EINSTEIN REDUX

At some point, I have to get more of the Sheet archives online. 

Because back in the day, I did have my moments. 

Fifteen years ago, you know what the front page story was? It was about Mammoth’s Council rejecting a plan for a fixed bus route up Old Mammoth Road, turning around at Lower Red Fir. 

*Just substitute Woodmen for Lower Red Fir and you’ve got some serious deja vu

The vote was 4-1 to nix the route. Councilman John Eastman was opposed. 

Councilman Kirk Stapp led the charge to reject the proposed route. “Will anyone ride it? My answer is no.” 

Old Mammoth resident Dave Talsky asked rhetorically, why would you run a bus 11 hours a day, 365 days a year to a neighbrohood where you might serve fifty residents? Talsky made the estimate based upon the number of homes occupied by permanent residents above Tamarack Street. 

At an estimated operating cost of $43/hour to operate the bus, that’s $473/day times 365 days = $172,645 for one year divided by 50 = $3,452 per resident who may (or may not) use the service. 

Eastman countered, “We’re possibly taking an opportunity for public transportation away from fifty residents,” and ascribed the pushback to NIMBYism.

That story appeared June 23, 2007. 

The next week’s editorial was titled “A Town Full of Einsteins.” I’ll quote the first few paragraphs:

“Welcome, dear tourist, to Mammoth, where we admire Einstein enough to quote him, even if in so doing, we make ourselves look like nitwits.

Witness the latest draft General Plan. On one of the opening pages, there’s a quote from Einstein set apart at the bottom of the page. It reads “Vision without execution is a hallucination.” 

Which immediately led me to rearrange the sentence. Certainly, execution without vision is a hallmark of Mammoth politics

… Has John Eastman lost his mind? The longtime Councilman, according to many sources, made an extremely weird speech last Thursday during the spillover portion of last week’s two-night meeting.

First, Eastman reiterated all the points he’d made the night before during the discussion regarding the proposed Old Mammoth bus route. Hey pal, we heard you the first time. 

Then, Eastman made an impassioned plea for the Town to acquire Snowcreek Athletic Club – a topic discussed during Council’s closed session on Wednesday night. Eastman apparently did not recuse himself from the discussion, even though his wife is currently employed by the Athletic Club. He then compounded matters by making a public push for the acquisition the next night. 

My reaction: Developer Chuck Lande is a helluva lot smarter than anyone associated with Town government, and if Lande passed on the Athletic Club during his negotiations with Linda Dempsey, he passed on it for good reason. 

If one were to argue the acquisition, however, the rationale would go something like this: The Town is smoking crack if it thinks it can ever justify building a $40 milllion Recreation Center, much less operating it. You know you’re gonna lose your ass no matter what you do, but you may lose a lot less ass buying and expanding an existing facility versus building new. 

And you’ve got a child care facility on-site, which I might add, is being shut down as of today.”

*By the way, that editorial was published the day of my wedding. So take that all you pansies who seem to take a personal day every time you feel overwhelmed … 

Speaking of Lande, I called him this week to ask him about the future of Snowcreek Golf Course. As the golf course has tended to open later in recent years, some locals fear Lande is contemplating eliminating the course altogether. 

This is not the case, says Lande. The course, he added, is an important amenity. It does lose an enormous amount of money each year, so one way to mitigate that loss is to shorten the season and open July 1 versus June 1.  

While he maintained Chadmar is not contractually or otherwise obligated to provide the amenity, he said the goal is to pull the trigger on hotel development sooner rather than later, and he envisions the course would complement the hotel. 

He also mentioned he and his son Chad recently visited a resort in Wisconsin that had decided to design/build a par-3 course versus a traditional course – and that he thought it was very well done. 

We’ll finish with a few odds and ends I’ve been saving. 

First, I’ll share a Joanne Hruska (Calgary) letter to the editor which appeared in the April 11 issue of Barron’s:

“I can’t help but think of the eerie similarities to when my home-builder parents went bankrupt in the early 1980s due to the crash of previous euphoric home prices, coupled with incredibly high interest rates that nobody foresaw. Boomers had an insatiable appetite for homes, and the accompanying need to finance them increased the demand for debt and pushed interest rates near 20%. The bank ended up buying my childhood home for half of a declined, unsolicited offer. I hope that the large cohort of millennials don’t end up like their parents.”   

Now, from an interview with actor Terry Crews which appeared in the April 30/May 1 issue of the Wall Street Journal. 

Crews was a former, journeyman NFL player who retired in 1997, hoping to break into film. 

And while he was going on casting calls and trying to get noticed, he pawned everything versus conceding that he needed to get a paying job. He then started borrowing money from his steadfast friend and former teammate Ken Harvey.

Harvey literally had to send Crews gold coins to pawn so Harvey’s wife wouldn’t notice transfers from their bank account. 

But Harvey eventually had to cut him off. 

Crews was absolutely enraged and disappointed in his friend until he realized, “Wait a minute. Why am I mad at the only person who’s been trying to help me?” 

The next day, Crews visited an employment agency. They gave him a job for the day sweeping a factory floor. 

It broke him. 

“I swept that floor for eight hours. The first hour was pure misery, but as I swept, this magical feeling came over me: I was actually doing something about my situation. I was working. For the first time in my life. Don’t get me wrong. I busted my ass in the NFL. I killed myself out on that field. But I was never in control of what I was doing. In the NFL, the team signs you or doesn’t sign you. The team trades you or drops you. All you do is wait for the phone to ring so someone can tell you what to do. I’d been stuck in that mentality, waiting for someone else to help me or tell me what to do …”

The wage was $8/hr. After taxes were taken out, they handed him $48 cash. He put $20 in car for gas, gave $20 to wife, and had $8 left in his pocket. 

But he also knew he’d never be broke again.