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Thanks to his high visibility as St. Petersburg's chief negotiator with the
Chicago White Sox, the Florida Legislature and Frank Morsani, assistant city
manager Rick Dodge emerged from obscurity in 1988. Never again would he be
referred to simply as "assistant city manager Rick Dodge" -- from that time on
he became St. Petersburg's "point man" on all things baseball.
It's a responsibility the recruiter never mentioned when Dodge was hired in
1977.
* * *
Born in Philadelphia on June 29, 1944, Richard B. Dodge grew up and
was educated in Alexandria, Virginia.
Dodge was 24 and studying for a masters degree in marketing at the University
of Virginia when his mother, Dorothy, died of a stroke. Not much later, Dodge
and his older brother, Bill, learned that their father, William Dodge, had
Alzheimer's. William died three years later in Virginia after spending his last
year with Rick.
One night father and son went fishing. One minute his father was fine, the
next he couldn't figure out how to flip the bale over the spinning reel. But
the air was cool and the fish were biting and there was a great sense of love
between father and son. At sunset, William said, "Well, Rick, I know how I want
to die. I want to be shot dead at age 100 by a jealous husband."
The elder Dodge spent his life as a civil and mechanical engineer. He went
bankrupt in the 1960s when his oil burner installation service went sour. But
despite being legally relieved of his debts by the court, William struggled and
paid everyone off over the next 10 years. Rick gained resiliency from that; he
also took strength from his mother, who went back to college at age 45. At the
time of her death she was comptroller of St. Mary's College in North Carolina.
"She was incredible, the single most determined human being I have ever known,"
Dodge says.
William and Dorothy raised two sons, Rick and Bill. Bill, four years older,
was in the Peace Corps when Rick entered the University of Virginia. Both were
active in high school and college sports. Bill ran cross-country and marathons,
rowed crew and played basketball in high school; Rick played football and
baseball, rowed crew and wrestled. "I wasn't any good as a wrestler, though,"
Dodge says. "I saw a lot of lights, as the expression goes."
While earning his bachelor's degree in education from the University of
Virginia in the late 1960s, Dodge worked as a teacher's aide in a federally
funded project that brought children with learning disabilities into a
classroom. One day there was a letter waiting for him at his fraternity house
offering a job teaching a high school class for the mentally retarded.
"I called them and said, 'You must have made a mistake because I never
interviewed. I know nothing about dealing with the retarded.' They said they
had been down and seen the program that I worked in and were impressed with
me," he recalls.
It was a challenge. Twenty-five students, ages 16 through 23, kids who didn't
fit in anywhere else. They were emotionally disturbed, kids with learning
disabilities and the profoundly retarded. It was a dumping ground.
"There was no curriculum. This was special education truly in its infancy,"
Dodge says. "I learned the first week that if you don't know what you're doing,
keep them busy. I'd go home at night and work three hours on what to do the
next day. You learn that things you thought would take an hour can take five
minutes. You end up planning 10 hours of work for a six-hour day because you
don't know what the frustration level will be.
"I decided what we needed to worry about was not whether these kids could read
or write but whether they could survive. Everything we did was based upon
motivations that I thought would get them to be self-sufficient in life.
Instead of using 'Dick and Jane' readers we used the Division of Motor Vehicles
instruction book and the goal was to get learner's permits. Instead of doing
essays we filled out job applications. Instead of doing rows of numbers we
learned how to do a checking account."
Dodge's students had no books, so he collected leftovers from around the
school.
"I used to go to these seminars and they would talk about all these lofty
goals in education and I'd say to myself, 'What am I going to do tomorrow?' "
he says. "One kid in my class was autistic and didn't speak. But I didn't know
about autism. The kid had one pair of shoes with huge holes that he wore all
the time. For Christmas I got him a pair of shoes and he looked at me and said,
'I love you.' Those were the first words he said after four months in my
class."
There were moments less tender.
"The first weekend I was in school, I went into the bathroom and there was a
big kid shaking down a little kid. He had a knife out, demanding lunch money.
What should I do? The little kid scurried out of the bathroom and I'm between
the door and this kid. I said, 'Don't make this any worse, just put the knife
down and go up to see the principal.' That's what you're supposed to do. But
the kid said, 'Get out of my fucking way.' I'm listening and hoping to hear
running footsteps down the corridor as this kid goes by me. It was just reflex
but I reached out to stop him. I don't know if he intended to hurt me but he
turned toward me with this knife in his hand. So I kicked him in the nuts. Laid
him out on the floor. The principal came in and the kid was on the floor
whining and crying. The knife scattered under the urinal and I figured my
career was over. I went to the principal's office. The kid came up and
apologized to me. His parents thought I was going to bring criminal charges but
I didn't so I had this rep in school. 'Don't screw with Mr. Dodge -- he'll kick
you in the nuts.' "
The first sign that Dodge's unconventional approach was working with his
students came when 10 of his 15 eligible students passed their driver's exams.
"The whole point," he says, "was it was something they wanted. I can't express
what those kids felt like and looked like when they got handed a driver's
permit." Then he thought, what really counts here is their ability to hold a
job, so he refocused the kids' attention on filling out job applications and
interviewing techniques. He received permission from the high school principal
to look for employers who might hire the older kids in the afternoons. IBM was
starting a new factory and they agreed to participate.
Dodge took his program district-wide during two subsequent years but
ultimately he burned out.
He took a 180-degree turn and responded to a newspaper advertisement for a
parks and recreation director in Stafford County, Virginia. He was hired the
same day. Surprise: He was the department's first employee. "I had no office. I
had no staff. Nothing." But Dodge hired a staff and during his four years won
10 national awards for bringing the arts into a rural county.
He developed a revenue-producing, self-sustaining, 600-acre park in Virginia.
"We got the owner to donate the land for a tax write-off. We got the state to
build a fishing lake. We got a grant from the federal government to develop
campgrounds and then a swimming pool. It was a question of finding creative
solutions," he says.
Glamorous? No. When the Little League ballpark opened, Dodge lined the playing
fields. When the parks department sponsored plays, Dodge was a ticket-taker. He
started an adult education program by using empty classrooms at night. "We took
this little ad out in the paper," he recalls. "It said, 'Lonely? Call Sylvia.'
We got 5,000 calls and Sylvia -- my secretary -- would answer and say, 'If
you're lonely, try taking our pottery class.'
"The whole point," he says, "was, how do we energize the community? You
haven't lived until you go around a county that is 80 percent agricultural and
tell them they need to put land aside for parks. They think land is what you
plant crops on and what you're buried in. We were rural -- right outside of
Washington, D.C. You could see the wave coming. The county went from a 30,000
population to 300,000 in a decade."
While working in Stafford County, Dodge lived at home with his parents and
went to graduate school at the University of Virginia. It wasn't easy: the
university was a two-hour drive, which he made three times a week for five
years. "Somebody asked me, 'What was the hardest thing about the master's
program?' It was the drive."
From rural Stafford County he moved on to become recreation director of New
Castle County, Delaware, a more urban setting with nearly 500,000 residents and
plenty of established facilities, from city ballparks to golf courses.
"It was a wonderful situation -- people were full of piss and vinegar and we
felt there wasn't anything we couldn't do. That was really a wonderful time,"
Dodge says. He stayed four years.
* * *
Someone recommended Dodge to the City of St. Petersburg when the
parks and recreation director decided to retire after 40 years. The city wanted
someone to work as a deputy for a transitional period and then assume the
position.
"I had never been to Florida," Dodge says. "I came down in January. They took
me to the beach and they talked about this city that was on the edge of
fulfilling all these things. There was a pretty strong ethic supporting the
parks system. The day that they offered me the job, Johnny Carson had this bit
on the Tonight Show. He said he had just gotten back from St.
Petersburg, Florida
. . . 'The town of the newly wed and nearly dead . . . Where you don't put a
glass of water on the table because someone will throw their teeth into it.' "
Dodge covered his water glass and accepted the job. He moved to St. Petersburg
and started work in June 1977.
"I came to St. Petersburg and hated it," he says. "I wasn't used to the heat
and had a hard time the first summer. My first day I went to look at a
sandcastle contest on the beach with my wool suit on. I was by myself and the
community was older and very conservative. I had a hard time finding any place
to connect in the community.
"The department was archaic and non-responsive. The guy that I was replacing
was a legend. He knew everybody and he was a wonderfully charming, social guy
but a terrible manager. It was just a mess. My first day as director I fired
the ranking supervisor for theft. I closed a zoo; it was unsanitary. Bears in
cages slightly bigger than them. It was the only time I hated my job because I
saw all these problems I couldn't act on. I had no idea how difficult it is to
turn around an agency like that.
"There were a lot of controversies," he says. "One of my first projects was
building a nine-hole golf course. People said it would never work. It would
lose a ton of money. That was my first opportunity to demonstrate competency on
a project."
Hiring talented employees helped. Lee Metzger came on board as a recreation
director and eventually took over the whole department. Herb Polson was hired
from the police department and became Dodge's administrative services officer,
later going on to city hall with Dodge as intergovernmental liaison officer.
Anita Treiser ran the city's first volunteer program and marketing manager Rich
Hickman also came along under Dodge in the leisure services offices. They all
stayed with him through good times and bad.
"Rick Dodge came in and took a department that was running okay and he
modernized it," Polson says. "Volunteer programs. Marketing. Public relations.
He started all that stuff."
City manager Raymond Harbaugh reorganized the city and expanded the grasp of
the recreation department to all leisure services, from libraries to the
Bayfront Center. "We had a broader charge and I thought it was a neat
opportunity," Dodge says. He oversaw construction of three libraries and
spearheaded a public/private partnership that lured the Salvador Dali Museum to
St. Petersburg in 1982. His work was rewarded in 1983 when the department won a
Gold Medal award from the National Recreation & Parks Association.
"I had a couple of really attractive opportunities elsewhere. Minneapolis,
Houston. The normal thing would have been to go. I am not very good at doing
the same thing twice."
Dodge earned a promotion to assistant city manager in 1985 and spread his
talented staffers across the city, giving Treiser, Polson, Mussett, Metzger and
Hickman control or influence over virtually all aspects of city operations.
END CHAPTER 8
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Meanwhile, in San Francisco . . .
One. Where Did All My Friends Go?
Chapter 1. About Last Night
Chapter 2. For a Team to Be Named Later
Chapter 3. Is It Later, Yet?
Two. Blame It On Bowie
Chapter 4. The Egg
Chapter 5. The Chicken
Chapter 6. Don't Build It. We Won't Come.
Chapter 7. Taking Away Tom's Bone
Chapter 8. Don't Screw With Mr. Dodge
Chapter 9. Anatomy of a Fast Pitch
Three. We Are the Competition
Chapter 10. Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard
Chapter 11. Such a Bargain!
Chapter 12. The Pitch
Chapter 13. Happy Holidays, Mr. Morsani
Chapter 14. The Dog and Pony Show
Chapter 15. That's Not Funny, Pat
Chapter 16. H. Wayne's World
Chapter 17. Deep Pockets, Short Arms
Chapter 18. Heartbreak City
Four. Dream On
Chapter 19. Something's Got to Give
Chapter 20. Wish I May, Wish I Might
Chapter 21. The Gameboys of Summer
Five. Take a Giant Step
Chapter 22. The Artful Dodger
Chapter 23. Do You Know the Way to San Jose?
Chapter 24. Four Guys Named Vincent
Chapter 25. Make The Check Payable To Bill White
Chapter 26. Bottom of the Ninth, Two On, Two Out, Winning Lawyers in Position
Epilogue
About the Author
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