Notes From the Coast

   The contents of this blog are rather stale and the reason for this is that the blogger is on a trip to the West Coast. Given that only subjects of immense significance are covered here, and personal matters not at all, postings were on hold until I had time to approach a topic of importance. It just so happens that the trip provides one in the form of an 'Atmospheric River' or "Pineapple Express'.  

   We arrived at the Abbotsford Airport on Sunday, Nov.14th and drove west toward Vancouver in heavy rain. Which continued. There are now a lot of 'coasts' in British Columbia and not just the one bordering the Pacific.  If you were to arrive at the Abbotsford Airport today, you would find that the runway is open, but just about everything else is submerged. You can still make it to Vancouver, but heading east is problematic. Here is an illustration, accompanied by some headlines. 

"Abbotsford mayor says catastrophic flood danger averted for now, as water levels drop"

"Thousands remain out of their homes in B.C. after devastating, destructive floods"

"B.C. residents urged not to panic-buy as bare shelves fuel food security angst"

"Military set to arrive today after province declares state of emergency"

"It could take weeks to begin repairing 'unprecedented' damage to B.C.'s highway system, experts say."

   By now, most Canadians will be aware of all of this and even some in the United States. A headline in The Guardian today is "Canada Storm: Floods Could Lead to Country-wide Shortages as Air Force Deployed to British Columbia." So, I need not go on.  But, having provided you with only a rather meagre post, I will change the featured one to the right. Perhaps you haven't read it and it is of more interest. 

The Bonus: 
  My readers usually expect one and I generally provide a gem, or at least a nugget of information. I am travelling and visiting family, however, and was not planning on blogging. So here is the best I can offer today - "Eating a Hot Dog Could Take 36 minutes off Your Life, Study Says, " . The study is found in the journal Nature Food, and was reported on CTV News.  If this is true, then Joey Chestnut can't be feeling well. He has often consumed from 60 to 70 hot dogs in just a few minutes while competing in "Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest."

The Mensch of Malden Mills

 Aaron Feuerstein

   I noticed Mr. Feuerstein's obituary and recognized his name right away. He was a fine fellow, as the death notice indicates:

"Aaron Feuerstein, Mill Owner Who Refused to Leave, Dies at 95: After a Fire Devastated His Massachusetts Factory in 1995, He Kept Paying His Employees and Spent Hundreds of Millions to Rebuild," Clay Risen, NYT, Nov. 5 2021

Aaron Feuerstein, a Massachusetts industrialist who became a national hero in 1995 when he refused to lay off workers at his textile plant after a catastrophic fire, then spent hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild it, died on Thursday at a hospital in Boston. He was 95. [There is much more. Read the obituary if you can.]

   I recognized his name because, years ago, I was associated with a university business school that had, as part of its mission, the desire to develop leaders who "contribute to societies within which they operate." I decided to search for such leaders and it is not an easy thing to find them. One can be a very good business leader and not be good. Apart from donors and philanthropists, how can you locate those who are contributing socially, not just commercially? Some were found and Mr. Feuerstein was one of them. That is why I recognized his name.

   As a result, a short profile of him was developed for dissemination in a newsletter. It is no longer available on the website of the university or the business school, but it is provided below. It is interesting that Mr. Feuerstein, was once interviewed by a graduate of the same university. During a time when there are so many bad stories, it is nice to read a good one. Students were the intended audience and that is why so many sources are mentioned. They may now be useful for those who wish to learn more about the leader of Malden Mills.

[Note: Current readers in 2021 - what follows was written in 2007.]

         "He became that rare duck, the businessman as natural hero"

   That quotation is taken from "The Mensch of Malden Mills" a profile done on the CBS program 60 Minutes back in 2003 by Morley Safer (a Western graduate, by the way). Although many Western students may shop at Mountain Equipment Co-op, Trex or Patagonia and be aware of the Malden Mill's product Polartec, most are too young to know the reasons why the owner, Aaron Feuerstein, was hailed as a hero.

   Malden Mills was started by the Feuerstein family in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In 1995 a fire destroyed the Malden buildings, potentially dealing a severe blow to the community. Rather than move south or out of the country, or retire with the $300 million in insurance, Mr. Feuerstein chose to keep the employees on the payroll and re-build the company. He said simply: "I have a responsibility to the worker, both blue-collar and white-collar. I have an equal responsibility to the community. It would have been unconscionable to put 3000 people on the streets and deliver a deathblow to the cities of Lawrence and Methuen. Maybe on paper our company is worthless to Wall Street, but I can tell you it's worth more". While taking such action would have been, perhaps unconscionable, it certainly would not have been unusual for most to do so. Indeed, Mr. Feuerstein's care and concern for the company, community and workers were what were perceived by the press as being unusual behaviour for a CEO, and which led to him being regarded as a hero and "rare duck" in the many accounts that were published at the time.

   Stories about Malden Mills and the fire are easy to locate in late 1995 and early 1996, particularly in the newspapers in New England (available to you via Factiva and Lexis/Nexis) . Mr. Feuerstein was invited to the State of the Union address by President Clinton and was praised as a paragon of corporate responsibility by Labor Secretary Robert Reich. There were also many news reports such as the one mentioned above by Morley Safer on 60 Minutes. An interview with Tom Brokaw on NBC is found on Dec. 18, 1995 and Lou Dobbs chose Feuerstein as "CEO of the Week" on CNN on Sept. 20, 2002. For reports such as these we encourage you to use the resources of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive to which Western has a subscription.

   For background information about the company see: "Malden Mills Industries, Inc." in Vol. 16 of the International Directory of Company Histories, p.351. A good article that appeared just prior to the fire is found in the New York Times: Susan Diesenhouse, "A Textile Maker Thrives by Breaking all the Rules," July 24, 1994, p.A1. From both those sources you learn that Malden Mills was consistently socially responsible. For example, in the 1990s the company undertook environmental initiatives to protect the Spricket River by constructing a water treatment plant that conserved energy and reduced emissions. There had also never been a strike at any of the Malden plants. For an article that offers an academic assessment and which concludes that Aaron Feuerstein epitomizes the responsible leader see: "Market Controls on Corporate Social Responsibility: An Exploratory Study of Banking & Investment Policies," Breena E. Coates, Journal of American Academy of Business, Vol.11, No.1, March 2007, p.110.

   It would be nice to conclude such an uplifting story on a positive note, but that is not the case. One reason we were reminded of it has to do with the fact that Malden Mills is again in the news and the news is not particularly good. During the rebuilding period the company lost money and customers. Sales were also affected by unseasonably warm weather. Like hundreds of other Northeastern textile operations, Malden Mills struggled to compete with foreign companies that offered far lower wages and which were less concerned about environmental issues. Given the quality of the product it produces and with the assistance of military contracts, Malden Mills may continue to survive as Polartec. To follow the recent events related to Malden Mills we suggest the following: "Malden Exits Bankruptcy as Polartec," Evan Clark, WWD, Vol.193, No.59, Mar. 20, 2007, p. 10; "Malden Mills Prepares for Sale," Home Textiles Today, Vol.28, No.4, Jan. 29, 2007, p.12; "Malden Mills Bankruptcy Case Reopened," Bob Kievra, Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, Mass.), Jan.13, 2007, p. B8. The profile found on Hoovers is also useful.

From: The Bottom Feeder, March 2007 Vol.7. No.3.

The Bonus: 

   Other good leaders who contributed a great deal to society were found and I will mention here, another example: Robert and Ellen Thompson who founded the Thompson-McCully Asphalt Paving Company, just across the border in Michigan. It was the largest road construction company in Michigan. When they sold it, they chose a buyer who would keep as many employees as possible. Then, "the good news that Thompson-McCully employees would not lose their jobs was followed by the even better news that most of them would not have to worry about it if they did -- since they were sharing in the proceeds of the sale. According to most accounts, more than 80 Thompson-McCully employees received cheques ranging from $1 to $2 million. Some retired employees and widows also received payment as the Thompsons distributed $128 million among the workers. Mr. Thompson stated: "I'm particularly pleased that this agreement will allow the employees of Thompson-McCully and a charitable trust I have established to share the proceeds of the sale. Our company's success has been due in large part to dedication and hard work of the men and women who have worked here over the years, and they deserve to be recognized"….You realize that the people around you have gone through all the pain and suffering with you….I wanted to pay them back".

There is more: "The story does not end there. "The Thompsons provided $100 million to establish the Thompson Foundation which is largely used for educational scholarships for the underprivileged in the Detroit area. As well, Mr. Thompson's alma mater, Bowling Green, has benefitted from his generosity, as have the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center and the Kellogg Eye Center."

Spontaneous Generations

 

Spontaneous Generation (singular)
"The theory of spontaneous generation states that life arose from nonliving matter. ... Louis Pasteur is credited with conclusively disproving the theory of spontaneous generation with his famous swan-neck flask experiment. He subsequently proposed that “life only comes from life.”
What was spontaneous generation and why was it wrong? It was once believed that life could come from nonliving things, such as mice from corn, flies from bovine manure, maggots from rotting meat, and fish from the mud of previously dry lakes. Spontaneous generation is the incorrect hypothesis that nonliving things are capable of producing life."

   Having disproved the notion that nonliving things were sometimes generated spontaneously, we now appear to be on the cusp of discovering that a generation cannot be conceived and developed on a whim. The notion that if you are a member of Generation Y (a Millennial), or are a Gen Xer, you are of a certain type, is now being questioned. 

   About four years ago, I indicated that I was a contrarian about cohorts such as those and will have little more to say about them. My original post is here and the title indicates how I felt about the subject: Millennial Nonsense: Generalizations About Generations. The only reason I raise the subject again, is because a few more articles have surfaced recently and they suggest not much is being gained by talking about Generation Whatever.  Here are some samples:

Sources: 

"It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”: From Boomers to Zoomers, the Concept Gets Social History all Wrong," By Louis Menand, The New Yorker, Oct. 18, 2021.

‘Gen Z’ Only Exists in Your Head:  The dividing Lines Between Generations Are a Figment of our Collective Imagination," Joe Pinsker, Atlantic, Oct.14, 2021.

"You know there’s drama in research circles—or at least what qualifies as drama in research circles—when someone writes an open letter.

Earlier this year, that someone was Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park. His request: that Pew Research Center, the nonpartisan “fact tank,” “do the right thing” and stop using generational labels such as Gen Z and Baby Boomers in its reports. Some 170 social-science researchers signed on to Cohen’s letter, which argued that these labels were arbitrary and counterproductive...."

Generational labels capture some of the basic fact that people who are born in different eras lead meaningfully different lives. But these labels are clumsy and imprecise—and getting more so all the time. They flatten out the experiences of tens of millions of very different people, remove nuance from conversations, and imply commonality where there may be none. The social scientists are right: Generational labels are stupid.

"Answers to 10 Questions About Generations and Generational Differences in the Workplace," Cort W Rudolph, PhD, Rachel S Rauvola, PhD, David P Costanza, PhD, Hannes Zacher, PhD. Public Policy & Aging Report, Volume 30, Issue 3, 2020, Pages 82–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/praa010

Conclusion:

Our goal with this work was to present answers to 10 common questions about generations and generational differences as they are assumed to operate in the workplace. Mannheim’s (1927/1952) original conceptualization of “the problem of generations” deals with questions about the mechanisms of social change. Given the answers to the preceding 10 questions, we would argue that there is a need to recast the problem of generations into more modern terms. The contemporary problem with generations lies in their ubiquity as an explanation for social phenomena. There is no credible evidence to suggest that generations exist, or that they manifest to influence behavior in any systematic way. Further, there is no value whatsoever in formulating organizational, economic, or labor policies based on these unsupported social constructions.

There you have it. Now that I am no longer a contrarian on this issue, I may have to reassess my position. 

Milk & Eggs

Supply Management and Marketing Boards (again)

   Prices are rising and early next year the prices of milk and eggs will be around 10% higher. I learned this from an article in the G&M (Nov. 4), with this rather good headline: The Canadian Dairy Commission Has Picked a Terrible Time to Milk Consumers." It is a good article and among other sentences in it are these:

The CDC insists the increases are necessary to “partially offset increased production costs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.” But the only supporting evidence it offers is an unaudited cost-of-production report that includes no raw data and is based on a random survey of 224 farms.

   The insensitivity of announcing so steep and quick an increase during the pandemic is stunning, but not surprising. Indifference to the real world is baked into Canadian supply management, a thoroughly opaque system of production quotas, price fixing and protectionist import tariffs that has produced some of the highest retail costs for dairy products in the world....It is a system that allows dairy farmers – along with chicken, egg and turkey producers, who also benefit from supply management – to thrive in a bubble, safe from the global economic palpitations that are being felt by everyone else.

   Although the system may be 'opaque', one should not automatically oppose it since, Its plusses are that it guarantees a steady supply of safe, good-quality milk that comes from humanely treated cows, prevents overproduction that can lead to spoilage and eliminates price volatility. It is also Canadian milk, produced locally and not imported from across the border.

  The article also includes a link to a new study which is very useful if you are interested in supply management or the prices of milk and eggs.  That study is the reason behind this post.  A while ago (June, 2018), I provided you with a very thorough bibliography about supply management that goes back for most of this century (it is the post with the picture of Eugene Whelan having a jug of milk poured on his head by dairy farmers back in the 1970s.) If you combine that bibliography with the one in the new study, and actually read the study, you will be an expert on the subject of marketing boards and be either pleased or displeased about the prices of milk and eggs. 

Sources:

   Apart from the Globe article see: "Farmers Defend Impending Price Hike on Dairy Products," Scott Miller, CTV News, Nov. 4, 2021

   The new study: "Supply Management 2.0: A Policy Assessment and a Possible Roadmap for the Canadian Diary Sector," Sylvain Charlebois, et al. Foods, 2021, (10), 5, 964, April 2021. The entire article is available from the link provided above. Here is the abstract:

Many believe the current Canadian Dairy supply management system is outdated. Examining a recent consumer survey suggests consumers, especially among the younger generations, have mixed feelings about how the Canadian dairy industry is good for the environment or whether animals in the sector are humanely treated. The general Canadian public strongly supports financial stability for farmers, though is not fully educated about how supply management works. Issues regarding the centralization and amalgamation of the industry, making many regions underserved; recent milk dumping due to a strong shift in demand caused by COVID-19; and the popularity of dairy alternatives, show that the dairy sector in Canada is ill-prepared for major change. Dairy farmers are receiving compensation for trade deals recently ratified by the federal government, creating a precedent that will lead to an overcapitalized industry. The aim of this paper is to review the industry’s current state and suggest a roadmap for a more prosperous future.

To see the picture of Eugene Whelan - Supply Management - Marketing Boards. 

The Bonus: 

  If you happen to be an oologist and are interested only in eggs, then see: Oology and Ralph's Talking Eggs: Bird Conservation Comes Out of Its Shell, which is found at the bottom of this post:   Bird Art. 

The Badminton Library

 More Reading For This Time of Darkness

    There is not one book in this library about badminton.  As you may have noticed, I sometimes write about books which are published in a series and this one is known as The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes. It consists of around thirty volumes, most of which were published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It you are a sporting type, this series will be of interest. If you are not, it still may be, since the sports and pastimes of the past were more eclectic and include such things as punting, coursing and falconry. One title in the series: Dancing: A Handbook of the Terpsichorean Arts in Diverse Places and Times, Savage and Civilized. 

   Badminton was the name of the Duke of Beaufort's house and he is associated with the publication of the series. If you are interested in both sports and book collecting, this would be a good place to start. The books abound in various editions, but a sophisticated collector will opt for an elegant edition, such as the one above which was noticed on the Christie's auction site.

   It is the case, however, that many of these books are now available to read via the marvellous invention, the Internet. As the weather worsens and we no longer go outside to participate in sports, we can at least sit inside and read about them. A list of the books is provided below, so you can look them up and buy them on AbeBooks or elsewhere. Also, hints are offered about how to access them for free online. As both events and days turn darker, the readings provided will keep you diverted until at least December, when the 'real' winter begins.

The Bonus:
   For those of you with shorter attention spans, I offer The Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes which was published during the years from 1895-1923. The interesting articles found within it, will keep you going for the rest of this year

Here are some samples from the TOCs:

Cycling for Women
North-Country Hunting for Ladies
Bicyling in Barbados
Cycling in the High Alps
Hunting in India
Elephant Hunting in Nepal
Skating Gossip
The Sport of Rajahs (by Baden-Powell)
Otter Hunting With Cycle and Camera

And there is Canadian content:

The Stikine River: The Route to the Klondike
Canoeing for Pleasure and Sport in Canada
A Black Bear Hunt in Northern New Brunswick
Sport on the Prairie (1892) by Viscount Kilcoursie

   Here is what happened to the poor Viscount:

To read the magazine (which is also searchable) see: The Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes.

Sources for the Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes

   The Wikipedia entry for the Badminton Library is a good one. It is from that source that I provide the titles. Back in 2008 the Valuable Book Group published a collector's guide and information about it is found on The Wayback Machine in the Internet Archive, which is a marvellous repository for all the things that have been dropped from the Internet.  Have a look at it. Although google abandoned its project to digitize everything, some of these titles were made available and are found on https://books.google.com/. (search by the series title.)

Volume 1: Hunting                                            
Volume 2: Fishing: Salmon & Trout                  
Volume 3: Fishing: Pike & Coarse Fish
Volume 4: Racing & Steeple-Chasing
Volume 5: Shooting: Field & Covert 
Volume 6: Shooting: Moor & Marsh
Volume 7: Cycling
Volume 8: Athletics & Football
Volume 9: Boating
Volume 10: Cricket
Volume 11: Driving
Volume 12: Fencing, Boxing & Wrestling
Volume 13: Golf 
Volume 14: Tennis, Lawn Tennis, Rackets & Fives
Volume 15: Riding & Polo
Volume 16: Mountaineering
Volume 17: Coursing & Falconry 
Volume 18: Skating & Figure Skating
Volume 19: Swimming
Volume 20: Big Game Shooting I
Volume 21: Big Game Shooting II 
Volume 22: Yachting I
Volume 23: Yachting II
Volume 24: Archery
Volume 25: Sea Fishing
Volume 26: Dancing
Volume 27: Billiards
Volume 28: The Poetry of Sport 
Volume 29: Motors & Motor-Driving
Volume 30: Rowing & Punting 
Volume 31: Athletics
Volume 32: Football
Volume 33: Cricket

   For those of you who are old fashioned and who have access to the Western Libraries, some of the above are available in hard copy. For example, there is a copy there of: Dancing : A Handbook of the Terpsichorean Arts in Diverse Places and Times, Savage and Civilized.

If you are interested in such things as these, see also my American Sportsman's Library.