It was a fine send-off. After 30 years, our friend Marian was
retiring from the marketing department of a major university. Like
a lot of people in top jobs, Marian was an outsider. She was
brought in because in a metropolitan area of three million people
university officials allegedly couldn’t find one local person
qualified to do her job. And it wasn’t like they were hiring a
chief nuclear engineer. But then maybe all our local marketing
directors had moved elsewhere too.
I would think there’d be advantages to hiring locally. Local
professionals know a city, its people, its history and traditions
intimately. Locals often have a stake in their communities in a way
outsiders — who may be only putting in time till their next move
— do not. They are more likely to be involved in local
organizations — not as networking opportunities — but because
they are genuinely invested in their communities and want to see
them thrive. And locals are likely to stay longer in a position.
Besides, you help your homegrown economy by giving a local resident
a job. Hiring locally, however, is often at the bottom of the list
of priorities of any hiring board, if at all. Probably because the
board is made up of transplants, too. (Hard to imagine now that all
our large hometown corporations — Anheuser-Busch, Monsanto,
McDonald Douglas (now Boeing), the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
— were founded and made successful by smart local boys. The idea
that smart local men or women could run them today is deemed
absurd.)
Not long ago I got into a painful conversation with a New York
transplant who told me how provincial St. Louis was, how we needed
more outsiders in positions of leadership, fresh thinkers who could
bring in new ideas and different perspectives. I replied that I
couldn’t disagree more. “The reason all our cities seem the same,
seem so bland and generic, is because we have destroyed what made
them unique, our local culture and our local traditions,” I said.
“The fact is all the people running our local businesses, schools,
and churches are rootless, job-hopping outsiders from
Nowheresville.”
He said he’d never thought of it that way. I wasn’t
surprised.
THE DAY AFTER she retired, Marian put her house on the market.
After three decades of living among us she is moving away. Or maybe
I should say that despite living here for three decades she never
did put down roots. To her, St. Louis was simply a way station
between her last job and retirement. As is so often the case in
Generic America, roots are considered a hindrance to upward
mobility, and upward mobility is all that matters. Not family, not
home, not being rooted in a community where one has something at
stake.
Marian was born in rural southern Indiana. A hundred years ago,
she would have been a farmer or the local school marm. Today, she
was a marketing specialist and, as such, just another replaceable
cog in a large, complex machine that will continue to operate just
fine without her. As a farmer, a wife, a mother, and a valuable
member of a small rural community, she would have been
irreplaceable.
Marian still owns the family farm in southern Indiana, though
she seldom visits. And yet she holds onto it out of some profound
familial instinct she cannot quite explain, but is doubtless
related to that same longing for land and place that brought her
ancestors to America 200 years ago. Rather than return to the farm,
she intends to move to Arizona where her daughter and son-in-law
live. They have been in Arizona less than a year, and have yet to
sell their previous home in North Carolina. Now there is talk that
her son-in-law may be transferred to California in a year or two.
If so, Marian will likely follow them there.
There was a profound sadness to Marian’s retirement party that
wasn’t entirely occasioned by her imminent departure. I think it
was that Marion’s life serves a prime example of how deracinated
all of us have become, and in what low esteem we hold such
elemental virtues as home, family, and place. There was a time when
being transient, unconnected, rootless, and uncommitted were
considered vices, not virtues. When did everything become upside
down?
