Growing Up Then and Now

“Un bon pere apprend a son fils la responsabilite et donne alors sa responsabilite de fils”  Jack Dawkins, age 7             

El and I honeymooned in Europe, but we didn’t get there any normal way.  We took the Amtrak sleeper car to NYC, bought a Village Voice and started searching for the cheapest one-way tickets to anywhere in Europe.  We found an ad saying just exactly that and the ticket place was only 4 blocks away from where we were sitting.

From thereon it was like the scene in The Sting.  It’s an old building, even dingy; the elevator we take to the fifth floor is the old-fashioned close-the-gate-yourself type; and when we walk into the “office,” it’s a boiler-room operation scene:  card table desks each with a telephone; people working the phones with head-sets on; and a young bearded gentleman comes up with a friendly, serious face.  “Can we get a cheap plane ticket to Europe?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says, “for $100 each I can get you anywhere in Europe – just depends on what day you want to fly.  Madrid tomorrow?  Frankfort Thursday?  Prague on Friday?”  Madrid tomorrow we say, and find out he only takes cash and then only hand-writes up a receipt (not close to a printed ticket), and says “Take this to the Air Madrid counter at JFK tomorrow.  Be there by noon.”

So El’s pretty suspicious but I’m feeling like this worked exactly the best we had imagined.  To Ellen’s ever-lasting credit, she gave me the benefit of the doubt that we could do our honeymoon almost 100% spontaneously – the only sure thing was that we had to be back in two months.  Rosie, as I sometimes called her, has a question, so she calls the number in the Village Voice ad, worse than no answer, the line is disconnected!   Now I have my doubts too, but I tell her, “Look, we budgeted to lose this $100 and buy stand-by tickets – so what’s to worry – let’s see if it works.”  We spent the second night of our honeymoon in some motel just across the Hudson on the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel.

Next morning we take the subway to JFK, find the Air Madrid counter, and hand over our receipts.  “Oh,” she says, “we take these but it’ll cost you each another $50.”  So we pay cash again and get on the plane.  By then the ticket taker lady and others in line knew it was our honeymoon and surprised us with a champagne-filled flight across the Atlantic.  That’s how we started our marriage.  The rest follows.

Seven week-old Jack at the Capitol

                                                         Tomorrow:  Our Marriage

Like I said The Third Time’s the Charm:  if not for Ellen ditching her college boyfriend, none of this would have happened; if not for losing the Mayor’s race, none of this would have happened, etc. etc.  What an interesting and fulfilling and fun-packed life has come my way.  Oh, I almost forgot, I just can’t resist, I have to tell the “Our First Dance” story – maybe Ellen will yet come to appreciate it.

So we’re at this birthday party the third-time’s-the-charm night.  I ask Ellen to dance.  She wants to lead.  Most all the way.  I have to fight to get a chance to show her how a man can also lead.  (Maybe this is why Rock & Roll, and just gyrating hips next to each other, has replaced the Fox Trot in popularity.)  So I should have been prepared for what life with this exuberant dancer would be like.

Our Wedding Dance – and still dancing after all these years!

Her wanting to lead has played out in most every aspect of our life together, from politics to the bedroom to child rearing.   It’s not been easy being married to this died-in-the-wool feminist, fully emancipated, self-reliant, truly smart and filled with wisdom, zestful to the point of being audacious at times, lady – whom I greatly admire.  Here’s a true story:

After observing her first year as a Legislator, I tell her based upon my five years of experience, that while it’s good to stick to your principles, there are always compromises in the end.  Keep your pole star, but so long as a final deal moves in the right direction, take it.

“I know that!!” she says, “Watch me do it!”

Tomorrow:  Filibustering with the Best of Them

Like I told you, I was a volunteer attorney for the St. Paul Tenants Union so I knew the landlord/tenant laws pretty well.  Well, while out campaigning the first year I was running for office, I knocked on Jim Lewis’ door on Ashland and asked my usual question:  What would be a good thing to do if I get elected?  He points to the house across the street and says, “Do something about that.”  What he pointed to was an absentee-owned, run-down, poorly managed rental property, that was not just an eyesore, but something he said was driving down his property value and on the brink of tipping the whole neighborhood into decline.

Well, right in that instant it occurred to me that all I had to do was change the existing Tenant Remedies Act law to allow a city to stand in the shoes of a tenant and bring a legal action to get the landlord to fix the place up to code.  “I got an idea about that,” I told Mr. Lewis, and sure enough it was one of the first laws I got passed (in 1989).  Problem is that it’s now 2002, thirteen years later, and the law still had not been tried once in the City of Saint Paul despite lots of pleas by me, on behalf of my neighbors dealing with problem properties, to the 1989 Mayor George Latimer, the new 1990 Mayor Jim Scheibel, and the new 1994 Mayor (the guy who beat me).   It was only finally in 2002 that the incoming Mayor (Randy Kelly) put me in charge so the law might actually get used.

Well, I used it and it worked!  Problem was it worked too good.  Within weeks of becoming Director of Housing and Neighborhood Improvement, I had the Number #1 worst slumlord in the City in my office.  #1 based on his having had 1,131 police calls, code enforcement calls and other service calls to his 18 properties in the past year.  I walked him through the ceiling to floor chart on my office wall.  “Here we are,” I said, pointing to the top of the chart:  ‘Meeting with the Director.’  “Now you can choose this path, the path of voluntary compliance, and take advantage of the laws I wrote to help deal with any problem tenants,” I told him, “or we can go down this path which leads to the City taking over your property, getting the necessary repairs made, and charging the entire cost to your tax bill.”

I heard from an Inspector later that upon leaving the building and lighting-up he was heard to remark, “That Fucking Dawkins, who does he think he is #!#?!”

Making the cover of the Slumlord Times

Well, he chose the path of non-compliance and sure enough, with the skids greased at the Courthouse, the Judge took his property away from him, appointed a receiver to take over the property, temporarily relocated his tenants to the downtown Embassy Suites while emergency repairs were being made, and told him he could have it back once it was up to code.  I heard later through the grapevine that our landlord actually went to the Embassy Suites himself and saw his tenants enjoying the free happy hour that comes with the room he was paying for.

Apparently feeling grievously wronged by me, he organized 14 other landlords (mostly other slumlords) to pony-up the money to hire two lawyers to work full-time to stop me in my tracks.  A suit was filed in federal court alleging, among other things, that the new Mayor and I had conspired in the back rooms of the Capitol to rid the City of Blacks and other minorities.  After three years of endless depositions and poring through every document I’d ever written, the case was thrown out of court with the Judge saying there was not even a scintilla of evidence that Dawkins was discriminating against minorities.

Tomorrow:  Nevertheless, the Case Goes On