A former employee of mine contacted me recently to refresh his memory about a conversation we had when I was his boss at a weekly newspaper, nearly 45 years ago. The result is recounted in his blog, which he titled:

The Mentoring Lesson and the Hackensack Zoning Board

 

It’s National Mentoring Month, and instead of baking a cake, I’m going to share the best mentoring lesson I ever received.

I was about to enter my third year of college and was a stringer (freelance writer) for The Central Bergen Reporter, a weekly newspaper based in Hackensack, N.J.

Hackensack is a small, older city — the Bergen County seat — and was in the midst of a multi-year redevelopment that generated a lot of news. I was new on the job, and went to The Reporter’s Main Street storefront office to get my assignment from the editor, Steven H. Solomon.

“Step into my office,” Steven said with a smile, stood up from his desk and walked me out the front door to a nearby sidewalk bench. He told me I would be covering a meeting of the city’s zoning board that evening, but first, there was something I needed to know.

I’ll let Steven tell his story. When I was planning this blog post, I reached out to him to confirm some details, and he generously recounted his whole tale:

I used to go early to meetings, to get a copy of the agenda, get a good seat, make small talk with someone I hoped would give me a good quote.

So I went early for a zoning board meeting. I had a nice seat up front. The clock was ticking. But none of the members were in their seats.

I got up and walked over to the door to the side room and I could hear voices. I went in. The members were all there, sitting around a table.

I figured, what the hell, and took a seat at the table with them.

Everyone stopped talking like in the old E.F. Hutton commercial on TV. Then there was harrumphing and mumbling. Wilbur Lind, future city manager, told me to leave.

I refused, reciting as best I could the Open Public Meetings Act provision that said a quorum of a public body has to allow attendance of the public.

I was told they would call the police.

My voice might have faltered a little bit, but I responded that if they did that I'd have a really BIG story.

They backed down and filed into the meeting room.

And then as they worked through the agenda, they pushed their chairs backs from the microphones and conferred with each other. No one in the public could hear anything!

So I got up and walked over to the dais and leaned over it to hear what they were saying. What fun!

I wrote a scathing letter to the board's attorney, Carlos Peay, Jr., admonishing him that it was his duty to tell his client, the board, what the law was and not what they wanted it to be.

I never heard back from him.

And the board never again met beforehand in the side room or discussed business away from the microphones. At least as long as I went to their meetings.

“Tonight, I won’t be there; you’ll be there,” Steven told me. If the board members tried to pull the same stunt, it was now up to me to decide if I would just let it slide, or walk up to the dais, make a nuisance of myself, and listen in on their deliberations. Steven said the public had a right to know what the board members were saying, and he would no longer be there to guard that right; “Now, it’s in your hands.”

He didn’t tell me what to do; he told me what I had to decide, and what was at stake. That felt like a lot of personal responsibility to my 20-year-old self, but it was energizing as well.

In that one brief conversation, I got it all. The newspaper’s mission. My role in achieving that mission. The value of that work to the public. It didn’t matter that I was getting $15 an article, nor that our circulation was 25,000 free copies dropped on people’s doorsteps. This was serious, important business, and I now felt fully deputized.

It’s in your hands.

That evening, I showed up early, walked around the meeting room and met some of the applicants. The board members and staff trickled in and took their seats at the dais — no pre-meeting. The hearing for the evening’s first application got underway and I took a seat in the front row, reached into the inside pocket of the chocolate-brown, corduroy jacket my parents had bought me from Sears, grabbed the reporter’s notebook Steven had given me, and got to work.

Several applications for variances would be heard that evening. Steven had asked me to write 16 tight paragraphs about the most newsworthy application, for a new bank; he also wanted a couple of shorter items for our News Briefs column. But only one thing was uppermost in my mind.

The first hearing concluded and it was time for the board to discuss that application. I was nervous. If the board didn’t deliberate publicly and I didn’t walk up right then and assert the public’s right to know, I would never be able to do it later. I wasn’t looking forward to making a spectacle of myself, but I was determined to do it if the occasion arose. I couldn’t let Steven down. And the paper. And the public. The mid-August evening was starting to feel very warm inside that corduroy jacket.

I listened and leaned forward, ready to stand up.

The board members spoke into their microphones and we in the audience heard every word. I was relieved, and proud. Steven had made a difference, and now I was part of that same organization. I, too, had the power to make a difference, and though I didn’t need to use it on that particular evening, I had acquired a sense of mission I have retained ever since.

Not every mentoring lesson comes in formal mentoring session. I don’t think Steven nor I ever stopped to think about the mentor-mentee relationship we had; at the time, we were just editor and reporter, and soon, friends. To this day, I try to live by those words — it’s in your hands — and I’ve never had a better mentoring lesson than to learn the true purpose and meaning of my work.