Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (17 page)

Bart is fond of a Henry Ford adage about lessons learned from a temporary defeat, something along the lines of “opportunity often comes in the form of misfortune.” Encouraging the graduates to trust their instincts and not be afraid of making mistakes, he goes on with his story. He founded DSD Labs in 1978, initially for the purpose of designing interface display systems, and for three years was the sole employee. In 1983 he put DSD Labs on hold and founded Linc Telecommunications. Although that company went bankrupt, Bart eventually repaid all his debts to creditors. After the bankruptcy setback, he restarted DSD Labs.

His persistence paid off. DSD Labs grew to encompass hundreds of employees in more than a dozen locations. Today, Department of Defense contracts account for fully half of DSD Labs’ work in the high-end engineering market. Clearly, passion and persistence spell success for Bart.

After business comes a cross-section of other occupations. Nineteen percent of the men are educators, the vast majority having positions in higher education. Fourteen percent are doctors, dentists, and scientists. Eleven percent are lawyers. Six percent are engineers of some type. Other fields represented are government, the arts, social services, journalism/writing, philanthropy, and architecture. A look at the titles describing their jobs suggests a wide span of income levels. For every doctor, lawyer, scientist, architect, accountant, owner, partner, president, vice president, director, treasurer, and chairman, there is a painter, musician, writer, librarian, translator, teacher, inclusion coach, paralegal, state representative, and crossing guard.

Applied sociologist and octogenarian Chuck Willie held the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education chair at Harvard University. Even after receiving emeritus status, he has remained active—teaching his signature course on grassroots social action, writing books and articles, serving on boards, giving talks (often at gatherings to celebrate the birthday of his Morehouse classmate, Martin Luther King Jr.), and consulting, for example, on social problems and school assignment plans. Among several reasons Chuck gives for staying active in his field is keeping in touch with former students. He was my doctoral advisor and remains my mentor and friend.

Profile: Charles V. Willie

Charles V. Willie (also known as Chuck) was born in 1927 as the third child in an African American family of two parents and five siblings. They lived in Dallas, Texas. He remembers short visits to the homes of an aunt in a rural area of Louisiana and an uncle in a rural area of Oklahoma. He had never traveled outside of Texas alone until he enrolled in Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

This college was established for black male students many years ago and would have closed during World War II if the president, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, had not inaugurated a new policy of enrolling fifteen- and sixteen-year-old black students even if they had not graduated from high school. Although Chuck Willie was sixteen years old and had finished high school, one of his freshman classmates—Martin Luther King Jr.—was only fifteen years old and was one year short of receiving a high school diploma.

Dr. Mays knew that these young people needed help in developing their own philosophy of life and how to implement it. As part of daily chapel services, each Tuesday Dr. Mays talked to the student body, exhorting Chuck and Martin and their classmates to deal with racial segregation in ways that were legal in Georgia during the first half of the twentieth century. “When you get on the trolley,” he would instruct his students, “put your dime in the fare box, go to the back of the trolley, but
leave your mind up front
.” This advice taught them not only how to deal with segregation laws, but also how to maintain a sense of their significance.

Dr. Mays also modeled resourcefulness, and he counseled students how to be open to opportunities. Chuck listened closely and adopted a credo that has served him well all his life. “I worked hard, my timing was good, and opportunities found me.” His parents stressed the importance of education, and all five Willie children went to college. Their father, who had an eighth-grade education, was a Pullman porter whose job put him in contact with all sorts of people. Their mother had graduated from Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, taking one semester of coursework per year for eight years. “During the Depression, my mother couldn’t get a job, so she stayed at home with us in Dallas, helping with homework and providing nurturing, stimulation, and structure in our own ‘Willie Head Start Program’ long before there was a national Head Start Program.”

Chuck excelled academically at Lincoln High School, played trumpet in the marching band and in the jazz orchestra. He was chief officer of the marching band, sang in the school’s chorus, and was elected senior class president. Teachers as well as students steered him toward leadership roles and singled him out for opportunities. He was selected to be “Principal for a Day” in his high school. The head of the Negro Branch of the YMCA Boys Division in Dallas invited Chuck to be his summer assistant. This led to a paying summer job every year while he was in college. One summer he was acting director of the Boys Division of the black YMCA. “I experienced a professional role when I was put in charge. I also realized that my job was more than helping others; it was helping people to negotiate
with
each other. People trusted in me. And, of course I didn’t want to let the people down.” Chuck also said, “These experiences helped me to understand how to become ‘a person for others’ and how to ‘make an enemy become a friend.’”

Another mentor, his high school music teacher, had encouraged him to apply to
his
alma mater, Morehouse College. Salutatorian of his high school class and Lincoln’s highest-ranking male student, Chuck won a Morehouse scholarship for the freshman year. He knows that he owes much of his success to “the people who believed in me and pushed me forward.”

Leadership opportunities continued to come his way when he was elected president of his class at Morehouse in the sophomore, junior, and senior years. With the end of World War II, veterans had returned to the Morehouse campus, older and more experienced than Chuck and his peers, but he held his own. “I would bring people together to solve problems among themselves and to do what was fair.”

Chuck went on to earn a master’s degree from Atlanta University in 1949, followed by a PhD from Syracuse University in 1957, both degrees in sociology. He became an
applied
sociologist, concerned with solving social problems in communities and in society as a whole. Soon, he was chairman of the Department of Sociology and vice president of student affairs at Syracuse University. In 1974 the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) appointed him professor of education and urban studies.

His areas of research include education planning and school desegregation, the structure and process of family life, community organization, race and ethnic relations, and public health. At age seventy, Chuck was appointed to the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education chair. After receiving emeritus status, he continued to teach one course on grassroots social action at Harvard until age eighty.

Chuck is the author, coauthor, or editor of dozens of books and approximately one hundred articles on issues of race, gender, socioeconomic status, religion, education, urban communities, and family relations. These include:
A New Look at Black Families
, 6th ed.;
Grassroots Social Action: Lessons in People Power Movements
; and
Student Diversity, Choice and School Improvement
.

The
Student Diversity
volume updated an earlier book, coauthored with Michael Alves,
Controlled Choice: A New Approach to Desegregated Education and School Improvement
. In the belief that
diversity
is integral to school improvement, Willie and Alves had developed a new school assignment plan for Boston in the mid-1980s. Chuck explains, “School improvement is a very broad term, encompassing school
context
along with curricula. Students learn not only from teachers, books, and other resources but also from their relationships with classmates. Therefore, diversity in the student body, as well as in the faculty and staff, must be ensured.” Under the “Controlled Choice” plan, Boston’s school system was divided into three zones and parents could choose five schools for their child, including a neighborhood school, within their zone. Chuck is proud that 85 percent of parents got their first or second choice of schools, and only 40 percent chose a neighborhood school. “Most parents chose and were assigned the best school for their child, whether or not it was located close to home. Choice also was intended to stimulate
change
—parents would avoid poorly performing schools; those schools could potentially learn from more successful schools and get turned around.” Controlled Choice lasted in Boston for a decade until a new school superintendent took over. With budgets tightening, transportation costs associated with choice proved prohibitive. To this day, the Boston Public Schools are still experimenting with school assignment schemes, none of which has been as effective as Controlled Choice.

Chuck has served as a consultant, expert witness, and court-appointed master in major school desegregation cases in larger cities such as Boston, Hartford, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Little Rock, Milwaukee, San Jose, Seattle, and St. Louis; and in other municipalities such as St. Lucie County and Lee County, Florida, and Somerville, Cambridge, and Brockton, Massachusetts. Although he has reached eighty-five years of age, he continues to accept invitations to speak in colleges and universities, at professional conferences, and at gatherings to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

Decade by decade over his long career, more leadership roles came Chuck’s way. He was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the President’s Commission on Mental Health and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council in the 1970s. He served as president of the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS) in the mid-1970s and as vice president of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in the mid-1990s.

Many awards have also come Chuck’s way, recognizing him as a distinguished alumnus of Syracuse University; lauding his standing as a scholar, author, and lecturer; and citing his contributions to public service. He also has twelve honorary degrees. The ASA bestowed its Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award in 2005 and the William Foote Whyte Award, Applied Sociology Section in 2004.

In 2006, the ESS bestowed on him its Merit Award, the ESS’s highest honor. It recognizes members for outstanding contributions to the discipline, profession, and organization. Despite all the honors, Chuck observes, “There are still some things I haven’t learned about my discipline and my discipline hasn’t learned about me.”

One of Chuck’s reasons for remaining active in his field is staying in contact with former HGSE students. I am one among many fortunate enough to call him mentor and friend. While working on my doctorate in administration, planning, and social policy at HGSE in the mid-1980s, I would check in with Chuck, who was my doctoral advisor. He invariably greeted me with, “How’s my Favorite Scholar?” I believed that I
was
his Favorite Scholar, and I certainly did not want to let him down—just as he didn’t want to let down the people who believed in him along the way. Only some dozen years later at Chuck’s Harvard retirement party did it emerge that each of the former students who came to pay tribute to him had believed that he or she was his Favorite Scholar!

Chuck has continued to work into his eighties for other reasons. He wants to be in a position financially to help his three grown children or his three grandchildren with the cost of education, housing, or health care. He wants to stay active as long as he can. “Not just to stay busy—I’m a little too busy—but to be helpful, to meet a need. I try to bring along people of color who have been passed over for years and recruit them for institutional boards that want to be diversified. That’s what keeps me involved as Overseer Emeritus at the Boston Museum of Science.”