Ruby Awards Celebration 2007
On February 27, winners of the 2007 Ruby Awards were honored at a banquet at Apple Mountain. These awards, sponsored by Interlude Magazine, WNEM-TV5, and 1st State Bank, recognize upward, bright, young individuals in many different fields who are making a great impact on the Tri-City Area. Eric Gilbertson was the evening's featured speaker and the following was his speech.
February 1, 2007
Eric R. Gilbertson, President
Saginaw Valley State University
Congratulations to all the recipients on this fine honor. This is an award that was created for a very good reason: never has there been a greater need to identify, recognize and encourage a new generation of leaders for our Community. But make no mistake, you are being honored tonight not so much for your accomplishments – as impressive as they may be – but for your promise. And indeed you are promising young people.
I, myself, was once a promising young person. Really. You are doubtless as incredulous at that thought as your own kids are when you implore them to believe that once you really were a teenager.
But it’s true; I was once young and eager and ripe with promise. Now . . . well . . . I suppose that to put it most charitably I have become something of a doddering town elder. And it happened so fast. It is utterly amazing how quickly you are transformed from a "Young Turk" to an "Old Fogey."
It hit me a while ago in a Chamber of Commerce Board meeting. At some point in the conversation, a few people turned to me and asked for a "historical perspective" on the issue under consideration. They were not asking for my creative genius; they were not asking for my fresh insights; and they were not asking because they respected me as a precocious student of history. They were asking me, in short, because I was . . . well . . . a historic artifact myself.
This shouldn’t have come as a shock, of course. But really . . . I mean it . . . I wasn’t always ancient. Before achieving this senescence I was once the youngest person to do this or that – the youngest in my graduating classes in high school and college, a very young college president, and so forth. Now my proudest achievements are as the oldest whatever – like the oldest person, by far, ever to play in the SVSU intramural football league. My wife – rather than being impressed with my manly athleticism – thinks I’m a pathetic nut case. She remains the elusive cheerleader that I never was able to impress, even as a teenager.
And I take it as high flattery to be reassured that I seem to be holding up reasonably well under the weight of these accumulated years.
I suppose I should have felt honored to be asked that question about historical perspective at that meeting – after all, at least I was still at the table. But I could remember when I was still younger than most on that Board – when I was one of those promising young people. At the time, I thought experience was an over-rated asset; now, once I have some, I don’t see how anyone can succeed without it.
Such is the generational arrogance of yours and mine and those who came before us and those who will follow. The swiftness of the passing of time is every old man’s lament – though I wouldn’t go back and do much of anything over.
I tell you this tonight, however, just to warn, again, that the time it takes for your transformation from a promising young person to a "has been" can be measured with an egg timer. You once promising young people will some day too be asked only for a historical perspective on things, and it will happen much sooner than you can realize now.
And when that happens, you – like me and my generation – will find yourselves wondering about your personal and your generational legacy, anguishing over how you wish to be remembered. And so . . . it’s really not too soon to begin asking that ominous question: what will be your legacy? How will you wish to be remembered?
* * *
The term "generation" is highly imprecise, of course – we’re never sure when one begins and the other ends. And there are all those people who are "in between" one generation and another – not part of "the Greatest" but too old to be "Baby Boomers;" post Boomers but not really "Gen X’ers," and so forth and so on. And generalizations about generations are wild generalizations, to state the obvious, painting over, with simplistic labels, millions of enormously complex people with wide differences in beliefs and cultures and experiences.
Having said that, though, let’s be superficial anyway – just for tonight – and think a bit about some of the generations that were once bright and promising like yours, and now are caught looking back either with pride or lament.
Those in the so-called "Greatest Generation" – many of your grandparents – were steeled by the Depression; they won the great War against fascism at huge sacrifice. After the War they created a civil culture and an industrial colossus – here in our communities and across the fruited plain – with factories and interstate highways and parks and churches and neighborhoods. They taxed themselves for the Mercury and Apollo Missions to space and to build schools and colleges (like SVSU) for their children – look sometime at the dates when the school buildings of your children were built. And they stood down communism with steely resolve.
They believed in things and they tried to pass those on.
When they wanted their government to do something, again, they taxed themselves to pay for it – there’s a unique idea. (Parenthetically, during the Vietnam War, the highest marginal tax rate was 77%!)
Saginaw and Bay City and Midland are very American places. What happened in America happened here too – at roughly the same time. Much of what we have – and so take for granted – can be traced to the foresight and sacrifice and investment of the men and women who came of age and fulfilled their promise in those war and immediate post-war decades.
If it is a bit of hyperbole to call them the "Greatest," then it’s surely not too far off the mark.
* * *
I worry a lot about the legacy of my generation. I’m what you might call an early "Baby Boomer." I do remember the Sixties, which to some suggests that I was a socially-backward teenager, though I didn’t think so at the time. I remember having goofy and pretentious ideas – like not trusting anyone over age thirty . . . naive ideas about economics and anarchy and the nature of good and evil . . . often confusing pleasure with happiness, laziness with enlightenment, self-centeredness with peace and love and all that. We did have a lot of fatuous ideas back then; but at least we had ideas – some generations come and go without any.
We "Boomers" used to think of ourselves as idealists. But at mid-life – and with a chance to put our ideals to work – we apparently decided that social problems were intractable, that lofty societal aspirations were unrealistic, that governments really couldn’t do much right, and that we really didn’t like to tax ourselves very much anyway.
Critics could say that we haven’t built much other than 401(k)s and low handicaps and personal palaces. And it’s true, we haven’t taken special care of the environment or invested much in our public institutions; and we may have confused political conservatism (which is, ironically, the swinging away from the radical liberalism of the Sixties) with raw selfishness.
There is a line from T.S. Elliot:
"Here were decent Godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road and a
Thousand lost golf balls."
Ouch!
That sounds a little harsh, of course. There are some wonderfully generous and public-spirited individuals in my generation. But we really haven’t paid much attention to larger social causes, and as a general matter I’m afraid we’ve been more self-pitying than sacrificing, more self-indulgent than civic-minded.
I sometimes wonder if the interstate highway system or the moon landing or the national parks system would ever have happened if it had been left to my generation to do these. I wonder, selfishly I suppose, if SVSU would have been created by Baby Boomers if it had not been created for them?
But there’s still time; the "Boomers" are not done yet – though the shadows are growing longer on our "Season in the Sun."
* * *
So what about your "Season in the Sun"? It’s not too soon to begin worrying about your legacy – generational and personal.
Think about the assets and institutions and things about our communities that make our lives better and make us proud – those things that define us as a people, as communities. There are businesses that provide employees with work and pride and incomes to support their families, the museums and orchestras and public parks, the Temple Theatre and the Midland Center for the Arts and the Bay City waterfront, the homeless shelters, and the churches, the best of our schools and . . . forgive me . . . Saginaw Valley State University and our sister colleges and universities. These did not just fall from the heavens or spring forth from a bountiful Earth. They were not gifts of nature – they came from human imagination and human toil and human sacrifice.
And think about the people who created these things and left them for us – in generations just past and those before them too. Some of their names are on buildings and businesses, streets and scholarships; but, alas, so many of their names are forgotten – as will happen to most of ours. But they left a mark.
Ted Doan, born to wealth and opportunity, did not rest on his fortune. At the tender age of forty he became the CEO of the Company his grandfather founded and imagined it as a global business – and more. And then he used the Company – Dow Chemical – and the wealth of his family – the Herbert W. and Grace A. Dow Foundation – to create a community that is even more extraordinary than perhaps we fully understand. He and his friend, Alan Ott – an individual not born to wealth but gifted with a wealth of intelligence – imagined and created so many of the Midland and regional assets that the rest of us take for granted today.
Ted Braun, son of Saginaw, likewise imagined and worked to create or improve assets and institutions in his hometown: the Saginaw Community Foundation, Covenant Health Systems, the Wickes Foundation, and many, many more. The Rev. Roosevelt Austin built a religious community; and David Gamez imagined and created a healthcare system for our indigent neighbors. They and their friends and co-generationalists – people like Lloyd Yeo and Sam and Patty Shaheen and others – have already left a mark on the town they love.
In Bay City, the Rowleys imagined and worked to create a waterfront and organize community events that today define that Community and give it a sense of identity and pride. When Peg first told me about developing condos along the river in downtown Bay City, I thought she must be nuts! And there were others – Jerome Yantz, the Wirt family, Charley Curtiss, more – who came with and after them and who continue imagining and creating.
Naming names is risky, of course, when there are so many people who comprise the leadership of a community; so many others who have determined and defined the legacy of the generations in our Valley and beyond. If they had one thing in common it was a fidelity to a very basic American value – the notion that it was the duty . . . the duty . . . of each generation to improve upon what they had inherited and to leave things better for those who followed.
And it was my personal good fortune that several of these people and others also came together from their separate communities to imagine and create a University. They understood then, as we are relearning now, that there are things these unique communities can do together that none of them could hope to do alone.
You will notice that I have repeated the word "imagined" over and over again to describe their legacies. That is, perhaps, their greatest gift – that they imagined things that were not there or that could be made so much better. It is, after, all, the power of imagination that as much as anything else distinguishes our species from others.
One of my colleagues at SVSU identifies those within our organization who have the potential for leadership with this test: do they see only what’s there, or can they see what’s not there and should be? That’s not a bad description of the most crucial quality of leadership – can one imagine what might be?
So list your own heroes – it shouldn’t be hard; they’re still all around you. Thank them. Then thank them again. They were all once promising young people too.
* * *
And so . . . we return to the initial question: how will your generation be remembered, what will be your legacy?
Clearly, it is not for any of us alone to determine the course and the legacy of a whole generation, but we can do our part to determine it on the smaller stage upon which we play out our own lives – our neighborhoods and our towns, our Region, this wonderful flat Valley of ours.
You are leaders – doomed to be, in a sense. You’ve already shown that you are not willing to sit back and watch things happen. As someone once told me: "Some things in life only a damn fool would do – if you’re a damn fool, you have an obligation to do them." That unlucky tendency will cost you time and effort and leisure and sleep; it will also probably cost you some friends along the way. But you will have the satisfaction of knowing, at the end of the day, that you have mattered. The spectators of life really won’t.
You will determine and define the legacy of your generation – especially here in MBS, our hometown. The problems of the World may seem beyond our reach, but here closer to home there are hungry and hopeless children, there are deteriorating schools, there are missed opportunities to lift our culture and to welcome those who would live among us, there are jobs to be created – jobs that will give meaning to lives and pride to families.
It won’t require much imagination to find the needs; finding the means and finding the will are going to be much harder.
Clearly you will all have a primary responsibility to your families and your organizations – businesses, agencies, academic institutions, whatever. And you have already proven that you can and will achieve personal success. Sincere congratulations on all of this – really.
But is that enough? As the song goes . . . "is that all there is?"
Your Season in the Sun – your moment, really – is just beginning. This award says you’re off to a promising start. But the story is yet to be written. And time is fleeting. Remember that in what will seem like the blinking of an eye, impertinent younger people will be asking you for "historical perspective."
What will you want to tell them? Thank you.