Sometimes it is not fun to be my age.
I was looking at the renewal forms for The Arizona Redbook, a sort of social register founded over twenty years ago to make addresses and phone numbers of Phoenix area philanthropists available to each other for invitations to charity balls and other occasions for giving. Its roster was limited to philanthropists in an era before Google or LinkedIn.
It might be difficult to believe that a desert town had a “social register,” but it did, controlled by a very small group of people, mostly wives of corporate executives. Once you were recommended you were in, and they kept track of you, and you got invited to things like the Heart Ball. From its pages were drawn the volunteers and charitable givers who helped the city grow.
Looking through The Red Book ( which is still a hard covered red volume although it is now also online) on the way to my own listing, so I could check my information, I passed through the In Memoriam section and found out that not only had Nancy White, who with two of her friends had started The Red Book, die last year, but Gary Driggs passed as well.
“Who is Gary Driggs?” you may ask. He was one of the people in Phoenix who believed in me when I was young and unproven, a woman, a democrat and a New Yorker. It was the 1970s.
He, on the other hand, was a man, the owner of a bank, a member of the LDS church, and probably a Republican, although I never asked him about it. We had nothing in common that would be recognized today, and in today’s divided political arena we may never have spoken.
But Phoenix was a small town then. It was really trying to grow, and I had a PhD. I was and still am a futurist, and at age 35 I had the idea to start a think tank in Phoenix where people could sit down and talk to each other about Arizona’s future. When I told my boss, the Chancellor of the Maricopa Community College District, that I wanted to start an “Arizona Futures Institute,” he said, “go ahead.”
I applied for a grant and got it. Then I began aggregating all the people who were already interested in Arizona’s future to be on my board. Although they didn’t know me from a bag of potato chips, they still thought it would be useful to be on the board of something called the “Arizona Futures Institute” that was attached to a college. They all said yes. This might’ve been the best idea I ever had.
Through the Futures Institute I met everybody who was anybody in Phoenix, because after I invited them on my board I just let them do their thing. They wanted to bring in speakers and they brought an expert in water, and one in climatology. The best was the one predicting Arizona’s growth. For this they commissioned Herman Kahn, from the Hudson Institute. If you know anything about think tanks, you know Hudson Institute is very conservative, but I didn’t care because I wanted to be on the inside of everything.
One of the people who agreed to be on the board of the Arizona futures Institute was Gary Driggs.
Gary was the head of Western Savings and Loan. He was a totally optimistic, smart, friendly man who brought lots of great resources to the Institute. He also taught me to have great respect for the values of the Church of the Latter Day Saints.
For two years, we had a great time studying the future of the state. Unfortunately, the Institute ran out of money and had to be shut down, which led to my leaving the Maricopa Community Colleges to start my business. Gary Driggs was one of the people who told me I would have to start a business, because I was too big for a job.
I went to him asking for a job first, and he said something like, “when we hire someone for a job we put them in a corner at a desk and they stay there doing the same things for years. You would be bored silly doing that; therefore, you cannot have a job.”
Although I was stunned by what he said, part of me knew that it was true so I started my first business, a public relations company called Hardaway Connections. The Arizona Futures Institute board members later became my clients and they all remained my friends.
Especially Gary. Gary was not a client, but he gave me my first home mortgage. I was a single woman, no longer a W-2 employee so he gave me what he called a “character loan. What he meant by that, as he told me, was that he knew I would rather die than not pay him back and so I was a safe loan. Of course he was right. But I will never forget how much his faith in me propelled me forward and gave me faith in myself.
Years later, when I started a high-tech marketing business, we drifted apart. And I never got to explain to him how important he was to me. He is now in Mormon heaven and I can only write about how much I appreciated him. He may have been a political conservative and he probably was, but I never asked, because he was a true liberal in the enlightenment sense of the term. He believed people were good, and he believed in basic human rights. All the rest was commentary.
A moving story well-told.