In 1971, on the date of my 23rd birthday, just a year out of college, I announced my candidacy for mayor of my hometown Marlborough, Massachusetts. The idea was not to begin a personal political career, despite having recently earned a Political Science degree. Instead, I was doing this to save my hometown from self-destruction.
A few months earlier my friend Ron, like me also born and raised in Marlborough, had been decrying a disconcerting, escalating trend of our city government wooing builders of factories, warehouses, office parks, condominium complexes and mini-malls in return for needed tax revenues. The downside was the uprooting of apple orchards, meadows, farms and forests to be replaced with bland or gaudy commercial structures plunked down willy-nilly all over town. "If we don't stop this soon," Ron kept insisting, "Marlborough is not going to exist anymore."
Ron seemed overly dramatic to me at first, i.e., that our hometown would literally cease to exist, but after a while I began to grasp what he was getting at. The rural, bucolic setting we had always known and loved as children was in danger of disappearing forever. Instead, Marlborough would become one more debilitating suburban crawl.
But what could we do about it? One day, Ron had a daunting solution: "We have to run you for mayor." He explained that my Poli Sci degree and experience running for offices in high school and college, even if admittedly limited and amateurish, made me a more logical choice than he to take this on. Also, at 6' 3" I was much taller than Ron plus two years older. End of discussion!
A student activist at Stonehill College in the era of protests against Vietnam, corporate capitalism and racial segregation and support for feminism, environmentalism, gay rights and more, I nonetheless recoiled at Ron's "nomination." How would my running for the city's top elective office, a campaign I surely could not win, save the day?
Moreover, young activists like us at that time had pretty much soured on the notion that the key to solving societal problems rested with elected officials in the first place. Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, our elected representatives seemed always to be promising hopeful change and speechifying about what they would do about it, then letting us down with a lack of follow-up action.
And I had another objection as well. "If running for mayor means I'll be out there campaigning all by myself while you sit off on the sidelines just cheering me on, forget it," I told Ron. "I'll do this only if you and our other friends campaign alongside me from now until Election Day," adding, "You need to go out and gather signatures for my nomination papers without any help from me, then file them with the city clerk, and get them certified. Do all of that and I'll agree to this."
Ron said OK although a part of me did not believe him. People were so often all talk and no action, just like the politicians. Yet a few days later, he and a mutual friend Deborah showed up at my house to report, "We did it. We collected enough signatures for the city clerk to review and approve. You're going to be on the ballot."
A week or so later, two more native Marlboroughites, Pete, a throwback to nature-loving Henry David Thoreau, and my brother Ed, a finance whiz-kid, joined Deborah, a feminist pioneer and Ron, the hippie inspiration of it all, to comprise what turned out to be a twentysomething "gang of five." Cutting my shoulder-length hair, planning to dress in jacket-and-tie (vs. bellbottoms and Army surplus jacket) as well as labeling myself as an "alternative" candidate (thus shedding the term "radical"), I joined my novel campaign team throughout the spring of 1971 for hours-long skull sessions every Saturday, dissecting the city's issues and brainstorming what we could do about them. Scant knowledge of the most basic governing procedures and assumptions forced us to augment these meetings with homework into matters most older citizens already took for granted. Clearly we had a lot of catching up to do.
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