It is an odd thing when you lose your second parent, no matter what your age, you instantly sense an orphan’s loneliness in the world.
Maxine Christy Kimball’s four sons secretly spread her ashes around the old family home, the home she had sold a couple dozen years before and I would buy back in a dozen more.
The first ten years at Oregon State and Northeaster Universities were exciting times, and we completed many of our initial startup plans. Some mistakes were made, like the time we gave $40,000 to a mailing company to print and mail out 300,000 of our brochures and letters to potential supporters, only to find zero interest or return on the mailing. An impossible result. The cocky youngster I had hired to run our Membership Department reported that all had gone smoothly with the mailing company and that she had simply misplaced the Post Office receipt, our insurance that the mailing was actually mailed before paying.
On a following weekend, I drove to the town where the mailing company was located and stopped in to get a copy of that receipt. No one was there but the place looked more closed than just closed for the weekend. I walked around the building, looking in the windows. The place was filthy, and I could not make out any equipment. Then through a back window, squinting I could make out rows of stacked and banded envelopes and recognized our logo even at a distance. They had not mailed any of the 300,000 letters. On Monday I returned, the place was as closed as it had been the day before. They would never open again, we would never see that $40,000, and suing a bankrupt company seemed bad money chasing bad money.
I let the Membership Director go, lending to a sense amongst young staff that covering up a mistake might not be better than owning up to it, maybe even $40,000 better.
I was tough on everyone. “Bigger, Better, Faster, Cheaper” says the Daffy Duck statue on my desk. I lived by that motto, and drummed it into everyone every day.
When I saw anyone wasting anything I would pull out my wallet and read three notes, amongst the hundreds that had been written to me by contributors. The first one was from a mother who had clearly sealed up her letter, thought again, reopened it, and added a P.S. in another color pen:
“Dear Vote Smart:
I am sorry! I am an unemployed, single mother of three and simply cannot afford to give you anything. But I wanted you to know that what you are doing is just wonderful and how much I appreciate it.
What you are doing is so long overdue.
Sincerely,
Mrs. McGillicutty
P.S. I have decided that I can’t afford not to contribute. Enclosed is my $35.”
——
Dear Vote Smart:
I have been in government for 27 years and you folks are the first really good thing I have ever seen. I am now retired and living off Social Security which is just enough to cover my food and medicine. I decided I can do without the medicine this month. Enclosed is my $35.
Bill Thomas
——
Dear Project Vote Smart:
I can’t afford $40. I lost my husband and have been in the hospital for a month. But I can give you $10. God bless every one of you.
Mary Mitchell
I would read one of these to a careless staffer or student and ask, “What do you think Mrs. McGillicutty would say if you spent her $35 that way?”
It was very effective. Mrs. McGillicutty gave us $35 and saved us thousands.
Over those first 10 years we were doing well, had climbed to over 40,000 members, but our annual budget was a paltry 1.2 million, or less than one percent of what citizens spend helping congressional candidates’ trash each other.
Years earlier when I was Chairman of the Arizona Corporation Commission, a conservative columnist who I thought disliked me, wrote a piece referring to me as Daffy Duck. The article was shockingly flattering, ending with “All is ducky at the Commission.” That started a torrent of Daffy Duck gifts for the next thirty years. I would eventually name my log office, which had a short door, The Duck Inn, which had double meaning to any staff or intern invited in.
I hoarded every penny and demanded more, much more, a kind of slavishness that would envy Scrooge. In retribution, the staff presented me a statue. I lived by its motto and relentlessly drummed it into everyone, every day.
Our staff had grown from one to 36 but the number of interns was dropping because all those who qualified for internships had already finished them.
We decided to try and extend our internships to other universities across the country in a National Internship Program and advertised the internship opportunities at our two campus offices.
The applications poured in, far more than we could accept, with most of the young wanting to dip their beaks into the high mountains, volcanos and beaches many had never seen in the Pacific Northwest of Oregon rather than Northeastern.
National Interns working full-time for 10 weeks were far more productive than the local students coming in for just a few hours each week, as if Vote Smart were just another class. Adding to the bonus, National Interns became a great source of new pre-trained staff once they had graduated.
What we needed was more space. Both universities had doubled our space, but we needed far more if we were going to continue on track and start covering primaries and local races.
To build our own research facility and with a bit of inheritance from my mother, I purchased a gorgeous nine-acre property covering both sides of the Alsea River about 30 minutes from the Oregon State campus.
I thought it perfect, nestled in the mountains in what I considered a short drive from campus. As I walked the property line, the sounds of children splashing in the river added to my confidence. When I approached the river I pushed back the shrubs lining it and peered through the mist to see no children at all.
Dumfounded, I began to turn back when from nothing at all I saw a wave rise and travel most unnaturally upstream.
It was fast and magical, then suddenly as it approached falls tumbling over a large boulder, the wave broke and into the air it flew.
I never saw a salmon run. It was mesmerizing. A good omen I thought, something else swimming against the flow, out on a quest for its version of the Grail.
Turned out that a thirty-mile commute into the mountains was not what Vote Smart staff or students were hoping for. Many having seen my “children” splashing in rivers before.
The second effort to buy a place of our own was a large 5000 sq. ft. home being sold for back taxes. Located at the end of a cul-de-sac, it had a back deck casting a view over some of the most luscious productive land in the world—what the Oregon Trail led to—the Willamette River Valley.
The owner happened to be in prison, not so much for the taxes owed as for the factory set up in his basement to build weapons of mass destruction, or what the 2nd Amendment had been written for: The sale and distribution of automatic weapons of mass death with armor piercing bullets.
Anyway, I thought this site perfect too. Adelaide, my wife, not so much. With a look that mixed pity with disbelief, Adelaide questioned, “You see it is in a neighborhood, don’t you?” “Yes” I responded, “Once they find out what we are up to, they will be proud to have us operating next door. I’ll bet most of them will come over as volunteers!”
This is what Adelaide was up against. Sometimes my ability to be out of touch with reality was in every conceivable dimension so astounding as to suggest a pre-frontal intervention by Cuisinart. You probably thought as much yourself from that prior story, but I tell you this, the whole truth here, I simply thought what we were doing was so clearly needed, so glorious, so momentous that every American would instantly understand, would want to play a part, be a part, any part, of this historic re-birth of democracy.
Turns out that the prison guy still had some say and hoped to get out and revive his business in gore.
It is unfortunate that I could not close that deal. It would have provided me with the education that Vote Smart so needed me to have about my species.
When we finally did purchase property, this time with Vote Smart resources, I got that education and an exposure to the ugly in our natures.
Ten miles from campus on the Mary’s River, a creek really, we found what all would think the most private of settings.
The property was down a dirt track that disappeared into a forest of Oaks, crossed a tiny single lane bridge, dead ending at a large barn and small house on a 50-acre farm without a neighbor or other structure in sight.
We purchased the property and named it Agora Farms after the original spot in Greece where many of our notions of democracy came to be.
We began fund raising with our members to pay it off, renovate the barn into offices and living quarters, and began the zoning process to build a research facility the hill side. It seemed such a simple thing. It never occurred to me that anyone would fight the permit, but I had overestimated my own kind – educated, comfortable, self-righteous, progressive, white people.
(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder 1988
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