Followup on the Obama school name choice

As most probably know and as I alluded to in a post about Tom Conlon two days ago, our school board has decided to unnamed the school at 707 Holly from Daniel Webster and name it after Barack and Michelle Obama.

I suggested a more cautious approach for the renaming earlier. Somebody has contacted me offline to suggest that I missed an important point that renamings generally ignore:

Once you name something after someone[s] you make it more unlikely that something else will be named for him/her/them.

The President and First Lady now will have a school named for them. There is a chance that in a decade or so, when they might otherwise have been in a position to have something better named for them and that they won’t be in the running for that honor.

And, now that the District is in an unnaming mood, what school might be next? Daniel Webster was not a perfect person, but there are schools in our city named after much less deserving people. Andrew Jackson was a slave owner who relocated and slaughtered native Americans. Yet we have a school in Frogtown [with high populations of both of these minority groups] which has been carrying his name for generations. And maybe Warren Harding warrants a school, but a major high school??

School board members work hard for little pay. They are responsible for large budgets for which funding sources often give them little leeway in how they are spent. They have no independent staff to give them the answers to the questions they feel they need. I do not wish to make their work any harder, but maybe they really should start looking at what else needs to be unnamed now.

Tom Conlon is leaving

We elect Republicans in our city quite often. However, we seldom elect somebody who admits to being one.

Tom Conlon was the exception, having fallen heir to Eleanor Weber as holding the only school board seat that the DFL could not take. [Greg Felice was in there too, but that situation is a bit more complicated and did not last.]

Now it has been revealed that, as part of a move to North Carolina, he will be leaving the board.

Sooner or later we will see posters in various fora suggesting that we are closer to one-party rule locally.

Maybe so. However, I suspect that we won’t see a lot of difference. Aside from the fact that local issues are so often non-partisan [as we have been reminded before there really is not much difference between DFL and GOP pot holes] we still seem to find things on which to differ.

As for Tom Conlon: It may well be that he will be remembered for his last dissenting vote, the vote against taking Daniel Webster’s name off of a school and replacing it with Barack and Michelle Obama’s. That decision was certainly defensible even with the partisan element removed. Naming public institutions and places after living people has its problems. There are people who even now have diplomas certifying graduation from Richard Nixon High Schools.

UPDATE: [5/23/09] Yesterday's DPP carried a side bar which noted the times and place of Tom Conlon farewells and suggested a memory book is being compiled.and that people with memories should send them to an Edina address. Somehow that Edina address seems to be saying a lot.

What is in a name?

For a long time Saint Paul Public Schools did not name schools after people, living or dead. When schools were significantly rebuilt they were given new, geographic names. Van Buren became Dayton’s Bluff, Deane became Parkway, Harrison became Phalen Lake. They refused to recycle an already used name [Mechanic Arts] for what became Arlington High school.

Then things changed. I think the first was allowing the new elementary school in the old Johnson building to keep Governor Johnson’s name. Quickly after came naming existing schools after the almost-dead Bruce Vento and the newly dead Paul and Sheila Wellstone. There was a lot of emotion in all three of these renamings.

Now we are learning that we might rename Webster School in honor of either Barack Obama or both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, both of whom are very much alive.

Whenever we rename something which has been named for one person to naming it for somebody else, one has to wonder why we are removing the name. Have we learned something about Daniel Webster which speaks ill of him?

We also need to remember that naming something after a living person poses risks. In 1962 and 1963 John Glenn was the great American hero. Schools, streets, and parks around the republic were named after him. I suspect that if President Kennedy had not been killed so soon after Glenn's orbits that many more things would have been given the Glenn name, but there was suddenly a big movement to name new things after the slain president. How many people would have guessed that they were naming something after a future politician? I don’t mean that there is necessarily anything wrong with politicians, but how many Republicans must have bit their tongues while they went into polling places at schools named “John Glenn” as they cast their votes?

Likewise, there were a lot of schools and other places named for Richard Nixon while he was the president.

I doubt that President Obama will do anything as embarrassing as Tricky Dick did and I know that there is some appeal in being the first [or at least first in the area] to jump on the let’s-name-something-after-Obama bandwagon, but maybe we could wait a bit.

Tom Conlon is not always right and if the DPP quotes him correctly, ["I can't think of any precedent where we named it after a living politician."] he is mistaken on this a bit since BruceVento was still living but he was terminally ill when East Consolidated was named after him, but in a way Conlon seems to make sense.

The Oertwig comeback

Over his five earlier runs for the school board, Al Oertwig has to have become one the highest cumulative vote receivers in our city’s history.  I don’t have the numbers, but the only names I can think of who might have accumulated more would be George Latimer, Vic Tedesco, and Milton Rosen.

 

Now it seems that he wants to add to that total.  He has let it out that he would like the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party to endorse him for another school board run.

 

I wish him luck and suspect that he may need more than  whatever luck my wishes are able to deliver.  There was an earlier nastiness which led him to leave office before and it would seem likely that some of it will come up again.

 

Maybe there will not be much raised publicly, certainly not in fora where honest conversation can happen in daylight, but there may well be a lot of alleged dirt coming up in whispers and emails where it cannot be easily confronted.  It may be difficult for his comeback to succeed.

 

However, I remember that Al was one of the directors who would research late into the night doing his own research and not just swallowing what the administration wanted to feed him, a director who worked hard and traveled all over the city checking things out and I would commend his candidacy to those who plan to participate in the caucuses of his party and to the public if the candidacy progresses so far.