one) and hit her in the noggin.
She started crying and the principal, Sister Mary Mathias, saw her, came running over and asked what happened. Through tears, she pointed at me and said, “he hit me with a wheel!” The Sister of Mercy ran over and showed me none, slappin’ the shit outta’ me and screaming, “you hit her with a wheel!” Yeah, while coverin’ up like Muhammad Ali doin’ the “rope a’ dope”, I was trying to tell her, “not a car wheel, a piece a’ candy!” She wasn’t hearing it.
In the late fifties and early sixties they knocked down the tenements from 30th to 33rd Streets between 1st and 2nd Avenues which were across the Street from three brownstones used as the Madison Square Boys Club from 1920 thru 1940.
The new building for Madison Square Boys Club at 301 East 29th Street was dedicated on April 29, 1940. I don’t know if the club got its name from Madison Square Garden, but the first Madison Square Garden was in our neighborhood. It was then called the Great Hippodrome and took up the entire block between 26th and 27th Streets, between Fourth and Madison Avenues.
P.T. Barnum, who ran Barnum and Bailey’s circus, leased it. William Vanderbilt, who owned the property, took it over and called it “Madison Square Garden,” naming it after the park across the Street. As early as 1901, the Boys Club was operating out of a room in the Madison Square Church House at 30th Street and 3rd Avenue. In 1917 the Boys Club moved to larger quarters and officially was named the “Madison Square Boys Club.”
Demolishing those tenements and digging up three blocks of ground for the foundation of a new housing development, called “Kips Bay Plaza,” left a huge excavation hole the length of those blocks. The builders encircled the excavation with an eight-foot-high wooden fence, not nearly enough security to keep some East Side kids out. After a steady rain the excavation filled with water so when we peered over the fence and seen the "lake", to us it looked like Atlantis. We jumped down and built rafts out of any discarded wood we could find to ride the rivers of urban renewal.
Another one of our favorite pastimes was running through the morgue at nearby Bellevue Hospital at 30th Street and 1st Avenue. You could see the dead bodies through the glass doors on the front of the drawers where the bodies were stored, but sometimes, when we were feeling brave, we’d pull out the whole drawer.
One night, we either saw, or imagined seeing, some movement on one of the bodies. This brought all the “goil” out of us and sent us screaming outta’ dere.
Recently reading an informative and nostalgic book about the history of Madison Square Boys Club by Irving Harris called “Madison Square Memoir,” I found out that our crew wasn’t the first to engage in this foolishness. Jackie Weiner writes: along with his friends, “Bunny” Catalano, Frankie Mills and Jerry Murphy, they’d slip into the basement morgue and pull out the drawers with the recently delivered dead bodies.
They decided to play a prank on some of the younger kids in the neighborhood. Jackie asked them if they had the balls to go with them on the “morgue run.” Thinking they would look like “chickens” to the older guys if they didn’t go, they agreed.
On the night of the run, Jackie told them to wait outside so he and his friends could make sure the coast was clear. Once inside, Jackie’s friend, Frankie, got in an empty drawer, laid down flat and covered himself up. Jackie then brought in the younger kids and showed them the drawers with the covered bodies in them. He then took them to the drawer with Frankie in it. Jackie opened the drawer; Frankie popped straight up and let out a piercing scream. The kids let out a louder scream and ran, maintaining the pitch. Jackie and his friends ran after them but couldn’t catch up and didn’t see them for days afterwards. I guess you could say the morbid the merrier!
***
We are looking for help in re-publishing this book and promoting it. Contact Sonny Patini at sofian7847@gmail.com.
Friday, October 12, 2012
DISORGANIZED CRIME...A MEMOIR...Preface
By Sonny Patini [pen name]
A true story about 50’s and 60’s New York, gambling, drugs, the mafia, the witness protection program, prison and friendship.
CONTENTS
Preface 2
Chapters
1 The City 3
2 The Life 51
3 Doin’ Time 80
4 The Set-Up 88
5 The Mob 96
6 Flippin’ 98
7 The Tennessee Waltz 104
8 Death of a Partner 107
9 The Beginning of the End 128
10 The Boston Mob 137
11 The Columbo Family 153
12 New Jersey’s Lucchese Family 167
13 New Sentence, New Name 172
14 Back to the Apple 182
15 Part of the Solution 183
16 Somewhere Beyond the “See” 187
Afterword 193
1 The City 3
2 The Life 51
3 Doin’ Time 80
4 The Set-Up 88
5 The Mob 96
6 Flippin’ 98
7 The Tennessee Waltz 104
8 Death of a Partner 107
9 The Beginning of the End 128
10 The Boston Mob 137
11 The Columbo Family 153
12 New Jersey’s Lucchese Family 167
13 New Sentence, New Name 172
14 Back to the Apple 182
15 Part of the Solution 183
16 Somewhere Beyond the “See” 187
Afterword 193
This book is dedicated to my sister and all the selfless volunteers of animal rescue.
PREFACE
I shot the heroin into a vein in my leg, having burnt out the veins in the rest of my body long ago. In a Pilates-like move, I lifted my leg over my head while moving from the chair to the floor, somehow thinking that would be the "express" to the place heroin goes to get you high. Looking across the sparse, cheap hotel room, I focused on the window and thought that might be my best exit - my only exit! The mob was after me, the feds were after me, the NYPD were after me, my left arm was paralyzed and I was going bald.
Earlier that day I was in the Staten Island public health hospital being guarded by U.S. marshals around the clock. Once I realized I shared the bathroom with the patient in the next room, I went to the hall phone, escorted by the marshal, called a cab service and told them to meet me in front of the hospital in fifteen minutes. Next, I took some clothes into the shower under my robe, turned on the water, got dressed, jimmied the lock, excused myself from the shocked patient in the next room and walked down the fire stairs into the waiting cab.
It was 1977. The reason I was in the hospital with a paralyzed left arm was because I asked my wife to bring me some heroin for my 30th birthday on her weekly visit to where I was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan. She brought it; I shot it and woke up some time later, lying on top of my left arm with the needle still in my leg. I didn't even have time for the "Pilates Express" position. I got up and started slapping my arm, which I thought was asleep and would awaken soon. After slapping the shit out of my arm for an hour and looking like I went a few rounds with Mike Tyson, I figured something was wrong.
Being the larcenous bastard I am, I quickly thought of a way to turn the O.D. (overdose) into a P.D. (payday). Having just gotten a job running an engravograph machine, I realized they didn't make me sign the mandatory safety sheet acknowledging I had read the safety rules. I got my friend, told him I'd give him ten percent to say he saw the machine lid fall on my arm. Then, I walked over to the machine and slammed down the lid so hard the loud crash woke up the sleeping, half-drunk hack who was on duty. My friend told me the subsequent performance of me writhing in "pain" on the floor, reminded him of the young teenagers break-dancing in Times Square, the only thing I didn't do was spin on my head.
My friend started yelling, "The lid fell on his arm; the lid fell on his arm!" When the hack came over and asked what happened, I said, 'You weren’t sleeping were you? You saw what happened, the lid fell on my arm. Call the P.A. (physician's assistant)!" For whatever reason, he said he did see it and later on he put it in writing.
***
We plan to serialize much of the book at this blog, hoping to generate interest
in the book and in its author. It has been printed in a paperback version [including photos] by
Mountain Lion Productions, copyright 2012.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
RIVERSIDE DRIVE, MANHATTAN, NY, 1942-53
From TING AND I: A MEMOIR...
My first eleven years were spent living with my mother, father, and siblings in a two-bedroom apartment in a set of five-story buildings abutting the George Washington Bridge on Riverside Drive, near the northern end of Manhattan Island. By the time I was nine, three of my four younger siblings had come along: Nick in 1948, Diana, in 1949, and Cliff in 1951. Chris was born much later, in 1959.
The neighborhood was almost exclusively Catholic, while I was Protestant, a “left-footer,” out of step. Their school, All Hallows, was parochial; mine, Hunter College Elementary School, was nondenominational.
Although I participated in all the kids’ games, I was viewed as different. “The way he talks makes me feel funny” was how one contemporary explained this to my mother. At age nine or ten I beat up one of my main antagonists and had much less trouble thereafter. I was thin, wiry. The local tailor had been asked to take in a hand-me-down jacket so it would fit me, and he replied that if he took it in any more, there wouldn’t be a jacket.
It was around 1950. We played a lot of hide-and-seek, urban type. The buildings were five stories high, without elevators. I liked to hide in the dumbwaiters, large, open wooden boxes attached to a rope on pulleys at the top of the shaft. You could bring your groceries upstairs or your trash downstairs with these devices. Each apartment had a door that opened onto this shaft, so the residents could put in or take out objects. I would get into the box at the cellar level, then pull on the rope enough to pull myself above the lowest opening. Hard for kids to find me, a good thing—but the smells were unpleasant.
We played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, war, sword fights (sticks, rolled-up newspapers). Advanced weaponry included linoleum guns, sticks with a nail at the front end, a long rubber band, and small (one-inch) squares of cut-up linoleum to put in the stretched rubber band before releasing it toward your foe.
Televisions were rare. We did have many radio programs that included my favorite heroes: The Lone Ranger (cue up Rossini’s “William Tell Overture”); Tom Mix; Roy Rogers, his horse, Trigger, and his significant other, Dale Evans; Gene Autry; The Shadow (“Able to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him. Who knows? The Shadow knows.”); the Green Lantern; Sgt. Preston of the Yukon; the Green Hornet (cue up Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”) and his trusty sidekick Kato (Japanese?); Detective Johnny Dollar (who organized his story around his expense account vouchers). Babysitting my younger siblings—at that point I had a sister and two brothers; went fine during the hours these shows were on, but later in the evening radio became quite boring.
Much of my social life was with the Fort Washington Collegiate Church, one of four Dutch Reformed churches in the city. Our minister, Rev. Daniel Poling, lost a brother in World War II. The brother, Clarke, had given his lifejacket to another soldier when their boat had been on the verge of sinking. Rev. Poling had a son who was stricken with cerebral palsy—pitifully, severely. The father’s faith must have been tested. He became a leading figure in the Dutch Reformed Church of America. I collected a slew of perfect or near-perfect attendance pins for Sunday school and can still quote Scripture, often on either side of an issue. Members of scout troops associated with the church, we were theoretical wilderness experts but went almost nowhere.
Whether it was with scouts or just as a small pack of urban urchins, we crossed the George Washington Bridge one day to collect wildlife samples from the wilds of New Jersey. I proudly brought back a jar of active tiny swimmers, misidentifying them as tiny tadpoles. Mom had me flush them down the toilet: they were mosquito larvae.
Hardly any girls to speak of at church. Certainly none we spoke to. I would have made an exception for blond and lovely Pamela Knight. Alas.
Decades later, when I stopped by the Riverside Drive apartments, I was amazed at how much smaller everything looked than I remembered it. Perhaps we measure things in part by their ratios to our own dimensions, such as height.
My first eleven years were spent living with my mother, father, and siblings in a two-bedroom apartment in a set of five-story buildings abutting the George Washington Bridge on Riverside Drive, near the northern end of Manhattan Island. By the time I was nine, three of my four younger siblings had come along: Nick in 1948, Diana, in 1949, and Cliff in 1951. Chris was born much later, in 1959.
The neighborhood was almost exclusively Catholic, while I was Protestant, a “left-footer,” out of step. Their school, All Hallows, was parochial; mine, Hunter College Elementary School, was nondenominational.
Although I participated in all the kids’ games, I was viewed as different. “The way he talks makes me feel funny” was how one contemporary explained this to my mother. At age nine or ten I beat up one of my main antagonists and had much less trouble thereafter. I was thin, wiry. The local tailor had been asked to take in a hand-me-down jacket so it would fit me, and he replied that if he took it in any more, there wouldn’t be a jacket.
It was around 1950. We played a lot of hide-and-seek, urban type. The buildings were five stories high, without elevators. I liked to hide in the dumbwaiters, large, open wooden boxes attached to a rope on pulleys at the top of the shaft. You could bring your groceries upstairs or your trash downstairs with these devices. Each apartment had a door that opened onto this shaft, so the residents could put in or take out objects. I would get into the box at the cellar level, then pull on the rope enough to pull myself above the lowest opening. Hard for kids to find me, a good thing—but the smells were unpleasant.
We played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, war, sword fights (sticks, rolled-up newspapers). Advanced weaponry included linoleum guns, sticks with a nail at the front end, a long rubber band, and small (one-inch) squares of cut-up linoleum to put in the stretched rubber band before releasing it toward your foe.
Televisions were rare. We did have many radio programs that included my favorite heroes: The Lone Ranger (cue up Rossini’s “William Tell Overture”); Tom Mix; Roy Rogers, his horse, Trigger, and his significant other, Dale Evans; Gene Autry; The Shadow (“Able to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him. Who knows? The Shadow knows.”); the Green Lantern; Sgt. Preston of the Yukon; the Green Hornet (cue up Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”) and his trusty sidekick Kato (Japanese?); Detective Johnny Dollar (who organized his story around his expense account vouchers). Babysitting my younger siblings—at that point I had a sister and two brothers; went fine during the hours these shows were on, but later in the evening radio became quite boring.
Much of my social life was with the Fort Washington Collegiate Church, one of four Dutch Reformed churches in the city. Our minister, Rev. Daniel Poling, lost a brother in World War II. The brother, Clarke, had given his lifejacket to another soldier when their boat had been on the verge of sinking. Rev. Poling had a son who was stricken with cerebral palsy—pitifully, severely. The father’s faith must have been tested. He became a leading figure in the Dutch Reformed Church of America. I collected a slew of perfect or near-perfect attendance pins for Sunday school and can still quote Scripture, often on either side of an issue. Members of scout troops associated with the church, we were theoretical wilderness experts but went almost nowhere.
Whether it was with scouts or just as a small pack of urban urchins, we crossed the George Washington Bridge one day to collect wildlife samples from the wilds of New Jersey. I proudly brought back a jar of active tiny swimmers, misidentifying them as tiny tadpoles. Mom had me flush them down the toilet: they were mosquito larvae.
Hardly any girls to speak of at church. Certainly none we spoke to. I would have made an exception for blond and lovely Pamela Knight. Alas.
Decades later, when I stopped by the Riverside Drive apartments, I was amazed at how much smaller everything looked than I remembered it. Perhaps we measure things in part by their ratios to our own dimensions, such as height.
Friday, October 5, 2012
HIGH SHOES AND BLOOMERS, a Memoir
http://outskirtspress.com/highshoesandbloomers/
Written by Alice Conner Selfridge,
edited by Douglas Winslow Cooper
The author tells, with humor, about being raised in the years when entertainment was “self-made” and captures the reader’s interest when relating stories about growing up in a home without a bathroom. She brings to them the childhood fantasies she experienced when making the scary trips to the “two-holer” and the “abominable cellar” where the food was stored. She tells of her fear, as she had to, reluctantly, reach her hand into “the cave” where the creepy shriveled, stringy-haired things grew.
Visit the home where the father ruled with strictness and firm discipline, and the mother made things seem better with home-baked pies. Share the joy of semi-annually receiving a new pair of shoes or discovering a “musical mousetrap” in the back room off the kitchen. Learn of the warmth, love, and squabbles that were shared with ten brothers and sisters, in spite of the hard times.
Published October 4, 2012.
Available in paperback from Outskirts Press, amazon.com, bn.com.
Other books our group has published or that are in press:
AVA GARDNER'S DAUGHTER?
by Douglas Winslow Cooper and Marie Elizabeth Foglia
THE SHIELD OF GOLD
by Lenny Golino and Douglas Winslow Cooper
Written by Alice Conner Selfridge,
edited by Douglas Winslow Cooper
SYNOPSIS
A child of the 1930s, and the youngest of eleven children, Alice tells of growing up in a small rural community in Massachusetts. She relates the ups and downs of a large family in the hard times of the Depression and the WWII years, when “going without” was an accepted and necessary way of life. Her vignettes are sure to provide the young reader with insight and awe, while provoking fond (and not so fond) memories for the older readers.The author tells, with humor, about being raised in the years when entertainment was “self-made” and captures the reader’s interest when relating stories about growing up in a home without a bathroom. She brings to them the childhood fantasies she experienced when making the scary trips to the “two-holer” and the “abominable cellar” where the food was stored. She tells of her fear, as she had to, reluctantly, reach her hand into “the cave” where the creepy shriveled, stringy-haired things grew.
Visit the home where the father ruled with strictness and firm discipline, and the mother made things seem better with home-baked pies. Share the joy of semi-annually receiving a new pair of shoes or discovering a “musical mousetrap” in the back room off the kitchen. Learn of the warmth, love, and squabbles that were shared with ten brothers and sisters, in spite of the hard times.
Published October 4, 2012.
Available in paperback from Outskirts Press, amazon.com, bn.com.
Other books our group has published or that are in press:
AVA GARDNER'S DAUGHTER?
by Douglas Winslow Cooper and Marie Elizabeth Foglia
THE SHIELD OF GOLD
by Lenny Golino and Douglas Winslow Cooper
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
MANAGING YOUR EMPLOYEES
http://www.asiancemagazine.com/2012/09/20/managing-your-employees
based on an excellent talk by Eric Egeland of Capacity Consulting, Inc., and my own recent unpleasant experience.
Women are increasingly ascending to management roles. They may easily be mistakenly tempted to treat their subordinates like family, one management advisor maintains. Readers of asiancemagazine.com might succumb to this if they adopt traditional, non-confrontational approaches that are often very effective outside the commercial realm. Allowing others to “save face” by soft-pedaling criticism of them causes problems.
Which management philosophy is most like yours? 1. Keep your employees under your thumb. 2. Require strict adherence to your rules. 3. Teach them, and offer them direction. 4. They are adults: let them just do their jobs.
In mid-September, the head of Capacity Consulting, Inc., Eric Egeland, presented a compelling seminar in which he justified some surprising advice. For example, as nice as teaching and trusting sound, requiring strict adherence works better, as long as the rules are clear, sensible, and consistent.
Egeland is familiar with the personnel management literature, but also has extensive experience as an “undercover employee,” through multi-month gigs as “one of the team,” watching what it is that employees do when the boss is unaware. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play” is often true on the job. Egeland gave three disappointing, real-life examples, one being the sabotage of the sales performance of new hires by the “old-timers.”
Much that is important to business goes beyond the job description.
Managers go wrong when they focus simply on the performance of specified tasks, rather than on the broader issue of behavior.
Humans tend to avoid conflict, but this can cause a manager to soft-pedal a criticism that needs to be made strongly. Treating employees “like family” is often unappreciated and can backfire, as any criticism comes as a surprise, is taken personally and is resented.
We like to believe in the goodness of our fellow humans, but perhaps one in ten will disappoint us greatly, so we cannot count on their virtue. To be fair to all, we must be consistent in enforcing our rules, diligently but not militantly. A lack of enforcement favors those who break the rules over those who obey them.
When his talk was over, I congratulated Egeland on his excellent presentation, and I told him how I had lost one of my own best employees by not following a couple of his precepts. I had treated her too much like family, and I had been reluctant to express any criticism. when she performed below expectations.
Some readers will find themselves managing their family members. How to do that? Very carefully!
A fuller presentation is available in Eric Egeland’s new book, EMPLOYEES, KIDS, AND PETS: How to Get Out of Your Own Way and Be a Better Boss, Manager and Parent, available though amazon.com.
Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., a retired environmental physicist, is married to Tina Su Cooper, a former editor at the Encyclopedia Britannica and mother of two. Tina is the central figure in his book, Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage, and Devotion, available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or through their website, tingandi.com.
based on an excellent talk by Eric Egeland of Capacity Consulting, Inc., and my own recent unpleasant experience.
MANAGING YOUR EMPLOYEES
Women are increasingly ascending to management roles. They may easily be mistakenly tempted to treat their subordinates like family, one management advisor maintains. Readers of asiancemagazine.com might succumb to this if they adopt traditional, non-confrontational approaches that are often very effective outside the commercial realm. Allowing others to “save face” by soft-pedaling criticism of them causes problems.
Which management philosophy is most like yours? 1. Keep your employees under your thumb. 2. Require strict adherence to your rules. 3. Teach them, and offer them direction. 4. They are adults: let them just do their jobs.
In mid-September, the head of Capacity Consulting, Inc., Eric Egeland, presented a compelling seminar in which he justified some surprising advice. For example, as nice as teaching and trusting sound, requiring strict adherence works better, as long as the rules are clear, sensible, and consistent.
Egeland is familiar with the personnel management literature, but also has extensive experience as an “undercover employee,” through multi-month gigs as “one of the team,” watching what it is that employees do when the boss is unaware. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play” is often true on the job. Egeland gave three disappointing, real-life examples, one being the sabotage of the sales performance of new hires by the “old-timers.”
Much that is important to business goes beyond the job description.
Managers go wrong when they focus simply on the performance of specified tasks, rather than on the broader issue of behavior.
Humans tend to avoid conflict, but this can cause a manager to soft-pedal a criticism that needs to be made strongly. Treating employees “like family” is often unappreciated and can backfire, as any criticism comes as a surprise, is taken personally and is resented.
We like to believe in the goodness of our fellow humans, but perhaps one in ten will disappoint us greatly, so we cannot count on their virtue. To be fair to all, we must be consistent in enforcing our rules, diligently but not militantly. A lack of enforcement favors those who break the rules over those who obey them.
When his talk was over, I congratulated Egeland on his excellent presentation, and I told him how I had lost one of my own best employees by not following a couple of his precepts. I had treated her too much like family, and I had been reluctant to express any criticism. when she performed below expectations.
Some readers will find themselves managing their family members. How to do that? Very carefully!
A fuller presentation is available in Eric Egeland’s new book, EMPLOYEES, KIDS, AND PETS: How to Get Out of Your Own Way and Be a Better Boss, Manager and Parent, available though amazon.com.
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Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., a retired environmental physicist, is married to Tina Su Cooper, a former editor at the Encyclopedia Britannica and mother of two. Tina is the central figure in his book, Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage, and Devotion, available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or through their website, tingandi.com.
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