South Mountain Company

Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company

This blog provides up-to-date news of goings on at South Mountain Company and occasional musings from John Abrams (and others).

South Mountain Company

Carver Ken Left His Mark

By John Abrams |

As we steadily approach a Nex Gen Transition that will culminate two years from now, a two way migration is occurring at SMCo. Elders migrate out, and new faces/new talents migrate in. In the last decade, six longtime employee-owners have transitioned to new careers or retired. Collectively, they represent 168 years of employment

The most recent retirement was that of Ken Leuchtenmacher.

We first ran into Ken working up on the hill above the Allen Farm at Rob Kendall’s camp. Must have been around 1988. At the time, he was building solar greenhouses under the Solar Sanctuary moniker.

Ken grew up on a farm in Iowa – a true corn-fed boy – who went on to study at the University of Iowa. When the school shut down in 1969 due to the horrific shootings at Kent State, he migrated to Minneapolis and studied art for a while at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Afterward, he worked a couple silk screening jobs: first for a bottling company, then for a sign-making firm that created all the posters for IDS tower, the tallest building in Minnesota. The grandparents of his best childhood friend had a camp on East Chop. Upon visiting in 1974, Ken was smitten. He went back to Iowa, dealt with the way-too-early death of his Dad, returned to the Vineyard, and never left. He worked at the hospital for a while before joining Roger Wey’s construction company. They poured the slab in the second house we ever built, in 1976. (I remember that slab. Can’t say it was the best ever.) Soon after, Ken signed on with Burnham and Magnunson, earning his carpentry chops before starting his own business in the early 80s.

In 1993, we began work on our largest project – by some measure – to date: the Kohlberg House at Swan Neck. By that time, Ken had formed a partnership with Patty Egan and Larry Schubert. We hired all three to help us with the endless carpentry in this highly crafted timber-framed house. Shortly after completion, Ken migrated to SMCo. For many years, he was Billy Dillon’s solid second. Quite the duo – Ken was the quiet, steady, curmudgeonly assistant who always kept his talented and rambunctious leader in line.

He would work in the shop on rainy days. In 2005, he became an SMCo owner. A year later, after a long shop tour-of-duty building the Marcus stairway, he stayed. And never left until this May. He was a fixture as Jim’s assistant shop lead. A craftsman through and through, and an artist too, he was always a steady force and a mentor to our younger carpenters and woodworkers.

He also became our resident stairway maven. I have no idea how many times he set up in the annex, crafted a complete housed-stringer stairway over the next month or so, disassembled it, took it to the job site, and installed it.

Ken doesn’t suffer fools gladly, he doesn’t tolerate injustice, and he’s never one to pull a punch. He has a way of giving you (and me!) a piece of his mind that always sticks. Because he is generally quiet, his voice, when raised, carries weight. And for Kenny, nothing ever stands in the way of quality, his one-word guiding star. He is a standard-bearer.

During his time at SMCo, Ken took classes and learned woodturning and wood carving. These began as avocations and became integral parts of his craft. The essence of professional development. He always continued to grow his skills.

Never one to stay idle, Ken was recently recruited by his old partner-in-crime Billy Dillon, and Camp Jabberwocky, to do an extraordinary job.

He transformed a swing pergola (that we built when we did our Jabberwocky renovation in 2018-2019) into a memorial to celebrate campers who have died over the 60 years of Jabberwocky’s storied past. He hand-carved their names – 24 of them – into the re-purposed tree trunks that support the pergola. “When you go to camp [as a kid] , you carve your name on a tree,” Ken said in a Vineyard Gazette article “It’s like they’ve been there and carved it themselves.”

Each day camp caretaker Jack Knower, a former counselor and keeper of institutional knowledge, would tell Ken about the campers whose names he would carve that day. Ken said it was almost a religious experience. “I really feel connected to these people.”

We will always feel deeply connected to you, Ken. You’re an essential part of our history.

Entering the Neutral Zone

By John Abrams |

On November 19th, at our annual Day of Business, we unveiled the Transition Plan that will lead us to the next iteration of South Mountain. It was a threshold moment, a new hinge point in our 45 year history.

Are you ready? (This may take some time to tell.)

Over the next three years, our company will gradually transition from first to second generation leadership. At the end of that time, I, as founder, CEO, and president, will retire and continue to work very part time for several years. Deirdre Bohan will become CEO and president, and will work in a “first-among-equals” arrangement with the four other members of our strong, capable, dedicated, and well-aligned Leadership Team (comprised of Ryan Bushey, Rob Meyers, Siobhán Mullin and Newell Isbell Shinn). We are tremendously excited, and very confident, that this Transition, which we have been planning for many years, will assure the long term success of the company. It will allow us to continue to serve our clients and our community in the way that we always have.


LEADERSHIP
To thrive, prosper, serve, and endure, an organization needs effective leadership. So does a family. So does a country. Leadership is both a skill and an orientation. Everyone has some leadership skill, just as everyone has some athletic skill and some musical skill, and some of every other kind of skill. Even those who claim no musical skill can still sing a song to their child at bedtime. In the same way, everyone has leadership skill. Some have more of it than others, just as some are better athletes and better musicians. Some people have an orientation toward leadership; they think about it and practice it. Some work hard to learn it and cultivate it. Some have natural leadership ability. Most good leaders combine all three.

As the leader and CEO of this company, I have, over time, had the great good fortune to gather a group of stellar leaders here at SMCo (and people with other essential skills, too – those who can design, and build, and craft, and engineer, and practice finance, and administer, and manage). This has been intentional. In my own career, I have learned to do all of those things, but in most cases, only well enough to recognize and attract people who can do them better than I. That’s what our company consists of – people with 38 unique skill sets and orientations that comprise the whole. We couldn’t possibly flourish without each of them.

Few of my colleagues arrived here as skilled leaders. Our current leaders – Deirdre (our COO) and Ryan, Rob, Siobhán and Newell (our four department directors) had some innate leadership skills that they brought with them, but more importantly, they had a leadership orientation, and they developed those skills here at SMCo. There are other people here besides these five who have a strong leadership orientation and will develop those skills further over time.


BUSINESS TRANSITIONS
According to the Small Business Administration, there are approximately 30 million small businesses in the U.S. Many of them were founded by baby boomers who are aging out. Some will be passed down within families, but fewer than in the past. Most businesses will close their doors with the retirement of the Founder. Many others – those with value – will be sold to a new owner or absorbed by larger companies. None of those things was ever my intention or the intention of any of the other SMCo owners, past and present.

A smaller (but growing) number will be sold to their employees and become worker co-ops or ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans). South Mountain was sold to its employees and became a worker co-op in 1987. Having already made this conversion, we now have the luxury of foregoing the arduous and complex process of figuring out the transfer of ownership, and can direct full attention to capacity building.

Planning for our Transition began six years ago, in 2013. In June of the following year the full SMCo Board (all 19 owners) approved and adopted, by consensus, our first “Avalanche Scenario” (what happens tomorrow if I am buried by an avalanche today) and our “Next 40” projection (what the company will look like/who will lead it in 40 years time).

Despite all of this preparation, I struggled for some time to fully visualize leaving this company. In January of 2019, all that changed. I saw our leadership group taking the bull by the horns and making amazing progress. It was time to give shape and definition to our future.

In Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, , William Bridges writes:

Change is situational: the move to a new site, the retirement of the founder, the reorganization of the roles on the team, the revisions to the pension plan. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological; it is a three-phase process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the details of the new situation that the change brings about.

Managing transition involves helping ourselves through three phases:


  1. Letting go of the old ways and old identity people had. This first phase of transition is an ending, and the time when you need to help people to deal with [the loss].

  2. Going through an in-between time when the old is gone but the new isn’t fully operational. We call this time the “neutral zone”: it’s when the critical psychological realignments and repatternings take place.

  3. Coming out of the transition and making a new beginning. This is when people develop the new identity, experience the new energy, and discover the new sense of purpose that makes the change begin to work.”

We are just completing phase one.


THE PLAN
After my realization, I assembled a plan and brought it to the Leadership Team. Understanding it requires some background.

It’s important to know that we had never considered, in any meaningful way, hiring a new CEO
from outside. We were encouraged by the King Arthur Flour model of a small leadership group – three in their case– becoming co-CEOs. At the time, our discussions with them led us to believe this was the right model for us.

But after further consideration, it didn’t make sense to have five co-CEOs (too unwieldy and confusing) and there weren’t two or three individuals that outshined the others. The five have great complementary skills and personalities, and are uniquely well-aligned. Four of them are department directors and Deirdre’s job has been co-managing the company with me – her job has been like a co-CEO for a number of years. The answer was clear: Deirdre should be the CEO, but in a first-among-equals arrangement with the Leadership Team.

I proposed this at a meeting. I expected some pushback or resentment from those who might have expected to be one of the co-CEOs. There was none. Everyone recognized the impracticality of five people sharing CEO responsibilities and the need for the company and community to have someone that is ultimately responsible for South Mountain Company – a face for the company and a place for the buck to stop. It was as clear to them as to me that Deirdre was the right choice. Since joining our team in 1995, at the age of 28, she has moved from bookkeeper to interior designer to COO to co-manager, developing into a confident, dedicated, skillful, compassionate leader and friend. She never aspired to this position; in fact, for years she did not think herself suitable. Now she knows that, with the support of the others, she is.

Deirdre will not absorb all of my responsibilities; rather she will continue her COO work while adding some new responsibilities. For several years now, we have been working to distribute some of the particular skills and experience I have accumulated to other members of the Team. We meet regularly to develop the details and work on implementation. Each Team member has completed a personal capability analysis and statement – outlining what they could provide and what they need to learn. We continue to work on these together.

For example, one of the key areas of need is in “sales” – the complex process of cultivating in prospective clients a deep understanding of who we are and what we do that leads them to believe we are the perfect fit for them. I had always done that alone.

These days, Ryan accompanies me to nearly every initial meeting and is growing into this role in leaps and bounds. Newell has been having more and more client contact and is starting to have a much larger role in the interface between design and construction. We are finding that both are particularly well-suited to these roles.

As we develop these capabilities, and many others, we think we are also developing the confidence, optimism, and vision which will lead to a prosperous shared future.

From this work, a plan has emerged.

The design of this plan becomes a model for future transitions which will come far sooner than this one has. As a seasoned company, we will never again have a 25 year old leader who remains in the role for nearly half a century. Deirdre will be taking the reins at the age of 55 and anticipates inhabiting the role for 10 or 15 years, at which time we will have developed a new Leadership Team and a robust system of transition for the next time around. Hopefully the CEO to replace Deirdre is with us today.

This transition is a work-in-progress. During the three years from now until the transition, we will conduct further capacity-building, flesh out the details, and test ideas and methods.

For those of us who have been working on it, this endeavor has become a great adventure. Ultimately, I think it will become that for all of us. I personally have one goal, and one goal only: to leave this company, this company I deeply love, in the best shape it’s ever been, ready to go forward as it never has. And to leave the people in this company, who I deeply love as well, in a position to succeed.

In a way it’s like watching a mostly grown child venture out into the world. But vastly different too: the child is young, adolescent, unformed – there’s very little certainty about how things will go. But this “child”, this company, is led by mature, capable, empathetic, passionate, dedicated people. It’s hard to imagine anything but success.

After the Day of Business, in response to a request for feedback, one of our employees, Chris Wike, wrote, “I am grateful to have come to this company when I did, to get a taste of what is was, but I am truly excited to be a part of what it will become.”

I think we are all feeling that way. We will move forward toward this new beginning together.

Larger Than Life

By John Abrams |

Paul “walking on water”.
That first house.

When Paul Simmons was 22, he built a house in Acushnet, just down the road from his hometown of New Bedford, where his father had a concrete form business. He built it from the ground up – the foundation and everything else too. He and his first wife raised two sons there.

For the last 30 years (since he was 32), Paul has battled multiple sclerosis. He was diagnosed a few days after the morning he woke up, got out of bed, and crumpled to the floor. He had no feeling from the waist down. When the doctors finally figured out what was wrong, one of them, a neurologist, told Paul he would never walk again.

“Give me that goddam wheelchair,” Paul replied. He pulled himself into it, wheeled to the door, and left the room, only looking back to say to the doctor, “I don’t ever want to see your face again.”

Three weeks later, Paul shoved the wheelchair against the wall and asked his wife for a walker. He got up. He learned to walk. A few months later, he went skiing! Paul has always loved to ski. It was the favored family activity when his kids were growing up, but in recent years, his degenerative MS has made each run more difficult.

Last year, he tackled Wildcat Mountain with his grandkids. From the summit, he looked across the valley to Tuckerman’s Ravine at Mt. Washington, remembering the times he had hiked and skied the headwall, the good lines, the beautiful days. The day before, skiing with the kids, Paul had fallen and couldn’t get up. He did, somehow. Now, a day later, he could feel that this run was going to be trouble. Maybe his last one.

He told the kids to go on ahead; he would catch up. It took him an hour and a half to struggle down the mountain, in part because it was such a monumental effort and in part because he kept stopping, looking across the valley, savoring his last run.

One of Paul’s largest scale projects.

Paul takes after his Dad. His company, L.P. Simmons (it used to stand for “Lonely and Poor” after his second divorce, now it’s “Level and Plumb” deep into his third marriage), has built all our concrete foundations for the past few decades. The rough-and-tumble, boisterous nature of Paul and his cohort overlays consummate professionalism, tremendous skill, and a remarkable breadth of experience.

Paul is very good at what he does.

Paul with son Tim circa 1992.

He has skied hundreds of days and built hundreds of foundations with no feeling in his knees. These days, he can’t manage the hard physical work; his son, Tim, manages the on-site aspect of his business. Tim says his Dad is his number one priority (don’t tell his partner Aja). He says Paul’s a genius. “He looks at a set of plans and immediately sees everything. And he can do anything. But he should have been a critic – that’s his real calling. Food, movies, me – he’ll tell you what he thinks about all of ‘em.” Tim has been through some rough times, too, and beat the odds. He feels that his father’s love was a big part of what carried him through the rapids.

Paul’s physical limitations don’t stop him. Remember that house he built 40 years ago? Since then, he has built half a dozen more in his spare time. Today he lives at the end of a dirt road in Vineyard Haven with his wife Ann. Recently, he took me for a tour. The house is chockablok full of hand-crafted treasures – ingenious woodwork (much of it made with reclaimed lumber from our yard, from jobsites, and driftwood). There are curvy polished concrete counters and fine tile work. There’s even a recent addition to the house with a beautiful iron and wood stair railing. He still does everything himself (mostly).

Paul with wife Ann in their Vineyard Haven home.

He has a tiny shop in the basement with rudimentary tools. He carefully figures out everything he needs, goes downstairs, cuts the pieces, and hauls them up. Once they’ve arrived upstairs, they don’t go back down for corrections. It’s too hard to negotiate the stairs. He measures twice and cuts once.

Whenever Paul comes to our office (these days assisted by a cane) to drop off a quote or pick up a check, he lights the place up. He’s as friendly as he is loud, and he brings a bit of joy into the day, no matter how he’s feeling. As our Director of Finance, Siobhán, describes it, “Everyone starts smiling. He’s larger than life.”

We’re lucky to work with him, to benefit from his vast experience, to enjoy his friendship, and to endure his good-natured insults and admonishments. The positive spirit and defiant optimism that pulled him up out of that wheelchair 30 years ago continue to define him. He’s a lesson to us all.

Peter Blackstone Ives, Friend & Partner

By John Abrams |

Pete Ives retired last month. Of the many long term employees/owners who have made this company what it is, Pete had the longest tenure (except for me, last man standing, apparently). His illustrious career here spanned 41 years.

He came to SMCo in 1977, just two years after my former partner Mitchell Posin and I came to the Vineyard and South Mountain began. At the time he was an accomplished mason, painter, drywaller, floor sander, tilesetter, and surfer. He’d never done a lick of carpentry. He said, “Just tell me what to do. I’ll do anything, as long as I don’t have to tell anyone else what to do.” He was loyal, dedicated, and skilled, but he feared responsibility.

Back then it was just me, Mitchell, Steve, Pete, and Heikki Soikkeli (I think). By 1985 there were ten employees. Steve and Pete came to me and said they wanted to stay at South Mountain and make their careers here, but needed a greater stake and more than an hourly wage. We decided to become a worker cooperative. Pete became one of the original three employee owners when we restructured in 1987.

And he stayed. Over time he began to find confidence in his work and himself. He learned to be a very good carpenter and then a foreman, first reluctantly, then with pride. So much for not telling people what to do. He was the Clerk of the organization, the only one we ever had until his retirement. He also became an essential part of the Personnel Committee for all those years.

His work at SMCo extended into five different decades. He was the responsible foreman for some of our most emblematic projects, like Sagan, Thistle, Hass, Weinstock, Hamermesh, Field, Howes, Cook-Kraus, Davis, and Lake-Hodgson.

His work culminated appropriately with the wonderfully playful Lee Treehouse.

Pete has been friend, colleague, and co-owner. I have seen his three children at birth, growing up, and grown. Clare has always been a constant, his partner in the truest sense.

My wife Chris always said he was the heart of SMCo. The keeper of the soul. The king of casual. Killing it with kindness. Getting the job done in the most stress-free way possible. If Pete was there, it was surely gonna be fun. And infused with craft. Always craft. He had an unbelievable touch with people and wood. Knew how to make both fit together seamlessly.

We are lucky to know him and grateful for all he’s been and done. His spirit will remain a part of this company for as long as the company endures.

Pete with Steve, Marko, and me in some God-forsaken foundation.

Jabberwocky: There’s Nothing Else Like It

By John Abrams |

Camp Jabberwocky is a magical place where dreams come true and nothing is impossible. It’s been that way for 65 years.

The first page of Clark Hanjian’s Jabberwocky: A Brief History of The Martha’s Vineyard Cerebral Palsy Camp begins with: “On a small island in the North Atlantic, off the southern shore of Massachusetts, there is a place where hope flourishes. The place is Camp Jabberwocky – a small summer camp for the disabled…”

On September 5th the last campers of the summer left Camp Jabberwocky. Two days later, we began a major overhaul of the main building, known as the Mess Hall, and other parts of the facility. The 14-acre campus, with 17 buildings, which usually falls silent at the end of the summer, is chock full of activity and change. In mid-May, just before the campers return, this transformation will be complete and Jabberwocky will be, we hope, just a bit more magical than ever before.

Last week, as Jabberwocky executive director Liza Gallagher sat with SMCo architects Matt Coffey and Beth Kostman reviewing the proposed furnishings and color schemes for the new space, she told us that the day before, as a session ended and campers departed, there were many tears and some wailing. Some of these campers have been here every season for 30 years.

This is where, as Clark says:
Disabled folks are at the center of a community rather than at the periphery.

The camp started [in the early 50’s] as a small experiment: a handful of children with cerebral palsy, a tiny summer cottage, a director, and a young assistant. From there, the camp has grown to a…volunteer staff of well over forty people [and several paid]. It now serves about one hundred disabled children and adults every summer.

Jabberwocky is a community. It has families and extended families, and grandparents, and children. It has births and deaths and marriages. It has oral history, traditions, myths, and legends. It has people with a full range of abilities, skills, and interests. And these people work, play, eat, and create together. They argue and dance together. They write and cry together. And like people in other communities, they are here year after year. A few come and go each season, but the majority are here living together every summer.

For most of the year, disabled people are in the minority. They are stared at, singled out for special treatment, and generally viewed as outside the mainstream of normal life. For a couple of months each year, the camp provides a break from this routine. At Jabberwocky, people with disabilities form the majority of the community. Their experience becomes the dominant experience. Their needs become the priority needs. Their concerns become common concerns. In these wondrous times the whole community becomes as family.

It is a record of experiments and risks. A portrait of cooperation. Jabberwocky is a tale of bountiful harvest from a few scattered seeds. It is an epic of generosity and thanksgiving. Stories like this are crucial to the existence of humanity. They remind us of what great things are possible in our limited days. And so, we need to keep telling them.

This summer we had the great good fortune to be a part of a new Jabberwocky program. The old red bus rolled into our yard on four occasions with a group of campers who came to do woodworking in our shop. “The campers were positive, upbeat, and hilarious,“ says Jim Vercruysse, our shop foreman. “My favorite time was at the end of each class when we would take a group photo holding up our finished projects and call out ‘JABBERWOCKY!’ It felt great to be part of such an enthusiastic and cheerful bunch.”

At the end of the summer of 1966 a counselor named Linda Yenkin wrote in the Vineyard Gazette:
We are all tired now, but when the children are gone and the camp is quiet, when there is no more Skipper wandering off and calling everyone he meets a pigeon, and when there is no more Kevin yelling in the Mad Hatter’s ear in the very early morning, “Move over, my bed’s broke,” when we no longer hear any more off-key singing in the condemned looking red bus, when all this is gone, then we will miss it all very much, and only then will we realize that we have to wait an entire year for the magic to begin again. But the magic never wears off.

There is, I’m certain, nothing in the world quite like Camp Jabberwocky. And now it will change. Some of the campers said good-bye to the old mess hall and “thanked it for the memories,” said Liza.

The project is part of a fundamental shift in our company’s work or, rather, an expansion of the breadth of our endeavors. Our high-end residential projects, affordable housing work, performance engineering, and solar design/installations continue, but another arena has become central: institutional work for non-profit organizations. At the same time as we have been completing the Jabberwocky plans, we have begun planning for a new campus for Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (our umbrella social service agency which serves 6,000 Islanders each year), and an expansion of the Island Grown Initiative’s Farm Hub.

Our previous experience with institutional work has been limited to master planning efforts, so this is new for us. Each of these projects requires significant learning. But that’s nothing new – we always seem to be doing something different that we must learn how to do before we do it. Exciting stuff. Keeps the blood pumping and the synapses firing. As long as the inevitable mistakes are minor, all’s well.

I can’t adequately describe the thrill of working with this organization and watching this project slowly find its form and round into shape. There are times in life when you know that you are doing what ought to be done, that the work that you are doing is bringing fundamental positive change to a place or an organization or a community. Those are particularly rewarding times.

In service to that notion, some of our recent strategic planning work has focused on committing ourselves to finding ways to engage in as much of this mission-driven work as possible. Now those opportunities are rolling in. Apparently, saying dreams out loud is the first step toward realization. Simple as that.

We’re off on an inspiring, soul-stirring ride at Jabberwocky!

Bill Graham and His Mohu Legacy

By John Abrams |

I saw The Post recently. Good Spielberg. Compelling history. As always, Meryl Streep was superb as she captured all the nuances of Katharine Graham’s emergence as a woman to be reckoned with. I was struck by the moment when she said, “My husband used to say the news is the first rough draft of history.”

But The Post wasn’t just history for me. It reminded me of my personal history – and South Mountain’s – with her land, her house, and her son Bill.

Katharine Graham died in 2001. Her son Bill inherited the 218 acre property – called Mohu – that included her fabled house. Built in the 1920’s, the sprawling house occupied a prominent place on the land overlooking James Pond and beyond to the Elizabeth Islands. It was highly visible from nearby Lambert’s Cove Beach. For several years Bill wondered what to do with this evocative (but empty) 10,000 square foot summer house.

One day, sitting on the beautiful bluff in front of the house, he got the answer: undevelop the site and put the house to good purpose. The site, he realized (which had always been his favorite place on the planet) could become even more beautiful without the house. But how could the house best be used?

He called and asked me to come look at it. He explained his idea and asked if we could cut the house into pieces, move them, and create affordable housing from the parts. I told him it wasn’t feasible. The road was narrow and closely bounded by stone walls; the house would have ended up in small pieces. But the house was full of good simple materials – wood and doors and tile – that could be salvaged and effectively re-used. There was no sheetrock, no plaster, nothing to throw away. I suggested that he hire us to dismantle the house piece by piece and save everything. Once apart, he could donate the materials to The Island Affordable Housing Fund, to use them in the construction of new affordable housing and/or sell them to help fund affordable housing.

Bill liked this plan, and hired South Mountain Company to do the job. We set about meticulously unbuilding the house. It was a tough job that required three months of demanding labor. It was highly uneconomic, but tremendously gratifying, for Bill and for us.

The site was restored to a verdant meadow that blended with its surroundings. Two stone fireplaces and their chimneys were left standing, silhouetted against the sky, a reminder of the history that was embodied in the house. An immense stash of materials was bundled, stacked, inventoried, stored in a barn and gradually put to good use.

Because the house was located near the water, we needed approval from the West Tisbury Conservation Commission. When they came to do the site visit, they asked, “What will it be replaced with?”

I answered, “Nothing. Bill is undeveloping the site and restoring it to the way it was before the house was built, nearly a century ago.”

Most in the Vineyard community applauded the project.

A few people didn’t.

One of these was the contrarian left-wing journalist Alex Cockburn. I had followed Cockburn’s work in The Nation for decades. I appreciated his no-holds-barred writing style, but sometimes he seemed to go a bit beyond the pale for shock value. Somehow he heard about Mohu and thought it was appalling that this house had been “demolished”. He led off an article about it with this polemic: “Here’s a question for you. Which scion of which well-known newspaper dynasty assembled a squadron of bulldozers in May of 2005, mounted the lead bulldozer and led this rumbling squadron into a ferocious assault on the house his mother left him on her death in 2001? When it was over, a house which had seen visits from President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Nancy Reagan lay in splinters and rubble.”

Alex had no clue what the real story was, but over the next few months the two of us exchanged e-mails. Having his prickly pen pointed directly at me sometimes smarted. But I can say this: whether he agreed with my explanations or not (mostly he didn’t), at the end of that exchange, he at least knew the facts.

This is a story of re-purposing: the restoration of a beautiful place and the re-use of fine materials. This is a story of conservation: appropriate land use and putting waste to good purpose rather than into a landfill.

Some years after the Mohu de-construction, we renovated a beach house on Bill’s property. Working with Bill was never easy but it was usually rewarding. He was brilliant, creative, generous, and compassionate. He had great taste and he loved conversation. I always had a soft spot for him.

Recently Bill Graham committed suicide (you can read his obituary here), like his father before him. One of the sad parts of this tragic ending was the conclusion of Bill’s deep love affair with that large and wonderful property. When he first moved there, it was mostly overgrown new growth woodlands filled with poison ivy, bull briars, rocks, and brush. Restoring it became his lifelong project. He reverently brought it back to life. He cleared it bit by bit, restored stone walls, made a beautiful network of paths, and engaged the Dunkls (that’s a whole other story!) to make organic bridges, walkways, and steps around and over the beautiful brook that ran through.

I’m sorry that he’s no longer a part of this place, and that remarkable land.

But he is. He made his mark.